TV drama
Kieron Tyler
Knitwear fetishists won’t be as thrilled with Borgen as they were with The Killing, but based on the first two episodes of the Danish political drama, Birgitte Nyborg Christensen is a match for Sarah Lund. She’s as likely to stray from what she ought to be doing as Lund and just as adept as spotting what no else can see.On live TV, days before the parliamentary election, party leader Nyborg horrifies her spin doctor by reacting to a clip of a coalition partner’s new position on asylum seekers by instantly saying she can’t work with him. Following her convictions and being honest is what she’s Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Diehard Morsians have been harbouring murderous thoughts ever since it was announced. No doubt they communicate these to one another in fiendish acrostics and cryptic clues. It was one thing giving Lewis his own spin-off, quite another to bring Morse back to life in the form of a prequel. The heretical suggestion of Endeavour is that the grumpy old sleuth did not in fact spring fully formed into the world in the shape of John Thaw, with that slow world-weary lope and a withering glare lurking in those iridescent peepers.Well, at least the eyes have it. Shaun Evans is in most respects a Read more ...
howard.male
2011 was an excellent year for highly original music from female musicians, two of whom brandished ukuleles yet found quite different ways of using them.New England’s Merrel Garbus (otherwise known as Tune-Yards) put her foot down on the effects pedal and made that humble four-stringed instrument sound like a Fender Strat, while singing her Broadway meets avant-garde post-punk songs in half-a-dozen different voices on the brash and brilliant Whokill. Angry and tender, aggressive yet vulnerable, Garbus was a bolt from the blue, whereas Old England’s Mara Carlyle was more like a slowly rising Read more ...
hilary.whitney
This is probably cheating - because it was released in 1980 - but one of the cultural highlights of my year was the opportunity to revisit the film Bad Timing, which was screened as part of director Nicolas Roeg’s retrospective at the BFI in March.The story of a doomed relationship between the sexually liberated but emotionally vulnerable Milena (Theresa Russell) and cold, clinical Alex (Art Garfunkel) bears all the hallmarks of a Roeg production - the flashbacks and flashforwards, the lush cinematography – and hasn’t dated in the least although, admittedly, it’s not to everyone’s taste. An Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
2011 was a year when the wheels of global history cranked noticeably forward, the news always full of images that will be in school text books within a decade. It was also the year when, for most of us, “a bit peeved” became “utterly livid” that greedy, over-privileged vermin had gambled and lost all our money and were clearly getting away with it, unhindered.On the other hand, such weighty affairs needed a preposterous counterpoint and there’s little in life more inconsequential yet excellent than Lady Gaga, who dominated the first half of the year with the release of her second album Born Read more ...
Jasper Rees
You can see why prequels come into being. A dramatic character becomes a national treasure and eventually, once old age or worse removes them from the small screen, they are opportunistically exhumed by means of the backstory. Young Delboy was brought back to life in Rock and Chips. Young Morse is expected to be solving murders soon. And now here comes Young James Herriot. For all the logic of squeezing a last drop of juice out of a character, it seems a bizarre notion to revisit a vet who last shoved a forearm up a barnyard orifice more than 20 years ago.The Herriot industry carried all Read more ...
howard.male
While the rest of the country has been busy discussing the knitwear of Denmark’s answer to DCI Jane Tennison, I found myself bereft of anyone to share my unbridled enthusiasm for this Australian adaptation of Christos Tsiolkas’s novel The Slap. Even at the virtual watercooler of Facebook, only one person gave me a thumbs up when I wrote a paragraph on its excellence. Why a fairly generic murder procedural should inspire such obsessive devotion while a completely original and gripping family drama is relatively ignored is something of a mystery.But perhaps it’s because The Slap dared to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's your worst nightmare. Two WPCs appear at your door and inform you that your husband has been killed in a road accident. It doesn't help that the one doing the talking looks like the uglier sister of Macbeth's witches. Then they twist the knife by telling you that there was an unknown woman in the passenger seat, now also dead. Only moments earlier, Ellie Manning (Anna Friel) seemed to have it all, or about 90 per cent of it. She and husband Greg (Marc Warren) were trying enthusiastically for a baby. She seemed happy in her job as a primary school teacher, and Greg appeared to be Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It was several minutes into The National Anthem, Charlie Brooker's latest dramatic output on Channel 4 after his excellent 2008 mini-series Dead Set, a zombie-laden satire about reality television, before I laughed. I say that not as a criticism – far from from it – but as a huge compliment. For Brooker neatly confounded our expectations by making the opening scenes (shown as part of the Black Mirror season) appear as if they were part of a serious political thriller. It was only when the storyline took a ridiculous and hilariously obscene turn that one realised this was meant to be Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
ITV has been cunningly trailing its Christmas bumper edition of Downton Abbey, which will feature guest stars Nigel Havers and Samantha Bond and the spectacle of Mr Bates being dragged before the beak for murdering his first wife. Now that details of the Yuletide schedules have emerged, it's clear that Downton is the one to beat on Christmas Day.Gazing down imperiously from its 9-11pm slot, Downton will be hoping to keep BBC One's EastEnders (9-10pm) in second place, along with Absolutely Fabulous - in its first new episode for six years - that follows it. Earlier in the evening, BBC One Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Those of a certain age have certain memories (very certain) of Farrah Fawcett-Majors, wife of the Bionic Man and not exactly unbionic herself, especially in that poster of her in the red one-piece with Seventies enormohair and fluorescent American Dream gnashers. There were a couple of others in Charlie’s Angels. One forgets their names, and indeed faces. (Feel free, scholars of the era, to write in on this.) It was revolutionary at the time: girls had been high-heeling men in the schnoz since The Avengers, but only one lady at a time. Now three bra-burners, Aaron Spelling’s fantasy answer to Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
One of the great revelations of the decade-long HBO TV invasion is that so many of their series take everything at a truly leisurely pace. Their groundbreaking MO is not to rush, as pre-millennial TV shows usually did, but to give the plot space to breathe in a way that matches how we now watch TV - at our own pace, in our own time. In the case of Mildred Pierce, film director Todd Haynes’s beautiful-looking, Emmy-winning five-episode adaptation of the 1941 James M Cain novel, this sometimes backfires. The narrative has almost too much space to spread out, with five and a half hours viewing Read more ...