TV
Matthew Wright
A cynic might say that the presenter of a series entitled Places that Don't Exist is perfectly qualified to go on a long walk to look for religious revelation. In keeping with his past explorations of wild places, Reeve's commentary was better on scenery than spirituality. Yet he didn't have the time to walk the entirety of any of his routes, giving his narration a slightly distant, disjointed feel. Reeve made his reputation broadcasting about terrorism, and observed in the first episode that he felt uncomfortable with religious absolutism. It was just as well, then, that the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The sense of an ending is a hard thing to achieve. The Paradise has garnered a loyal following over two series, and no doubt there will be viewers sad to see it depart. But unless options are still being kept open – no announcement either way seems to have surfaced from the BBC – last night’s episode looked like a finale.It certainly went out with a set-piece bang of a kind from which there would seem no way back. The marriage of Katherine (Elaine Cassidy) and Tom Weston (Ben Daniels) could hardly get any worse – it’s long strayed into the sinister territory of a Wilkie Collins novel, Read more ...
fisun.guner
I can’t say I ever tune into More4, so I confess that I don’t know whether its arts strand is any good, or even if it has one. But I suspect that Get Folked might have made a better three-parter on BBC Four, and not just for dedicated folk-heads. As it was, it tried to pack a lot into its 50 minutes (though allowing only 10 seconds for Mumford and Sons might be seen as a blessing by some) and it did so with a lot of seasoned hyperbole. According to the voice-over in Sam Bridger’s mish-mash of a film, “Something unbelievable has been unfolding over the last few years,” and that something is Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The cumulative effect of the BBC's Cold War season hasn't been to remind us that truth is stranger than fiction so much as to demonstrate how they swirled together into a miasma of delusion and uncertainty. We've seen Reds under the bed and spies in the ointment and revisited once again notorious episodes of the highest treason.In BBC Two's Cold War, Hot Jets, we were shown not only how Britain suicidally sold its cutting-edge jet engine technology to the Russians, but how the crews of the RAF's nuclear-equipped V-bombers were trained to fly their final, cataclysmic missions beyond the Iron Read more ...
Matt Wolf
These days, it seems you can't move without encountering musicals in some context or another on TV. Series like Smash and Glee trade on the genre to a degree hovering between the loving and the parasitic, while two contrasting documentaries, The Sound of Musicals and The Story of Musicals, have shed varying degrees of light on how shows get actually get to the stage (or not). Shifting from the art form to the artist, Lionel Bart: Reviewing the Situation casts an affectionate if not wholly sentimental eye on the man behind arguably the greatest of all British musicals, Oliver!, only to lay Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There is a wonderful play to be written about the month in 1502 when Cesare Borgia was holed up in a castle in northern Italy with Leonardo da Vinci and Niccolò Machiavelli. Which of these two was working for the fearsome Borgia? Wrong. It was the creator of the Mona Lisa, not the author of The Prince. Machiavelli was a young diplomat of the new Florentine republic without a thought of realpolitik in his idealistic young head. Meanwhile back in Tuscany another young republican was working on that symbol of civic liberty, the statue of David.It would be 10 years later that the Medicis grabbed Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The bleak opening of Don’t Ever Wipe Tears Without Gloves is set in a nursing home where a man is dying of AIDS, tended by nurses who themselves know next to nothing of the disease. The phrase one nurse utters as a warning gives this Swedish drama its title: any human contact, even if it’s intended as the smallest act of kindness, risks passing on the infection. Simon Kaijser’s three-part drama will show us the varieties of response across society to these extreme new circumstances.It begins in the Swedish countryside, where Rasmus (Adam Pålsson) has grown up happily, surrounded by loving Read more ...
theartsdesk
In the past weeks there has been a frenzy of publicity about the timelessness of a Time Lord. Through sundry incarnations (and one sizeable moratorium), Doctor Who has been on television screens for 50 years. But it's by no means the only show possessing what a football pundit once called stickability. In this edition of Listed, we celebrate the shows which have been knocking around for what feels like forever, nearly half of them for even longer than the good Doctor. There's something here for everyone: soaps, sport and satire, royalty and Casualty - with an inevitable bias towards the BBC. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Long may it stay a mystery,” said Keith Richards, the first talking head seen in this opening shot of a two-part excursion through blues music. Self-evidently, two hours devoted to this oft-explored subject wasn’t going to leave too many mysteries. Woke Up This Morning did tread new ground though – at least for British television – by recalibrating perceptions of authenticity and motivation.Big Bill Broonzy had made his name in Chicago, where he was seen as a sophisticated and urban performer. For his 1938 New York debut, he allowed himself to be portrayed as fresh from an Arkansas farm. The Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Did we really ever have it quite so bad? One-off drama Legacy, the latest addition to the BBC’s Cold War season, took us back to 1974, civil unrest, power-cuts and the three-day-week. And in Spyland, that nether world of lost certainties and perennial jadedness, the weather’s rarely great anyway. So the lack of sun in Paula Milne’s tight and nuanced adaptation of the Alan Judd novel was no surprise: the clouds of le Carré were lowering.Which made the yellow Rover driven by rookie spy Charles Thoroughgood (Charlie Cox) about the brightest thing around (along with the red telephone Read more ...
Matt Wolf
I guess the BBC can't afford researchers or fact-checkers these days. If they could, perhaps something of substance might have arisen from their vacuous Culture Show profile of Vicky Featherstone, the gifted new artistic director of the Royal Court. Oh, and they have might have got the theatre's actual postcode right (SW1W 8AS, as per the Court website), rather than insisting twice on air that it's in (neighbouring) SW3. I mean, if you're going to be so careless with the details, what hope is there for the bigger picture? Precious little, on the evidence of this half-hour summation of a Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Access and trust are the key issues facing any documentary director, especially when the film concerned touches on questions that arouse controversy in society. It’s a long time since I've seen a work that achieved so much on those two fronts as Pussy Riot – A Punk Prayer. The HBO-Storyville documentary by double directors-producers Mike Lerner and Maxim Pozdorovkin tells the brave story of the Russian conceptual art, feminist punk collective. Two of the group's members are still imprisoned in Russian penal colonies for their participation in the "punk prayer" they staged at Moscow’s Read more ...