tv
The TV Weekend: The Americans (ITV), Spying on Hitler's Army (Channel 4), Case Histories (BBC One)Sunday, 02 June 2013
Take a spoonful of paranoia thriller Arlington Road and shake'n'bake it with a dollop of Homeland and you'd have the bare skeleton of The Americans, tonight's new night import from the American FX channel on ITV. It's 1981, and in the midst of Washington DC suburbia, where the lawns are manicured and dad washes the car on Sundays, lurks an unseen threat. It's married-with-kids couple Elizabeth and Phillip Jennings, who are sleeper agents of the KGB. Read more... |
Psychobitches, Sky Arts 1/ Up the Women, BBC OneFriday, 31 May 2013
Unfortunate title aside, Psychobitches is a wonderfully original idea - what if famous women through the centuries were alive today and seeking treatment from a psychotherapist? In a quasi-sketch format using the talents of 10 credited writers, it's a neat construct that allows writers' imaginations free rein, unconstrained by time, place or actual facts, and gives a roll call of talented actresses (and the occasional bloke) a chance to do their very best impersonations. Read more... |
The Iraq War, BBC TwoThursday, 30 May 2013
Did they get the president? That’s the benchmark question viewers will ask of any new film from documentary house par excellence Brook Lapping and producer Norma Percy ever since they secured an interview with Slobodan Milosevic for their landmark The Death of Yugoslavia. Their strike rate has rather dropped off lately. Even though – or because? Read more... |
Shameless, Channel 4Wednesday, 29 May 2013
They say that the most important part of any drama is the journey that it takes its leading characters on. Whatever events have taken place - and after 139 episodes and nearly a decade, this show has had a lot of them - you can expect them to have shaped the characters, who will likely have learned valuable life lessons and evolved. Read more... |
Words of Everest, ITVWednesday, 29 May 2013
In an average lifetime a human being sits in front of the television for around 29,035 hours. Why? Because it’s there. OK, so the precise statistic is a guess. The figure, like the answer, is more correctly associated with the great outdoors. George Mallory, explaining why he wanted to conquer a mountain nowadays measuring at 29,035 feet, responded with pithy insouciance. Read more... |
David Bowie - Five Years, BBC TwoSunday, 26 May 2013
Picking five creatively significant years was quite a smart way of tackling the huge career of David Bowie, though you could argue forever about whether producer/director Francis Whately had chosen the right ones. What about 1969 and the Space Oddity album, or 1970 and The Man Who Sold the World? How about a really bad year like 1987, which gave us Never Let Me Down and the egregious Glass Spider tour? Read more... |
The Tudors Season, BBC TwoFriday, 24 May 2013
Is the BBC taking dictation from the Gradgrindian brain of Michael Gove? According to the education secretary’s latest wacky diktat, what the nation’s children want is facts facts facts. Plus, in the teaching of history, lots of stuff about England/Britain giving Johnny Foreigner a bloody conk. So let’s give it up one more time for the Tudors, who are essentially our very own Nazis. Read more... |
Case Histories, BBC OneMonday, 20 May 2013
He's back - and he's even moodier than before. Jackson Brodie, the private dick for whom the word “brooding” was invented, hasn't been seen on BBC One since 2011, and now there are three 90-minute films to feast on, based on Kate Atkinson's novels and relocated to Edinburgh. Last night's was Started Early, Took My Dog. Read more... |
The Man Who Shot Beautiful Women, BBC FourMonday, 20 May 2013
You can only marvel at the family intrigues that virtually closed down the legacy of photographer Erwin Blumenfeld in the years following his death in 1969. Read more... |
Rock ‘n’ Roll Britannia, BBC FourSaturday, 18 May 2013
From being “a strange facsimile of the original” to generating the “first British record made by people who are 100 per cent convinced that they are doing the right thing”, Rock ‘n’ Roll Britannia breezily mapped the protracted birth of a British rock scene which could take America on at its own game. As Cliff Richard put it, what was created was “different enough to become European. Read more... |
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