sun 06/04/2025

tv

Eddie Izzard: Marathon Man, BBC Three / The Man with the Golden Gavel, BBC Four

Adam Sweeting

Is Eddie Izzard running a lot of marathons really worth three hour-long documentaries? No, but it was worth watching this first one.

Read more...

Five Days, BBC One

Jasper Rees

We’ve been here before. In the first week of theartsdesk’s existence, the BBC began screening a daily drama by the name of The Cut. Daily drama has never been the BBC’s thing, unless you happen to speak Welsh and follow Pobol y Cwm, and so it proved with this online soap dished out in bite-size five-minute pieces.

Read more...

Michael Winner's Dining Stars, ITV1

Adam Sweeting Three of Michael Winner's Dining Stars means your cooking is 'historic beyond belief'

The national urge for self-flagellation on television continues apace with Michael Winner’s preposterous new series. Not content with having to eat cockroaches in Borneo, never mind being tongue-lashed by John Torode and that thuggish bloke who looks like a bailiff on Masterchef, the population is now queueing up to invite a cantankerous elderly man into their own homes to ridicule their cooking. At the end of the series, the winner gets to cook dinner for Michael's celebrity chums,...

Read more...

Damages, BBC Two

Gerard Gilbert

The new series of the Glenn Close litigation drama Damages began like the previous two series of Damages – in the future tense. Someone deliberately slammed their car into the side of Patty Hewes’s car, and a grisly discovery was made in a wheelie bin. How we get to this dénouement will be revealed over the next three months. Am I up for such a commitment? Because miss just 10 minutes of this tortuous legal thriller and you’re up the proverbial creek.

Read more...

On Expenses, BBC Four

Adam Sweeting Brian Cox as Speaker Michael Martin: not even tribal loyalty could save him

As one of the opening captions put it, "you couldn't make it up",  and this sprightly drama about the House of Commons expenses scandal duly tacked its way skilfully up the channel between satire and slapstick. Concluding correctly that wallowing in moral outrage was not the way to handle a subject whose full ramifications have yet to land on us (and them) with their full crushing force, writer Tony Saint instead deftly depicted the Commons as a kind of Swiftian monstrosity, ludicrous yet...

Read more...

The Bible: A History, Channel 4

Jasper Rees

For six years from 1988, when Sinn Fein was banned from direct broadcasting, Gerry Adams could be seen on television, but not heard. Instead, actors would read his words while his lips soundlessly moved. What would the architects of that ban have said if they’d been told that one day the political face of the Provisional IRA would be given an hour on television to make a programme about Christ? "Jesus wept?" "He’s got a bloody cheek?"

Read more...

EastEnders live, BBC One

Veronica Lee

It was Stacey whodunnit. EastEnders’ first live broadcast last night, to celebrate 25 years on BBC One, ended with Stacey Branning (Lacey Turner) declaring, “It was me. I did it. I killed Archie. It was me.” So now we know, as one of the most drawn-out storylines in the history of soaps finally reached its conclusion (Archie Mitchell was killed at Christmas).

Read more...

The Great Offices of State, BBC Two

Gerard Gilbert The Great Offices of State: Michael Cockerell visits the Foreign Office

That title has been troubling me. The Great Offices of State is so stolid and dull, like an illustrated Ladybird children’s book from the 1950s - The Flags of the Commonwealth, or some such. And then you start trying to think of alternatives, a play on Yes, Minister perhaps, and you soon see that this flippancy wouldn't do justice to what is in fact a masterful achievement - the sort of television series that will (or should) be shown in schools and universities for...

Read more...

Skippy: Australia's First Superstar, BBC Four

Adam Sweeting

Though children’s TV series Skippy The Bush Kangaroo was only in production from 1966 to 1968, it continues to resonate deafeningly with Australians, who are still apt to break into the theme tune or start doing kangaroo-hops round their living rooms. In fact it isn’t just Australians, since its 91 episodes  were shown in 128 countries and dubbed into numerous exotic languages.

Read more...

Storyville: The Most Dangerous Man in America, BBC Four

Adam Sweeting

On Daniel Ellsberg's first day in his new job at the Pentagon in 1964, working under Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara, the Gulf of Tonkin incident occurred.

Read more...

Pages

 

latest in today

Help to give theartsdesk a future!

It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.

It followed some...

Music Reissues Weekly: Ibex Band - Stereo Instrumental Music

Stereo Instrumental Music was recorded in July 1976 and originally issued only on cassette. The release was organised by...

Levit, Sternath, Wigmore Hall review - pushing the boundarie...

Igor Levit is a master of the unorthodox marathon, one he was happy to share last night with 24-year-old Austrian Lukas Sternath, his student in...

Rhinoceros, Almeida Theatre review - joyously absurd and abs...

Is the theatre of the absurd dead? In today’s world, when cruel and crazy events happen almost daily, the idea that you can satirize daily life by...

Mr Burton review - modest film about the birth of an extraor...

Many know that the actor Richard Burton began life as a miner’s son called Richard Jenkins. Not so many are aware of the reason he...

Album: The Waterboys - Life, Death and Dennis Hopper

Mike Scott is The Waterboys. Launched by wide-eyed 1980s folk-...

Restless review - curse of the noisy neighbours

Horror comes in many forms. In writer-director Jed Hart’s...

MobLand, Paramount+ review - more guns, goons and gangsters...

A year ago Guy Ritchie brought us the Netflix series The Gentlemen, and now here he is on Paramount+ with his latest romp through the...

Ed Atkins, Tate Britain review - hiding behind computer gene...

The best way to experience Ed Atkins’ exhibition at...