TV
Tom Birchenough
Two years ago Penny Woolcock was at the heart of Birmingham street gangs in her documentary One Mile Way; that one was titled after the fact that two of the city’s competing outfits were separated only by the distance of the film’s title. In Going to the Dogs, she's back in the same 'hood, this time investigating the city’s dog-fighting scene, with the help of one of the earlier film’s lead protagonists, Dylan Duffus, who proved here a very able narrator-presenter.Tracking down, and ensuring the cooperation of the participants for Dogs… looked like it proved more challenging. No surprise when Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Before the Vikings came to Britain there was no whaling, though coastal-dwellers would avail themselves of any beached strays by chopping them up for their meat and oil. It was the bellicose Norsemen who imported the notion of actively pursuing the creatures, which is how the pilot whale hunt became a tradition in Stornoway in the Outer Hebrides. A line of boats would drive the whales into the shallows, where they were slaughtered by the islanders.It was the shape of all manner of hideous things to come, and it wasn't easy to sit through this first part of Adam Nicolson's history of whaling Read more ...
Jasper Rees
As an appetiser to the tournament about to swamp your television, the BBC paired up one global football brand with another: Becks, meet Brazil; Brazil, meet Becks. Appropriately the encounter lasted 90 minutes, and featured long stretches in which the two tentative participants probed and prodded at each other, interleaved by occasional brief flare-ups of drama.The BBC told the story of Brazil only recently through the portal of Michael Palin. Where Palin took an avuncular stroll through the country's history, geography and culture, Beckham’s researches erred towards the slightly more skin- Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Is football a thing of beauty? It depends who you ask. If you’re that way inclined, it is possible to see in the 90 minutes’ traffic of a game the qualities that also thrill theatre buffs and balletomanes, opera fans and gallery goers: human drama, obviously, but also grace, wit, villainy, perhaps even truth and profundity. As the World Cup arrives on your television for another month-long sit-in, this edition of Listed suggests the most cultured goals ever scored in the competition, and just for fun looks for parallels in the world of actual culture.Even if you detest football’s venal side Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's something of a cliche to regard concert pianists as mad geniuses or nutty professors, and John Ogdon fitted the formula only too well. Born in Nottinghamshire in 1937, he displayed absurdly precocious musical brilliance as a child, and in due course became one of the highest-flying students at the Royal Northern College of Music. When he won the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1962 (he came equal first with Vladimir Ashkenazy), a star was born and his international career lifted off instantly.With his science-fiction hair, brainiac beard and heavy-framed glasses, Ogdon Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It’s been a decade since the television drama Sex Traffic brought writer Abi Morgan into the mainstream. It won an impressive collection of awards, and its tale of international prostitution networks, and their brutality, was as harsh and under-the-skin as they come.In the time since, Morgan has established herself as one of the go-to British writers of her generation, with film work including The Iron Lady (Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher, pictured among enemies, below right) and Shame, television drama (for, and about, the BBC, The Hour), and plenty of theatre work. We haven’t heard, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Great idea. Round up a dozen 20-something American girls whose idea of a royal family is the Kardashians, whisk them off to a stately pile somewhere in the south of England, and put them in a beauty contest to see which one can take the fancy of a bloke who might just be Prince Harry.... but a terrible programme. Matt Hicks, the fey posh chap with slightly Harry-esque ginger hair who (oddly) looks like both Wills and Harry after they've been processed through a Photoshop blender, is a personality-vacuum blessed with the chat-up skills of the Speaking Clock ("er... you're a bit brazen"). Also Read more ...
Veronica Lee
When Amber (****) was shown earlier this year in Ireland, the crime series created by Rob Cawley and Paul Duane for state broadcaster RTE caused a kerfuffle as (giving nothing away) it didn't follow the usual narrative of teenager-goes-missing-police-miss-clues-and-family-implodes drama. But that's all yet to pan out, and last night's opening episode of four started traditionally enough as Amber, the 14-year-old daughter of Ben and Sarah Bailey, lied to her parents about visiting her friend and didn't arrive home when expected.The family implosion was already under way as Ben and Sarah ( Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
With the 70th anniversary of D-Day following hard on the heels of the extensive World War One commemorations, battle fatigue is becoming a very real concern for TV-watchers. Breaking the mould of retrospective war documentaries becomes increasingly difficult, as Messrs Enfield and Whitehouse demonstrated with deadly satirical accuracy in Harry and Paul's Story of the 2s, so all kinds of credit are due to National Geographic's frequently devastating record of the D-Day landings and their immediate aftermath.Although this was a multinational collaborative effort, the premise was straightforward Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Once upon a time British Airways was our national carrier. It had a theme tune that made you want to go "aah"/croon along/flood your lugholes with liquid strychnine. You knew where you were with BA. Then along came the uppity Euro-oiks from Ryanair and EasyJet, companies that can’t locate a space bar on a keyboard let alone a landing strip anywhere near a city centre, and yet they filched all BA's cattle-class customers. Meanwhile various nouveau airlines from Asia kreemed off the posherati who turn left on planes. But now the solution to this pincer-movement assault on British Airways' Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Big Society. Not to be confused with other Bigs: the Big Bang, Chill, Sleep, Easy, Lebowski, Fat Greek Wedding, Trouble in Little China etc. History records that David Cameron’s sizeable brainwave vaporised on impact with reality around the time of the last election. Its only visible remnant is the office of Police and Crime Commissioner. This is the new post that anyone – even former deputy PM John Prescott - can stand for without previous knowledge of policing. Voter turnout in 2012 was on the low side.But what does a PCC actually do? Step forward into the headlights, Ann Barnes, a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
When he's not investigating terrorism and the security services, Peter Taylor can usually be found probing into the tar-dripping innards of the tobacco industry. He's made a string of documentaries about it since the 1970s, as well as writing the book Smoke Ring: The Politics of Tobacco.He has even become part of its historical archive, and we saw him here in a 1975 clip when, as a keen young reporter, he stood up at Imperial Tobacco's AGM to ask the chairman how he much he knew about the impact of smoking on health. This new two-part documentary brings the story of the industry's dogged Read more ...