TV
Adam Sweeting
Buying a used car is not for the squeamish at the best of times, but the notion of buying one from something called the Essex Car Company freezes the blood. Yet the idea of making a slice-of-life, fly on the wall, reality-tv-style doc about the aforesaid jalopy-shifting outfit radiates an unmistakeable allure.The introductory voice-over laid out the floor plan: "Two hundred used motors, a team of fast-talking salesmen, and car-buying customers from all walks of life." Perfect. We were introduced to James, the most successful of the Essex boys when it comes to getting those lumps of car-flesh Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Loving the title. Caligula with Mary Beard. Professor Beard has been mentioned adjacently to some rum types of late. Internet trolls. AA Gill. They pale into nothingness, do they not, next to the emperor who mistook his horse for a consul. And his sister for a lover. You've heard the rumours. Caligula was huge in the Seventies, when such garishness blended with the wallpaper. Hence dyed blond crossdressing John Hurt being well weird in I, Claudius. Hence also Caligula's very own high-end eponymous porn movie. Those were the days. But are the stories all true?Well, maybe they are and maybe Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It could so easily have been The Walking Dead, where the living endlessly battle an ever-increasing tide of returnees from the beyond. The resurrected in the contemplative Returned weren’t zombies, but actual living people with a desire to pick up where they left off and reintegrate themselves into day-to-day life. Unfortunately for them, and for those they became reacquainted with, it couldn’t go smoothly. The first series of The Returned ended with the formerly deceased seemingly returning to where they came from, even bringing a couple of the living with them.The unnamed French mountain Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Does it always have to be so flipping grim up north? In Channel 4's new four-parter, the Mill in question is at Quarry Bank in Cheshire. The date: 1833, during the Industrial Revolution. Villains du jour: the Greg family, industrialists and merciless exploiters of child labour.As the first episode opened with the tolling of the wake-up bell calling the poor, struggling young workers to another dismal day on the factory floor, it all felt terribly familar. We were back at Lowood school with Jane Eyre, enmeshed in the proles-versus-fatcats class struggle of South Riding, reliving the grinding Read more ...
theartsdesk
There's good cops and bad cops, hard cops and soft cops, old cops and young cops, funny cops and straight cops, maverick cops and by-the-book cops. The pairings are legion, the permutations endless. The movies teem with buddy cops, unlike paired with unlike to bring down bad guys. They've all pretty much got one thing in common: it's a guy thing. Yes, when it comes to reeling in the guilty parties, not a lot of sisters get to do it for themselves. The release of The Heat, a shoo-in as this summer's big comedy hit, has found us trawling through the archives to celebrate other instances of Read more ...
graham.rickson
Most of us could compile soundtracks to our lives. We’d probably save our favourite songs and pieces for the worst bits. Pianist James Rhodes was sectioned in his twenties and maintains that a visitor who smuggled in an iPod stuffed with classical music helped to save his life. He’s refreshingly candid though, admitting slyly that “listening to a piece of Bach isn’t going to fix everything". Look at Rhodes’s garish website or listen to the banter on his latest live CD and you might be tempted to switch off. You'd be wrong; here, he’s an articulate host – humble, modest and engaging. Rhodes’s Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
You might wonder if anybody really deserves three and a half hours of TV biography, but after the first half of Robert Weide's immense survey of Woody Allen, the nebbish messiah, I was pawing the carpet in anticipation of part two. Documentaries don't, as a rule, leave you in seizures of mirth, but the judicious selections from Allen's bottomless catalogue carried a sealed-in guarantee of hilarity despite being snatched from their original context.But it isn't just comedy, or perhaps it's comedy as the visible tip of a fully-rounded philosophical iceberg. Even Allen's shortest one-liners may Read more ...
Jasper Rees
They’ve served BBC Four well, these dramas about the private lives of the stars. From writers to comics, presenters to chefs, the secret traumas of yesteryear’s celebs have entertained and enlightened. And, if we’re honest, embellished. Now that the channel has given up making drama, viewers will have to get their scripted gossip from alternative sources. In Burton and Taylor, the run concluded by peeping through the curtain at two of the most public private lives of all.William Ivory’s script dropped in on the famous romance long after its embers had officially flickered out. This was 1983, Read more ...
fisun.guner
Uri Geller was famous once. Superstar, rock’n’roll famous, and though this is now hard to believe, kind of cool. He hung out with John Lennon, who gave him a thing that resembles a gold-plated egg and that was, Lennon told him, a gift from a friendly alien. What’s more, he was the darling of the chat show circuit – no, not those crank channels where psychic readings are available when you phone in with your credit card details, but ones hosted by David Dimbleby. But what’s really amazing is that no one one laughed at him, as they later did David Icke for being several spoons short of a Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Christopher Guest and his group of players have been responsible for some of the funniest, driest comedy films of the past 30 years, including Waiting For Guffman, Best in Show, A Mighty Wind and, of course, his masterpiece This Is Spinal Tap, in which he played the tight-trousered guitarist Nigel Tufnel. Now he's directed and co-created (with Jim Piddock) Family Tree, a US-British sitcom first shown on HBO in America.Like most of Guest's work, the mockumentary sitcom is improvised by the cast and it centres on Irish actor Chris O'Dowd's Tom Chadwick, a 30-year-old unemployed claims assessor Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Another week, another breakout performance from Olivia Colman. That chirpy face and sprite smile encourages a nation of fans to follow her into all manner of beastly nooks and dread crannies in the hope that somehow with Colman for company it’ll be all right. Increasingly, it isn’t. After Tyrannosaur (murders husband) and Accused (son murdered) and Broadchurch (investigates child murder), we have Run (sons murder).Run is running for four nights this week. In the style of The Street, there are several sketchily-linked narratives which tell of lives on society’s pitiless lower rungs where moral Read more ...
theartsdesk
There's the First Night and there's the Last Night. Nowadays among the staples of the two-month world-famous festival of music at the Royal Albert Hall, there is also the Doctor Who Prom. Last night, to mark the 50th anniversary of the resurgent TV sci-fi show, a celebration was laid on featuring Murray Gold's music from the last eight years of Doctor Who.Performed by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and the London Philharmonic Choir under Ben Foster, there was also, to tickle the musical tastebuds of the fans, some music not hitherto noted for its connection to Daleks, Cybermen, time Read more ...