tv | Page 239 | The Arts Desk

tv

Camelot, Channel 4

Adam Sweeting Saturday, 11 June 2011

Joseph Fiennes as Merlin: Boldly going without Robert Plant's hair

With The Tudors recently departed from BBC Two, the kindly Channel 4 has stepped in to fill the gap with this new cod-mythological romp through a Middle Ages that never existed. Funnily enough, it comes from the same Irish-Canadian production consortium that cooked up The Tudors, and shares similar attitudes to casting, production values and dialogue.

Angry Boys, BBC Three

Veronica Lee Wednesday, 08 June 2011

Chris Lilley as Gran with one of her juvenile charges in superhero pyjamas

Chris Lilley may not be a household name, but he is well known to comedy connoisseurs. The Australian's work, which he writes, produces and appears in - in several roles, male and female, adult and teenager - is exceptional, and is by turns funny and challenging, offensive and poignant. You may have seen We Can Be Heroes, about teenage identical twins Daniel and Nathan (played by Lilley), and Summer Heights High, set in a secondary school where the egregious fool Mr G...

Injustice, ITV1

Adam Sweeting Monday, 06 June 2011

Fantastic! A new drama series in which the hero isn't a detective. Instead, William Travers (James Purefoy) is a criminal barrister who (after some sort of traumatic, nervous-breakdown-provoking experience we don't know much about yet) has moved from the pressure cooker of the London legal industry to the ostensibly more laid-back environs of Ipswich. He used to specialise in murder cases, but now he swears he's given them up.

Comment

Psychoville, BBC Two

Josh Spero Monday, 06 June 2011

Psychoville's angry, handless (the other one) clown and his senile associate, Mrs Ladybug Face

Psychoville, whose first series was made on such a low budget that one episode was filmed in one room in one take (having the additional benefit of being an homage to Rope), used all the extra cash thrown at it to horrifying effect in its second series finale. A Jacobean plot, with a revivified cryogenically stored Nazi's head and a cremation while alive, was animated with the best technology licence fee payers' cash can give, and instead of being chucked up the wall...

Case Histories, BBC One

Jasper Rees Sunday, 05 June 2011

Thanks to her evergreen bestseller Behind the Scenes at the Museum, Kate Atkinson can call on an army of fans to buy her work whenever it appears in print. Its debut on screen is, perhaps, another matter. Will they buy the BBC’s rendition of Case Histories? Those who have not had the pleasure of reading it are less advantageously placed to grumble about hideous revisions, outrageous changes and all manner of infidelities.

Comment

Stephen Fry: In Confidence, Sky Arts

Fisun Güner Friday, 03 June 2011

When a celebrity lets their public mask slip, something wonderful and also disconcerting can happen: they can noticeably become someone else. If they’re lucky, that change can be so marked that they become just another face in a crowd.

Comment

Wonderland: The Men Who Won’t Stop Marching, BBC Two

Jasper Rees Wednesday, 01 June 2011

Not long after the Good Friday Agreement, BBC Northern Ireland broadcast a charming drama featuring a tale of two drums. An Ulster Protestant was too wedded to the marching season to join his wife on holiday in Donegal, so she wrought her revenge by destroying his bass drum and replacing it with its Catholic antithesis, a bodhrán. If last night’s The Men Who Won’t Stop Marching is any indication, that won’t be happening on the Shankill Road any time soon.

Comment

Lead Balloon, BBC Two

Jasper Rees Wednesday, 01 June 2011

It’s been more than two and a half years since the third series of Jack Dee’s comedy about a comedian. Everyone in Rick Spleen's world looks a little bit older, a mite more pinched and drawn, as if proximity to the man about the house is draining the blood out of its occupants. Time has not at all been kind to Rick himself (but then, when was it ever?). His temples are awash with grey, his skin is sallow with failure, and his self-important delusions seem ever more steeped in bitterness and...

Queen - Days of Our Lives, BBC Two

Adam Sweeting Tuesday, 31 May 2011

Despite selling 300 million albums, being memorialised in stage musicals and computer games and with a feature film about their early career in the works, Queen are still moaning about the press. It's a theme that simmered steadily through this two-part history, with drummer Roger Taylor especially splenetic about the cruel and unusual treatment doled out to his band by first the music papers ("the evil empire"), then later the tabloids.

Scott & Bailey, ITV1

howard Male Sunday, 29 May 2011

We all enjoy the moment when the detective loses his rag and lunges across the desk to grab the suspect by the lapels, but such scenes are in short supply in this new female crime-fighters series. Instead, the interrogative approach of “the new Cagney & Lacey” as it’s been called, is more slowly, slowly catchy monkey, but that doesn’t make it any less satisfying.