tv
The Story of Film: An Odyssey, More 4Saturday, 10 September 2011
After the first two parts of Mark Cousins’s magisterial The Story of Film: An Odyssey, I’m still in two minds as to whether it’s fair to call the presenter a generalist. He has already managed to piece together details from the cinema cultures of almost every film-making nation on earth with the authority of a specialist – and that’s before his narrative has formally progressed beyond the arrival of the talkies, let alone colour. Read more...
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QI, BBC TwoSaturday, 10 September 2011
A couple of summers back, I spent an entire term with an idling history teacher who watched, in his many, many free periods, the entire back catalogue of QI on his laptop. And gave us running updates. Much as we mocked him for his pseudo-intellectual thumb-twiddling, in a staff room full of chat about timetables, syllabuses and the iniquities of the tuck shop, the regular injection of dorky trivia – and the entrenched and bitter arguments it provoked – was very welcome. Read more... |
Horizon: Are You Good or Evil?, BBC TwoWednesday, 07 September 2011
Scientists, eh? You can’t live with them and you can’t live without them: they cure life-threatening diseases and they threaten life with ever more powerful weapons. And in the instance of this documentary, they state the bloody obvious and then go to elaborate lengths to prove that their statements of the bloody obvious are objectively correct. Read more... |
How Facebook Changed the World: The Arab Spring, BBC TwoTuesday, 06 September 2011
It seems unlikely that the founding fathers of social media had in mind a revolution of any greater magnitude than turning your teenager’s bedroom walls inside out and making themselves rich in the process. Still, here we are, less than a decade later, reeling from a series of very literal revolutions which have, over the past nine months, upheaved a vast tract of the Arab world and recalibrated the definition of people power. Read more... |
Appropriate Adult, ITV1Sunday, 04 September 2011
Appropriate Adult began with a series of jumpy scenes mapping the bustling domestic landscape of trainee social worker Janet Leach. It was as though we were being offered one last hit of the oxygen of conventional family life (though not, we later learned, one without its own troubles) before we descended into the dead, airless realm of peepholes, incest and floodlit excavations for bones and buried nightmares. Read more... |
The Jonathan Ross Show, ITV1Saturday, 03 September 2011
When Michael Parkinson voluntarily took his talk shows off-air, he stayed away for rather more than a decade. Eventually he returned from the wilderness to his natural home on Saturday night and was rightly greeted as the prodigal son of chat. Jonathan Ross has unwillingly been away for a 10th of the time, having left under a storm... Read more... |
Outnumbered, Series Four, BBC OneFriday, 02 September 2011
From the long shot of the suburban London semis onwards, I couldn’t help but think of the 1960s BBC sitcom Not in Front of the Children which similarly focused on a middle-class couple with three children. There’s no laughter track on Outnumbered but there’s also no escaping the fact that - apart from a colourful new range of insults the kids casually fire at each other (“numb-chuck”, “toss-piece”) - this could easily be one of Wendy Craig’s naughty but nice TV families,... Read more... |
Donor Mum: The Children I've Never Met, BBC OneWednesday, 31 August 2011
Six months after giving birth to a child conceived through anonymous sperm donation, Sylvia decided to become an egg donor. It was her way, she said, of “giving something back”. It was 1991 and she was to become one of Britain’s first anonymous egg donors. Once she'd left the clinic, she was expected to think no more about it: she was helping an infertile woman realise her dreams, just as she, lacking Mr Right, had been helped to realise hers. She never thought for a minute that her act of... Read more... |
Harry's Arctic Heroes, BBC OneTuesday, 30 August 2011
Does anyone else ever feel a mite sorry for the North Pole? It always takes second billing to its more famous namesake, and you can see why. The South Pole belongs to a continental land mass. Antarctica has penguins, historic huts, and chaps... Read more... |
The Field of Blood, BBC OneMonday, 29 August 2011
The overwhelming impression given in television of urban Scotland in the Eighties is of a land where people had discovered neither vegetables nor lightbulbs. The Field of Blood on BBC One last night went no way towards correcting this: as tenebrous as you might expect for a mini-series about child-killing, everything was shadows. Read more... |
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