tv
Glastonbury at 40, BBC FourSunday, 20 June 2010
You could tell Glastonbury at 40 was in trouble as early as the opening three minutes, when it cut from a well-heeled, ageing hippie survivor mumbling about “earth magic” to footage of Robbie Williams in 1998 bashing his way through the entirety of "Angels". The programme stumbled into the vast gulf between those two concepts as uncertainly as a reveller stumbles into the wrong tent at four in the morning, and never once looked like finding its way back home. Read more... |
Steve Winwood: English Soul, BBC FourFriday, 18 June 2010
Almost like an inverted echo of Stevie Wonder over in Detroit, Little Stevie Winwood was a Brummie teen prodigy who scored an early dose of stardom with the Spencer Davis Group at age 15. Raved over for his amazing soulful vocals and effortless instrumental skills, he went on to form Traffic before joining “supergroup” Blind Faith with Eric Clapton. Read more... |
Gareth Goes to Glyndebourne, BBC TwoThursday, 17 June 2010
We love Gareth Malone, don’t we? We are big fans of the Pied Piper of primetime. And so we should be. The youth of today seem impressively eager to down tools, put away childish things like knives and drugs and safe-cracking equipment, and follow this slightly weedy and totally uncool choirmaster out onto the concert platform. Our glorious new coalition should be using him to tackle crime. Read more... |
Frost on Satire, BBC FourThursday, 17 June 2010
Remarkably, the most provocative moments in Sir David Frost's survey of TV satire were supplied by his own early-Sixties show, That Was The Week That Was, when he was still an oily young upstart on the make. The BBC's Director General himself had declared that the aim of the show was to "prick the pomposity of public figures", but he must have felt the shockwaves rattling the door of his office. Read more... |
Peckham Finishing School For Girls, BBC ThreeThursday, 17 June 2010
We know the format: take a bunch of posh, privileged types - held up as examples of cluelessness when it comes to how “ordinary” people live by privileged, overpaid TV executives - and plonk them down in the middle of some dodgy council estate. Remove their credit cards and give them £6.50 to last a week. Watch as they baulk at the amount of cash their new, jobless neighbour manages to spend on fags, kebabs and the occasional drug habit. Read more... |
True Stories: We Live in Public, More4Tuesday, 15 June 2010
With the last ever series of Big Brother dominating Channel Four’s schedules for the rest of the summer, the first TV screening of this Sundance Film Festival award-winner couldn’t have been better timed. Because the chillingly disconcerting “art project” that dot-com pioneer Josh Harris devised back in 1999 (just before Big Brother came on air for the first time) made the world’s most controversial reality TV show look like Kenneth Clarke’s Civilisation, by... Read more... |
Who Do You Think You Are? - Sarah Jessica Parker, BBC OneSunday, 13 June 2010
American television's desire to upgrade the BBC’s Who do You Think You Are? into a prime piece of emotional real estate was never likely to meet any serious resistance. Read more... |
Father & Son, ITV1Tuesday, 08 June 2010
I always used to wonder why casting directors ever sent for Dougray Scott when they might just as well have used an old chest of drawers or a pile of deckchairs instead, but at last this gloomy Scottish actor seems to be coming into his own. Maybe his stint in Desperate Housewives kicked something loose, but he wasn't bad at all in BBC One's ... Read more... |
Gleeful: The Real Show Choirs of America, E4Monday, 07 June 2010
My excuse is that I was comfortably settled on the sofa next to my wife when the first episode of Glee aired, and I just got drawn in. I know, it’s not much of an excuse - and it hardly explains the fact that I then went on to watch the next 20 episodes - but there we are. And as a heterosexual middle-aged ex-punk rocker, I’m certainly not the obvious target demographic for this latest American television... Read more... |
Doctor Who: Vincent and the Doctor, BBC OneSunday, 06 June 2010
The Doctor Who crew are fond of their encounters with historical characters. In his time, and let's face it he has infinite supplies of it, the Doc has rubbed shoulders with Shakespeare, Charles Dickens and Agatha Christie, and recently weathered the Blitz with Winston Churchill. For this one, "Vincent and the Doctor", le Docteur voyaged back to 19th-century Provence to straighten out a puzzling temporal kink. Read more... |
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It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.
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