TV
Adam Sweeting
Every few months we get a new Project Fear campaign by "experts" announcing that a small glass of Bristol Cream twice a week now qualifies as "binge drinking", and guarantees certain death. However, none of the interviewees in Louis Theroux's latest documentary had paid any attention to these warnings. They were patients at the specialist liver centre at King's College Hospital in south London, and each of them was fighting a different kind of battle with alcohol.There was Stuart the antiques dealer, suffering from cirrhosis and with perhaps only months to live, though this information was Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
In the last century, when the BBC took arts documentaries seriously, Arena was one of the highlights of the week. Nowadays its appearance is as rare as that of a Midwich cuckoo. Money, or rather the lack of it, is the problem. In our grave new world a single promo for EastEnders can cost more than a 60-minute film.Three cheers then for Arena: All the World’s a Screen – Shakespeare on Film, a cavalcade of clips that show the Bard really is all things to all men. None of the talking heads belongs to a woman. None of the interviews is original, but David Thompson and Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
Diversity has replaced perversity as a staple of modern drama. Whereas once upon a time an unenlightened viewer might cry – on seeing two men kiss – that they were going to leave the country before homosexuality became compulsory, a scene of mixed-race rutting can still ruffle a dodo’s feathers today. Monday’s episode of Marcella, for example, with Nicholas Pinnock’s bare buttocks pumping away on top of Anna Friel, ploughed a new furrow on peak-time ITV.The fifth episode of Blue Eyes opens with an idyllic scene in which a white mother, Asian father and two cute kids enjoy a sunlit breakfast. Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
If only the Duchess of York had waited two more days, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II could have shared her natal date with St George, Shakespeare and Turner. But the Queen Mother did bequeath a sense of duty (as did George VI) and perhaps of equal importance, a sturdy physicality. She died at 101, in contrast to her chain-smoking husband's demise at 56. And so here is Her Majesty still hard at work and marking the 90th birthday with a sequence of home movies to share with the nation. The royal advisers, and one suspects Prince Charles, whose strangulated speech is the oddest Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Victoria Wood was a very private national treasure. Not for her the tawdry catwalk of Twitter nor the klaxon of the confessional memoir. She wasn't comfortable talking to journalists and when she found one whom she could just about trust, she stuck with them. That is how I found myself interviewing her many times over the years, and came to see past the carapace of jollity that was her performance persona. The first time I met her was, weirdly, for a supermarket magazine. She could barely believe it herself, having endured quite severe food issues over many years. Inevitably those came Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
So just how grey were the 1950s? "It was grey," said Bruce Welch of The Shadows. Au contraire, said Joan Bakewell, the Fifties were "giddy and full of optimism." Veteran journalist Katharine Whitehorn added that not only were the Fifties not boring, but that even then people had already heard of sex.But this was Tom Jones's film, and in his view "the early Fifties were grey and boring and flat." Born in June 1940, the then Thomas Woodward spent his formative years in Pontypridd, and in the foggy old films and photos of it included here the town resembled some ghastly failed experiment in Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In 2014 the Channel 4 series Confessions looked at the changing face of the old professions. In the programme about doctors, one GP remembered the standard practice of deploying acronyms on patient notes that looked like arcane medical terminology but were in fact nothing of the sort. One of them was NFN, which meant Normal for Norfolk.It’s not quite clear why a new docusoap of that name has adopted it. East Anglian safe spacers may be triggered into a sense of mortal offence followed by noisy excommunication for BBC Two. The title is more harmless than it looks. This is yet another Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
The pampered bureaucrats who commission television drama have suffered from tunnel vision for years. Today a thriller series must feature at least four of the following: a family in peril; a dysfunctional investigator; foreign baddies; terrorism; cybercrime; a Chinese connection; striking camera angles and colour filters; moody music; and, above all, a pervasive feeling of dread.The Tunnel: Sabotage, which began on Sky Atlantic last night (with all episodes now available via Sky Box Sets), has the blooming lot. The first series, a cross-channel version of The Bridge, closely echoed its Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The BBC opened its examination of the history of European togetherness with presenter Nick Robinson beaming at us from the top of those White Cliffs, looking out at the glistening sea which made us an island (until, of course, Mrs Thatcher supported the Channel Tunnel).This inconclusive history of Britain in and out of Europe began at the very end of the Second World War, when the eloquent proposer of a united Europe which definitely included West Germany was Sir Winston Churchill. This first episode of two, subtitled "An Island Apart", set the scene with two ex-politicians, Hague and Blair, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
When it aired on BBC One at the dawn of the Seventies, Doomwatch became one of the marvels of the broadcasting age, sometimes pulling audiences of over 13 million. Thanks to the keen imagination of its creator, Dr Kit Pedler – a gifted scientist and environmental campaigner – it possessed an apparently clairvoyant ability to seize on cutting-edge scientific ideas and their potential for running dangerously amok.Pedler teamed up with screenwriter Gerry Davis, with whom he'd previously created the Cybermen for Doctor Who, and between them they delivered a programme which struck a chord Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If this were a British series it would be called 22.11.63, since the title refers to the date on which President John F Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Anyway, this is a TV version of Stephen King's hit novel, and its mix of historical conspiracy and time-travelling sci-fi is perfect fodder for its producer, JJ Abrams.You have to swallow a fairly hefty portion of disbelief to allow yourself to get into the story, namely that the homely neighbourhood diner in Maine run by Al Templeton (Chris Cooper) has a porthole through time hidden in the pantry. Every time you walk in there, you're Read more ...
graeme.thomson
I interviewed Merle Haggard once and he’s a slippery old snake: dry, reserved and fiercely intelligent, with an ornery pride and an oft-used gift for riling people. I’m not sure we got to know him all that much better after Gandulf Hennig’s superb documentary Learning to Live with Myself, but it was a hell of a ride none the less. A man with hidden depths buried inside his hidden depths, Haggard said towards the end of the film that he had struggled his whole life to achieve his aim of being “self-contained, totally”. He wasn't about to go all therapy-speak on our asses now.Filmed over three Read more ...