TV
Mark Sanderson
H Division has a new home in Whitechapel that basks in the white heat of the technological revolution. The police station not only has a telephone but a “microreader” that allows the user to check thousands of miniaturised card indexes. Alas, a wry smile is all the viewer is likely to get from this opening episode of the fourth season. Nothing happens until the last ten minutes.When it was originally broadcast on Amazon Prime, Ripper Street 4 began with a two-hour episode. Terrestrial viewers on BBC Two have to make do with 60 minutes of scene-setting, throat-clearing and explanation. Three Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Ever since Britain shipped Cary Grant across the Atlantic, the romcom has been a transatlantic English-language staple. This spirited and hilarious – whether intentionally or not – examination of the last 30 years of the genre, dominated as it is by WASPs (yes, white Anglo-Saxon protestants) and the Anglophone world, looked at why we are so fulfilled by these contemporary fairy-tales, and offered some surprising insights.There were figures galore, of the financial kind: gross earnings, particularly. When Harry Met Sally (1989), $246 million, and we had the treat of the entire repertoire of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There is a grand ongoing project in Wales at the moment, the goal of which is to hunt for the deep ancestral DNA of the Welsh people. CymruDNAWales has already made some startling findings, in particular about a dozen all-powerful chieftains from 1500 years ago whose DNA is found in a large number of Welsh males. But enough about Welsh men and women. What about Welsh dogs?A country whose image is bound up in sheep farming doesn't seem to have a national herding dog to match. The Welsh sheepdog is the only candidate, and a few years ago it was very nearly extinct: only 80 were left in the Read more ...
Barney Harsent
If you’re going to go toe-to-toe with Daredevil and Jessica Jones, the first two series in Netflix’s supremely realised and blood-spattered depiction of Marvel Comic’s Hell’s Kitchen, it’s as well to do it with conviction. By hosting Preacher, based on the comic book series by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon, Amazon went in swinging – low and hard, fighting dirty from the off.WARNING: HERE BE SPOILERS!The series concluded on the streaming service this week, but even before it had aired there were concerns about whether it could ever do the comics justice. In fairness, the story of a man of the Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
So much has happened since the first of June when Versailles flounced on to our screens with its flowing locks and flashing cocks. The British people have voted to widen the Channel, the Conservatives have a new leader, Labour doesn’t have one and Christopher Biggins has been expelled from the Big Brother house. As Louis XIV might have said: plus ça change…The title song (Now and Forever by M83) became increasingly haunting as the weeks and wigs (often with heads still attached) rolled by. The series lost interest in sex as more and more bricks were laid, the palace took shape and glory shone Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Did we really need to go through this all over again? The referendum campaign left roughly half the nation levitating on cloud nine, and roughly the other half feeling amputated. We all know what happened, but in this hour-long post-mortem Laura Kuenssberg went looking under rocks for extra titbits and morsels that could explain from the inside of the two campaigns how Britain voted for the trapdoor/sunlit upland marked Exit.The news is that there isn’t much news to report. Kuenssberg’s scoops have already been trailed in the prints: Clegg outing Gove as the source of The Sun’s non-story Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If Ashley Pharoah's superior chiller began with its 19th century protagonist, Nathan Appleby, trying to apply science and reason to seemingly irrational events, by the end of this sixth and final episode he had strayed way beyond the outer limits. Not only had the murky past of the Somerset village of Shepzoy reared up in numerous terrifying manifestations, but Nathan and his wife Charlotte were also receiving vivid and disturbing flashes into the future.To a soundtrack of eerie old English balladry, we've already had a parade of demonic possession, hauntings and murder. Last week, Shepzoy Read more ...
james.woodall
Some years ago broadcaster Andy Kershaw introduced on BBC World Service radio a piece of Brazilian music with this blunt dismissal: “When I hear a track by, say, Gilberto Gil, I tell myself: ‘Right, time to take the lift and go to bed’.” It wasn’t a terribly joined-up complaint, but (in Kershaw-speak at least) it made sense.He’d arguably chosen the wrong musician for his swipe – Gil remains relentlessly inventive and, at 74, fantastically dynamic – but it was clear what he was getting at. A lot of Brazilian (or Brazilian-inspired) pop music has, at half-cock, made it into hotel lobbies and Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The American northwest is gorgeous: endless lakes, limitless ocean, mountains, forests, overwhelming blue skies in deepest summer, mists and of course rain, in one of the wettest places on earth – 4 metres of rain annually. Here were hundreds of islands too, archipelagos in a land almost infinitely rich in resources, from the Alaskan Panhandle and British Columbia south to Washington State.We were on an extended visit, on foot, canoe, kayak, speedboat and car, guided by the enthusiastically knowledgable Dr Jago Cooper from the British Museum. The landscape was punctuated by visiting Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Remember Sex Box? Perhaps you were wisely watching paint dry that night instead. Sex Box was part of Channel 4’s ongoing commitment to making the nation’s toes curl in horror. It involved couples getting it eponymously on in the titular container, after which they emerged blinking into the studio lights to give a blow by blow account to Mariella Frostrup. As if that wasn’t barrel-scrapingly unBritish enough, here for your viewing pleasure is Naked Attraction.The premise is that physical attraction is a sine qua non of a romantic relationship, so why not begin at the beginning and create a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Incredible but true, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein really did hire a largely-British film crew to come to his country and make a movie called Clash of Loyalties, about how Iraq freed itself from British influence in the 1920s and blossomed into an independent state. It never made it as far as a cinema release, but the footage was recently rediscovered in a garage in Surrey by its producer, Latief Jorephani (pictured below).This entertaining but slightly ragged documentary by Stephen Finnigan (★★★) told the story of the film and rounded up several of the surviving cast and crew, though the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Squash! Bulldoze! Blow-Up! Tie Up! Break-Up! Re-Build! There is practically nothing the artist Cornelia Parker won’t and can’t do with found materials, offcuts, the discarded and the recycled, not to mention tieing up Rodin’s The Kiss at the Tate in miles of string. Since she discovered bulldozer drivers like nothing better than bulldozing, she has been practically unstoppable. That DANGER! sign can be all too true when she is blowing something up, although found materials have included two small wooden American churches, one hit by lightning, and the other torched by racist biker gang Read more ...