tv
Room at the Top, BBC FourThursday, 07 April 2011
Another week, another northern novel about working-class libidos adapted for BBC Four. One is still catching one’s breath from the festival of copulation that was Women in Love. Spool forward a few decades - or a week in television scheduling terms - and roughly the same set of characters have reconvened for the next instalment of how's your father in Room at the Top. They’ve... Read more...
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The Kennedys, HistoryThursday, 07 April 2011
It's unlikely that this soap-esque miniseries about America's most notorious political clan will stir up the kind of furore in Britain that has engulfed it in the States. Over there, merely to mention the Kennedys seems to conjure up visions of a lost Eden (well, Camelot) in which America stood square-jawed against the Russians, won the race to the moon and policed the planet with its colossal Arsenal of Democracy. Add in the horrific assassinations of JFK and his brother Bobby and the... Read more... |
The Crimson Petal and the White, BBC TwoWednesday, 06 April 2011
Playing a prostitute on film has been big career business for some very famous actresses, not least Jane Fonda, Elizabeth Taylor and Julia Roberts, but it hasn't worked quite the same way on TV. Unless you count Secret Diary of a Call Girl. Or Moll Flanders. Or The Devil's Whore. Though maybe not Five's brothel sitcom, Respectable. Read more... |
Campus, Channel 4Tuesday, 05 April 2011
Let us begin with the nots. Fashionably weird is not enough. Edgy, whatever that means, is not enough. The repeated use of the word “vagina” is not enough and semi-improvised ensemble acting is not, in itself, quite enough. These were just some of the many not-thoughts which ran through my mind during the opening episode of the much-touted Campus. So what did picky me want? I wanted funny. Read more... |
Imagine: The Trouble with Tolstoy, BBC OneMonday, 04 April 2011
Trouble? What trouble? There may be the odd reader who doesn't get past the Austerlitz sequence of War and Peace, and many who don't brave the master's last big novel questioning church and state, Resurrection, but that's their problem, not Tolstoy's. He is indeed - as Professor Anthony Briggs, the other star of this two-part documentary, states - the God of the novel. As a man, he was troubled to his dying day, and eventually a trouble to the state. Read more... |
Top of the Pops: The Story of 1976, BBC FourFriday, 01 April 2011
Thank goodness for selective memory, because although I remember that pop music had something of a mid-life crisis between the sequin explosion of glam rock and the spittle tsunami of punk rock, I had been blissfully spared comprehensive recall of all the grizzly details. That is until I watched what turned out to be another of those cheap-to-make caffeine-charged documentaries which goes off on so many tangents that it’s hard to recall what it was meant to be about in the first place. Read more... |
Martina Cole's The Runaway, Sky 1Thursday, 31 March 2011
According to her website, Martina Cole is "the person who tells it like it really is". If it's really like this dramatisation of her 1997 novel The Runaway, it's unrelentingly brutal, squalid and frightening, a televisual blow to the head from a blunt instrument. Perhaps the fact that the series was shot on a giant set in South Africa helps to account for its strange atmosphere of reality assembled from an Ikea-style flatpack. Read more... |
Silk, Series Finale, BBC OneTuesday, 29 March 2011
Will Silk make it to series two, or will it feel the wrath of BBC One's mad axeman, Danny Cohen? The former, we fervently hope. Despite some implausible incidents and occasionally silly plotlines, Peter Moffat's battling-barristers drama reached the end of its first series looking stronger than when it started. Read more... |
Sex and the Sitcom, BBC FourTuesday, 29 March 2011
Whatever you think of Friends, you have to concede it was good in the sack. If there were jokes to be had about sexual fantasy, sexual abandon and sexual incontinence, they were had. The one with free porn, the one with Rachel dressing as Princess Leia for Ross etc. The one area they avoided was sexual inhibition. It was all very refreshing, all very welcome, unless you happened to be watching with addicted youngish daughters. I was appalled at all the sex. No doubt this was a case... Read more... |
Grand Prix: The Killer Years, BBC FourMonday, 28 March 2011
Following yesterday's season-opening Australian Grand Prix, McLaren's team boss Martin Whitmarsh was extremely unhappy that his driver Jenson Button had been given a drive-through penalty. Button had overtaken a Ferrari by cutting a corner, and should have yielded the position back, but McLaren requested guidance from the race controllers. Instead, all they got was a punishment from the stewards which retarded Button's progress by 23 seconds. Read more... |
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