BBC
Oasis in Their Own Words, BBC iPlayerMonday, 03 October 2016
Trying to pip the release of Mat Whitecross’s documentary Supersonic to the post, this brief hack through the BBC’s archive throws together a galloping overview of Oasis’s rise and fall, narrated by their own interviews and quotes. Arguably Oasis... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Women in LoveFriday, 26 August 2016
Women in Love was Ken Russell’s first cinema film to directly reflect his work in television. He had directed The Billion Dollar Brain (1967), but that was an adaptation of a Len Deighton book. French Dressing (1964) was a few steps removed from a... Read more... |
The wisdom and wit of Carla LaneWednesday, 01 June 2016
Carla Lane, who has died at the age of 87, was the first from Liverpool. Before Alan Bleasdale and Willy Russell, long before Jimmy McGovern, hers was the loudest Liverpudlian voice on television portraying ordinary working people's lives. From The... Read more... |
DVD: Penda’s FenTuesday, 31 May 2016
Penda’s Fen has so many constituent parts it could burst its seams. Almost-18 schoolboy Stephen Franklin is struggling with determining the nature of his sexuality. His school is about regimentation and promotes the army with drill, uniforms and... Read more... |
David Attenborough's Zoo Quest in Colour, BBC FourWednesday, 18 May 2016
What larks! The first run of Zoo Quest – itself the first of the wildlife programmes – started 62 years ago, in 1954. It was thought it had all been filmed in black and white, on small 16mm cameras, but in fact a condition imposed by the BBC was to... Read more... |
DVD: Culloden / The War GameTuesday, 05 April 2016
The most radical of the directors who forged a “cinema of resistance” at the BBC in the 1960s, Peter Watkins completed two groundbreaking docudramas there – Culloden (1964) and The War Game (1965) – before the suppression of the second prompted his... Read more... |
DVD: Ken Russell - The Great ComposersFriday, 01 April 2016
The earliest film collected here, 1963’s Elgar, stands up incredibly well. Some of its quirks were imposed from above: fledgling director Ken Russell was initially employed by the BBC’s Talks Department and was discouraged from using actors in his... Read more... |
Virtuoso Violinists at the BBC, BBC FourSaturday, 12 March 2016
Virtuoso Violinists was an hour of unalloyed informative pleasure that toured televised highlights of great violinists playing great music. Its painless excursion into the western classical canon reminded us why the BBC is the NHS of culture, and we... Read more... |
We Made It: Stuntwoman Tracy CaudleMonday, 08 February 2016
With a raft of high-quality digital effects available, real stunts might seem a little old-fashioned. In truth, the art of the stunt is alive and well: according to veteran performer Tracy Caudle, not only is it often cheaper to film the real thing... Read more... |
We're Doomed! The Dad's Army Story, BBC TwoWednesday, 23 December 2015
The sclerotic culture of dithering that afflicts the higher-ups at the BBC has been mercilessly exposed in W1A. It turns out that fear of failure was always a managerial thing at the corporation. How else did Dad’s Army have such a bumpy ride to... Read more... |
DVD: Visions of Change, Vol 1Tuesday, 15 December 2015
There was a time when the BBC provided a creative context – free of the anxiety-fuelled micro-management that characterises commissioning today – that gave a great deal of space to original and experimental film-making. While the pioneering work of... Read more... |
Arena: Night and Day, BBC FourMonday, 23 November 2015
Arena is the longest-running arts documentary programme for television at the BBC, and perhaps the world: as the BBC itself phrases it, this compendium celebration presented 24 hours in 90 minutes for 40 years, marking the show's latest anniversary... Read more... |
