TV
Adam Sweeting
This new series by Ashley Pharoah is dramatically different from his previous efforts in Ashes to Ashes and Life on Mars, though he still likes travelling though time. His method here was to saw off chunks of Far From the Madding Crowd, stir in some shavings from Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, and then, having donned protective clothing, to squirt in a distillation of The Exorcist. All that remained was to stand clear and watch the concoction explode.The story so far: it's 1894, and Nathan Appleby (Colin Morgan), a man at the cutting edge of the new-fangled science of psychology, has Read more ...
Barney Harsent
And so we come to the end of the most spiteful, divisive and downright deceitful political campaign in living memory. And while we’re on the Ds, I’ll have disingenuous too, thanks. The remain camp was captained by a mildly Eurosceptic prime minister, who called the referendum in an attempt to secure an election victory, while Brexit has been spearheaded by a shambolic, and mildly Europhile, thatched homunculus, who simply wants the other guy’s job. We are, essentially, collateral damage in a spectacularly damaging career move.But with the shouting is over, it’s time for the really important Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's amazing that they've managed to sustain The Good Wife over seven series and 156 episodes which have, by and large, maintained a standard of writing and acting which can stand toe to toe with anything else on TV. Apparently it's now being dubbed "television's last great drama" in some quarters, not just because of its quality but also because it aired not on some boutique cable channel or on-demand subscription service but on the mainstream CBS network. You don't miss 'em until they're gone, and all that.That said, this final series has sometimes felt as though its creators were a little Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Take Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti, and add Handel and Mozart and the Frenchman Massenet, and you have the composers whose operas the Kansas-born mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato has made her own. She's one of the few who has become a classic opera diva while remaining true to her roots (she was born in Prairie Village, Kansas, and one of her all-time favourite songs is "Over the Rainbow": remember Dorothy was a Kansas girl too.)Melvyn Bragg’s empathetic interview, conducted in the Crush Bar of the Royal Opera House, was a real treat. Question and answer was interspersed with clips of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Have psychologists analysed whether subtitles increase our enjoyment of TV drama, perhaps lending it an extra tincture of the exotic? They do no harm at all to this new Polish drama about border guards protecting the frontier between Poland and Ukraine. In Referendum week, it's a hot topic (these Polish guards, with an Alsatian tracker dog called Osama, don't favour a Merkel-esque open-door policy to refugees trying to slip through the forest). This opening episode offered plenty to whet your appetite while resisting the temptation to get too complicated or cram in too much plot. The Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Disappearance, shown in France a year ago, was adapted from a Spanish drama. Both shows had a more gender-specific title: Desaparecida or Disparue. A less abstract translation into English might have been The Missing, but that title had already been taken by a recent BBC drama with which The Disappearance shared a dogged fidelity to a template (see also Broadchurch, plus a lot of Nordic noir): one fresh suspect per episode, enough false leads to set up a red herring factory, and then a big reveal to finish [spoiler alert: the denouement is discussed below].The titular absentee was Léa Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It was an exhumation waiting to happen. As the UK ponders trashing Europe, Eurotrash was summoned from the grave to remind voters what they’ll be missing if enough Brits put an X in the exit box. The Europe of Eurotrash is not grey suits and fisheries legislation. It’s a place where a ruling on the straightness of cucumbers is a gag waiting to happen, where pooches and porn stars stand for political office, where the then future Madame Sarkozy could be distinctly heard to ask, “Do you like my titties?”.It’s not easy or appropriate to write about Eurotrash the day after the referendum Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
An old subversive Soviet joke has Karl Marx coming back from hell, facing enormous crowds of very unhappy people and telling them, "Oh I'm so sorry – it was only an idea." But what an idea and ideas, as Bettany Hughes's film reminded us. She took us on a very brisk canter through Marx’s life (1818-1883) and times, first visiting Trier where he was born into a bourgeois Jewish family, although his rather radical father had converted to Lutheranism to make his professional life easier under the Prussians. Evidently the young Marx was dashing, dapper and privileged – with a portrait to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The guitar, the "little orchestra" beloved of Andrés Segovia, is an instrument for all seasons, and for venues from salons to stadiums. It isn't exactly the same instrument in all cases, of course. Comparing the traditional acoustic Spanish guitar to the electronic weapons systems used by Radiohead or U2 is like parking an Austin 7 next to a Tesla Model X.It's one of the loopholes in Guitar Star (★★★) that it seeks, somehow, to throw all known types of guitar and every playing style into a pot, whence (at the end of nine episodes) a winner will be plucked. Logically, it's an impossible Read more ...
Jasper Rees
New Blood began as it didn’t quite mean to go on. Somewhere in India five Brits on their travels mustered in a medical laboratory as volunteers to test-run a new drug. The tone was pregnant with portent, so it was no surprise when a knife was wielded and blood spattered. You settled in for a moody medical noir.Six years and one title sequence later, the tone made a 180-degree handbreak turn. Standing over the corpse lying at the foot of a block of flats in rainy London, Mark Addy’s old-school plod (pictured below) spouted sarky putdowns at a uniformed young upstart who fancied himself a Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
In the middle of the last century the worst thing that could be said about a working-class housewife was that she had “run off with a black man”. Well, the Queen of France, no better than she ought to be, has had it off with a black man (in fact her pet dwarf). Last week’s opening episode of Versailles ended with Louis XIV (George Blagden) setting eyes on the resulting black baby for the first time.The second episode immediately picks up the baby and runs with it – all the way to a blind wet nurse from whose breast the sinister henchman Marchal (Tygh Runyan) plucks it before attempting Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Never in the field of human voting has so much been demanded of so many by so few... Triggered by a moment of prime ministerial hubris and made reality by a Tory leadership bid and the relentless UKIP catcalls, the referendum is putting control of our EU membership into the hands of a British public who are heavy on emotion, but light on facts.Not that this is surprising. When predicting the future, points tend to be moot, and this has meant that both campaigns have been based largely on fear and self-interest. The one thing that has shone through so far is a horrible disregard for the Read more ...