Channel 4
Adam Sweeting
This opener to the second series of Dominic Savage’s I Am… dramas starred Suranne Jones as the titular Victoria, an ultra-driven career woman surrounded by the trappings of material success but spinning into a dark vortex of depression. Jones’s intense performance is winning her showers of plaudits, but the film’s improvisational approach and the absence of structure or context meant that her efforts were partially wasted. The jerky, close-up shots focusing relentlessly on every twitch, grimace, or flash of panic on her face eventually induced a kind of seasickness.We were shown the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Perhaps inspired by its ever-intriguing Walter Presents strand, Channel 4’s new thriller Before We Die is based on a Swedish original called Innan vi dör (“before we die” in Swedish). The action has been transplanted to Bristol, whose buildings, bridges and narrow streets have been rendered atmospheric with rich colour textures and stylish visual compositions. The opening credits, with ominously pulsating music and dramatic monochrome portraits of the cast-members, also suggests we’ve stepped away a little from the Brit-TV norm.Lesley Sharp stars as DI Hannah Laing, who’s reaching a stage in Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s crazy, but could it possibly work? Writer Nida Manzoor (a veteran of Doctor Who and BBC Three’s sitcom Enterprice) grew up in a Muslim family, but that didn’t stop her being a fan of punk rock, Blackadder and This Is Spinal Tap. She also writes songs, so creating a sitcom about the female Muslim punk band Lady Parts wasn’t quite such a stretch as it might seem.Her smartest trick here, though, is to have used the device of the band to cast a wry and hilarious eye over not just Muslim life but common preconceptions of it, and its complicated interactions with the secular West (it’s not all Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
History ain’t what it used to be, not on television at any rate. Recently we’ve witnessed the ongoing furore about the factual accuracy or otherwise of The Crown, while Bridgerton has cheekily galloped bareback over the conventional cliches of telly costume dramas. Now here’s The Great (Channel 4), which sort-of purports to tell the story of Catherine the Great, although writer Tony McNamara has given himself plenty of room for whimsy and invention.Each episode is prefaced with the caption “An occasionally true story” (a precaution some other programme-makers might like to consider), and Read more ...
theartsdesk
Okay, so some people taught themselves the violin or wrote a novel, but under this year’s circumstances, it was inevitable that television (terrestrial, cable, online or otherwise) was going to clean up. With large chunks of the population forced to stay home, what could be more natural than to reach for the remote controller to magic up another bingeable boxset or Walter's latest noir thriller? Above all, with its seemingly infinite catalogue, this felt like the moment that Netflix became the generic term for "home entertainment", joining Amazon and Google in dividing up the planet between Read more ...
Veronica Lee
After nine successful series, a Bafta and an Emmy nomination, Taskmaster has moved from Dave to Channel 4 – amusingly, the broadcaster that its creator Alex Horne first took it to but which turned it down. It has made the transition seamlessly – ie, without changing a thing – and is still utterly daft and a joy to watch. But then, when you have a great concept that's well executed, why muck around with it?For the uninitiated: in each series a different group of five comics or comedy actors solve a succession of parlour-game tasks, using just silly props and their ingenuity, against the clock Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Shall we talk about racism? Currently we seem to be talking about it all the time, and it’s the question non-white parents in Britain sooner or later find themselves pondering as they watch their children grow up in our increasingly confrontational society. For this Channel 4 film, director Geoff Small had assembled a cross-section of notable black and mixed race personalities, and let them describe their often conflicted emotions.Some took a pragmatic approach. Writer Gary Younge long ago took the view that “racism exists, you are going to have to navigate it.” He considers that teaching his Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
On one level this documentary could be summed up as “parents have baby”, but since the parents in question are “Britain’s most prominent transgender couple”, it was a lot more complicated than that. Jake Graf used to be a woman and his wife Hannah was previously a man, and the path to having their first child caused them considerable soul-searching.You might ask why they would want to have a Channel 4 film crew pursuing them during a stressful year in which they searched for a surrogate mother and tracked down a suitable sperm donor. Perhaps they considered it a way of demonstrating to a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s impossible to tell whether this reality-doc series (C4) came to praise Best Western hotels or kill it off entirely. Some viewers have been weeping with laughter at the David Brent-style antics of the company’s Aussie CEO Rob Paterson and his motivational slogans (Smash It!, Give a *** etc), while others have hailed it as a red-flag warning about how not to run a business. With the pandemic crisis, there might not even be a business left to run.This final instalment threw caution to the winds and charged ever deeper into fantasy-land, not least with the company’s promotional Christmas Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Great idea to use a symphony orchestra as the basis for a TV drama, because all of human life is there. Not to mention death, since this entertaining, though melodramatic, new French import (Channel 4) began with the dramatic collapse on the podium of veteran conductor George Delvaux just as he was launching into the finale of the New World symphony. He was pronounced dead at the scene.After Delvaux’s demise, the plot orbits around the return to Paris of ace French conductor Hélène Barizet, played with flair and tremendous dress sense by Marie-Sophie Ferdane. Though strangely, she carries a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Do TV companies get some sort of financial incentive to use the phrase “A Very British…” in their programme titles? This now-meaningless descriptor has been applied to airlines, brothels, political coups, the Renaissance, Margaret Thatcher, sex scandals, Brexit and lord knows what else. When you can’t think of an original title, you know what to do.As for Best Western hotels, this company is so Very British that its new UK CEO is a former Aussie Rules football player, Rob Paterson. One of his early key decisions was to outsource the company’s call centre to Italy because most people now book Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The national treasure that is Grayson Perry, CBE, RA, is hosting a six-episode national art club on Channel 4 for professional artists, amateur artists and the public. Since Perry came to national attention when he won the Turner Prize he has been happily ubiquitous. He may well be the country’s most effective proponent of the visual arts, as well as its most famous transvestite.Perry has written many books, delivered the Reith Lectures, curated exhibitions including the British Museum’s ground-breaking Tomb of the Unknown Craftsmen, was a bold curatorial innovator for the RA summer Read more ...