tv
Timeshift: Battle for the Himalayas, BBC FourFriday, 30 January 2015
When people talk about the Heroic Age of exploration, the heroes are generally agreed to be the explorers. But we’d know a great deal less about Edwardian chaps pluckily struggling through far-flung snowscapes if there weren’t images of them in situ. And the men who caught those images can be counted heroes too. Herbert Ponting pioneered cold-weather photographic techniques in Antarctica with Scott. Read more... |
Touched by Auschwitz, BBC TwoWednesday, 28 January 2015
There’s been a pronounced sense of finality at this year’s 70th anniversary commemoration of the 1945 liberation of Auschwitz. No closure, of course, but an awareness that the ranks of survivors are diminishing, and that soon their first-person testimonials will disappear into a past. Read more... |
Mr Selfridge, Series 3, ITVMonday, 26 January 2015
Mercifully not preceded by a Broadchurch-style hype-tsunami, the new series of Mr Selfridge has slipped neatly back into the Sunday 9pm slot as if it's the rightful owner just back from a year of travelling round the world. It's not revolutionary, ground-breaking or "subversive", but equipped with some new characters and promising plotlines, this opening episode ushered us into the post-World War One era with a spring in its step and the wind in its hair. Read more... |
Surviving the Holocaust - Freddie Knoller's War, BBC TwoFriday, 23 January 2015
First-hand testimonial is surely the building block of history. Whether it’s in the form of written diaries or the television memory, it allows us to go back to the very basics as we, the reader-viewer, effectively re-experience the life of the teller. Read more... |
Cucumber, Channel 4Thursday, 22 January 2015
It doesn’t take many cucumbers smacked into cupped male palms to realise this isn’t, surprisingly, a show about salad. Russell T Davies has written three new series (Banana shows on E4, and Tofu online), exploring LGBT sexuality today. Queer As Folk, Davies’s 1999 breakthrough creation depicting the lives of three gay men living around Canal Street in Manchester, was an important landmark in dramatic depictions of gay life. Read more... |
The Eichmann Show, BBC TwoTuesday, 20 January 2015
Part of a series of programmes marking the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, The Eichmann Show was a 90-minute account of how the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the SS's most enthusiastic engineers of the Holocaust, became "the world's first ever global documentary series". The key men in making this happen were TV producer Milton Fruchtman and renowned documentary director Leo Hurwitz, the latter a victim of McCarthy-era blacklisting in the USA. Read more... |
Catastrophe, Channel 4Monday, 19 January 2015
There’s a tricky balancing act involved when writing a sitcom. Too much "sit" and you’re in danger of losing the laughs, too much "com" and it becomes increasingly difficult to find the space to land a serious dramatic punch. Get one of these things wrong and, like a fat man facing a baby on a see-saw, it looks all wrong and is no fun for anyone. Read more... |
Marry Me, E4Friday, 16 January 2015
The latest sitcom from the United States is very much in the American mould of smart dialogue, pacy timing and some astute human observation layered with a hint of schmaltz. It concerns two thirtysomethings, Annie and Jake, who have been together for six years. In the pilot episode last night, she was expecting him to pop the question while they were on a romantic holiday, while he has planned to go on bended knee when they return home. Read more... |
Cockroaches, ITV2 / Crims, BBC ThreeTuesday, 13 January 2015
Commissioning new sitcoms is a notoriously imprecise science. The first episode, and sometimes the first series, finds a sitcom at its least sure-footed. Keen to tell you all about itself, it tends to behave out of character, gabbling nervously and exaggerating every gesture. It might never find its feet, but you can rarely tell from one half-hour introduction. My own personal hostage to fortune was to have a sense of humour bypass when reviewing Father Ted. Read more... |
Spiral, Series 5, BBC FourSunday, 11 January 2015
It's a poignant moment for the return of this superior French police drama. With the Paris terrorist crisis the top story across all media, we rejoin our fictional police captain Laure Berthaud to find her still in emotional fragments following the death of her lover Sami in a terrorist bomb blast at the end of series four. Read more... |
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It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.
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