tv
South Riding, BBC OneMonday, 21 February 2011
You can see why the BBC's drama gurus wanted to have a go at remaking South Riding, which last came around in 1974's hit version from Yorkshire Television. It has drama, romance, social conflict, lofty ideals and looks a bit like a parable for our cash-strapped times. Read more... |
Treme, Sky AtlanticFriday, 18 February 2011
When Treme debuted on HBO in the States, some excitable critics watched the pilot episode and instantly proclaimed it a masterpiece superior even to The Wire. David Simon, who created both shows, may have been delighted. Or on the other hand, he might have wondered how anybody could assess a complex, long-term portrayal of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina so categorically on so brief an acquaintance. Read more... |
Masterchef, BBC OneWednesday, 16 February 2011
There is little danger of our nation wasting away for the lack of culinary-themed televisual roughage: hairy bikers, domestic goddesses, campaigning wide boys, chicken-liberating poshos, alpha-male bully boys, Michelin-starred French fusspots. Channel hopping some nights feels more like flicking through the world's least coherent cook book. Read more... |
Big Fat Gypsy Weddings, Channel 4Tuesday, 15 February 2011
News reaches us of discontent within the so-called "travelling community", where not everyone appreciates the portrait of Romany life which has been emerging from Channel 4's hit series. Perhaps they didn't like all that stuff about hairy-knuckled male chauvinism, women being married off as teenagers and kept in the kitchen, and the gypsies' habit of settling disputes by staging punch-ups in car parks. Read more... |
Outcasts, BBC OneMonday, 14 February 2011
I only needed to see the trailer of this new eight-part science-fiction series for the words “Battlestar” and “Galactica” to spring depressingly to mind: the neutral colourlessness of everything, the characters looking meaningfully into the middle distance, the scrubby Earth-like landscape of Carpathia (rather than its almost anagrammatic Caprica from Battlestar), and the fact that this was another bunch of disenfranchised humans trying to settle on a new planet. Read more... |
Reggae Britannia/ Rocksteady: The Roots of Reggae, BBC FourMonday, 14 February 2011
BBC Four's Britannia series keeps it simple - it tells the story in a straight line, illustrates it with as much archive material as the budget will allow, and interviews as many key protagonists as it can find. If the subject is strong enough, you'll get a good film out of it. Read more... |
The 2011 Baftas, BBC One: The Twitter ReviewSunday, 13 February 2011
@Wossy seems to have been cast as second baddie in #PiratesduCaribbean 4 This intro is entirely about namechecking the films so they can cut away to the US stars who've jetted in from #Tinseltown Lame string of Little Fockers jokes. These clips montages always make films look like the complete Shakespeare. Then you go and see them... Read more... |
Mad Dogs, Sky 1Friday, 11 February 2011
Yes, the Sky 1 drama department is trying to elbow some room on the national sofa and their policy with Mad Dogs is to cast it to the very hilt. Thus John Simm, Philip Glenister, Max Beesley and Marc Warren, playing four old lags who’ve sort of lost touch over the years, board a plane for Spain, summoned for a nostalgic bunfight by another compadre. Read more... |
Panorama: Forgotten Heroes, BBC OneThursday, 10 February 2011
A film apparently in support of British servicemen on BBC One? The Daily Mail will never believe this. Whatever, this was a bleak, unsparing investigation of the way veterans of our nation's various pointless and endless wars are dumped back into civilian life with scant regard for their mental health or physical wellbeing. Read more... |
Faulks on Fiction, BBC Two/ Birth of the British Novel, BBC FourTuesday, 08 February 2011
London’s literary world must be as small as it was in the 18th century. Or at least that’s the impression you get when you watch book programmes on the BBC, for it’s the same old characters that keep cropping up. Read more... |
Pages
latest in today
The Lightest Element, Hampstead Theatre review - engrossing,...
British theatre has a proud heritage of science plays. From 1990s classics such as Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia (1993) and Michael Frayn’s ...
Here comes the flood: Bob Dylan's 1974 Live Recordings
Lighters at the ready, because here comes the flood. Drawn from 16-track tape, 1/4in reels and lo-fi sound board cassettes that are now a half...
Album: The Waeve - City Lights
Real-life couple Graham Coxon and Rose-Elinor Dougall are both musicians of some profile in their own rights. The former, especially, for his work...
Donohoe, Roscoe, Stoller Hall, Manchester review - two great...
A little piece of musical history was made last night at Manchester Chamber Concerts Society’s season-opening concert. Two of the greatest...
Wang, Lapwood, LSO, Pappano, Barbican review - grace and pow...
It takes stiff competition to outshine Yuja Wang, who last night at the Barbican complemented her spangled silver sheath with a disconcerting pair...
My Favourite Cake review - woman, love, and freedom
The taxi cab has become a recurring motif in modern Iranian cinema, perhaps because it approximates to a kind of dissident bubble within the...
Beethoven Sonata Cycle 1, Boris Giltburg, Wigmore Hall revie...
A happy, lucid and bright pianist, a forbidding Everest among piano sonatas: would Boris Giltburg follow a bewitching, ceaselessly engaging first...
The Band Back Together, Arcola Theatre review - three is a d...
We meet Joe first at the keys, singing a pretty good song, but we can hear the pain in the voice – but is that...
Music Reissues Weekly: Sean Buckley & The Breadcrumbs
Although Dagenham’s Sean Buckley & The Breadcrumbs are less than a footnote in the story of beat boom-era Britain, appearances on archive...