TV
Kieron Tyler
Being dead – however recently – doesn’t necessarily mean reputations are immune from being rewritten or trampled on. Best Possible Taste was scheduled just before another channel’s documentary on Kenny Everett's fellow TV personality and BBC DJ Jimmy Savile, which raised allegations of his sexual assault of minors. Savile has been dead a year. Everett for seventeen.“We must construct our own universe,” Everett was told by his wife Lee in the latest BBC Four bio-drama based around the private lives (and pain) of Britain’s popular entertainers. Everett was lucky to get this treatment. That Best Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Shouldn’t it be a stiff lower lip? When a person loses control of his or her emotions, and gives in to the instinct to blub, the telltale sign is not the unstiffening of the upper lip but the wobbling of the lower. In short, we have been saddled with a national characteristic that is an anatomical inaccuracy. It was an American who got it wrong in the late 19th century. But that’s not until next week. In fact in part one of this history of British repression, we weren't very repressed at all. We – or rather our Enlightenment forebears – had not yet learned the art of keeping a lid on it.Ian Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The screenwriter Peter Bowker won over viewers of all stripes with his wonderfully clever, musical serial Blackpool and sealed the deal with the chunky post-Iraq War drama Occupation. He demonstrated a deft narrative touch, an expert ability to spin a yarn and the right level of unpredictability to give him a reputation as something of a televisual auteur. Ah, but before all that he used to write for Casualty, and it is to those days he returns with Monroe, the second series of which began last night, and which bears a strong resemblance to the BBC’s hospital soap warhorse.Dr Gabriel Monroe Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
And so to the third series of HBO's panorama of the Prohibition era, where we joined the denizens of Atlantic City as they prepared to celebrate New Year's Day, 1923. In the finale of series two, we'd seen our chief protagonist, Nucky Thompson (Steve Buscemi), tying off some loose ends as he prepared to take the plunge into full-scale gangsterhood. These included persuading Margaret Schroeder (Kelly Macdonald) to marry him so she couldn't testify against him in court, and despatching his weak and treacherous brother Eli (Shea Whigham) to jail.Both of these are back on board for series three ( Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
At boarding school in the mid-1970s Matron – a grey-haired, sharp-beaked stick of a woman who put the fear of God into us – would often remark: “Remember, boys, always be polite to the lower orders.” She was referring to the army of cleaning and kitchen staff who kept the lino lethally polished and our stomachs full of stodge. It was as if the swinging Sixties had never happened. Even when the power was cut off during the winter of discontent there was always plenty of hired help to light the candles.Such archaic sentiment, even though the peasants have revolted, can still be found in leafy Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Do we really needed to hear more from Joe Lampton, the anti-hero of John Braine’s Room at the Top? His battle for social advancement and sexual self-expression has long since stopped holding up a mirror to society, you'd think. In fact we nearly didn’t hear more from him in this new BBC adaptation. Anyone turning on BBC Four one night in April last year expecting to watch would have been disappointed. Owing to a late-blooming rights dispute, the BBC decided on the day of broadcast not to go ahead. Now, 18 months later, with all legal ducks finally in a row, the first episode went out last Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It's a reasonable assumption that Emile Zola would never have guessed his novel Au Bonheur des Dames (The Ladies' Paradise, part of the Rougon-Macquart series) would be the inspiration for a BBC costume drama. And it's an even safer one that he would have barely recognised his 1883 novel, an acute observation of capitalism and bourgeois life in mid-19th-century France, in Bill Gallagher's adaptation The Paradise.Gallagher, who wrote the equally soapy Lark Rise to Candleford, has relocated the action from Paris to an unnamed city in the North-East of England, presumably Newcastle, where the Read more ...
graeme.thomson
The Special Relationship might be on a sticky wicket politically, but in telly at least it seems to be thriving. Spooks, Downton and Episodes have all recognised the sound commercial sense in bringing together marquee names from both sides of the pond. Now comes Cuckoo, a new six-part comedy series which pitches budding US film star and Saturday Night Live stalwart Andy Samberg against our very own comic giant Greg Davies. The third lead, Helen Baxendale, presumably ticked several boxes simply for being known on either side of the Atlantic seaboard for her (terrible) turn in Friends.So much Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The uproarious success of Downton Abbey, now firmly established as one of Britain's great national pastimes, seems to have had the happy effect of persuading ITV1 that it must make more drama. Thus, the autumn of 2012 has been ushered in by new ITV dramas swirling about our ears like tumbling leaves, from The Last Weekend and The Scapegoat to the comeback of Downton itself.More interestingly, the channel has also served up a batch of conspicuously female-centric pieces, albeit with mixed results. The murdered-girl story A Mother's Son felt like a series brutally curtailed by chainsaw, losing Read more ...
josh.spero
There are two reasons I can often be found slumped on my sofa watching the 8.30pm cookery-show slot on BBC Two on a Monday evening: first, it has the perfect lead-in, University Challenge, after which nothing involving mental exercise is required; and second, I'm a greedy cook. Tonight saw the return to this slot of erotic gastronome Nigella Lawson with Nigellissima, whose cod-Italian title suggested exactly the food she would be cooking.But it's not so much the food I want to write about. Yes, it looked more desirable than Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Speedos - tagliata, chocolate cheesecake (not Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In time-honoured fashion, hope sprang eternal for the British contenders in the 64th Primetime Emmy Awards, held last night in Los Angeles. Downton Abbey had picked up seven major nominations (and 16 in all, including various behind-the-scenes categories), while there were also high hopes for the multi-nominated Sherlock and gongtastic possibilities for the BBC detective series Luther and its star Idris Elba. Clive Owen was in the running for his portrayal of Ernest Hemingway in the HBO mini-series Hemingway & Gellhorn, while Jared Harris had a shout for Best Supporting Actor in Mad Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
"There used to be among families...a position, a certain...call it 'parade'." So stammered Benedict Cumberbatch's rigidly principled, increasingly broken Christopher Tietjens at the climax of last week's penultimate Parade's End, echoing his own line from the series' first episode as he struggled to justify his fidelity to adulterous wife Sylvia (Rebecca Hall).In the kind of verbally shrewd reversal that has defined Tom Stoppard's meticulous, occasionally magnificent script, a frustrated General Campion told him "there are no more parades for that regiment". Tietjens was the last Read more ...