BBC
Sir Cliff Richard: 60 Years in Public and in Private, ITV review - bachelor boy bounces backTuesday, 11 December 2018It was when he was on holiday at his agreeable estate in the Algarve in August 2014 that Cliff Richard got a phone call telling him his Berkshire home was being raided by the South Yorkshire Police. It was the beginning of a four-year ordeal in... Read more... |
The Ballads of Child Migration, St James's Church, Clerkenwell review - into the heart of darknessWednesday, 14 November 2018What adjectives best describe a performance of The Ballads of Child Migration? None of those you’d normally expect to see applied to an evening of superlative music-making, for the song cycle chronicles the deprivations suffered by child migrants... Read more... |
Wanderlust, BBC One review - an unflinching look at stale sexWednesday, 05 September 2018What signals the end of a relationship? The loss of attraction? Infidelity? Or is it, as Wanderlust explores, something more innocuous? The opening episode of BBC One's latest show packed in enough domestic drama to sustain most series, but found... Read more... |
The League of Gentlemen Live Again!, Sunderland Empire review - going local for local peopleTuesday, 28 August 2018When the League of Gentlemen – Mark Gatiss, Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, plus non-performing writer Jeremy Dyson – reformed for an excellent series to update us on events in Royston Vasey (“portal to another world, or just a shit hole?”)... Read more... |
DVD: ArcadiaWednesday, 15 August 2018Arcadia is the latest and the best of a series of films which draw on the archives of the BFI and the BBC, collages of often forgotten footage, designed to make the riches held by those venerable institutions come alive.Folllowing in the footsteps... Read more... |
h 100 Awards: Broadcast - TV's national treasuresMonday, 13 August 2018In the ever-expanding field of broadcast, it’s easy to get lost in the deluge of product raining down from swaggering global providers who sometimes seem to have more money than critical acumen. How gratifying, then, that some of the best of British... Read more... |
Keeping Faith, BBC One review - this summer's watercooler dramaFriday, 13 July 2018How well do you know the person you love? Are they someone completely different when you’re not around? This is the central question Eve Myles (main picture) has to answer in the BBC’s latest mystery drama. Faced with the sudden disappearance of her... Read more... |
Roscoe, BBC Philharmonic, Mena, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester review - a scenic send-offTuesday, 12 June 2018Juanjo Mena, chief conductor of Manchester's BBC Philharmonic for the past seven years, took his official leave of them with a programme reflecting his great love, the music of his Spanish homeland. Albéniz and Falla, to be precise, and the greater... Read more... |
Civilisations, episode 2, BBC Two review - Mary Beard on the cultural offensiveFriday, 09 March 2018The sheer ambition of the BBC’s new Civilisations is becoming apparent. This second episode, with Mary Beard grasping the presenter baton from Simon Schama, was subtitled “How Do We Look?” and themed around representation of the human image. It... Read more... |
Civilisations, BBC Two review - no shocks from SchamaFriday, 02 March 2018Lord Clark – “of Civilisation”, as he was nicknamed, not necessarily affectionately – presented the 13 episodes of the eponymous series commissioned by David Attenborough for BBC Two in 1969; it was subtitled “A Personal View”, and encompassed... Read more... |
John Tusa: 'the arts must make a noise' - interviewThursday, 22 February 2018In our era of 24/7 news, downloadable from anywhere in the world at the touch of an app, it's hard to remember that not so very long ago the agenda was set by the BBC - the Home Service as Radio 4 was then called, and BBC TV, just the one channel,... Read more... |
Requiem, BBC One review – everything but the scaresSaturday, 03 February 2018Despite horror’s omnipresence in cinema, British television has been somewhat deprived of jump scares. Every couple of years there’s an anomaly, such as Sky’s The Enfield Haunting or ITV’s Marchlands, but nothing has caught the public’s imagination... Read more... |