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School of Saatchi, BBC Two/ Gracie!, BBC Four

Adam Sweeting Monday, 23 November 2009

Thanks to the shenanigans of Brit-art superstars like Messrs Emin and Hirst, Art has become a lucrative appendage of pop culture, so it’s only logical that it should be given its own version of X Factor, with a bit of Apprentice-style authoritarianism bolted on for good measure. In School of Saatchi, a panel of judges sifts...

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Confessions of a Traffic Warden, C4

Gerard Gilbert Thursday, 19 November 2009

Confessions of a Traffic Warden: Durga from Nepal prepares to pounce

Who’d be a traffic warden, eh? The answer, it would seem, is any number of immigrants willing to be paid £7 an hour to be verbally abused, physically attacked and generally despised by the great British public. And Olly Lambert, writer-director of Channel 4’s well-made and informative Cutting Edge documentary, Confessions of a Traffic Warden, says that although his original intention was to find out about the people beneath the uniforms, what he actually discovered was the...

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Hi Society: The Wonderful World of Nicky Haslam, BBC Four

Adam Sweeting Tuesday, 17 November 2009

Nicky Haslam, social butterfly and interior designer to the impossibly wealthy

This odyssey of party-goer and interior designer Nicky Haslam frequently resembled a Private Eye diary by Craig Brown, who’s always at his best when lacerating narcissistic name-dropping diarists from earlier generations. We watched Haslam swapping anecdotes about Picasso with the painter’s biographer John Richardson, reminiscing about how Mae West used to sleep with two monkeys on her bed, and pointing out where...

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Enid, BBC Four

Adam Sweeting Monday, 16 November 2009

Enid Blyton (Helena Bonham Carter) curbs her enthusiasm for long-suffering husband Hugh Pollock (Matthew Macfadyen)

Has somebody got it in for poor Matthew Macfadyen? In the recent series of Criminal Justice he didn’t even make it to the end of episode one before he was fatally stabbed by Maxine Peake. Now here he was as Enid Blyton’s adoring and supportive first husband Hugh Pollock, books editor at the George Newnes publishing house, only to find himself on the wrong...

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What Is Beauty?, BBC Two

Josh Spero Saturday, 14 November 2009

As questions go, "What is beauty?" is quite possibly only second to "What do women want?" in the frequency of its asking and in the difficulty of its answer. As the first programme in BBC Two and BBC Four’s Modern Beauty season, What Is Beauty? features Matthew Collings skirting around the edges of an answer and in doing so inadvertently...

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Misfits, E4

Gerard Gilbert Thursday, 12 November 2009

Filmed in the same Thamesmead locations in south-east London as Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, Misfits also features a gang of young trouble-makers in boiler suits. Unlike Alex and his Droogs, who face the fearsome "Ludovico" aversion therapy (after which thinking about violence, or hearing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, triggers nausea), this bunch are on a fairly slack community service gig.

Andrew Marr's The Making of Modern Britain, BBC Two

Gerard Gilbert Wednesday, 11 November 2009

The last time I saw Andrew Marr in the flesh was at the Independent’s old offices in Canary Wharf, during a savage round of job-shedding in the late Nineties. To address the staff, editor Marr had jumped upon a table, like Keir Hardie addressing striking miners, and his old-school style of speech-making is perfectly in tune with the politics of the first half of the 20th century. Marr, in truth, wasn’t a very natural newspaper editor - he is a much better working journalist.

Collision, ITV1/The Execution of Gary Glitter, Channel 4

Adam Sweeting Monday, 09 November 2009

DI Tolin (Douglas Henshall) tries to untangle the wreckage in Collision

The premise of Collision (as well as its title) is unmistakably similar to that of Paul Haggis's movie Crash, in which a road accident provides the linking point for a cluster of disparate personal stories. However, instead of the boulevards of Los...

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Comedy Showcase: Campus, Channel 4

Gerard Gilbert Friday, 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...

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Spooks, BBC One

Adam Sweeting Wednesday, 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”.