BBC One
Adam Sweeting
There was a risk that this new take on the indestructible sleuth of Baker Street might be smothered at birth by a dust-storm of pre-publicity, with coverage stretching from the tabloids to Andrew Marr (who really seems to believe he's an arts correspondent, and not just Alfred E Neuman's long-lost twin brother). Previewers couldn't help making comparisons between Benedict Cumberbatch's manic, omniscient Sherlock and the current Doctor Who, which I suppose was inevitable since Who writers Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss are the brains behind Holmes, 2010-style.But after being dropped into the Read more ...
howard.male
The fact that we humans are, technically speaking, bad liars proves that we are instinctively moral creatures (rather than getting our morals from our god or our parents) and that lying is therefore, evolutionarily speaking, probably a bad idea. You can get away with saying you were caught in traffic, rather than admitting you were in the pub, but a polygraph will pick up on changes in blood pressure, pulse and respiration - those indicators of anxiety you’d rather not be feeling - and your goose will be cooked. But imagine how much more difficult it would be if the lie you were telling Read more ...
theartsdesk
JasperRees He can't pronounce vuvuzelaJasperRees Is this really Becks' first time? What do he and Rourke say to each other? Bloody hell, Roxy are looking a bit seniorSweetingAdam Rourke once made a TV movie about Shergar. Title role I guess.JasperRees Did they deliberately choose a Mickey Rourke clip in which he didn't say a word?SweetingAdam They've put Rourke's head on backwards.JasperRees Has Woss ever told anyone they don't look fantastic? Rourke manifestly would qualify. He looks like he just got reconstructed after a fireJasperRees He's talking through his ears. I haven't heard a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There was a gnawing suspicion that The Silence wouldn’t amount to much, since it was dumped in a four-night splurge in the middle of the mid-summer doldrums, and even the normally docile Radio Times had decided to stamp its foot and pick holes in it. One’s apprehension proved ill-founded, however. It turned out to be taut, tense, well acted and smartly written, and carried enough pace to lift it over the more credulity-stretching passages.Australian screenwriter Fiona Seres had set the bar pretty high for herself. On the one hand, The Silence was a drama about an extended family, with the Read more ...
theartsdesk
As Jonathan Ross is an incorrigible tweeter, theartsdesk has decided to review his last stand on the BBC on Twitter. Adam Sweeting and Jasper Rees will watch Friday Night with Jonathan Ross and tweet a joint review live as the programme goes out. The show begins at 10.35pm on BBC One on 16 July.In order to catch their live review live, you'll need to sign up to Twitter, if you haven't already. Follow SweetingAdam on Twitter here and JasperRees here. (NB don't confuse SweetingAdam with another Adam Sweeting on Twitter. theartsdesk Adam's avatar is a picture of his red sports car being towed Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Great comedy may be timeless, but that's probably because of the great comedians performing it as much as the material itself. Could you imagine Dad's Army being anything more than a shadow of its former self if it was remade with a new cast? Would Frasier achieve the same transcendent mix of bourgeois self-regard and millisecond farcical timing with James Corden and Mathew Horne in place of Kelsey Grammer and David Hyde Pierce? Do we want to hear anybody reciting the "Dead Parrot Sketch" ever again?Jonathan Ross's pretext for assembling a bevy of his comic chums to recreate rare Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The voice, being 70, isn’t quite the untamed beast of yore. But it retains a certain feral throb. Alan Yentob stands across the recording studio, listening donnishly as Tom Jones belts one out. “You still feel the presence and power,” he reports. Not that you’d know from the way Yentob sways ever so imperceptibly in his BBC execuspecs. Yentobs don’t dance. Go on, man, do the done thing. Whip off your drawers and lob them lovingly at the Pontypridd Pelvis.Actually the knickers thing is sort of discouraged in the Jones camp these days. A couple of decades back the slightly simian lothario put Read more ...
fisun.guner
It took Picasso four years to learn to paint like Raphael, but it took him a lifetime to paint like a child, or so he said. For Brancusi it wasn‘t a case of relearning childhood, but of being careful not to lose it in the first place. “When we are no longer children we are already dead,” he said. A little further down the food chain of contemporary art, Grayson Perry, the delightful transvestite potter who accepted his Turner Prize award as alter-ego Claire (because he likes to feel the prickle of humiliation when he’s dressed like Milly-Molly-Mandy in a crowd), evokes the spirit of Alan Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Brilliant though it was to be shooting an Imagine film for BBC One, we did experience the occasional tremor of foreboding about making a programme with Nigel Kennedy. We (that's me and director Frank Hanly) had a bit of previous with Nigel - I'd done several print interviews with him, and we'd shot a couple of short films with him for EMI.The last one was at Rockfield studios in Monmouth for his recent jazz album, Shhh! We'd bowled up out of the pouring rain on a black November night to be greeted like long-lost family members, as Nige plied us with wine and insisted that we join him, his Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The Doctor Who crew are fond of their encounters with historical characters. In his time, and let's face it he has infinite supplies of it, the Doc has rubbed shoulders with Shakespeare, Charles Dickens and Agatha Christie, and recently weathered the Blitz with Winston Churchill. For this one, "Vincent and the Doctor", le Docteur voyaged back to 19th-century Provence to straighten out a puzzling temporal kink.While visiting the Van Gogh exhibition at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, where art historian Dr Black (Bill Nighy) was holding forth about the marvels of the tormented Dutch genius, the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Aptly, this new documentary about how the Rolling Stones fled from England to the South of France to record Exile on Main Street was premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, with a supernaturally healthy-looking Mick Jagger on hand to give it a promotional shove. Jagger (along with Keith Richards and Charlie Watts) produced the film, working closely alongside director Stephen Kijak to knit together an evocative and emotional portrait of "the greatest rock'n'roll band in the world", at what many would argue was their peak.The fact that the project is an authorised job from the heart of the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Idris Elba’s screen career is going so swimmingly that you wonder what can have tempted him back to Blighty. Probably not the weather, since the former denizen of Canning Town now lives in Florida, and is in perpetual demand Stateside thanks to the extreme hotness engendered by his portrayal of Russell “Stringer” Bell in The Wire. He was in the American version of The Office, co-starred with Beyoncé in Obsessed, has several movies in production and will executive-produce a new legal drama series for NBC.So, Idris Elba, where did it all go wrong? I jest, of course. Slightly. Luther is Read more ...