tv
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... |
Pulse, BBC ThreeFriday, 04 June 2010
Call me a grumpy old man if you like, but on an average week it can be hard to see the point of BBC Three - unless the point is for an overly expansionist state broadcaster to patronise the nation’s youth as a generation of weight- and Wag-obsessed delinquents with an unhealthy taste for autism and Asperger’s. But then on rare good weeks – or perhaps even years - along... Read more... |
Atlantis: The Evidence, BBC TwoThursday, 03 June 2010
Here’s a question: what have the eminent Victorian statesman and four-times prime minister William Gladstone and the Nazi Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler have in common? Well, if you didn’t catch last night’s Timewatch Special, you'd probably never guess. They were both obsessed with discovering that great, drowned civilisation of antique myth, Atlantis. Gladstone thought it was located somewhere on the South Atlantic, so he proposed a government sponsored expedition but was turned down... Read more... |
What Makes a Great Tenor? BBC FourWednesday, 02 June 2010
Thus I approached What Makes a Great Tenor? in a spirit of moderate scepticism. Had appearing on Popstar to Operastar destroyed at a stroke the credibility of its presenter, the Mexican tenor Rolando Villazón?
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Rick Stein's Food of the Italian Opera, BBC FourWednesday, 02 June 2010
Golfing for Cats: Alan Coren once invented the perfect book title on the basis that if you combined those who follow the activities of Tiger Woods with those who adore smaller domestic felines, you have a massive demographic primed to buy your last tome. Likewise for TV commissioning editors, there must be something tempting about the high-concept hybrid. Read more... |
The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister, BBC TwoTuesday, 01 June 2010
The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister joins an ever-lengthening list of dramas detailing the joys, the struggles of lady-on-lady love. It’s never quite clear who these entertainments are for. Blokes, as we know, have a response to this stuff that hovers between complex and Neanderthal. Sometimes you wonder why the schedulers don’t always screen them during major sporting tournaments, when the chaps are all looking the other way. Read more... |
Sectioned, BBC TwoThursday, 27 May 2010
“Are you looking forward to Christmas?” was always going to be a difficult question. Anthony looked forward to spending it with his daughter and grandchild – as long as he kept taking the medication that allowed him to stay out of hospital. Andrew should have had a happy gathering lined up, except his latest bout of mania had seen him leave the family home. Richard was wrapping presents. Read more... |
Money, BBC TwoWednesday, 26 May 2010
It was never going to work now, was it? Martin Amis’s dense yet surging 400-page novel condensed down to just two hours of primetime TV? But director Jeremy Lovering, along with writers Tom Butterworth and Chris Hurford (Ashes to Ashes) certainly have a good bash at it. On the plus side, many of Amis’s original words, dialogue and set-pieces were left intact. On the minus side, where do I start? The first problem is that Nick Frost was miscast. Read more... |
Stephen Fry on Wagner, BBC FourWednesday, 26 May 2010
Is there anywhere Stephen Fry will not go? I mean in documentaries. We’ve had Fry on depression and Fry on America, Fry on HIV and Fry on endangered species. Movingly, we’ve had Fry on who he thinks he is, an odyssey in which he discovered that much of his family fetched up in the gas ovens. Fry on Wagner? Admit it, you weren’t surprised. You didn't think, not another bloody comedian investigating, in pursuit of ratings, a subject of which he knows next to nothing. Read more... |
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