TV
Lisa-Marie Ferla
In 40 years’ time, when some suit at the BBC is searching the archives for some suitable footage to illustrate women in music in the early 21st century, will he pull out an image of Miley Cyrus or Rihanna wrapped in fishnets and bondage tape? I ask because it seems as though the central question posed by this women-in-punk-themed edition of The Culture Show - namely, whether the spirit of the fearless femmes of the 1970s lives on today - must be answered not by the many successors to the punk, riot grrrl and grunge acts playing their way through underground venues all over the country, but by Read more ...
fisun.guner
Well, I’ll be damned if subscriptions don’t shoot up this summer. This lovingly made paean to the New York Review of Books, directed by Martin Scorsese and his long-time documentary collaborator David Tedeschi, was better than any advert, though I’d hesitate – but only briefly – to say that it was one long advert. 95 minutes probably makes it an advertorial feature, like those misleading pages you see in magazines and increasingly newspapers. Still, that doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy it. One’s attention was drawn early on to that famous masthead: the word “Books”, it was pointed out, is Read more ...
Andy Plaice
Wolverhampton today, tomorrow the world. As unlikely as it was, that was the incentive for aspiring prize-winners in this first of three stories from Channel 4 looking at regional beauty pageants which in turn lead to Miss England and beyond.The events themselves pretend to have moved on from the 1970s when beauty contests were screened live on television, attracting huge audiences in awe at the glamour of it all. Whisper it, but you’re not allowed to call them beauty queens any more. As we saw through the eyes of four young women from the West Midlands, vying to become Miss Black Country, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Last Saturday saw the broadcast of the final Wallander on British TV. The new six-episode series has hit DVD within days of the programme being off air. As the distracted, always-troubled detective, Krister Henriksson had asked that for his return to the role after a four-year gap in this third series, it should end with no possibility of a comeback – after series 2, he’d said he wouldn’t play Wallander again yet he did. This time, the series ended with a full stop. There is no chance Wallander will be coming back.The conclusion came with Kurt Wallander developing Alzheimer’s. The final two Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
We last saw Dr Pamela Cox presenting BBC Two's Servants: the True Story of Life Below Stairs. Having done the academic's-eye-view of Upstairs Downstairs, she has now moved on to the world of Mr Selfridge in this three-part survey of the rise of the shopgirl from obscurity to comprehensive takeover.Dr Cox is an enthusiastic and refreshingly informal host, but even these helpful characteristics couldn't entirely banish the whiff of Open University hovering over this programme. There were groaning shelves of facts and statistics to plough through as she demonstrated with exhaustive thoroughness Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
The BBC might have convinced itself that the only thing that will change in the way it caters to the youth market next autumn is the method of delivery, but Murdered By My Boyfriend makes the case for retaining BBC Three as a channel that can be idly flipped onto on a Monday night. Previews of the short drama, inspired by real-life events, were full of the usual cliches: the story that writer Regina Moriarty told was both “tragic” and “depressingly familiar”. But the fact remains that young women between the ages of 16 and 24 are statistically most at risk of being abused by a partner; and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Celebrating the 80th anniversary of opera at Glyndebourne, this 90-minute documentary was fascinating when it delved into the house's history, but started to lose its bearings when it came back to the present day and dwelt at laborious length over this season's new production of Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier. It was as if nobody could decide what sort of film to make, so they made two and cut chunks of them together.What might be called the "origin story" of this most resplendently rural of opera houses took us back to the post-World War One era, when decorated Army captain and Wagner Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” Given how easily some seem to dodge the latter, Benjamin Franklin’s oft-quoted epigram could do with a little modification. Nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxis? That, at least, is the premise of A Cabbie Abroad.This series is a spin-off from BBC Two’s show Toughest Place to Be…, in which Brits in everyday professions – midwife, paramedic, binman etc – were sent off to see how their job is done in another part of the world. In series four, they stuck a London cabbie in the middle of Mumbai.Mason Read more ...
Andy Plaice
My heart sank when Lorraine Pascale’s documentary on fostering began with her making cakes with Junior, a 10-year-old boy in care. I feared Bake Off meets Who Do You Think You Are?, but those worries quickly faded as Pascale told her extraordinary story.We know her as a television chef and best-selling cookery author, but her success is all the more remarkable when her circumstances are revealed. Born in Hackney, she was given up at birth and spent the first 18 months of her life with a foster family. Little was known about this period. One hazy photo remained. Possibly the foster mum was Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Here at theartsdesk we still receive the occasional missive from readers on several continents incensed at the BBC's axing of Zen in February 2011, a decision taken by then-controller of BBC One Danny Cohen. Zen didn't get a mention in Cohen's article in Wednesday's Times, entitled "Never mind the box-set brigade, let's celebrate British drama", but he managed to plug plenty of more recent BBC drama productions (and a couple from ITV, in a token attempt at even-handedness). It was as if a long list of titles would be enough to demonstrate the truth of his argument that British TV drama is Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There is a saying that dogs have owners but cats have staff, and it's an axiom forcibly borne out by this new three-part series. The felines in question are Sumatran tiger cubs rather than primped and pampered household pets, but they're so rare, and so prone to the tigerish equivalent of infant mortality, that Australia Zoo's tiger expert Giles Clark decided to rear them at his family home.Like a first-time father, he was soon looking gaunt and haggard on three hours sleep a night, worn to a frazzle by leaping up to tend to the faintest mew or gurgle from the celebrity kittens. At first Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Gary Lineker has been honing his marketing schtick for several decades now, selling us a spud-based product that promises to make us feel great, only to fill us with self-loathing as soon as it’s finished. Yes, the England football team, seemingly made of potato, slickly packaged, but ultimately unsatisfying and undoubtedly bad for your health. (The crisps, I hear, are much healthier than they used to be.)Of course we lost. We lost to Italy in the European Championships in 2012, and haven’t beaten the Azzurri in the World Cup since 1977. They’ve won it four times, most recently in 2006, when Read more ...