tv
Comedy Showcase: Campus, Channel 4Friday, 06 November 2009
“Green Wing, but set in a university” is one of those useful handles that reviewers were always going to grasp when discussing Victoria Pile’s new improvised ensemble comedy, Campus, the opening try-out in Channel 4’s new Comedy Showcase season of sitcom pilots. For once, the handy nut-shell description is spot on. Campus is precisely that: Green Wing, but set in a university – and as a fan of Green Wing I should feel that that is good... Read more...
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Spooks, BBC OneWednesday, 04 November 2009
At the end of series seven, our tight-lipped MI5 squad risked designer shoe leather and impeccable coiffure to defuse a Russian atom bomb in London, and their boss Harry Pearce (Peter Firth) was kidnapped by dubious Russian agent Viktor Sarkisian. Hence series eight began with the hunt for Harry, whisked (unbeknown to his underlings, who expressed their concern by smiling even less than usual) by helicopter to a mansion in “Moscow on Thames”. Read more... |
Garrow's Law, BBC One / Fleetwood Mac - Don't Stop, BBC OneMonday, 02 November 2009
In Garrow's Law: Tales from the Old Bailey, writer Tony Marchant has turned to the real-life archives of the Old Bailey to find cases to illustrate the pioneering legal work of William Garrow. In the late 18th century, courtroom trials bore more resemblance to bear-baiting or witch-finding than to anything connected with justice or due process. Read more... |
The World's Greatest Money-Maker: Evan Davis Meets Warren Buffett, BBC TwoMonday, 26 October 2009
If you’d invested a thousand dollars with Warren Buffett in 1965, your stake would have grown to more than than five million bucks today. If the UK had followed one of Buffett’s golden rules of investment – Don’t Get Into Debt – our clapped-out rust-bucket of a nation might now feel like a very different place. Buffett's take on debt is that "if you're smart you don't need it, and if you're dumb you've got no business using it," which Gordon Brown should have etched on the inside of his... Read more... |
The Thick of It, BBC TwoSunday, 25 October 2009
To think the unthinkable, are we now getting towards the thin end of The Thick of It? The show remains unchallenged as the most bilious, urgent comedy on television. No argument there. It coruscates, it eviscerates – even a thin Thick of It does all those aggressive things to the body politic that satire should. But is there now the merest hint, just the faintest smidgin, of weariness, of heaving itself once more into the ring to land a few more blows on the clapped-out mob... Read more... |
Krautrock: The Rebirth of Germany, BBC FourSaturday, 24 October 2009
It's over-egging it a bit to equate Krautrock with the entire rebirth of Germany. It's also slightly jarring to entitle the film Krautrock when its narrator then blames the World War Two-obsessed British music press for inventing such a disparaging term (cue supplementary evidence of Spike Milligan and John Cleese pretending to be Nazis.) Read more... |
Modern Family, Sky1 / Question Time, BBC OneThursday, 22 October 2009American critics have been fanfaring Modern Family as something of a sitcom revolution for its wit, intelligence and the cast's all-round expertise. It might take longer to grow a British fanbase, because you need a few spins around the circuit before its contours start to feel familiar, but then suddenly the lights go on and revelation ensues. Read more... |
Defying Gravity, BBC TwoWednesday, 21 October 2009
In space, no-one can hear you snore. The opening two-parter of Defying Gravity introduced us, in a sluggish and tortuous manner, to the six-year mission of the spacecraft Antares, which contains eight astronauts and will visit seven planets, starting with Venus. Everything was meant to be stirring and momentous as mankind took up the baton previously lifted by the likes of Vasco da Gama and Neil Armstrong, to pursue the quest for knowledge and new frontiers. More prosaically, the...
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Murderland, ITV1Monday, 19 October 2009
You can only assume they decided to confront the, er, generously proportioned mammal in the room. ITV launches a new police procedural starring the star of an old police procedural. Said star is a sizeable Scot with an old Toby jug of a face and, oh sod it, let’s just admit we’ve cast him because of the baggage. Yes, Cracker is back. OK, not Cracker, nor even Fitz, but a lived-in Glaswegian high-rise of a man who cracks murder cases on primetime, pausing only for the... Read more... |
Synth Britannia, BBC FourFriday, 16 October 2009
Would-be axe murderers of the BBC often propose to lop off (among other things) TV channels Three and Four, but Four’s music coverage is vastly better value for viewers’ money than the executive pension fund. Synth Britannia stuck firmly to Four’s “Britannia” formula, being a bunch of talking heads and clumps of archive footage interwoven with synth-pop classics from the late Seventies and early Eighties. Read more... |
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