documentary
Adam Sweeting
One can only speculate about why More4 would want to broadcast a documentary about bare-faced electoral fraud in the week before the climax of our own unimpeachably democratic process. However, this rather long film about 2009's Afghan presidential election gradually marshalled its arguments into a pointed critique of how the “democracy” which the West has unloaded over Afghanistan like a badly aimed air strike is anything but. Of course, this may not strike many people as front page news.Interestingly, even such complete novices at the free elections game as the Afghans had beaten the Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Several contributors alluded to this quality – he loved stories, was caught up in the drama of pirates and swashbuckling heroes (as Adam Ant used to his advantage when he hired Malcolm “for a thousand guineas” as an advisor. Malcolm then went off with his backing band and renamed them Bow Wow Wow). His partner Young Kim spoke touchingly of how he would often talk in his sleep, regressing to being a child, and she would talk to him while he was asleep, as though he was a five-year-old. The programme managed to show his mischievousness, a certain naivety, but also his “creating anti- Read more ...
Jasper Rees
You always know where you are with Griff. You may be up a mountain or on a river or visiting any of the various topographical options the various TV companies deem it essential to send him. You may be doing up his house with him in Wales, where he freely admits he doesn’t really come from, or nosing round London, Paris or New York, as he did in the last series of Greatest Cities of the World. You may, as with the new series, be in Rome. But in the end, you never leave the Land of Griff.In the Land of Griff, all is bafflement, muddlement and of course chortlement. The lingua franca understood Read more ...
howard.male
You might think that an hour-long documentary mainly shot around a slaughter yard and rubbish dump might not make for particularly agreeable television, but trust me, this opener of a three-part series is by turns amusing, life-enhancing and gripping. Producer Will Anderson and director Gavin Searle have done an excellent job of getting under the surface of one of the worlds great megacities. A place that in the space of 50 years has grown from a population of about 300,000 to 16 million today.At first, parts of Lagos society appear to be on the brink of meltdown, but as the documentary Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
At around the same time that Oliver Postgate, that singular genius of children’s television, was knocking up new worlds in his garden shed in Kent, so, in a garden shed in Wiltshire another remarkable maverick, Professor James Lovelock, was assembling a new world of his own. Postgate’s was a moon inhabited by Clangers, while Lovelock’s was a re-imagining of Earth as “Gaia” - and what is perhaps unexpected is that it is children’s entertainer Postgate who comes across as the more melancholy of the two men. Lovelock, by contrast, seems remarkably chipper for a doomsayer who predicts the Read more ...
fisun.guner
Goldsmiths has produced 20 Turner Prize winners. It produced Damien Hirst and the majority of the Brit Art pack that caused such a Nineties sensation. It has attracted some pretty impressive tutors to its fine art department – ground-breaking artists in their own right, in fact. As such, the school is considered to be something of a star in itself. So what’s its secret? This BBC Four two-parter aimed to find out - and, you’ve guessed it, in keeping with a certain jaunty documentary-making tradition, it gave the participants just enough rope to hang themselves.If you tuned in last night, you Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
From Monday 12 April, retro channel History is airing a 10-part series called WWII Lost Films. It will present the story of the Second World War from the viewpoints of 12 Americans involved in the war effort, using a newly restored stash of rare and unseen colour footage.Providing a real-life counterpoint to the fictional saga The Pacific (showing on Sky Movies Premiere), the series draws on more than 3,000 hours of film culled from private collections and archives around the globe. The footage has been restored to HD quality and refurbished with Dolby-enhanced audio, with voice-overs Read more ...
Matt Wolf
That fame, and the pursuit thereof, is hurtful to the soul is the unexceptional if, I suppose, ever invaluable message of Starsuckers, the Chris Atkins documentary given genuine ballast by the details it selects with which to argue its case. Though overlong for what it is, and often veering off on tangents worthy of separate movies in themselves, it makes you laugh and wince in equal measure. Anonymity has rarely seemed a healthier place to be.
It's also emphatically not the status wished for by a celebrity-mad society whose varying levels of rot are anatomised via Atkins's eclectic Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Jazz enthusiast Clint Eastwood, who co-produced this film with the BBC's Arena, clearly harbours a particular regard for songwriter, singer, impresario and record company mogul Johnny Mercer. When Eastwood made his film of John Berendt's book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, which was set in Mercer's home town of Savannah, Georgia and partly shot in Mercer House, built by Johnny's grandfather, the accompanying soundtrack was a newly recorded collection of some of Mercer's most celebrated songs.Happily, where Midnight in the Garden... was, even in the most rose-tinted view, a grotesque Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Alfred Hitchcock once claimed to have entered a Hitch look-alike contest and lost, characteristically making a joke out of a long-held private obsession. Doppelgängers, impersonators, imposters and victims of mistaken identity - innocent men wrongly presumed guilty - stalk his movies and television shows and now provide the inspiration for Double Take. Loosely based on a short story, August 25th, 1983 by Jorge Luis Borges, it starts with the idea of the Master locked in a murderous mano a mano with his own double. "Two of you is one too many," as he puts it.That alone would be a juicy premise Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Seven Ages of Britain began in the same week as A History of the World in 100 Objects on Radio 4. You wait a prodigiously long time for a massive cultural overview and then two come along at once. Do they think in a joined-up way about these things at the BBC? Or has this double helping been a sign of a wider moral and structural chaos that characterises the new world disorder? Last night David Dimbleby concluded his tour of two millennia of British art. It has, inevitably, been a bit of a sprint. In this final episode, the horror of the trenches was wrapped up in less screen time than Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Cuban boxers have always punched above their weight in the world arena: the little island has clocked up no fewer than 63 Olympic medals - 32 of them gold - in the last 40 years. Enjoying extraordinary access to the mysteries of the Havana Boxing Academy, this emotional documentary follows the fortunes of three ten-year-old lads over eight months as they submit to a punishing regimen of training for the National Boxing Championship. But, as with the best sports films, Sons of Cuba is about more than winning or losing. It's about more, even, than boxing itself.The day starts at 4am for Read more ...