TV
Jasper Rees
OK, let’s flop it out into the open. Let’s show the cards I was dealt way back when. Those boaters you saw at the start of Cutting Edge's Too Poor for Posh School? I may well, in another lifetime, blameless aeons in the netherworld of one’s past, have been seen wandering along a high street on a hill north-west of London underneath one of those. The tailcoats worn by pews full of adolescents on Sundays? Yep. Once upon a time that was oneself. (Thank God they didn’t show the top hats we had to wear as monitors.) My name is Jasper and I am an Old Harrovian. Thought I’d better get that out the Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
There must have been gnashing of teeth and the rending of heavily discounted garments in the marketing departments of Marks & Spencer, House of Fraser et al, when they realised that their commercial rival had been granted a three-hour advertisement on the BBC, but then there has always been something about John Lewis that seems to elevate it above the ruck and maul of the high street. What that something was – and whether or not it was purely mythical – was the subject of Liz Allen’s ultimately interesting documentary foray behind the façade of Middle England’s favourite department store Read more ...
Jasper Rees
We know the grammar now by rote. Some local institution is on its uppers. A traditional way of life is threatened by changing times. Sic transit etcetera and so forth. What’s wanted is a shot in the arm, a kick in the seat, preferably administered by a famous well-known celebrity star, one if at all possible followed at all times by their own bespoke camera crew. And yea, lo, not to mention verily, they will sprinkle their fairy dust, twinkle their pixie bits, and an impossible task of a horridly hard nature will by some completely predictable miracle be achieved, all thanks to grit, graft Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
You don't have to be female to wonder where the feminist revolution went. You only have to look at the not-very-private lives of footballers and the gaggles of wannabe WAGs flinging themselves in their path, or the way female pop stars seem to relish the requirement to dress up (or down) like porno queens, to wonder if it isn't high time somebody wrote an update of Kate Millett's Sexual Politics. But they'd all be too busy Tweeting to read it.Millett was one of the pioneering feminist icons tracked down by Vanessa Engle in Libbers, the first of her three-part series, Women. Read more ...
Veronica Lee
“The Mob made Vegas,” says its mayor since 1999, Oscar B Goodman. And he should know, having defended plenty of mobsters in his time when - he and I are equally quick to point out - he was a defence attorney and didn’t know what they were really up to. What a trick presenter Alan Yentob missed here; he could have simply chatted to this wrinkly, wily New Yorker transplanted to the Nevada desert and The Lure of Las Vegas (shown as part of BBC Two’s Vegas night), produced and directed by Janet Lee, would have been a whole lot more entertaining.What we got, this being an Alan Yentob documentary, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The career of Simon Russell Beale (b. 1961) needs little introduction. It took wing with the Royal Shakespeare Company but, give or take the odd foray into other buildings, including work with Sam Mendes at the Donmar Warehouse and more recently with the Bridge Project, he has made the National Theatre his home. Of all the Hamlets seen in the past 20 years, his seems to be the one that more than any remains unforgettable in the collective memory. Meanwhile, anyone who saw him as a camp King Arthur in Spamalot may not have guessed that long before Russell Beale took acting seriously, he took Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
Benjamin Franklin once said that fish and guests start to smell after three days – and something similar happened to BBC One’s latest “event drama”, Five Days. The odour was that of decaying promise, and, if duty hadn’t called, I probably wouldn’t have hung around until the final episode of Gwyneth Hughes’s week-long saga. Not that it was boring exactly – in an unhurried, linear kind of way, Hughes’s storytelling pulled you in and kept you there. But the longer it went on, the more it felt like being held under false pretences.It was all to do with some sort of seedy drugs mess in the end - Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Is Eddie Izzard running a lot of marathons really worth three hour-long documentaries? No, but it was worth watching this first one. Having seen close personal friends gearing up to run the London Marathon, a process involving months of training sessions and muscle-group-specific workouts, it was barely believable to see a patently un-honed Izzard strolling into the Olympic Medical Institute in Eddie Izzard: Marathon Man, confessing that “I’ve run before, mainly for buses,” and proposing to run 1,100 miles round the UK in a month’s time. Specifically, he aimed to run 43 marathons in 51 days Read more ...
Jasper Rees
We’ve been here before. In the first week of theartsdesk’s existence, the BBC began screening a daily drama by the name of The Cut. Daily drama has never been the BBC’s thing, unless you happen to speak Welsh and follow Pobol y Cwm, and so it proved with this online soap dished out in bite-size five-minute pieces. It was my solemn duty to issue daily reports for the first five days of The Cut's life. And now here comes Five Days, which will run eponymously till the end of the week: five episodes, one a night, till we find out whodunwhat. Will it keep you hanging on? For this second outing of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The national urge for self-flagellation on television continues apace with Michael Winner’s preposterous new series. Not content with having to eat cockroaches in Borneo, never mind being tongue-lashed by John Torode and that thuggish bloke who looks like a bailiff on Masterchef, the population is now queueing up to invite a cantankerous elderly man into their own homes to ridicule their cooking. At the end of the series, the winner gets to cook dinner for Michael's celebrity chums, such as Kym Marsh and Andrew Neil. A Pyrrhic victory if ever there was one. Winner is in his element as a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It could so easily have been just another bit of God-slot box-ticking. But The Bible: A History, in which Channel 4 has invited guest presenters to mull over some aspect of the Good Book, has been exciting a lot of comment from viewers. Summoning Gerry Adams to present a film about the life of Christ won't have done anything to dampen audience ardour. Channel 4 have responded by organising a public discussion. It takes place at the British Library next week on Wednesday 3 March at 6.30pm. Roger Bolton chairs, and the panel consists of three of The Bible's presenters - historian Tom Holland, Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
The new series of the Glenn Close litigation drama Damages began like the previous two series of Damages – in the future tense. Someone deliberately slammed their car into the side of Patty Hewes’s car, and a grisly discovery was made in a wheelie bin. How we get to this dénouement will be revealed over the next three months. Am I up for such a commitment? Because miss just 10 minutes of this tortuous legal thriller and you’re up the proverbial creek. It’s easy to see why Damages does extraordinarily well in DVD box-set sales – if you’re going to get hooked, then it’s good to have some Read more ...