TV
Claudia Pritchard
How irksome in some ways for the National Theatre that both the glamour and the accessibility of cinema have bookended its first 50 years, when the company and, latterly, its Southbank home, are essentially driven by and dedicated to live performance. But it was Laurence Olivier’s film career, making him a household name, which helped secure for him the job as first director of the National Theatre in 1963. And it is cinema relays that have taken NT productions to places and people who might never step into Denys Lasdun’s building, despite the company’s national ambitions.The Olivier years Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The funny business of being British, and the even funnier business of being foreign, are at the heart of the latest vehicle for the talents of David Mitchell and Robert Webb. They’ve conquered the sketch format and the grimy sitcom but in Ambassadors they branch out into trickier terrain of comedy drama. The show's task is to snigger at the absurdities of international diplomacy while also showing signs of some sort of beating heart.Mitchell plays Keith Davies, our new man in Tazbekistan, a tinpot Asiatic amalgam of a couple of post-Soviet republics where the methods of communism have made Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Vivacious blonde presenter Cherry Healey’s latest three-part series aims to show how a dangerously large proportion of the nation’s youth are abusing themselves with booze, drugs and food “until their young bodies and minds are ready for retirement". Part one – about alcohol - opens, predictably, on the streets of Newcastle where the usual array of working class Geordie pissheads they snag for these programmes are staggering about Bigg Market and slurring that they just don’t care. “Why dwell on something you may not get?” runs the typical response from a young woman who Healey’s breathalyser Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“Everything has happened so quickly,” Katherine Glendenning mused as the new series of The Paradise shot off the block. She'd been en voyage for a year, losing a father and gaining a husband, but now Katherine was back. Moray’s melancholy sojourn on coffee and cognac in Paris – “thoroughly French in every way,” he found it, with less originality than we might have expected – had been suddenly cut short too, and he was hot-footing it back to the waiting arms of Denise. The dramatic rapiers were drawn. More immediately worrying was that business at the Paradise was down, badly down. Not Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Man Down opens with a tried and tested sitcom premise; middle-aged-and-going-nowhere-fast Dan is being dumped by his much more mature, high-achieving girlfriend, Naomi. She's tired of his juvenile daydreaming - could a hovercraft be powered by farts? - and the fact that he lives in a flat attached to his parents' house. And he still hasn't replaced a lightbulb that blew weeks ago.But what follows deviates from that seemingly unpromising beginning to give us a half-hour of wonderfully silly, often slapstick comedy fused with a subtle decoding of male-female, adult-child relationships. If that Read more ...
Tim Cumming
In the age of big data where nothing escapes retrieval and the afterlife is a matter of cloud storage, the whole idea of "lost BBC tapes" seems about as inconceivable as a hunter-gatherer climbing out of an Iceland freezer cabinet. Dead of Night was broadcast in 1972 and has since become the object of a considerable cult. Thankfully, with this BFI release, it proves to be as odd, as arresting and as eerie as the best weird programming of the decade.Scripted, directed and produced by old-school, left-field, left-leaning BBC staffers – the kind of extinct animal whose return would have Paul Read more ...
Claudia Pritchard
“I hate surprises!” joked Cilla Black, for 20 years host of the family reunion show Surprise, Surprise, in ITV’s toothsome tribute to her 50 years in showbusiness. She needn’t have worried, for there were no shocks in this clean-heeled gallop through her career, from gigs in her native LIverpool as Swinging Priscilla with The Big Three, to discovery by Brian Epstein, The Cavern Club, television and national treasuredom. Live guests on The One and Only Cilla Black, including Christopher Biggins and warmed-over contestants from old shows, were cut with prerecorded segments shot on location Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, the creators of Scandinavia's drama boom could be forgiven if they started behaving like a collection of hysterical Justin Biebers. Not only are their home-grown series hits around the world, they're also being slavishly copied by other broadcasters. The American version of The Killing has been followed by a US take on Danish/Swedish joint effort The Bridge, starring Diane Kruger and set on the Tex/Mex border. Now here's an Anglo-French spin on it, replacing the titular bridge with our beloved Channel Tunnel.In some ways it's not a bad idea, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
What the Dickens is happening to wildlife television? At the back end of all those Atttenborough films they have a segment in which they explain how they got the miracle money shot of the chorus line of orcas, the war ballet of the giraffes, the Saharan ant colony. Well, forget all that. Television appears to have decreed that, wildlife-wise, pets are the new black. Earlier this year Horizon aired an underwhelming film about what cats get up to when you’re not looking. Answer: exactly what you’d expect. Before that it did one on dogs, explaining through the wonders of science how human Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Respect and dignity, intolerance and hatred: the poles were set far apart in Stephen Fry: Out There. It’s good to have Fry the thoughtful presenter back – it’s been a long time since his The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive – on a subject close to his heart, how gay people are faring in various parts of the world. This first episode took us to Uganda and Los Angeles, while part two on Wednesday drops in on Brazil, Russia and India. Quite an itinerary for two hours of television – fitted in over two years, during gaps in Fry’s other commitments – and it’s to Fergus O’Brien’s directing Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Period dramas are all the rage, and you can imagine Breathless being plucked with forceps from a steaming cauldron in which bubbled Call the Midwife, The Hour, Mad Men, Heartbeat and inevitably a sprig of Downton, which couldn't hurt. It's 1961, the National Health Service is still regarded as one of the wonders of the known universe, and women are foolish little things who wear stylish frocks, are obsessed with hair and nails and keep getting themselves up the duff. As one posh lady put it, inadvertently finding herself in an "interesting" condition, "I've been such a silly muffin."Luckily Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
In some ways Malachi Davies, one of the titular “truckers” in this new BBC comedy drama, brings to mind Frank Gallagher of Shameless. Admittedly Davies, played by Stephen Tompkinson, has a job - but it is a job that is as central to the identity of the character as Gallagher’s avoidance of one ever was. Some of the similarities are pretty superficial: the two characters share the love for a drink, a seeming inability to get a decent haircut and even an ex played by Maggie O’Neill. But what really links the two characters is the importance that each one places on family - at least, in the Read more ...