TV
Kieron Tyler
"Anyone for Demis?" wasn’t the only question posed by this trawl through some of the foreign – not American - popular music that’s been hugged to our collective bosom. That the large, hirsute, kaftan-shrouded Greek wonder that’s Demis Roussos was popular is obvious. He landed in the Top 10 in 1975 with “Happy to be on an Island in the Sun” and became a chart regular for the next two years. Everyone was for Demis. The other poser was the self-cancelling, “Now that pop music’s gone global, has the appeal of the foreign pop song gone forever?”Thankfully, this wasn’t the sniggersome jaunt through Read more ...
fisun.guner
There were rumours – on Twitter, naturally – that Charlie Sheen was going into the House. But, alas, these were unfounded, and he didn’t. Maybe even Sheen has to draw the line somewhere. Instead, only four people I’d heard of actually went ahead and signed this contract with the Devil: Sally “my husband doesn’t control me” Bercow, Kerry “this is my chance to reinvent myself” Katona, Amy Childs (I believe her catchphrase is “I’m really jel”) and Jedward, who not only must be counted as one but must remain unquoted, since they don’t really do sentences.It was clever of Channel 5 to kick their Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A nine-year-old girl testifies in court. She’s clear, precise and damning. The case revolves around her testimony alone. All the accused – 10 of them, her family and neighbours - are declared guilty and executed. The girl is the only one of the family left alive. Thirty-two years later, the girl faces the same charges. Tried, she’s found guilty but the case goes to appeal. The girl was Jennet Device and the charge was witchcraft. This extraordinary, atmospheric and beautiful documentary told her story, the story of The Pendle Witch Child, the implications of the case and how it resonated. And Read more ...
josh.spero
Before Banksy's work became the object of desire for champagne-sipping, canapé-snaffling hedge fund managers at auction houses' private views, there was something of the curled lip about street art. Indeed, for years it wasn't known as street art but graffiti - the painted defacement of walls. London in the Noughties saw the evolution of that view: there could be a legitimate artistic value of this sort of work. However, not all graffiti qualified - much was still mindless vandalism. That is what Graffiti Wars on Channel 4 last night tackled: the battle between art and spray-painting, between Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The pre-publicity has been spinning this saga of the notorious Renaissance family as a kind of origin story for The Sopranos. I suppose you could argue that Rodrigo Borgia, like Tony Soprano, was in the waste management business, as he himself suggested when he took the Papal throne as Alexander VI: "God has chosen us as a new broom to sweep the Vatican clean of corruption."But Rodrigo is undoubtedly aiming higher than a few sleazy rackets in New Jersey. As the incantation went at his spectacular coronation in Rome, "You are father of kings and monarchs, lord of the globe, earthly resident of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
On 5 August last year, a cave-in at Chile's 121-year-old San José copper mine left 33 workers trapped more than 2,000ft underground. Their subterranean ordeal would last 69 days, but this documentary concerned itself with the first 17 of those, the period during which the miners had no contact with anybody on the surface and had no way of knowing if they'd be rescued.The scenes that stuck in the mind at the time were the ones broadcast around the world, showing the extraordinary rescue of the trapped men as they were winched individually to the surface in a tube-like cage after a shaft had Read more ...
josh.spero
Your typical consumer of Who Do You Think You Are? on BBC One would almost certainly have been disappointed by last night's first instalment of the eighth series. There were no tears from June Brown, EastEnders' Dot Cotton, for a start. That is as it should be: what we got was a model of keen yet detached historical research, nothing from which Brown was going to take life-changing lessons, which is how facile this series can be.This programme was intriguing first off because it was not looking at even vaguely recent history; Brown started with her (forgive me if I get this wrong) great-great Read more ...
howard.male
“Oh my Gaaaad, you guys are crazy! That’s terrible. How could you say that?” exclaimed Shooting Stars contestant Brigitte Nielsen, unfortunately reinforcing our preconception that Americans just don’t get us Brits and our irony. Although it’s not really irony that Vic and Bob deal in, it’s a kind of vaudevillian surrealism. And they’ve shrewdly worked out that you can say just about anything to anyone as long as its impact is softened by its carefully crafted absurdity and the fact it’s been delivered by two loveable smirking heirs to Eric and Ernie’s twin thrones.If surrealism was, as Comte Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Life is full of aphorisms ascribing properties to particular colours. The scarlet woman. Red light spells danger. Yet, according to the first in the new series of Horizon, colour is “one of nature’s great illusions”. Even so, wearing red reduces stress and increases confidence. This examination of how colour is seen and interpreted, and how it affects us, revealed that an awful lot of science bods are bothered about how and why we see what we see.Why they’re bothered was immediately made clear. Colour can be linked to success. More Taekwondo players in red win than those in blue. Digitally Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This wasn't only the series finale, but the last ever episode of Camelot, since the American Starz network has decided to scrap plans for further seasons. It's not hard to see why. After a fairly promising start, Camelot spent several instalments staggering around aimlessly, as if writers and directors had been beheaded by King Arthur's Excalibur. Annoyingly, this tenth and final episode offered belated flashes of what the show might have been.At last, Arthur himself, played by the aggravatingly petulant Jamie Campbell Bower, began to - if you will - grow a pair. His ridiculous but heroic Read more ...
Jasper Rees
I Resign. It’s not a phrase you hear that often these days. Unlike, obviously, You’re Fired. There was a time, largely synonymous with the era when Tory toffs and grandees had sufficient private income to walk away from employment, that a chap could afford to resign, as the phrase has it, with honour. And it usually was a chap, usually after he’d been found to be hopping on and off strippers or tarts or his secretary or handing over the Falklands to some jumped-up tinpot little Johnny Foreigner. Nowadays politicians prefer to wriggle on a spit and keep the chauffeur. Honour be damned, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Is there a place for the travelling fun fair any more? Static attractions like Alton Towers and Thorpe Park have rides that are bigger, grander, more varied and scarier than anything a traditional, transient fair could ever transport. All the Fun of the Fair’s answer was that the fair has survived by winding the clock back, rekindling the past with original Victorian and Edwardian rides. There’s still room for something less bombastic.All the Fun of the Fair traced the history of the travelling fair in its familiar form. What we now recognise as the fair, with rides, sideshows and snacks Read more ...