TV
Barney Harsent
Turning autobiography into comedy gold is an alchemy that has often been tried. Among them Caitlin Moran’s Raised by Wolves, Kathy Burke’s superb Walking and Talking, and the mooted but, as yet uncommissioned story of Jeremy Clarkson’s childhood, provisionally titled For Whom the Bellend Trolls.When dealing with real-life reminisces, the balance between believability and comedy is a very difficult thing to get right. Slight situations can provide big laughs in a living, breathing reality, and the temptation is to supersize them for telly to make sure that everyone is in on the joke. The Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“Breezy” isn't a word we associate with Ray Winstone. We’re more used to something like “big slab o’ bastard”, the epithet he got (they were biased Glaswegians, admittedly) most recently for his appearance in Robert Carlyle’s The Legend of Barney Thomson.So to see him jauntily singing along to Sinatra at the beginning of Alan Whiting’s three-parter The Trials of Jimmy Rose looked different. Admittedly he was walking away from 12 years at Her Majesty’s Pleasure (not his first stretch, either), and being met in a Bentley suggested that probation wasn’t exactly going to be a hardship stint. The Read more ...
howard.male
Oliver Sacks, peerless explorer of the human brain, has today died of cancer aged 82. Inspired by case histories of patients suffering from neurological disorders, Sacks's eloquent musings on consciousness — which he termed 'neurological novels' — included The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat and Awakenings, the former adapted into a Michael Nyman opera, the latter an Oscar-nominated film. His combination of intellectual rigour, philosophical expressiveness and powerful compassion illuminated numerous conditions for a readership extending far beyond the medical Read more ...
Florence Hallett
It was suggested more than once during this adventure in Warhol-world that Andy Warhol himself was the artist’s greatest achievement. It’s a neat sentiment if not an original one, and while it may well be true, it didn’t bode well for a documentary in search of the “real” Andy Warhol. However exclusive the access to Warhol’s “planning diary”, however frank the interviews with friends, relatives and Factory colleagues, it seemed unlikely – and as a venture somewhat misguided – that we would ever really get beyond the version of Warhol so carefully cultivated by the artist himself.In Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Pop went the easel, and more, as we were offered a worldwide tour – New York, LA, London, Paris, Shanghai – of the art phenomenon of the past 50 years (still going strong worldwide). We were led by a wide-eyed interlocutor, the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed Alastair Sooke, to the throbbing beat of – what else? – pop music, Elvis and much else besides.Sooke protested a bit too much, doing down the previous big deal in modern art, Abstract Expressionism, in order to enhance the revolutionary nature of Pop in its fascination and appropriation of the tropes of advertising and consumerism. He Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Heaven, or a lot of pagan gods at least, may know what was in the air 2500 years ago. Bettany Hughes has just finished her trilogy of philosophers from that millennium, and now we have Professor Andrew Wallace-Hadrill taking us genially around Athens, founded – you guessed – 2500 years ago and providing the template for cities ever since.The televisual essay is now an integral part of popularising ancient history. And what could be more persuasive (and helpful to the tourist industry) than visits to two great ancient cities – Rome follows next week – with a pat on our heads to remind us of Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
What exactly do we expect when a drama opens with the declaration, “This is a true story”? The Scandalous Lady W, based on Hallie Rubenhold’s biography Lady Worsley’s Whim, brought us some unusual 18th century marriage shenanigans that ended in one of the most scandalous court cases of the era. But, despite its central legal scenes, “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” wasn’t the order of the day.David Eldridge’s screenplay instead adjusted details to strengthen what would have anyway been a very acute commentary on the status of women in society, and particularly within Read more ...
Barney Harsent
The appeal for commissioners of turning Rob Temple’s superb Very British Problems Twitter feed into a TV show is easy to see. The account has more than a million followers and the planning discussions will, no doubt, have included the words, “brand”, “awareness” and “maximise”. Probably “leverage” as well, but used wrongly, and by an idiot. Presented here as an extended collection of talking heads, it’s also cheap. Julie Walters will have cost a few quid for the voiceover – as will the contributors – but even when you add on the cost of the crew and the petrol to get to each of the houses for Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
"This ain't the Summer of Love," sang Blue Oyster Cult in 1975. Judging by this intriguing new drama, it might not really have been the Summer of Love in 1967 either, as David Duchovny's Detective Sam Hodiak picks his way through the dope and the kaftans and finds himself on the trail of a menacing little scumbag called Charlie Manson.Looking older and chunkier, but also sleek and a trifle sleazy, Duchovny slips into the role of an LAPD veteran with a knowing shrug. Though the young undercover narcotics cop he ends up working with, Brian Shafe (Grey Damon, pictured below right), starts off Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Haste was of the essence as the Allies hurried to create the ultimate weapon. They were fearful that Hitler’s Germany, which had been first to split the atom, would beat them to it – and they knew that the Nazis would have no compunction about using it.Subtitled “A Thousand Days of Fear”, this film from Tim Ward and Domenic Mastrippolito was in a hurry too, which was a shame because with the wealth of material here – interviews with many of the main players, some presumably still living, others interviewed previously (the distinction wasn't always clear), as well as some remarkable archive Read more ...
Barney Harsent
The premise is a simple one. Get some fairly well-known celebs – preferably at least one comedian – stick them in a room, get them to say some contentious things in front of a studio audience for some un-PC LOLs and then edit it down to a hilarious TV hour. By gifting this vehicle to the singular talent of Katie Hopkins, a person whose DNA seems to be comprised of twisted fragments from the Daily Mail sidebar of shame, TLC have found their Jeremy Clarkson. A no-nonsense star who doesn’t suffer fools. Or, it would seem, the disadvantaged, poor and vulnerable.Keeping order in the melee, as Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
This programme was a puzzle. It didn't quite work, and it should have worked an absolute treat, as Buddhism is in some respects the religion, or rather the way of life, that has more and more caught the attention of the West in terms of scholarship and practitioners. It was an hour-long visual history, tracing in a trip through the subcontinent the life of the Buddha, presented by the charming and knowledgeable historian Bettany Hughes.It was the first instalment in a trilogy examining the life, times and thought of three philosophers: Buddha, Confucius and Socrates, all of whom Read more ...