TV
Lisa-Marie Ferla
So long then, Matt Smith, and thanks for all the fish fingers and custard. I’m sure I wasn’t the only fan left scratching my head as the Eleventh Doctor, clad in smoking jacket and age-enhancing makeup, played out his final scenes - not least because I checked Twitter afterwards, just to make sure I hadn’t missed anything. I can’t begin to imagine what your family members, tuned in through force of habit as their turkey dinners digested, must have thought.I’m not sure whether last month’s 50th anniversary episode is to blame for setting the bar too high, or perhaps for using up all of the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
A year ago it was all so different. Lady Mary gave birth and on his way home from the delivery suite Cousin Matthew steered his vintage soft-top into a tree trunk. There's rather less to report from Downton Abbey (***) this Christmas and the Daily Telegraph is free to devote its Boxing Day front page to something else. No actor has asked to be written out of the series, no one got engaged or even kissed, no one ended up in prison or even tears. His Lordship came dressed as Santa Claus, although he claimed to be wearing the uniform of a Lord Lieutenant.The yawning sense that there is nothing Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Among all the frank, hilarious bits that peppered Caitlin Moran’s bestselling book How To Be a Woman, it was the early chapters – the ones that dealt with the author’s unconventional upbringing in the suburbs of Wolverhampton – that seemed most ripe for repackaging for television. Whether Raised by Wolves lives up to its promise as a coming-of-age comedy drama for any teenage misfit that ever had an annoying sibling remains to be seen. So far, only this pilot episode has been produced. But on the strength of this sample Channel 4 could do worse.Although co-penned by Moran and her sister Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Many a series has found that its initial dynamism and brilliance cannot be sustained. From Julia Davis’s smart, brutal sitcom Nighty Night to the wildly-plotted sci-fi of Heroes, the second seasons just couldn’t keep up the standard or the pace. Often this failure is down to a consensus reality being pushed too far, the suspension of disbelief which the creators cleverly, carefully built with the audience being shattered. Fresh Meat, until very recently, never slid into this trap.Channel 4’s sitcom about a house of students in Manchester arrived in 2011, courtesy of Peep Show creators Jesse Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Homeland's coming home? Well not exactly, but the conclusion to this crazy, mixed-up third series did suddenly feel as if the writers had finally managed to express something that they'd been groping towards for the last three months. Namely, if the show was to stay on the road (series four is in the works), Brody had to go.The endgame to Brody's assassination assignment to Tehran was brutal and shocking, but given the stakes being played for it kind of had to be. True, you had to swallow enormous skip-loads of steaming disbelief before you could allow yourself to experience the cathartic Read more ...
theartsdesk
We at The Arts Desk are as fond as the next person of swans-a-swimming, partridges and pear-trees, not to mention gold rings, but be honest: 'tis already the season to be jolly sick and tired of all those knee-jerk compilations of Slade, sleighbells and Celine Dion's "O Holy Night". Without wishing to audition for the role of Ebenezer Scrooge, it’s time to admit that not everything made in the name of Christmas is of the highest artistic merit. But, it turns out, there’s gold in them there hills – snow-capp'd, natch.Tireless champions of excellence that we are, we’ve raided our memory banks Read more ...
Jasper Rees
David Coleman never said, "Juantorena opens his legs and shows his class," any more than Queen Victoria said, "We are not amused." The words belonged to Ron Pickering, but Private Eye got it wrong. The chances are that Coleman, who has died at the age of 87, was not amused. A lot of people were, however. Who knows how much damage that one mis-attribution did, how much it contributed to the image crisis that Coleman put up with for so many years?Undeservedly or not, it is the lot of the British sports commentator to suffer the barbs and carping of his or her public. Some of them, and Coleman Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Most people know the basics of making a cocktail. Take two ingredients: one palatable and widely consumed, to make up the body of the concoction; the other, pungent and often bitter, to cause the lips to pucker and the throat to flinch. So it was that BBC Two set about this festive aperitif of a programme, with Alexander Armstrong, serial guest chair of Have I Got News for You and presenter of Pointless, as the part that slips down nicely, while Giles Coren, knowledgeable about food and drink, and at his best very witty, but not everyone’s glass of duty-free Advocaat, was the racy counterpart Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
We've already been casting a revisionary eye over Lord Lucan, the Cold War, the Kennedy assassination and the Profumo affair. Last year Sheridan Smith portrayed Mrs Ronnie Biggs for ITV, but what took them so long to get around to the Great Train Robbery itself? Just hours too long for the real Ronnie Biggs, as it happened.Scripted by Chris Chibnall, a man basking in bankability following his bustin' hit series Broadchurch for ITV, this two-part voyage round the GTR is stylish, well cast and easy to watch, but adds nothing much to the existing information-mountain about the crime. You'd get Read more ...
Andy Plaice
There’s a wonderful moment in Bruce Reynolds’s autobiography when he describes what became of his mate, a fellow train robber who had fled to Canada but was hunted down by the enigmatic Tommy Butler. Four and a half years after the Great Train Robbery in which crooks made off with £2.6million, Detective Chief Superintendent Butler had come to arrest Charlie Wilson and was knocking on his door."You look well, Charlie," said Butler. To which the fugitive replied: "And you, Guv. Cup of tea?" The detective was determined to find his man and, 50 years later, it’s a feeling shared by writer Chris Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Though greeted ambivalently when it made its debut at the end of 2012, Ripper Street has looked increasingly like TV's undervalued secret weapon as it has surged purposefully through this second series. Maybe the title was misjudged, suggesting it was just another gruesome and mist-shrouded Victorian murder mystery. Turns out it was much more than that.Indeed, echoes of Jack the Ripper have been almost entirely absent as the series has taken the plunge into such factually-based issues as rent-boy networks and the Barings Bank crisis of 1890 (different only in scale from recent financial Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s been a confusing week for British fans of Borgen. As they prepared to say farewell to Birgitte Nyborg and co, their beloved statsminister’s factual avatar was trending in the global media. If you know your Borgen, Danish PM Helle Thorning-Schmidt’s selfie with a President and a Prime Minister looked more like a brilliant script idea than a pesky news item. As outlets in Denmark and beyond devoted pages of print and hours of screen time to unpicking the semiotics of the moment, you can bet series creator Adam Price kicked himself he hadn’t thought of it as a storyline.Anyway, Birgitte Read more ...