TV
Adam Sweeting
The Doctor Who crew are fond of their encounters with historical characters. In his time, and let's face it he has infinite supplies of it, the Doc has rubbed shoulders with Shakespeare, Charles Dickens and Agatha Christie, and recently weathered the Blitz with Winston Churchill. For this one, "Vincent and the Doctor", le Docteur voyaged back to 19th-century Provence to straighten out a puzzling temporal kink.While visiting the Van Gogh exhibition at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, where art historian Dr Black (Bill Nighy) was holding forth about the marvels of the tormented Dutch genius, the Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Melvyn Bragg last night won this year’s Bafta TV fellowship for his long championing of ITV’s arts with the now mothballed flagship The South Bank Show, which itself has been nominated for more than 30 Baftas and won nine. Ironically Simon Cowell was another winner at the London Palladium, with a special award for an outstanding contribution to entertainment and for furthering new talent in reality talent shows such as The X Factor and Britain's Got Talent. The political satire The Thick of It won three awards, Julie Walters's win for Best Actress as Mo Mowlam beat herself in the euthanasia Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
Call me a grumpy old man if you like, but on an average week it can be hard to see the point of BBC Three - unless the point is for an overly expansionist state broadcaster to patronise the nation’s youth as a generation of weight- and Wag-obsessed delinquents with an unhealthy taste for autism and Asperger’s. But then on rare good weeks – or perhaps even years - along comes an original show like Little Britain, Being Human or Blood, Sweat and T-Shirts which suggest that maybe, just maybe, all that investment has been worthwhile. Pulse, the pilot for a potential new hospital horror series, Read more ...
fisun.guner
Here’s a question: what have the eminent Victorian statesman and four-times prime minister William Gladstone and the Nazi Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler have in common? Well, if you didn’t catch last night’s Timewatch Special, you'd probably never guess. They were both obsessed with discovering that great, drowned civilisation of antique myth, Atlantis. Gladstone thought it was located somewhere on the South Atlantic, so he proposed a government sponsored expedition but was turned down by the treasury, and Himmler thought that the Ayrian master race was directly descended from Atlantians and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Thus I approached What Makes a Great Tenor? in a spirit of moderate scepticism. Had appearing on Popstar to Operastar destroyed at a stroke the credibility of its presenter, the Mexican tenor Rolando Villazón? In a bid for the dreaded "accessibility", were they about to propose Paul Potts, the Carphone Warehouse Pavarotti, as the answer to the titular inquiry? Happily neither. In fact the programme struck an almost perfect balance between erudition, entertainment and a genuine fascination with the historical lore and legend of the opera house.As a presenter, Villazón radiates a hyperactive Read more ...
william.ward
Golfing for Cats: Alan Coren once invented the perfect book title on the basis that if you combined those who follow the activities of Tiger Woods with those who adore smaller domestic felines, you have a massive demographic primed to buy your last tome. Likewise for TV commissioning editors, there must be something tempting about the high-concept hybrid. As part of a season designed to interest the Great British audience in the arcane delights of the operatic tradition (which other shows in the series remind us was born in Italy), what better way to sugar the pill than to stick a much- Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister joins an ever-lengthening list of dramas detailing the joys, the struggles of lady-on-lady love. It’s never quite clear who these entertainments are for. Blokes, as we know, have a response to this stuff that hovers between complex and Neanderthal. Sometimes you wonder why the schedulers don’t always screen them during major sporting tournaments, when the chaps are all looking the other way. On the other hand, do fans of six-hanky chick flicks, legs curled on sofas across the land, really want to watch girls getting it on with girls? So you never know Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“Are you looking forward to Christmas?” was always going to be a difficult question. Anthony looked forward to spending it with his daughter and grandchild – as long as he kept taking the medication that allowed him to stay out of hospital. Andrew should have had a happy gathering lined up, except his latest bout of mania had seen him leave the family home. Richard was wrapping presents. A whisk for his mum, because she’d stopped eating; some liqueur chocolates for his gran, the only way to get a drop of alcohol into the old girl. Trouble was Richard had something else to look forward to: the Read more ...
howard.male
It was never going to work now, was it? Martin Amis’s dense yet surging 400-page novel condensed down to just two hours of primetime TV? But director Jeremy Lovering, along with writers Tom Butterworth and Chris Hurford (Ashes to Ashes) certainly have a good bash at it. On the plus side, many of Amis’s original words, dialogue and set-pieces were left intact. On the minus side, where do I start? The first problem is that Nick Frost was miscast. Not woefully miscast - physically he fits the bill – but Simon Pegg’s comic sidekick is more cuddly koala than dead-eyed grizzly, as Amis’s morally Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Is there anywhere Stephen Fry will not go? I mean in documentaries. We’ve had Fry on depression and Fry on America, Fry on HIV and Fry on endangered species. Movingly, we’ve had Fry on who he thinks he is, an odyssey in which he discovered that much of his family fetched up in the gas ovens. Fry on Wagner? Admit it, you weren’t surprised. You didn't think, not another bloody comedian investigating, in pursuit of ratings, a subject of which he knows next to nothing. Fry, as everyone knows, knows everything. “My love affair with Wagner”, he began, “began when I was a child.” Of course it did, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I always liked that line in the 1960 Spartacus movie when Spartacus's lover Varinia (Jean Simmons) is bidding a silent farewell to the crucified rebel gladiator. "Tell da lady no loidering," growls the Roman sentry standing guard nearby. I can't tell you whether the line will appear in this new and lurid rehash of the Spartacus legend, though if it does it won't have quite the same Bronx ambience about it since most of the accents are from the Antipodes, the series having been shot in New Zealand. It also arrives tooled up with all available digital technology, and whatever it lacks in Read more ...
David Nice
The backlash begins here with the first of Flavia Rittner's three documentaries: not an operatic wannabe or a gushing celebrity outsider to present, only a conductor who knows and loves his job inside out and a parade of gorgeous, energetic singers all at the very top of their hard-working game in state-of-the-art productions.It was a tall order for irresistible Royal Opera music director Antonio Pappano to whizz his way through Monteverdi, Handel, Mozart and Rossini in one hour, but by going straight to the heart of each matter, choosing a scene from a key opera and working on it in the most Read more ...