TV
Kieron Tyler
Despite the tee-hee title, the promise of a journey from “high culture to high camp” and the nudge-and-wink comment that the falsetto is “able to transport us to heaven knows where”, Alan Yentob’s examination of male singers who’ve chosen to “falsify their voice” was a thoughtful, though scattershot rumination on men who choose to take their voice beyond its natural range.Making the choice to embrace the high register isn’t just about potentially inviting accusations of effeminacy, it can bring self-inflicted physical damage too. Not being equipped to go high, grown men can suffer. Images Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Every leading thespian needs a depressive Swedish detective in his repertoire, and Kenneth Branagh has the knighthood to prove it. He may also face a little extra critical scrutiny this time around, since the return of his Anglicised Wallander comes in the wake of the recent Scandi invasion, courtesy of The Bridge, Borgen and The Killing II. We've even had a little dose of Sebastian Bergman, starring Rolf Lassgard, famous in Sweden for his portrayal of Kurt Wallander. And we've had the Swedish Wallander itself.How do Branagh and co measure up? Pretty well I guess, though it's always going to Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Now we're talking! Following on from a small-screen Richard II of greater aural than visual interest, along comes Richard Eyre's TV adaptation of both Henry IV plays, and the first thing that seems evident about Part One is how well it would hold up in the cinema. (Indeed, I saw it in just such a setting at a preview screening with the director in attendance.) Lustrously shot in all manner of rusts, ochres, and browns that can drain away where needed, primarily during the battle scenes, Eyre's diptych in its first half makes a ravishing case for Shakespeare on film even as it whets the Read more ...
Fiona Sturges
There are a few things wrong with Episodes, the comedy series in which Stephen Mangan and Tamsin Greig play a British scriptwriting couple who take their hit sitcom across the pond, but there’s a lot more that’s right with it. Look beyond the horrible title sequence, in which a television script literally takes flight and flaps all the way from London to Los Angeles, and the ghastly parping music which transports you not to a sunny Californian TV studio but a low-rent BBC panel game complete with plywood set, and you’ll find a show worth cherishing.The second series finale provided a Read more ...
Veronica Lee
What a dicey subject for debate Michael Johnson opened here, one that has scuppered the career of academics and social commentators alike, and which will have made many of his audience feeling deeply troubled. Johnson, now 44, competed at three Olympic Games between 1992 and 2000, won four Olympic gold medals at 200 metres and 400 metres, and still holds the world record for the latter.The starting point was his realisation that, at the Beijing Games in 2008, the eight sprinters who lined up for the men's 100m final, who hailed from four countries, were all descended from West Africans Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The Storyville documentary strand must rank as one of the special glories of British television. As its opening titles unfold in different languages, we can only celebrate programmes that still give time to international stories, told in their own time, and allowing an eclectic, sometimes oblique view on their subjects. Hitler, Stalin and Mr Jones, a film by George Carey (pictured below), serves as a rallying cry to endorse exactly that.The “Mr Jones” of the title was a Welsh journalist, Gareth Jones, whose career in the 1930s and before took him to both Hitlerite Germany and Soviet Russia, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“One never consciously observes. The only people who consciously observe are policemen and undercover agents.” Eric Sykes, who has died at the age of 89, was the last of the great vaudevilleans. When I met him in the late 1990s, he was already totally deaf and largely blind, and somehow continued to work and remain remarkably chipper with it. He had his first ear operation in 1952, another a decade later, whereafter he wore a hearing aid camouflaged as a pair of thick-rimmed glasses. He would sometimes rub his eyes through the plane where the lenses ought to be: a sight gag if ever there was Read more ...
Jasper Rees
A drama featuring mayoral politics and an unsolved death. Hm. What’s the Danish for déjà vu? By the end of episode one of Blackout, you were wondering when Sara Lund was going to strut into the town hall in her Faroe Isles pullie and attitudinal denim, stare at people very hard and seem ever so gradually to lose the plot. Not that there’s much plot to lose in Blackout. The Killing’s belle dame sans merci could knit it up in three hours, no bother.Which is lucky because this is British television drama, where they tend to have no faith in the concept of the slow narrative burn. Three hours is Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There are worse assignments than making a film about Nicola Benedetti, and the glamorous 25-year-old violinist had clearly entranced Lord Bragg. Mind you, you'd struggle to find much to dislike about her. She's funny and articulate and has a billion-watt smile, while being an utterly dedicated musician whose playing mixes technical command with potent emotional expressivess.It would also seem that she's driven by a mission to educate and inspire young(er) musicians so both they and classical music itself may have some prospect of future survival. She made the pointed comment that classical Read more ...
Matt Wolf
There was some pretty serious hair on view in the BBC's new film of Richard II, a play better-known for its luxuriant verse, and well there might be, given that the adaptation came to us courtesy that most fulsomely-maned of theatre directors, Rupert Goold. (Among his colleagues, only the RSC's Greg Doran can compete in the follicular sweepstakes.) That's all well and good, I can hear you asking, but did Shakespeare's extravagantly lyrical rhetoric survive the stage-to-screen transfer?The answer is yes in some places and not so well in others, but I can't imagine not being mesmerised by Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Those quaint old TV shows in which we were invited to support and admire the police unreservedly have long been overtaken by real-life events. Now evolution has brought us to Line of Duty, a series that presents the police as a failing bureaucracy hamstrung by paperwork and political correctness. From what one gathers of how our contemporary rozzers operate - inviting you to report crimes by email, for instance, because police stations are only open some of the time, or arresting victims instead of perpetrators - this may be unpleasantly close to reality.Perhaps writer Jed Mercurio picked up Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Post-Dubya, post-Palin, (very) post-Yes We Can, the US sitcom appears finally to have arrived at the same point its more cynically inclined British equivalent reached decades ago. In a political age defined by dishonour and doublespeak, it seems the most effective means of responding to all that mendacious incompetence is to dropkick depressing reality into the realm of the absurd.Perhaps pertinently, perhaps not, a couple of Brits are helping bring political satire to America's small screens. Conceived, directed and co-written (with Simon Blackwell) by Armando Iannucci, Veep - which aired in Read more ...