tv
Waking the Dead, BBC One/ Celebrity Naked Ambition, Channel 4Sunday, 13 March 2011
By the trail of dead shall ye know Detective Superintendent Peter Boyd, who bounces back irascibly for a ninth and final series of Waking the Dead. For once, British TV has the edge over its American counterpart. While Jerry Bruckheimer's US series, Cold Case, always feels dragged backwards by its clunking reconstructions of ancient crimes (especially the device of using young actors to impersonate now-elderly perps in their prime), Waking the Dead manages to... Read more... |
Monroe, ITV1Thursday, 10 March 2011
James Nesbitt has always looked full of himself and too bumptious for comfort, so who better to play a smart-arse neurosurgeon who prides himself on his rock-steady hands and steely nerves? "What really matters is how well you handle losing," he bragged to his attending team of young doctors as they gathered round the latest sawn-open skull, delivering the line with the air of a riverboat gambler striking a match on the sole of his boot. Read more... |
Great British Food Revival, BBC TwoWednesday, 09 March 2011
If you know which side your bread is buttered on, you should be up in arms about the white fluffy stuff you’ve been hoodwinked into putting into your toaster, implied a positively evangelical Michel Roux Jr in this first of a five-part series on the state of the nation’s food. Real bread is something that requires love, time, kneading, and more time, and more kneading. Supermarket bread is a cad and an impostor borne of sinister shortcuts in the process of making it, and the unholy use of... Read more... |
Agony & Ecstasy: A Year With the English National Ballet, BBC FourWednesday, 09 March 2011
You thought Black Swan was a nightmare depiction of the ballet world? Now watch Agony & Ecstasy: A Year With English National Ballet, Part 1 and squirm. Compare Natalie Portman’s tormenting balletmaster with ENB’s Derek Deane, as each of them stages Swan Lake. Read more... |
Civilization: Is the West History?, Channel 4Sunday, 06 March 2011
The two are not wildly far apart in their appreciation of the wonder of the West; indeed, Ferguson's accompanying book is subtitled The West and the Rest. Read more... |
A Culture Show Special: The Books We Really Read, BBC TwoSaturday, 05 March 2011
Unlike Sue Perkins, I’ve never sat on the Booker Prize judging panel. So I’ve never had the dubious pleasure of wading through 130-plus contemporary “literary” novels, of supremely variable quality, in a supremely short space of time (it’s approximately a novel a day, I’ve heard, given the allocated time). But still, I was left somewhat puzzled by the Culture Show special, The Books We Really Read, because... Read more... |
Love Thy Neighbour, Channel 4Thursday, 03 March 2011
Channel 4’s new flagship series is essentially a census on prejudice masquerading as a reality TV/game show hybrid. A £300,000 property is being given away in the undeniably pretty village of Grassington in the north Yorkshire Dales, the kind of place where “you have to have at least three generations in the graveyard to be a local”, as one resident put it. Read more... |
Jamie's Dream School, Channel 4Thursday, 03 March 2011
You might justifiably argue that Jamie Oliver’s lack of academic prowess (he left school with just two GCSEs – we’re not told what in) did him no harm whatsoever. Yet he’s keen that youngsters today should be switched on to education in a way that he clearly wasn’t. So he’s recruited 20 kids to take part in Dream School – kids who, like him, all failed to attain the requisite five GCSEs at grade C and above. And he’s recruited some pretty impressive names to teach them. Read more... |
The Story of Variety, BBC FourMonday, 28 February 2011
For those whose only knowledge of the form is the Royal Variety Performance, this programme (part of BBC Four’s variety season) gave a nice, if all too brief, overview. The first of a two-parter was presented by Michael Grade, whose family is variety royalty - generations of Grades were performers and agents, and latterly television executives. Read more... |
How To Live With Women, BBC ThreeMonday, 28 February 2011
Meet Tom. He’s an Essex geezer with all the charm of a used toothpick, whose idea of romance is a cheeseburger on a bench in the Sainsbury’s car park. He can’t hold down a job, spends all girlfriend Cherelle’s money down the bookies, and expects her to cook, clean and run his bath – once she’s finished working two jobs of course. Enter the gum-chewing, ratings-chasing BBC Three guardian angel, ready to solve the problem in the most dramatic, exploitative and tabloid way possible. With the... Read more... |
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