TV
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 ...
Andy Plaice
They’re calling it Dublin noir and, on first showing, there’s something very stylish about the BBC’s new three-part drama starring Gabriel Byrne. Pubs and cigarette smoke and long, smouldering looks help the cause. There’s plenty of rain too, and a lot of grey and blue in John Alexander’s film, broken up by flashes of colour and arresting, unusual camera angles.Based on the books by John Banville (writing as Benjamin Black), Quirke boasts an impressive cast including Michael Gambon and Geraldine Somerville, with screenwriting duties shared by Andrew Davies, who penned this episode, and Conor Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There's a bit of Gene Hunt revisited in Peter Bowker's new three-part drama. Philip Glenister returns to the Manchester stomping grounds he patrolled in Life on Mars, and he even drives an Audi (though it isn't Hunt's celebrated Quattro). But this time he's not a cop.It's 15 June 1996, the Euro 96 football championships are just swinging into action, and the Stone Roses and New Order are on the soundtrack. Glenister plays successful businessman Daniel Cotton, doing his best to patch up a poisonous family rift between his father Samuel (Bernard Hill, pictured below) and wayward, wastrel Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It says something about your status in broadcasting when you inspire not only a Spitting Image puppet, but also have a Private Eye column named after you. Presenter, commentator, interviewer and quizmaster David Coleman, as the title says, really was quite remarkable, a broadcaster as well known as the sportsmen and women whose achievements he commented on for four decades, and celebrated for his distinctive style in front of a microphone.He died in December and this tribute, an updated version of Carl Doran's film aired in 2011 to celebrate Coleman's 85th birthday, was an affectionate run- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
We've had endless waves of vampires, zombies and Frankenstein's monsters, so why not bundle them all together under the same doomily Gothic roof? Welcome to Penny Dreadful, created by writer John Logan and producer Sam Mendes (who previously worked together on the Bond movie Skyfall), in which we descend into a "demi-monde" of monsters and necromancy in Victorian London.Though the series is named after the lurid serial publications popular in the 19th century, which featured the likes of Sweeney Todd and Sexton Blake, the trickiest part here is picking your way through the reverberations from Read more ...