TV
Adam Sweeting
Supposedly, The Mill [*] was Channel 4's highest-rating drama of 2013, and the viewers' reward is this second series. However, the secret of the success of this dour, dimly lit series is hard to fathom. Its attempt to convert the history of working-class protest during the Industrial Revolution into a plausible interplay of character is as teeth-gnashingly literal-minded as it was first time round.Often, writer John Fay hardly seemed to bother with the "drama" part at all, as his screenplay lapsed into indigestible lumps of didacticism. This opening episode was a sustained campaign against Read more ...
Andy Plaice
We all love a good guitar riff and so a whole hour devoted to this one simple pleasure sounds like a surefire hit. BBC Four is the go-to channel for the rock‘n’roll documentary and this latest offering boasted a dazzling line-up including Brian May, Tony Iommi and Johnny Marr. The message was clear: if the riff was good enough for Beethoven, then pop and rock could learn a thing or two as well. From "Johnny B Goode" to "Smoke on the Water", crossing "Apache" to "Back In Black", the short repeated phrase we call the riff is the DNA of rock‘n’roll, we were told; the “skeleton of the song Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
A few months ago, Glasgow Girls - Cora Bissett and David Greig’s 2013 musical based on the true story of seven teenage girls from Drumchapel, Glasgow and their campaign to end the forced removal of school-age asylum seekers - returned to the city’s Citizens Theatre for another sell-out run. It makes the timing of this all-new reinterpretation of a story that has already been the subject of two TV documentaries a little strange, particularly as it too was billed as a “musical drama”: surely a more effective approach, I thought, would have been to adapt the existing critically acclaimed show, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
If you like middle-market tabloids, you’ll be into Coast. Like a reliable tide, the show about the sea has been washing up on BBC Two’s shores since 2005. A factual series defined by the ocean main which surrounds the British Isles, it comes with a stock of stories that, unlike the mackerel population, seem in no danger of running out. They are so plentiful, in fact, that last year David Dimbleby felt free to fish in pretty much the same waters with his series Britain and the Sea.Rather than rely on a single presenter, Coast goes for the multi-person approach. Nicholas Crane, geeky in specs Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
When the first, and shattering, series of Utopia ended 18 months ago there were alarming suggestions that its ratings weren't good enough to justify a second, even though there was plenty of potential for one. On the other hand if there were to be a series two, could it ever be good enough?Admittedly watching one episode of six isn't enough to form a conclusive verdict, but it is with joy (as well as terror, unease and anxiety) that I can report that so far, series two is well on track to compete with the original. Writer Dennis Kelly clearly has a mind like a black labyrinth and a sadistic Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Television is all about borrowing. One clever new format – a mock doc, a makeover show, a clever-clever quiz – spawns a stack of near-identical clones. Most of them do their time until the format starts to tire, eventually to die a natural death. The only exception is the indestructible talent show. Say what you like about Simon Cowell, but in taking reality ever deeper into the realm of fabrication, he killed off the docusoap. There’s barely been a nosey workplace series stuffed with twats mugging for the camera since. But for some reason the docusoap seems to have risen again. It’s the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The most notorious case of the BBC banning a pop record was the episode of the Sex Pistols' "God Save the Queen" in 1977, which was of course the year of Her Maj's Silver Jubilee. "That was genuinely dangerous," Paul Morley intoned gravely (the record that is, rather than its banning), though as with several of the cases examined here, this one wasn't quite as open and shut as it seemed.The Beeb had been cheerfully - or at least unprotestingly - airing the disc on radio until the moment when the band swore at Bill Grundy on TV. It was Malcolm McLaren's bizarrely-dressed band of urchins Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The fall of super-cyclist Lance Armstrong is a subject fit for Euripides or Shakespeare. It has also worked pretty well for director Alex Holmes, who managed to round up virtually all the key players caught in Armstrong's vortex of deceit for this unflaggingly gripping documentary [****].Though the feats of Bradley Wiggins and this weekend's Tour de Yorkshire have brought a sense of cheery optimism to the British public's view of cycling, Armstrong's story (and the climate of drug-assisted skulduggery in cycling which prompted it to happen) can hardly fail to leave any onlooker nursing a Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Common, Jimmy McGovern’s new BBC One drama about the effects of the joint enterprise law, seems at first sight to lack the topical horsepower of projects like Hillsborough. McGovern doesn’t disappoint, however, crafting from the apparent obscurity of an eighteenth-century statute intended to discourage aristocratic duels by implicating both parties a riveting, corkscrew-plotted narrative that brings to overdue public notice an easily abused and abusive regulation that today targets the opposite end of society.The didactic drive can, in lesser hands, flatten subtlety and exaggerate the obvious Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The black stuff. The phrase was patented in the early 1980s by Alan Bleasdale, Liverpool's other small-screen big hitter. But it could just as well describe the drama that issues from McGovern's imagination, with its dark understanding of the Manichean psyche, its intimacy with the curlicues of Catholic guilt, its knowledge that animal instincts pulse insistently beneath the epidermis we call civility.His imagination got a perfect start in childhood. There were already four older siblings when he was born in 1949, and four more would be squeezed into a two-up, two-down in a working-class, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Janet McTeer has admitted that she had to read Hugo Blick's screenplay for The Honourable Woman three times before she could understand what was going on. Therefore anybody hoping to drop into this as a casual viewer can expect to find the learning curve slippery and featuring a pronounced adverse camber.McTeer wasn't in this first episode, but there were still plenty of stellar names to be going on with. Stephen Rea (pictured below right) plays the world-weary Sir Hugh Hayden-Hoyle, the outgoing head of MI6 and a man reduced to microwaving himself solitary suppers in his apartment by Read more ...
fisun.guner
They came, they saw, they conquered. It was the Sixties and London swung, while the suburbs of Melbourne and Sydney dozed in a beery torpor. Clive James recalls the fizz of beer pumps as the dreary soundtrack of Aus, while Germaine Greer just wanted to escape to “a place of beauty”. She believed, she said, in the “great Australian ugliness”. No one mentioned the cultural cringe, at least not in the first part of Howard Jacobson’s two-part homage to his four brilliant Australians. The cringe, nonetheless, hovered in the air, unspoken, pervasive.Greer and James were joined by Barry Humphries Read more ...