documentary
Jasper Rees
Elbowings, buttings, anklings, maimings, studdings, anarcho-thespian handbaggings – the figure formerly known as the man in black is the thin line between the beautiful game and the collapse of civilised society as we know it. And what is his reward? Players abuse him. Crowds bay for his blood. Presidents call for his execution (Polish ones do anyway). To misquote Liverpool fans quoting Oscar Hammerstein II, he’ll ever walk alone. Who’d be one?Football nowadays brings out the right-winger in one (and I’m not referring to the old-fashioned five-three-two formation). As a lapsed and, of course Read more ...
Jasper Rees
I Resign. It’s not a phrase you hear that often these days. Unlike, obviously, You’re Fired. There was a time, largely synonymous with the era when Tory toffs and grandees had sufficient private income to walk away from employment, that a chap could afford to resign, as the phrase has it, with honour. And it usually was a chap, usually after he’d been found to be hopping on and off strippers or tarts or his secretary or handing over the Falklands to some jumped-up tinpot little Johnny Foreigner. Nowadays politicians prefer to wriggle on a spit and keep the chauffeur. Honour be damned, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Is there a place for the travelling fun fair any more? Static attractions like Alton Towers and Thorpe Park have rides that are bigger, grander, more varied and scarier than anything a traditional, transient fair could ever transport. All the Fun of the Fair’s answer was that the fair has survived by winding the clock back, rekindling the past with original Victorian and Edwardian rides. There’s still room for something less bombastic.All the Fun of the Fair traced the history of the travelling fair in its familiar form. What we now recognise as the fair, with rides, sideshows and snacks Read more ...
fisun.guner
The only voice recording Sigmund Freud ever made was for the BBC. It was made in December 1938, at Freud’s West Hampstead home just a few months before the father of psychoanalysis succumbed to throat cancer. He was 82 and wouldn’t see out another year, yet here he was on fighting form: “People did not believe in my facts and thought my theories unsavoury,” he declaims, his voice clipped, precise and resoundingly emphatic. “Resistance was strong and unrelenting. The struggle is not yet over."Freud was a revolutionary, and like all revolutionaries he was, clearly, a dogmatist. Twenty Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
There is an interesting tension at the Sarajevo Film Festival which, though this was my first time, I suspect exists as a matter of course. And this is a tension between the spirit of the people I meet here – ebullient, good-humoured and indefatigable (they really know how to party) – and the films themselves, which suggest a country and a region still reeling from the turmoil of its recent past. It’s a strange experience, then, poised between light and gloom.The origins of the festival embody this tension. It began in 1995, in the midst of the Siege of Sarajevo, one of the many cultural Read more ...
fisun.guner
Can Marcus du Sautoy do for maths what Brian Cox did for physics? Can he convince us of the beauty of numbers and help us fall in love with pi? It’s a tall order, but not only does Professor du Sautoy have an unstoppable passion for ratios, he’s also a natural communicator, which clearly helps if you’re the Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding for Science, which he is. And so du Sautoy guided us through some basic mathematical principles which underpin the workings of the universe. He introduced us to The Code.Everything is governed by The Code, he explained, and he made Read more ...
howard.male
For 35 years, contemporary art in Iraq was a no-no unless it was grimly, dully figurative or a gaudy mural glorifying Saddam Hussein. But this year, six Iraqi artists were invited to the most prestigious annual contemporary art event in the world; the Venice Biennale. It may be of little significance that Alan Yentob’s parents came from Iraq, but last night’s Imagine was probably the best of the series so far. Its focus may have been these artists and their art, but its reach was somehow much greater.It’s said that the best literature springs from oppressed or ravaged cultures, making Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Dan, a tall ginger streak of entitlement, had an issue with the hygiene. Channel 4 were about to lift him out of a five-star hotel in the Gambia and send him off to see how the other half lives. “They’re not going to be as clean as us,” he predicted nervously. Dan worried that he might have to survive sans moisturiser and hair gel. He hadn’t been warned about the lack of cutlery. And of loo roll. Nor that you approached each problem with the same manual solution.Who volunteers to make themselves look like utter tits for these films? Luxury-loving Londoners is who, said Tamsin Greig, slumming Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I was once shown around Anglia TV’s studios by the bloke who used to say, "And now, from Norwich - the quiz of the week!” by way of introduction to the immortal Sale of the Century. A tremendous thrill, as you can imagine. It all came back to me while watching Regional TV: Life Through a Local Lens which, despite a title which seemed to be code for “please don’t watch me”, proved to be a sprightly little mover packed with absurd stories and amazing factoids about the days when regional TV, BBC and independent alike, was far more than just a bit of token local news stuck on the end of the Read more ...
josh.spero
If I'm being honest, I never saw the charm of Alan Bennett's Talking Heads. Too many quiet disappointments, too much capital-A Acting. They lacked naturalism in presentation and content, whereas Double Lesson, from Channel 4's First Cut series of quirky documentaries and quasi-documentaries, had naturalism to spare last night.It probably helped that the show, a monologue given by Phil Davis to and across the camera, was based on real experiences of teachers who had attacked their pupils. Davis, playing David de Gale, explained from his potting shed, where he over-symbolically tended young Read more ...
william.ward
Programmes about Italian organised crime made by the foreign media are always hampered by the finnicky nature of the beast itself: there is so much background detail that needs to be staked out at the outset that your head is whirling from information overload. Like its mainstream political parties, high-street banks and national daily newspapers, Italy has three, four or five times as many of each as any other European country of similar size.Italy’s Bloodiest Mafia didn’t really bother with a comparative overview, other than to inform us that the Camorra, the Naples-based Mafia, has killed Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Chess grand masters have a reputation for possessing the kind of brilliance that’s inclined to tip into madness. Victor Korchnoi claimed he'd played against a dead man, while Wilhelm Steinitz insisted he'd played chess against God by wireless. As for Bobby Fischer, his momentous duel against Boris Spassky for the World Chess Championship in Iceland in 1972 earned him the accolade of being perhaps the most brilliant chess player of all time, but by the time of his death in 2008 he had become an embittered, ranting maniac.No film-maker could hope to delve inside the infinite tangle of wiring in Read more ...