TV
Veronica Lee
It's a testament to how good an idea Who Do You Think You Are? is that well into its tenth series (and several others worldwide) it still provides great entertainment – and not a little emotion. Its secret, I suspect, lies in the fact that every family has its stories and dramas and last night's subject, comic Sarah Millican, uncovered some interesting tales buried several generations back, long lost from current family folklore.The comedian is, by her own description, a home bird (the title of her latest tour), deeply rooted in her working-class South Shields origins – so much so that she Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The last time we saw soldiers going over the top at the Somme with comic baggage attached was the tragic finale of Blackadder. It’s the inevitable comparison that The Wipers Times writers Ian Hislop and Nick Newman were going to face, and though they aim for something different in what is, after all, a true story, there’s no escaping the same absurdity of clipped understatement that they have given their British officer heroes, or the essential one-dimensional nature of characterisation. Even fleshed out with free-standing cabaret-style sketches, at 90 minutes this sometimes felt as long as Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Ronan Bennett doesn’t do protracted. The writer of Top Boy has whipped us through another series, in the course of which an awful lot of water has flowed under the proverbial bridge. Except that it’s blood rather than water that tends to flow in Summerhouse, and the first we saw of a bridge in that neck of East London was in the last seconds of episode four, with Dushane hiding underneath one. He looked more than a bit cornered – not how we’re used to seeing him.Ashley Walters has grown Dushane (main picture) into a character whose confidence knows few bounds. He’s even arbitrated a feud Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
If the UK’s entire power supply were to fail, how long do you reckon it would take for society to regress to the point that people would begin eating cold chips they had rescued from a bin? According to Blackout, a feature-length docu-drama directed by Bafta-award winning Ben Chanan, the answer is a mere two days.This is a serious piece of work which, by its closing moments, turns from exploration of an intriguing what-if scenario to fully realised psychological horror. And yet it’s the elements of humour among the panic and the drudgery that make Blackout so engrossing. The film follows a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Scientists may have found a cure for insomnia. It’s thinking up names for television detectives. Have you noticed how elephant-tranquilisingly dull they are? Alec Hardy and Ellie Miller. Len Harper. Denise Woods. Tony Gates, Steve Arnott and Kate Fleming. Sergeant Geoff Plank. DS Fiona Photofit. Oh go on then, couple of ringers in there, but the rest have lately been busting crime on a mainstream channel near you (see sidebar to ID them all).Apparently they end up with these vapid non-names because the plausible ones are all taken by real coppers already. The TV companies are not allowed to Read more ...
Claudia Pritchard
Parents who separate make their children old before their time. The five young people in Olly Lambert’s spare and frank BBC2 documentary, Mum and Dad Are Splitting Up, certainly know more about dysfunctional adults than you would wish upon a child. Joining the pet rabbit and the little brothers and sisters at home have been alcohol, jealousy, non-communication, disillusionment and deception. The parents, now apart, were interviewed, for the most part, together, their wise child sitting in; they told the camera what you wish they had told Relate, or better still, each other, before the point Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
I can’t have been alone in my struggle to keep the two of them straight in my head: there’s the one set in the east end of London, in which a former BBC Spook tries to track down Jack the Ripper; and then there’s the one set in the east end of London, in which a former BBC Spook tries to track down a modern-day killer inspired by Jack the Ripper. When Rupert Penry-Jones, dressed in suave black tie like the James Bond he never was, arrived at the book launch that kicked off this fourth series of Whitechapel, it took a few minutes - and a bit of stylised violence in an alley involving a kid in Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Bruce Goodison has been responsible for some of the more impressive television of the last decade, sometimes drama, sometimes straight documentary, and sometimes drama-documentary, like his Flight 93: The Flight That Fought Back. He was back in the latter genre in Channel 4’s powerful Siege in the Sahara, bringing the heightened tension of fictional reconstruction to the story of the assault on the Algerian gas plant at In Amenas by terrorists in January this year. The ensuing hostage drama lasted three days, during which the Algerian side refused to negotiate, and left 40 of the Read more ...
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 ...