tv
The Comic Strip Presents: The Hunt for Tony Blair, Channel 4Saturday, 15 October 2011
As this rampant return to our screens repeatedly underlined, one of the great joys of watching The Comic Strip throughout its 30-year frenzy of frantic - if intermittent - silliness has been never knowing what precise manifestation of oddness lurks around each corner. Where else, after all, would you find "Babs" Windsor popping up – utterly gratuitously – to give Tony Blair a meaty snog? Read more...
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Who Do You Think You Are? - Tracey Emin, BBC OneThursday, 13 October 2011
Tracey Emin once made a tent for which she gained some notoriety. On it, she’d appliquéd the names of everyone she had ever slept with – including, as a child, her beloved Granny Hodgkins. Sadly, the tent, called Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995, was destroyed in a fire at Momart, the art-storage warehouse, in 2004. The loss of her tent was keenly felt, and she refused to recreate it. But genealogists in Who Do You Think You Are? Read more... |
Romanzo Criminale, Sky Arts 1Wednesday, 12 October 2011
Unless one has been misreading the policy stylings of the oddly named "Nigel Farage" and his merry band of isolationists, the general idea behind UKIP is that Nothing Good ever came out of Europe. Party members may therefore wish to pursue a blanket avoidance of decent crime drama, almost all of which comes from our continental neighbours. First there was The Killing which went on more or less forever and was more addictive than crack. Spiral was barely less cultish. Read more... |
Imagine - U2: From the Sky Down, BBC OneMonday, 10 October 2011
Never knowingly under-mythologised, U2 have chosen to mark the 20th anniversary of their album Achtung Baby with this sizeable documentary about the making of the record and the traumatic soul-searching that went into it. It dovetails neatly with the forthcoming reissue of the album itself, which will be available as a mere single CD, as well as in a vinyl box set and an "Über Deluxe" edition crammed with CDs, DVDs, luxurious art prints etc. Read more... |
Rostropovich: The Genius of the Cello, BBC FourSaturday, 08 October 2011
How can even a generously proportioned documentary do justice to one of the musical world’s greatest life forces? John Bridcut knows what to do: make sure all your interviewees have a close personal association with your chosen giant in one of his many spheres of influence, then get cellist-disciples from Rostropovich’s Class 19 in the Moscow Conservatoire – here Moray Welsh, Natalia Gutman, Karine Georgian and Elizabeth Wilson - to watch and listen to their mentor talking and playing. Read more... |
Hidden, BBC OneFriday, 07 October 2011
One has learned to approach high-profile BBC dramas with mild apprehension, since apparent promise and oodles of hype frequently turn out to be fig leaves for feeble plotting and a half-baked script (The Hour, this means you. And possibly you too, The Shadow Line). Too many recent series should have "promising idea, pitifully executed" chiselled into their neglected, overgrown headstones. Read more... |
House, Season 8, Sky1Friday, 07 October 2011
Since he hit the ground limping, seven years back, diagnostic genius Gregory House, MD, has been shot, drugged, trapped under a collapsing building, exposed to deadly viruses (his own doing), prosecuted, fired, committed to a psychiatric unit, and generally killed off and resurrected in many and variously cunning ways. Read more... |
Transplant, BBC OneWednesday, 05 October 2011
Sixty-five-year-old Penny was exceptional. Unfortunately, just how exceptional was revealed after her death from a brain haemorrhage. In life, she was in the minority of people - 29 per cent - who have placed themselves on the Organ Donor Register. Transplant was a sobering, measured examination of what happened to her organs after death. All participants had waived their right to anonymity. Read more... |
Terra Nova, Sky1Tuesday, 04 October 2011
Is it back from the future or forward to the past? We start in the year 2149, and Earth is overcrowded, polluted and staggering towards extinction. Nobody can breathe outdoors without using a rebreather mask, and most plant and animal life has withered away. Near-derelict tower blocks rot in the sickly ginger twilight, like out-takes from Blade Runner. Read more... |
Shirley, BBC TwoFriday, 30 September 2011
A couple of series ago Alan Yentob took himself off to Monte Carlo to grill Dame Shirley Bassey for Imagine about her life in showbiz. Kissinger got more out of Gromyko at the height of the Cold War. (The Soviet foreign minister’s nickname was Nyet.) The BBC have had another stab at showing what makes the girl from Tiger Bay tick, this time in the form of drama, where there is licence to make things up. Read more... |
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