tv
Ripper Street, Series Finale, BBC OneMonday, 25 February 2013
Last week we left Homer Jackson, the raffish ex-Pinkerton detective with the exceedingly chequered past, languishing in jail, after being fitted up for a Ripper-style killing by the murderous Frank Goodnight (played by cultish US actor Edoardo Ballerini). For this week's finale, Matthew Macfadyen's DI Reid urgently needed to get Jackson out again in order to apply his advanced forensic skills to unravelling a white slaving racket. Read more...
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Walking Wounded: Return to the Frontline, Channel 4Thursday, 21 February 2013
The public rarely sees the human cost of journalists covering war. More rarely still does it see the real civilian cost. That makes Walking Wounded a frank and refreshing insight into the world at either end of the lens. Read more... |
Storyville: Google and the World Brain/How Hackers Changed the World, BBC FourThursday, 21 February 2013
At what stage will the trend among journalists and documentarians to regard anything relating to the internet with suspicion or, worse, ignorance come to an end? Although I recognise that my relationship with information technology has never been exactly typical, this stuff has been easy enough to access for more than half of my life now. And I’m not exactly young. Read more... |
Utopia, Series Finale, Channel 4Wednesday, 20 February 2013
"New Sars-like virus claims first Briton" according to a headline in yesterday's Times, news which will have sent spasms of alarm through Utopia-watchers. A couple of episodes ago we heard how the original Sars outbreak had been a fictional creation, and this series-closer began with overheard news reports of another attack of Russian flu in Britain, which was provoking "scenes of disorder". Read more... |
Alex Polizzi - The Fixer, BBC TwoWednesday, 20 February 2013
The arts are in a bit of a state just now. Okay, we all knew that. The money that was there in the past - and where it was coming from - just isn’t the same any more. Finding a new way of doing things is the buzz. Looking outside the box. Read more... |
Her Majesty's Prison: Aylesbury, ITVTuesday, 19 February 2013
Television is a regular prison visitor. You can’t keep Louis Theroux out of the grimmest Stateside penitentiaries, the drama departments drop in now and then for a stretch inside – most recently in Prisoner’s Wives. And then there’s ITV. A couple of years ago it reported from Wormwood Scrubs to find out how the prison system was coping in Brown’s Britain. It wasn’t the prettiest sight. Read more... |
Complicit, Channel 4Monday, 18 February 2013
It was the moment when we learned that Sergeant Nick Brody really had been converted into an Islamist agent that the spring went out of Homeland's step. Complicit doesn't make the same mistake. Skilfully spun out over its movie-length span, it's a probing examination of the ambiguities and uncertainties that bedevil intelligence work. It won't make you sleep any easier at night. Read more... |
Vegas, Sky AtlanticFriday, 15 February 2013
Not a bad idea for a series, even if it is a tiny bit Boardwalk Empire Goes to Nevada. In short: whoosh back to the early Sixties and poke about in the wild and lawless underbelly of Las Vegas, a city awash with debauchery and corruption and under the thumb of the Mob. Better still, the show was created by Nicholas Pilleggi, screenwriter for Martin Scorsese's gangster flicks Goodfellas and Casino. Read more... |
The Sound and the Fury, BBC FourTuesday, 12 February 2013
As Julian Lloyd Webber combatively suggests of certain strands of 20th-century music: “Let’s make a noise no one likes. Read more... |
Black Mirror, Series Two, Channel 4Tuesday, 12 February 2013
Is Charlie Brooker a bit of a soppy old traditionalist at heart? In Black Mirror, our tuned-in, switched-on, networked-up society sits for its portrait. It’s never a pretty sight. Brooker’s vision of the near future, or the alternative present, is Swiftian in its modest savagery. There was a surprise in last night’s second-series opener - with Brooker, there always is – and on this occasion it was to do with the nature of the comedy. There wasn't any. Read more... |
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