TV
Demetrios Matheou
When The Newsroom’s first season started in 2012 the unthinkable seemed to have happened: Aaron Sorkin, creator of The West Wing and Oscar-winning writer of The Social Network, had lost his mojo. Not even his previous, erratic show, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, cancelled after its first season, had moments as excruciating as this. Set within a fictional cable news channel and centred on a ratings-hungry anchor man, Will McAvoy, who has rediscovered his fire for campaigning journalism, The Newsroom sought to combine the idealism and calling-to-account of Sorkin’s best work. But whereas Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“I see a lot of things up there, I get chills, see shadows. I don’t know if you call them ghosts or whatever, but you feel stuff. They’re trying to tell you something.” This is bolt boss Mohawk Joe “Flo” McComber, one of the many Mohawk iron workers rebuilding the World Trade Center. A tough guy, he’s not alone in sensing the spirits of the dead. “The site is being take care of in a different way. You feel it,” says Mike O’Reilly, another ironworker.Belfast-born artist and film-maker Marcus Robinson has been on site since 2006, recording the rise of 1 WTC from bedrock upwards with time-lapse Read more ...
Jasper Rees
David Frost, who has died at the age of 74, was a character. The obituaries will tour the entirety of his career as swinging young presenter of TW3, as the first transatlantic celebrity of the gogglebox who gave his name to a sugary brand of Kelloggs cereal, and as a lifelong thorn in the side of Peter Cook. Then there was Through the Keyhole and the TV-am cataclysm later followed by his Sunday morning resurrection on the BBC. Above all, though, it falls to vanishingly few interviewers to see themselves fictionalised as a character onstage. And it was in this capacity that I once had the Read more ...
mark.hudson
You either get Youssou N’Dour, or you don’t. For millions on his home turf, the Senegalese singer is a major cultural figure: the street urchin-turned-superstar who almost became president. For large numbers of Western fellow travellers he’s the sexiest, most charismatic figure to emerge from the whole world music phenomenon. For everyone else, specifically the 99 percent of the Western public who aren’t into world music and didn’t buy 7 Seconds (and even some of those who did), he’s, well, a bit boring: an average-looking, dull interviewee, whose music floats by in a simultaneous blur of Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It was only today I learned that, for copyright reasons, it is impossible to use Martin Luther King’s iconic “I Have A Dream” speech in its entirety without paying a hefty licensing fee to his estate. That knowledge made it easier to understand why a new documentary to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington seemed to gloss over its figurehead’s famous words.That those lines ring with familiarity half a century later is testament not only to King’s skills as an orator, but to the activists and civil rights leaders who pulled together what remains one of the largest, and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Tony Hancock stopped producing the work on which his reputation rests the best part of half a century ago. He still casts a long old shadow. Many years before BBC Four embarked on its series of biodramas, a life of Hancock starring Alfred Molina captured some of that hulking self-disgust. More recently Paul Merton has become a one-man module in Hancock studies, even going so far as to re-enact some of the old Half Hours. The absence of the real thing only served to remind the audience of Hancock’s ineffable charisma.There is always the danger, when contemporary comics make reverential films Read more ...
Claudia Pritchard
Brush up your geography and dust down your history – Dr Michael Scott is investigating the sources of Greek drama and their influence on all theatre to the present day. But he isn’t going to make it easy. The opening instalment of Ancient Greece: The Greatest Show on Earth, a three-parter, was a giddying ride out of Athens to the farthest-flung regions of Google. So it’s off to the amphitheatre of Thorikos for a trot through the birth of drama in the sixth century BC, on through the siege of Mytilene, and over the water to Melos, for an atrocity that would prompt Euripides’ Trojan Women Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Plays for Britain was a short-lived ITV equivalent to the BBC’s long-running Play for Today, and doesn’t suffer in comparison. Strong writers, directors and actors on their way up – Alan Clarke, Stephen Poliakoff, Howard Brenton, Ray Winstone, Pete Postlethwaite, Miriam Margoyles – all do good work in the sole 1976 series’ six one-hour plays, complete here.Brenton’s The Paradise Run follows three soldiers in a Northern Ireland rendered almost science-fictionally non-specific, though director Michael Apted makes the terror of a soldier’s rural ambush and execution clammily authentic. Future Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It’s a while since BBC One served us up for Sunday night primetime something with so much black humour as there is to enjoy in What Remains. The tone of the script from Tony Basgallop (Inside Men) is as sardonic as it comes, and the cast of characters he assembles around its south London location doesn’t look like it will be presenting the human race in its most redeeming light.David Threlfall as DI Len Harper isn't a detective with many illusions left about his job, or the people it brings him into contact with – we can see it in those tired eyes and stubbled cheeks. It’s Threfall’s Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Here's an association test - what's next in the sequence: flamenco, gypsy, soul? Yes, you win the free tourist trip to Andalucía along with writer Elizabeth Kinder, with whom you will almost certainly enjoy weak sangria and tapas while stumbling amusingly in bad Spanish, and you won't be troubled by a single unfamiliar thought about this alluring form of dance, music and poetic song.Flamenco is so hackneyed a part of the Spanish package that it's certainly time to chisel through the candy to seek the bitter heart of the real thing. But there's always something hokum when a presenter declares Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
This was a somewhat nostalgic look at the rise of “World Music” as a genre, starting in the Eighties when the term was first used, essentially as a marketing tool. As the ever ebullient Andy Kershaw put it, the problem was where in record stores “you could put a choir of Bulgarian tractor drivers next to some hot shot guitar slinger from Guinea-Bissau". And as another talking head - and there lots of mainly good ones - pointed out, there was an urge for something a bit more real, more connected, more spiritual even, than either the gloss of Eighties mainstream pop or earnest indie-rock was Read more ...
Claudia Pritchard
Had the wealthy William Burrell had a son, Glasgow might not have acquired the world-class art collection that the shipping entrepreneur amassed during his long life. But with the birth of a sole daughter came both ambitions and suspicion – he raised Marion to succeed to his art empire, then imagined every suitor to be a gold-digger, breaking off her third engagement with a public announcement in the newspaper that took even her by surprise.Father and child were never reconciled, and upon his death at 95, Burrell, by now the owner of top quality Chinese and Islamic artefacts, as well as Read more ...