TV
Tom Birchenough
Is scatophilia on the loose at the BBC? After The Secret Life of Rubbish, billed as "a view of the history of modern Britain - from the back end where the rubbish comes out", creatively programmed with a repeat of The Toilet: An Unspoken History on the same night, you might be forgiven for thinking so. Both reach, so to speak, the parts that most other television documentaries don’t.I’ll leave the toilet, or rather its energetic presenter Ifor ap Glyn (pictured by a privy, below right), to speak for himself. Ap Glyn covers familiar and not-so-familiar historical ground, from Thomas Crapper to Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Was it a fluke that Secret State concluded its business on the day Lord Leveson handed in his homework? Maybe they really are that clever at Channel 4. Where Leveson has investigated the invisible nexus connecting the press, the police and Westminster, Secret State has delivered its verdict on a comparable ratking of vested interests linking government, banks, oil, the military, defence contractors, MI6, old uncle Tom Cobbleigh et al. By last night’s closer, every man jack of them was clamouring for a lucrative war with Iran, and they were all somewhat miffed when hyper-idealistic Prime Read more ...
graeme.thomson
During a previous Imagine about neurologist Oliver Sacks, Alan Yentob listened to Jessye Norman singing Strauss while scanning equipment showed his brain “bathed in blood”. It provided powerful visual evidence that music physically alters our emotions – instantly and dramatically. The job of this latest film was to find out how and why. As composer George Benjamin pointed out, it’s “a mystery that has eluded scholars for thousands of years”. Enter Yentob and a veritable legion of talking heads to clear up any misunderstandings. In the event they ended up exactly where they started.There is Read more ...
Tim Cumming
There’s a shot of the six of them running across a railway line in Belfast, running for their lives, Brian Jones at the rear, "Satisfaction" at the top of the charts, and there he is, the one who set light to the whole thing, between Mick and Keith. For a time virtually a sixth member of the band, the teenage hustler-manager with the vision thing who walked into the Station Hotel in Richmond to see the Rollin’ Stones and said hello to the rest of his life, Andrew Loog Oldham is one of the few of his caste of Sixties svengalis to survive the ensuing five decades."Surely you’ve seen the blond Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Not the least interesting aspect of Give Us The Money, an examination of the effectiveness of famous pop stars campaigning to end poverty in Africa, was how historical it felt. Homing in specifically on Bob Geldof and Bono, who between then have spent decades hectoring the public, berating politicians and schmoozing billionaires with a view to alleviating the sufferings of millions of starving Africans, it was a glimpse into a lost world of stadium rock, furry non-HD video and political yesterday's men, like Gordon Brown and George W Bush.The commentary seemed to promise a controversial Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was the Seventies/Eighties supersoap Dallas which made Larry Hagman a household name, and his portrayal of the amoral, unscrupulous oil baron JR Ewing became a benchmark character in TV history. Hagman's performance also helped to make Dallas one of the highest-rated shows of all time, and the question "Who shot JR?" (which somebody did at the end of series three) became the focus of intense global speculation. An updated version of Dallas was recently launched by the TNT network in the States, and Hagman stoically returned to the set despite his steadily worsening health.Though he'll Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Somebody has missed a trick in not promoting Getting On to BBC Two. Where The Thick of It earned its spurs on BBC Four before graduating to a larger audience, and Gavin and Stacey made the comparable journey from BBC Three to BBC One, the sitcom set in an NHS hospital has not qualified for a transfer. It’s a great pity that it has not found a wider audience, because last night’s conclusion to the third series was a masterpiece of subtle revelation and, rarer still for a sitcom, deep humanity. Beautifully crafted by writers Joanna Scanlan, Jo Brand and Vicki Pepperdine, and shot with a lyrical Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
The title says it all: Bertolucci’s landmark (if boring) French film has its last word changed from Paris to Halifax – where butter is only used for glazing parsnips. The very idea of Derek Jacobi taking Anne Reid up the scullery is enough to put anyone off their food but the two grandes dames of English theatre add class to the bittersweet romance of Sally Wainwright’s dog’s-dinner of a drama.Jacobi plays Alan Buttershaw who was stood up by Celia Dawson 60 years ago – except he wasn’t. Celia moved to Sheffield and sent him an explanatory note via a friend called Eileen who destroyed it and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
What is the point of this? Someone somewhere must have imagined Cheryl: Access All Areas was a passably entertaining idea yet it makes Come Dine With Me look like Kick Ass. It’s the antithesis of watchable and a complete waste of time - boringly constructed, badly filmed, jam-packed with nothing revealing, amusing or exciting from start to finish. In short, there’s more fun to be had scraping burnt cheese off your cooker.The premise is that it’s a documentary about Cheryl Cole’s A Million Lights debut solo tour last month but the actuality is it documents only in the very loosest sense. Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The horror, the horror. Primetime television tends to give a wide berth to things that go bump in the night. However reliable a low-budget option for budding indie filmmakers, the chills are not multiplying on the small screen. There’s no need to call in a special spookologist to work out why. Horror has its own demographic, which won’t tend to curl up on the sofa of a Sunday night for a cosy hour of creaks and shrieks. So The Secret of Crickley Hall, which has slung on a white sheet and crept into the nation’s living room, is a bit of collector’s item.Adapted by Joe Ahearne (who also directs Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Zipping her trousers while coming out of a toilet cubicle, Sarah Lund continues the phone conversation that was on-going while she was in there. Making for a sink to wash her hands, she ignores the puppyish man trying to attract her attention. Nothing is going to distract Chief Inspector Lund, whether it’s the call of nature or the new police kid on the block.The third and final series of The Killing doesn’t begin exactly like the second, with Sofie Gråbøl’s Lund marking time checking what comes off ships arriving in Denmark. Instead, we find her in another sort of holding pattern. On her Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
Each episode of Southland – the best American cop show since The Shield – begins frenetically and never lets up – except for a freeze-frame in the first minute which the rest of the show spools back to explain. In this first part of the fourth season, one of LA’s finest is out of his black-and-white and chasing a suspect within seconds as his partner careers down the back alleys of South Los Angeles.These signature car chases are one of the reasons that adrenalin junkies love it so. The suspect leaps a chain-link fence: the officer known as Hollywood (a rich kid with a pretty face and a big Read more ...