TV
gerard.gilbert
Monty Don’s Fork to Fork is probably my desert island gardening book, while Don’s weekly articles in the Observer magazine are still sorely missed years after they last appeared. He is a marvellous writer, poetic and evangelical - although I’ve never been as enamoured of him as a TV presenter. The same goes for Don’s friend, Nigel Slater, whom I prefer in print than on television. I find their authorial voices more beguiling than their broadcasting ones.And I thought that the way that the bar has been raised in lifestyle television, particularly by Jamie Oliver with the likes of Jamie's Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It started ten years ago with The Second World War in Colour, continued with The First World War in Colour and Britain at War in Colour. You didn’t half get the picture. In series after absorbing series, the foreign country that is the monochrome past came closer. Colour footage flushed some pink into its cheeks. Grey flowered into khaki. Now here comes another war effort. Shooting the War tells the story of 1939-1945 from the bottom up. In part one, entitled “Men”, Tommy and Jerry laid down their weapons to wield cine cameras at the elbow of history.While it’s never a good idea to buy Read more ...
hilary.whitney
"What is it about Schubert’s music that has such power 180 years on? It has nothing to do with who he slept with or what he had for breakfast – it’s the work," insists filmmaker Christopher Nupen, whose series of films about composers is currently showing on BBC Four. "If you’re dragged towards the quotidian and the sensational, you’ll be pulled away from that elusive essence in the work that nobody has ever succeeded in explaining, but which remains one of the highest expressions of the human mind.”Nupen is also emphatic that the films, which feature Bizet, Sibelius, Respighi, Paganini, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Naturally it would be impossible to reach an objective verdict on what is the worst programme ever shown on television, but it is at least safe to say that Popstar To Operastar is determined not to get left behind in the race to the bottom. This could also be said of some of its contestants, whose unfamiliarity with the concept of "singing" seemed surprising in people who perform music for a living, albeit of the non-operatic kind.Not that the concept is necessarily a bad one. The notion of recruiting a bunch of pop singers and bussing them over to the operatic sphere could have been a device Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Saturday evening's By The People - The Election of Barack Obama helpfully illustrated some timeless truths about the art of documentary film-making. Its co-authors, Amy Rice and Alicia Sams, had spent two years enjoying priceless backstage access to Barack Obama's campaign for the presidency, first as he saw off Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination and then during the Presidential campaign itself.Then they were allotted a priceless two-hour broadcast slot, which is tantamount to film-makers' nirvana. Yet, loaded down with all the goodies the documentary gods could provide, they went Read more ...
Jasper Rees
On Have I Got News for You, the world viewed through Paul Merton’s eyes is not quite as others see it. He makes the random connections of the lateral thinker, thinks jaggedly round corners, and competes manically to have the last word, the last laugh. He also likes you to know that he knows stuff. Last night Paul Merton went to Germany to make a documentary. He’d never been before. You rather fancied that Germany viewed through the Mertonian prism might come up looking a little different, perhaps even a little funnier. But no, I didn't laugh once.In Merton's Germany it's business as usual, Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
If Gordon Brown had slipped and fallen on the ice this weekend you could have expected at least a dozen conspiracy theories to have emerged on the internet. Why was David Miliband spotted studying a weather map the night before? Why had the PM’s aides suggested that particular pavement? And who controls the gritting lorries anyway? The worldwide web is many things, and one of them is this festering, bottomless pit of paranoid conjecture – rich picking for a tough-minded series like BBC Two’s The Conspiracy Files, whose latest chosen subject was Osama Bin Laden. Or rather the lack of him.There Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In the next few weeks the wider public will be introduced to the charms of Rolando Villazón (b. 1972). Anointed as a star of opera houses around the world in the last decade, the Mexican tenor is about to participate in ITV1's Popstar to Opera Star. As singing celebs from the world of pop music take on the big arias, Villazón has been cast as mentor, panellist and figleaf. It is all a very long way from Covent Garden.His label Deutsche Grammophon is taking advantage of the exponential hoik in profile to release Tenor, a new CD of operatic favourites, some culled from his back catalogue, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
For Horizon's fascinating investigation into the ancestral relationship between man and dog, a record-breaking number of illustrious boffins had been compressed into 60 minutes of television. We met Dr Anna Kukekova from Cornell University, who has been conducting research into which gene makes silver foxes (dogs by any other name) either tame or wild. I'm sure other viewers were as thrilled as I was to make the acquaintance of Dr Adam Miklos, from an unprounceable university in Budapest, who delivered shards of insight into the way humans instinctively understand the shades of meaning Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
Perception was everything last night in Garfield Kennedy’s fascinating if, at times, frustrating documentary, The Trials of Amanda Knox. Was the American student who was convicted last month of murdering her British flatmate in Perugia, Meredith Kercher, a scheming hussy into (very) extreme sex games, or just an averagely adventurous twentysomething turned into a scapegoat by an Italian judiciary that had already convinced itself of her guilt? Kennedy’s film considered the evidence, and it also detailed the concomitant trial by the media - and there, to a degree, is a problem. Because this Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The first episode of a new series is always a minefield. How do you introduce the main protagonists, set the scene, hint at what you hope will be the show's long and brilliant future and still cram in enough storyline to keep viewers watching until the end? In this regard, perhaps Nurse Jackie was assisted by its brief 30-minute slot (of which the actual show only filled about 26), since this left no alternative but to focus and trim ruthlessly.The result was a tantalisingly ambiguous glimpse inside the world of Nurse Jackie Peyton (Edie Falco) and her life at New York's All Saints' Hospital Read more ...
theartsdesk
theartsdesk received a New Year's gift last night when we were given a significant accolade from BBC Radio 5 Live. In Web 2009 with Helen and Olly, the station's podcasters and self-styled "internet obsessives" Helen Zaltzman and Olly Mann recognised theartsdesk as one of the five "essential sites of 2009" in a series of awards to the "cream of weblebrity". The shortlist included such big names as Google Streetview and Spotify, the winner.Our category consisted of sites which "this year seemed to become entirely essential" and the presenters (pictured right) praised theartsdesk's " Read more ...