tv
Julius Caesar, BBC Four review - electrifying TV launch of all-women Shakespeare trilogyMonday, 18 June 2018![]()
Who would have thought, when Phyllida Lloyd's Donmar Julius Caesar opened to justified fanfare, that two more Shakespeare masterpieces would be sustained no less powerfully within the women's-prison context over the following years? Read more...
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Panorama: Putin's Russia with David Dimbleby, BBC One review - jolly football weatherThursday, 14 June 2018![]()
There was a lovely moment at the beginning of this Panorama where David Dimbleby was chatting to a schoolgirl – not just any schoolgirl actually, because she came from a family of 10 children, which surely makes her a bit out of the ordinary, even in... Read more... |
Get Shorty, Sky Atlantic review - Elmore Leonard meets TarantinoThursday, 14 June 2018![]()
Emma Daly (Carolyn Dodd) tells her estranged husband Miles (Chris O’Dowd): “There is always an angle, a shakedown.” Of course there is: Davey Holmes’s Get Shorty is “partly based on” the Elmore Leonard novel of the same name (“inspired by” would be more accurate). Read more... |
Hidden, BBC Four review - a death in SnowdoniaSunday, 10 June 2018![]()
Nordic shmordic. Why travel to Scandinavia to get your dark, disturbing mysteries when you can find them in Wales? You even get subtitles for an extra frisson of otherness. Read more... |
Our Girl, Series 4, BBC One review - 2 Section versus Boko HaramWednesday, 06 June 2018![]()
I’ve never been in the Army, but I can’t imagine anybody involved with the making of Our Girl (BBC One) has either. Read more... |
Line of Separation, All 4, review - handsome if soapy epicSaturday, 02 June 2018![]()
You don’t see a lot of German drama imported to British television. France, Italy, Scandinavia, yes. But the biggest country in Europe is less of a player. The great exception – and it really was great - was Deutschland 83, a thrilling hit when shown on Channel 4. Read more... |
Africa: A Journey Into Music, BBC Four review - too little, too late?Saturday, 02 June 2018![]()
BBC Four is the TV music equivalent of those oldsters music mags like Q and Mojo. Have there been five, or is it six, documentaries about Queen on the channel? Read more... |
Peter Kay's Car Share: The Finale, BBC Two review - happy ever after?Tuesday, 29 May 2018![]()
Would it be happy ever after for John and Kayleigh? Would they or would they not drive off into the sunset? By the end they weren’t driving off anywhere. Thanks to an errant hedgehog, the finale of Peter Kay’s Car Share (BBC One) turned into Peter Kay’s Car Crash and blew the bloody doors off. So they went home holding hands on the bus. Read more... |
King Lear, BBC Two review - modernised TV adaptation is a mixed blessingTuesday, 29 May 2018![]()
Some have contended that King Lear is unstageable, and perhaps it’s unfilmable too. Read more... |
Hip Hop Evolution, Sky Arts review - foundations of a revolutionSaturday, 26 May 2018![]()
Comprehensively charting hip hop’s rise from the underground to the mainstream is no mean feat, but that’s exactly what Canadian MC Shad aims to do over four hour-long episodes. Originally shown in the US in 2016, and available in full on Netflix, Hip Hop Evolution has finally reached the British box via Sky Arts. 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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