TV
gerard.gilbert
The American remake of Life on Mars was judged a flop by its jumpy network, ABC, and scratched after just one season – which gave the UK premiere less the anticipation of a launch party and more the slightly shameful miasma of a hangover. And given that British audiences are well acquainted with the show’s audacious premise (that of a time-travelling cop in case anyone really has been on Mars) the foremost interest was always going to be ‘let’s see what kind of a hash the yanks have made of this one?’. Well, bad luck, this wasn't any kind of hash. It was great fun.I well recall the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
You won’t read this in Steve Jobs’ autobiography, but in the early Eighties Britain led the world in personal computing. Acorn made the BBC Micro, which sold 1.5 million units. Sinclair Research shifted shed-loads of its ZX81, despite its rickety construction and coal-fired levels of performance. A generation of apprentice nerds produced their first bloops and squiggles on these devices. Today, no doubt they’re all writing apps for that iPhone you're reading this on.But judging by the portrayal of the central characters in BBC Four’s Micro Men, Clive Sinclair and his employee-turned-rival Read more ...
Jasper Rees
This review cannot start without a confession. More of a disclaimer, in fact. What you are about to read will not by any reasonable definition pass as a balanced critical response. I began my time at Oxford University in exactly the same week as Boris Johnson and indeed Toby Young, one of the makers of When Boris Met Dave. As a student, I knew or met half the talking heads who took part. As a journalist I know or have met most of the others. They all, to a man (and woman), sound like Prince Charles. So was it any good, this playful account of the birth of the modern Tory party in the cauldron Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Considering that Stargate began as a colossally silly Roland Emmerich movie about ancient Egyptians with magic wands and spaceships, it's proving astonishingly resilient. The Stargate SG-1 TV series created a booming fanbase so eager for more that it spun off Stargate Atlantis. There have been straight-to-DVD movies, computer games, books and animated series. Now here's Stargate Universe, which – judging by this double length opener – creators Brad Wright and Robert S. Cooper might equally well have called Stargate Galactica, Stargate Trek, or even Stargate Lost.Or why not McStargate, since Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
Woody Allen has done a disservice to psychoanalysis, reckons Hagai Levy, the 45-year-old creator of HBO’s In Treatment, which starts tonight on Sky Arts 1. Levy had directed 270 episodes of a popular Israeli soap opera before he hit on the idea of a five-nights-per-week drama about therapy - the resulting show, Betipul , becoming an instant hit in his homeland. Retitled In Treatment, the drama was remade in America within a year of first screening in Israel.The HBO version, on which Levy acted as executive producer, stars Gabriel Byrne (Miller’s Crossing, The Usual Suspects) as Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There’ll always be Austen on the telly. As the Bard is to the boards, so is Saint Jane to the box. The six novels were published (though not all written) in a seven-year period in the 1810s. In a rather shorter tranche of the 1990s they were all adapted for the (mostly small) screen. They’ve now just been done again, on the whole rather less well than the first time round.And such is the public’s greed for stories from Austen’s world of box-hedged romantic decorum that these days even the authoress gets pressganged into starring as herself. Her early life was covered in Becoming Jane, her Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
Is HBO trying to tell us something? Is the once peerless cable channel signalling a midlife crisis? I only ask because Hung, the HBO comedy-drama that starts on More4 in mid-October, features a marginalised middle-aged basketball coach who turns to prostitution, while Eastbound & Down is about a Major League baseball pitcher who, “several shitty years later”, finds himself teaching PE back at his hometown high school. Crisis or not, both shows are well worth checking out, starting last night with the Will Ferrell-produced Eastbound & Down - a vehicle for the very funny Danny McBride. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The Great Unknown, the Last Enemy, the Big Sleep… it’s death we’re talking about, and Dan Cruickshank’s affectingly personal film succeeded in reaching the conclusion that there is no conclusion he could comfort himself with. “What if after death there’s nothing?” pondered Dan.But although he expressed a wistful desire that he could share the true believer’s certainty that there is an afterlife, he seems pretty well resigned to the fact that nothing is all there is. Nonetheless, as an expert in art and architecture, he persevered in his efforts to discern whether some solace could be found in Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Now we've become so steeped in digital devices that we can’t count to four without the aid of a calculator, it’s the perfect moment to take a voyage back to an era when British Leyland manufactured cars in diarrhoea-beige and there wasn't any daytime TV.Electric Dreams (part of the BBC’s Electric Revolution season surveying 40 years of galloping technology) rests on a simple premise. I can imagine it being described by mad Californian professor Denzil Dexter from The Fast Show - "we took this middle class suburban family and subjected it to intense technology deprivation." The clock in the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Blame it on J.J. Abrams. With the success of the unfathomable Lost, Abrams altered the consciousness of American TV drama, and made it obligatory to think in at least four dimensions. Hence we had Heroes, in which people could fly, were indestructible, or could alter the course of history. Abrams himself is back on the paranormal beat with Fringe (due back imminently on Sky 1), a kind of X-Files-through-the-Looking Glass.Now here’s FlashForward, Five’s big new buy-in for the autumn, and a series which many reckon looks uncannily like ABC's potential replacement for Lost. The brainchild of Read more ...
william.ward
“Guarda, è come se fosse morta la regina Elisabetta, sai?” I didn’t really need the comparison with the hypothetical demise of our own beloved monarch to be spelled out for me by my partner, a somewhat reserved professor of Paediatric Neurology at one of Rome’s leading hospitals, in order to drive home the deep shock engendered by the sudden death of Italy’s best-loved veteran TV compère on the collective psyche of a nation.True to his quietly heroic and endlessly energetic persona, Mike Bongiorno did not die what our Anglo-Saxon warrior forebears used to call a “cow’s death” – ie in bed, or Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
David Mitchell’s smarty-pants TV panel show ubiquity – over-exposure even by Stephen Fry’s standards - may have started eroding the goodwill built up over five series of Peep Show, but all is forgiven once he’s safely re-garbed in the horribly plausible, drab office-wear of nerdish flatmate Mark. It’s difficult to imagine any other comic actor giving quite the same defeated peevishness to the line: “A new boiler... surely the least enjoyable way to spend a thousand pounds.”The gag belongs of course not to Mitchell but to Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain, the writers who have worked miracles to Read more ...