TV
Adam Sweeting
Sidse Babett Knudsen, alias the absurdly photogenic Danish Statsminister Birgitte Nyborg, provoked gasps at the Nordicana festival in London last June when she revealed that she was no longer Prime Minister in series three. And indeed, as the curtain rose on episode one, we could see that she was not.Instead, the ex-premier had cashed in her political prestige for one of those nebulous but lucrative roles as roving speech-maker, consultant and corporate board-member. We observed a svelte and designer-chic Nyborg helicoptering in to the Hong Kong headquarters of a pharmaceutical company to Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Today’s special preview of the impending 50th anniversary episode of Doctor Who finally filled in some of what happened in the gap between Paul McGann’s 1996 made-for-TV movie and the show’s 2005 televisual regeneration (Big Finish audios notwithstanding, obviously). So it was appropriate that today’s other Who-related event, a one-off tie-in documentary fronted by Professor Brian Cox, began by doing its best to bridge the gap between its presenter’s time in 90s dance-pop band D:Ream and his own unlikely regeneration as one of TV science’s most famous personalities.There are plenty of aspects Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Inevitably, an aura of fin-de-siècle gloom hung heavily over this final Poirot. So daunting was the prospect of terminating his 25-year career-defining stint as Belgium's finest (albeit imaginary) export that David Suchet insisted on shooting the last one before the others in the concluding series.In many respects it was business as usual. An A-list of reliable British thesps (Anne Reid, Phil Glenister, John Standing and a deservedly-promoted Aidan McArdle) found themselves incarcerated amid the spartan, crumbling surroundings of a lonely country house. The rain beat down, and the tall trees Read more ...
Jasper Rees
God morgen. Yes, Borgen is back on Saturday nights, and it’s all change at the top of Danish coalition politics. It gives nothing away to say that Birgitte Nyborg is no longer statsminister – she called an election and the opposition’s bluff at the end of the second series but it turns out that after three years in power Denmark’s fictional electorate had had enough of the Moderates. So the most glamorous and likeable of politicians is now on the lecture circuit in the private sector, and doing very nicely - she even has a new love in her life. This will be the last series of DR’s Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The images really do say it all in Strange Days – Cold War Britain. It’s a style of documentary making which puts archive material in first place, ahead even of presenter Dominic Sandbrook, who’s the sole screen presence here (no interviews, no talking heads). We can only wonder exactly how this challenging mêlée of material came together, but can be sure that archive producer Stuart Robertson had every bit as much input as director Rebecca Templar. And we presume that historian Sandbrook was standing over the process, suggesting the tone and nudging the choice and juxtaposition of clips, as Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Sometimes TV doesn’t need to be “challenging” or “groundbreaking” to be thoroughly worthwhile. The first episode of Sky Arts' new “…talks music” series saw the familar format of a live, seated interview applied to one of pop music’s highest achievers: Lindsey Buckingham of Fleetwood Mac. TV producer Malcolm Gerrie led proceedings in an attractive theatre in front of an audience of students. Most memorable were some blistering live demonstrations of Buckingham’s craft.Gerrie’s interview style may have been a little more One Show than Parkinson but still he kept the singer/guitarist well at Read more ...
Jasper Rees
So, another series down and what do we know? First up, until this final episode no one had died either by contractual agreement or Fellowesian godlike decree. We’ve had a rape, an unwanted pregnancy, a near abortion, a mysterious disappearance and a spot of senile dementia. Plus not one but two uppity colonial singers have drifted upstairs. If it weren’t for the vowels and the coat-tails, this could be Emmerdale, tackling urgent social issues in a Yorkshire accent and congratulating itself on the column inches the morning after. Why else all the animal husbandry?And still nothing much seems Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The Dracula story has seen almost infinite permutations, though none of them ever manages to improve on Bram Stoker's still-haunting original. This new Anglo-American production keeps Stoker's late 19th-century setting, but has transformed the befanged Count into a kind of supernatural corporate raider stalking the sneering, avaricious fatcats of the City of London. Played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Dracula (***) still retains his familiar Transylvanian roots. Professor Van Helsing, on the other hand, has made a dramatic switch to the dark side and is now the Count's ally and Read more ...
mark.kidel
Making a film about an artist with the phenomenal range and creative effervescence of someone like Elvis Costello was never going to be easy. There have been over 30 albums since he started out in 1977, hundreds of songs, many of which are as brilliant as anything written in the last 50 years, and a series of collaborations with artists including Paul McCartney, Burt Bacharach, Bill Frisell, Chet Baker, the Brodsky Quartet, Emmylou Harris, T-Bone Burnett and many others.Portraits of great artists and musicians inevitably throw up a similar creative conundrum: I encountered it with Ravi Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Energy is this season’s dirty word. The big six fix prices from their ivory towers beyond the national borders, and wouldn’t dream of turning up in person to take a fearful wigging from a Commons Select Committee. In the old days, it was all a bit different. Energy came overwhelming from coal, mined domestically by a huge workforce. So central to British life was coal that, when the industry was nationalised in 1947, the National Coal Board took what now seems a remarkable decision to set up a film unit and show the results in up to 800 cinemas.The Mining Review consisted of dramas, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
These celebrations of our yesterdays can easily end up all camembert and wind. But while film people and television people will generally cock such things up, we do still have the odd cultural institution which can be relied upon to throw the right sort of party. For the National Theatre's golden jubilee, therefore, the stops were jolly well pulled out and the invitations damn well accepted from the actors who, striplings at the Old Vic in the Sixties, are now our own Oliviers and Ashcrofts and Scofields. And it was almost all impeccable.Of course the greatest frissons were reserved for those Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Compulsives may be wondering whether it was coincidence that Bedlam, Channel 4’s new four-part documentary following the work of the Bethlem Royal Hospital, reached our screens in the same week that the same channel’s Obsessive Compulsive Cleaners returned for a second series. The channel’s own internal debate as to whether it’s out to entertain or enlighten us has clearly not gone away. Then there was ITV’s hour on OCD Ward on Monday as well, dealing with many of the same issues as Bedlam, no less seriously, this time at Springfield University Hospital. Springfield can’t be far away from the Read more ...