TV
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 ...
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 ...