BBC One
Adam Sweeting
Mamma mia! The last Leaders' Debate has come and gone, so what on earth are we going to do on Thursday evenings now? I was half expecting an announcement at the end of the show telling us that the Debates will be coming back for a new series in the autumn. Next Thursday of course is the election itself, which will be a straggly, bleary-eyed, long-drawn-out affair. How much nicer if it could be compressed into a crisp 90 minutes and then decided on a viewers' poll.But I'm just wallowing in the Neverland aura which has shrouded this entire election campaign. It has been a phony war waged in a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Despite his "interesting" haircut and fondness for the undeleted expletive, violinist Nigel Kennedy is a man of exceptional taste and discernment. While recording his new jazz album Shhh! at Rockfield studios, he took time out to hail theartsdesk and greet the 'desk's Adam Sweeting.This is a hectic year for Kennedy. He's currently playing a programme of J.S. Bach and Duke Ellington on a German tour with his newly-formed Orchestra of Life, comprising young musicians from Kennedy's adoptive home, Poland, and at the end of May he hosts a weekend of Polish music (and other activities) on London's Read more ...
howard.male
Of course I’ve not been anticipating the appearance of the new Doctor with quite the counting-the-days excitement of many children, teenagers and anoraked adults across the land. But to invert the Jesuit motto, "Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man," my seven-year-old self has recently resurfaced, resulting in at least a frisson of excitement. After all, there’s also a new Tardis, a new assistant, some new bug-eyed monsters, and hopefully one or two scripts as scary as "Blink" or as inexplicably moving as "Human Nature/The Family of Blood". So what’s not to get Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Having already unearthed a Joseph, a Maria, an Oliver and a Nancy for three of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s many West End productions, at the same time generating several dozen hours' worth of free primetime publicity, the BBC are now aiding the “merciful Lord” in his search for a Dorothy (and a Toto, although we’ll have to wait until future episodes before we get into the Alan Partridge-esque circus of dog auditions) to tread the boards in his forthcoming stage adaptation of The Wizard of Oz.Over the Rainbow is basically The X Factor for girls raised on Boden and Birkenstocks. One candidate's Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Seven Ages of Britain began in the same week as A History of the World in 100 Objects on Radio 4. You wait a prodigiously long time for a massive cultural overview and then two come along at once. Do they think in a joined-up way about these things at the BBC? Or has this double helping been a sign of a wider moral and structural chaos that characterises the new world disorder? Last night David Dimbleby concluded his tour of two millennia of British art. It has, inevitably, been a bit of a sprint. In this final episode, the horror of the trenches was wrapped up in less screen time than Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
Benjamin Franklin once said that fish and guests start to smell after three days – and something similar happened to BBC One’s latest “event drama”, Five Days. The odour was that of decaying promise, and, if duty hadn’t called, I probably wouldn’t have hung around until the final episode of Gwyneth Hughes’s week-long saga. Not that it was boring exactly – in an unhurried, linear kind of way, Hughes’s storytelling pulled you in and kept you there. But the longer it went on, the more it felt like being held under false pretences.It was all to do with some sort of seedy drugs mess in the end - Read more ...
Jasper Rees
We’ve been here before. In the first week of theartsdesk’s existence, the BBC began screening a daily drama by the name of The Cut. Daily drama has never been the BBC’s thing, unless you happen to speak Welsh and follow Pobol y Cwm, and so it proved with this online soap dished out in bite-size five-minute pieces. It was my solemn duty to issue daily reports for the first five days of The Cut's life. And now here comes Five Days, which will run eponymously till the end of the week: five episodes, one a night, till we find out whodunwhat. Will it keep you hanging on? For this second outing of Read more ...
David Nice
How old Placido Domingo? Old Placido Domingo in not bad vocal health, to paraphrase Cary Grant's celebrated telegram reply. The other answer depends on your source of reference. Domingo is 68 in the eyes of last night's rather lazy, over-reverent Imagine, but 75 according to my not so New Everyman Dictionary of Music. Where did that come from? It would make him an octogenarian by the time of the date he proudly announced at the programme's end as the furthest-forward in his singer's diary. Perhaps this isn't that much of an issue. There are plenty of others that Alan Yentob Read more ...
Jasper Rees
When is enough? The template usually cited as the perfectly proportioned lifetime for sitcom is Fawlty Towers. It ran for two series, 12 episodes - in and out, no mucking about. The Office deliberately kept the same hours, give or take the odd Christmas special and an entire American remake. Disappearing off the other end of the scale was Only Fools and Horses, which adopted the opposite tack of keeping faith with its characters as the contours of their lives changed. Gavin and Stacey, whose creators Ruth Jones and James Corden are knowledgeable students of the genre, has always had the look Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The mechanism for securing a publicity still from the BBC is as follows. Go to the relevant website, log in, look for the photographs that illustrate the programme, then take your pick. For Dame Shirley Bassey: The Girl from Tiger Bay there wasn’t much of a selection. Only one image, in fact, at least that I could see. It finds Alan Yentob perching like a prize-winning schoolboy on the edge of the sofa, while the prize leans intimately on his shoulder. We need Imagine, especially now that the guillotine is slowly and insubordinately lopping Lord Bragg’s coiffeured head off over on the other Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
At the end of series seven, our tight-lipped MI5 squad risked designer shoe leather and impeccable coiffure to defuse a Russian atom bomb in London, and their boss Harry Pearce (Peter Firth) was kidnapped by dubious Russian agent Viktor Sarkisian. Hence series eight began with the hunt for Harry, whisked (unbeknown to his underlings, who expressed their concern by smiling even less than usual) by helicopter to a mansion in “Moscow on Thames”.One assumed that Harry would in due course be restored to his futuristic glass-panelled office, where he likes to drink whisky and reflect on the deaths Read more ...