It is now part of the fixtures and fittings on British television. Its original stars, once alternative comedians, have become leathery gerontosaurs of the establishment. And yet on Comic Relief the grammar of giving has been largely immune to evolution. A star – usually a comic - goes out to Africa and reports back from a community in dire need of a basic necessity to alleviate suffering and death. They mug charmingly for the camera, make friends with the children and ask for your money.It’s a trusted method, but this year Richard Curtis has tried to shake things up a little. Rather than Read more ...

The generational time-bomb is a popular dramatic device - ITV were at it only  a couple of months ago with The Poison Tree - and new five-parter Lightfields boldly sprawls itself across three separate eras (1944, 1975 and 2012). Binding it all together is the titular location, a farmhouse in Suffolk, through which the different generations of characters pass.The rapid cutting between three separate periods featuring three different casts was hardly a guarantee of intelligibility, though you could more or less gather the gist of it as it whirled along. During the wartime period, 17-year- Read more ...

It's an interesting time for Sue Perkins's coming-out sitcom to debut, coming as it does a matter of weeks after the government has begun the process of introducing equal marriage in the UK. Despite it being broadcast in a country where seemingly sexual orientation is no longer an issue, it reflects a wider reality where some people still feel unable to be honest about themselves with their loved ones or, worse, fear their lives would be made hellish by living openly as a gay man or woman.That's the serious stuff dealt with. Heading Out, by contrast, is resolutely upbeat, right down to the Read more ...

So, Death in Paradise has harrumphed its way to another series finale. DI Richard Poole (Ben Miller) was in a grumpier mood than usual by its closing episode, contending with Fidel’s distraction as he waits results of his Sergeant’s exam, and Dwayne, as ever, diverted by the laydeez.Sara Martins’s saintly (think, patience of) presence as his sidekick Camille Bordey goes on being underappreciated, though she continues treating Richard like a rare specimen to be protected from life’s vagaries. If Camille's hoping for something else, she's one hell of an optimist, even by Francophone standards. Read more ...

Stephen Poliakoff's slow-burning drama had turned into a propulsive whodunnit by this final episode, hurtling towards a resolution with panache and surprise. The five-part mini-series about a black jazz band in early 1930s high society has had the feel of an exploratory score at times. With syncopated beats and riffs decorating its unfolding narrative, the occasional scene and detail has seemed superfluous. But Poliakoff has had his reasons. By episode five, almost every character had a motive for murdering Jessie (Angel Coulby), the lead singer, or at least assisting in a cover-up.This Read more ...

After the nightmarish vision of justice system turned spectator sport that was last week’s Black Mirror, you’d be forgiven for feeling a little disappointed that writer Charlie Brooker hadn’t ramped up the horror at the start of the final episode of this all-too-short second series. There were many adjectives one could consider throwing at Waldo, the inexplicably popular blue cartoon bear at the centre of the action, but “horrific” probably wasn’t one of them.And yet the climatic moment of this particular piece of drama was the scariest of all, not least because of its sheer plausibility. As Read more ...

He may not be a household name, but Michael Emerson became a household face by virtue of his role as the sinister Benjamin Linus in Lost, the leader of the group called the Others on the show’s hallucinatory South Pacific island. Emerson, born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa in 1954, was already a theatre veteran with a string of intermittent TV performances to his credit. Now his ascent became rocket-assisted as he appeared in all of Lost's six seasons except the first, winning an Outstanding Supporting Actor Emmy in 2009. Lost ended in 2010, leaving even faithful viewers bewildered by Read more ...

Last week we left Homer Jackson, the raffish ex-Pinkerton detective with the exceedingly chequered past, languishing in jail, after being fitted up for a Ripper-style killing by the murderous Frank Goodnight (played by cultish US actor Edoardo Ballerini). For this week's finale, Matthew Macfadyen's DI Reid urgently needed to get Jackson out again in order to apply his advanced forensic skills to unravelling a white slaving racket.Jackson was slickly able to prove his own innocence, then quickly extracted crucial clues about the gang who were drugging and kidnapping young women. His medical Read more ...

The public rarely sees the human cost of journalists covering war. More rarely still does it see the real civilian cost. That makes Walking Wounded a frank and refreshing insight into the world at either end of the lens. Siobhan Sinnerton’s remarkable film followed British photographer Giles Duley as he returned to Afghanistan after losing both legs and his left arm in an IED explosion two years ago this month while embedded there with the US Army’s 75th Cavalry Regiment.His project - to photograph work in a Kabul hospital that specializes in restorative treatment for locals Read more ...

At what stage will the trend among journalists and documentarians to regard anything relating to the internet with suspicion or, worse, ignorance come to an end? Although I recognise that my relationship with information technology has never been exactly typical, this stuff has been easy enough to access for more than half of my life now. And I’m not exactly young. Google and the World Brain, the first of this week’s two technology-themed instalments of BBC Four’s usually excellent Storyville international documentary strand, argued that attempts to preserve the entirety of human knowledge Read more ...

"New Sars-like virus claims first Briton" according to a headline in yesterday's Times, news which will have sent spasms of alarm through Utopia-watchers. A couple of episodes ago we heard how the original Sars outbreak had been a fictional creation, and this series-closer began with overheard news reports of another attack of Russian flu in Britain, which was provoking "scenes of disorder". But we know that these outbreaks too have been fabricated, as an excuse to dose up the population with the antidote.Utopia's tortuous and bindweed-like plotting has had us pondering over what, exactly, Read more ...

The arts are in a bit of a state just now. Okay, we all knew that. The money that was there in the past - and where it was coming from - just isn’t the same any more. Finding a new way of doing things is the buzz. Looking outside the box.Maybe someone should call in Alex Polizzi, who’s just begun series two of The Fixer, the family business first-aid programme that aims to turn around enterprises hovering on the edge of financial disaster (amazing, given current times, that some are still hovering at all). Tolstoy was not wrong - unhappy families sure have something special about them, and Read more ...