TV
ellin.stein
The Victorian Gothic (with 1970s additions) maze of Cheltenham Ladies’ College is a far cry from the sun-blasted soundstages of Los Angeles, particularly at this time of year when it’s surrounded by deep piles of swirling autumn leaves. Nevertheless, this past week saw the high-ceilinged, wood-panelled College corridors filled with over 400 scriptwriters, both aspiring and established, rushing to the seminars, panels and pitching sessions offered as part of the Cheltenham Screenwriters' Festival, the only event of its type in the UK.Unlike the Cheltenham Literary Festival, which is about Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If you’d invested a thousand dollars with Warren Buffett in 1965, your stake would have grown to more than than five million bucks today. If the UK had followed one of Buffett’s golden rules of investment – Don’t Get Into Debt – our clapped-out rust-bucket of a nation might now feel like a very different place. Buffett's take on debt is that "if you're smart you don't need it, and if you're dumb you've got no business using it," which Gordon Brown should have etched on the inside of his glass eye.On the other hand, if everybody copied Warren Buffett’s diet, which consists of T-bone steaks, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
To think the unthinkable, are we now getting towards the thin end of The Thick of It? The show remains unchallenged as the most bilious, urgent comedy on television. No argument there. It coruscates, it eviscerates – even a thin Thick of It does all those aggressive things to the body politic that satire should. But is there now the merest hint, just the faintest smidgin, of weariness, of heaving itself once more into the ring to land a few more blows on the clapped-out mob currently downing dregs of Pinot Grigio in the Last Chance Saloon?The Thick of It kicked down the door again last night Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's over-egging it a bit to equate Krautrock with the entire rebirth of Germany. It's also slightly jarring to entitle the film Krautrock when its narrator then blames the World War Two-obsessed British music press for inventing such a disparaging term (cue supplementary evidence of Spike Milligan and John Cleese pretending to be Nazis.)Nonetheless, I liked this film so much I watched it twice. There were loads of insightful and entertaining interviews, and most of the music was great, though the extracts weren't long enough. In fact the whole film wasn't long enough, and how often do Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
American critics have been fanfaring Modern Family as something of a sitcom revolution for its wit, intelligence and the cast's all-round expertise. It might take longer to grow a British fanbase, because you need a few spins around the circuit before its contours start to feel familiar, but then suddenly the lights go on and revelation ensues.
Initially, it looks like it should be called Modern Families. There's grouchy senior citizen Jay (Ed O'Neill) and his young Colombian wife Gloria (the scorchio Sofia Vergara), gay couple Mitchell and Cameron, and "conventional" parents-with-kids Phil Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In space, no-one can hear you snore. The opening two-parter of Defying Gravity introduced us, in a sluggish and tortuous manner, to the six-year mission of the spacecraft Antares, which contains eight astronauts and will visit seven planets, starting with Venus. Everything was meant to be stirring and momentous as mankind took up the baton previously lifted by the likes of Vasco da Gama and Neil Armstrong, to pursue the quest for knowledge and new frontiers. More prosaically, the trade journals tell us that Antares may be brought down by networks pulling the financial plug before it can be Read more ...
Jasper Rees
You can only assume they decided to confront the, er, generously proportioned mammal in the room. ITV launches a new police procedural starring the star of an old police procedural. Said star is a sizeable Scot with an old Toby jug of a face and, oh sod it, let’s just admit we’ve cast him because of the baggage. Yes, Cracker is back. OK, not Cracker, nor even Fitz, but a lived-in Glaswegian high-rise of a man who cracks murder cases on primetime, pausing only for the commercial breaks. It’s almost as if the young witness already knows all about Robbie Coltrane. “I’ve seen you before,” she Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Ludovic Kennedy, whose death at the age of 89 was announced today, will be remembered for many achievements beyond his contribution to broadcasting. But for those who grew up when there were only three channels to choose from, he informed a generation’s idea of what a broadcaster ought to be.Whether such a patrician figure would have had the same career nowadays is open to doubt. He would have been deemed rather too plummy to read the news on ITV, or present Panorama, both of which he did with distinction. And if Did You See..? still existed, it’s hard to imagine Kennedy finding anything to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Would-be axe murderers of the BBC often propose to lop off (among other things) TV channels Three and Four, but Four’s music coverage is vastly better value for viewers’ money than the executive pension fund. Synth Britannia stuck firmly to Four’s “Britannia” formula, being a bunch of talking heads and clumps of archive footage interwoven with synth-pop classics from the late Seventies and early Eighties. But that’s OK as long as the raw material is strong, and this saga of post-punk, pre-New Romantic gadget-pop was often fascinating and sometimes even thought-provoking.Not that they didn’t Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
Hung is about a teacher with an enormous penis who becomes a gigolo, which might sound like prime Judd Apatow real estate, but is a surprisingly tender foray into the male and female sexual psyches. Part two of HBO’s current male midlife crisis fixation is a completely different kettle of fish-out-of-water to Eastbound & Down – quirkier and less boisterous – and its pedigree (written by the creators of The Riches and shot by the director of Sideways) tells you a lot of what you need to know. Oh, except did I neglect to say that it’s deeply, satisfyingly funny?It was also a bit slow Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
Is John Prescott’s post-political TV career a form of atonement, a retirement gift to his lovely wife Pauline and a chance for her to share centre-stage in place of the diary secretary? Whatever the reason, Pauline Prescott has taken to the limelight like an MP to expenses, benignly batting her mascara-crusted eyelashes as the couple take another of their Jag-chauffeured tours, a faintly ludicrous Old Labour twist on King George VI and Queen Elizabeth visiting East End Blitz victims.Last year’s BBC2 documentary Prescott: the Class System and Me threw up no great insights – unless you count Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In Superman's DC Comics universe, Bizarro World is a cube-shaped planet where everything on earth is echoed in back-to-front form. A smidgen of Bizarro thinking has surely infiltrated the bewildering environment of Fringe, where a special team of FBI agents struggle with incredible paranormal phenomena, impossible inversions of the natural order, and above all the concept of parallel universes, currently the hot topic at the start of series two.In last week's opening episode, Agent Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv) made a startling entry by crashing through the windshield of her car, on her way Read more ...