TV
Adam Sweeting
As a prequel to the BBC's panorama of all things Tudor, Sunday night's new 10-part drama The White Queen (BBC One) whisks us back to the Wars of the Roses. Adapted from Philippa Gregory's novel, the series tells the story of how Edward IV, scion of the house of York, married the beautiful and widowed Elizabeth Woodville, from the rival house of Lancaster. In the opening episode, the pair first meet when Elizabeth (Rebecca Ferguson) petitions the king, as he rides past with his retinue, for the return of her lands. These were lost when her husband, Sir Richard Woodville, was killed in battle Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It’s been quite a week for surveillance. And no, that doesn’t mean the NSA and whatever’s happening in Hong Kong. You can bet the week's viewing figures that the majority of Britain’s households, particularly those in the triple-F category – meaning, feline-focused families – will have been more preoccupied with Horizon’s investigation into what exactly goes on when that flap goes up, The Secret Life of the Cat.It wasn’t just a chance for viewers to go soppy about the character of their favourite felines: for that, there’s the internet, where cat home movies get the all-time top YouTube Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It’s more pulse-quickening than a visit from Denmark’s actual prime minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt. This weekend Sidse Babett Knudsen, Borgen’s Statsminister Birgitte Nyborg, arrives in London to open Nordicana, an event dedicated to the ever-increasing amount of Scandinavian exports seen on our TVs. She will also be interviewed and take questions from the audience. Who needs real PMQs?Over Saturday and Sunday, Knudsen will be joined by the cast of Borgen’s fellow DR production Arne Dahl and Jan Arnald – the author of the books it’s based on, who writes as Arne Dahl. Also stopping off are Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The idea of writing nine 30-minute dramas (or more like 26 minutes when you take the ads out) about the thrills and calamities of first-dating might have been asking for trouble, but seems to be working out unexpectedly well so far. The crafty part about the concept (dreamed up by Bryan Skins Elsley) is that instead of having to explain the setup and establish the characters' relationships, you just watch two strangers starting the process from scratch, so they're doing the job for you.After a persuasive start on Monday with David and Mia, starring Oona Chaplin and Will Mellor, the ante edged Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Nobody said it was easy being an infant prodigy. Take Hugo, ranked in the top 0.4 percent of the population. He knows everything there is to know about train engines, train stations, rail networks etc, has them committed to his photographic memory. At 10 he is, basically, on some sort of spectrum, and he knows that too. “This is my brother Oscar,” he said. “He’s a more normal child.”Is it just coincidence that Child Genius (****) kicked off on the day Michael Gove announced details of the new I-level? Gove would approve of the star participants, who are all strong on maths and facts. They Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
In the end, it was always going to come down to the last episode whether The Fall was powerful female-driven drama or, to quote another writer for theartsdesk, “misogynistic torture porn”. That conclusion, however, was as elusive as the ending of Allan Cubitt’s thriller; cunningly set up as if to strongarm BBC Two into a second series before the announcement was made.The Fall has avoided many of the cliches of the traditional whodunnitPerhaps part of the confusion was mine, given that once upon a time Gillian Anderson played my first feminist hero. Having done the awkward stage door meet Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Given the breadth of Marcus du Sautoy’s cultural scholarship, it was a small surprise that British poet Andrew Marvell wasn't name-checked at the start of the presenter’s new three-parter Precision: The Measure of All Things. “Had we but world enough and time,” the great Metaphysical wooer called to his Coy Mistress, touching directly on the subjects of episode one, “Time and Distance”. Time was equally of the essence for du Sautoy, who barely caught breath in his (more respectable) urgency to explain everything behind his subject, and how it touched on the world we live in. The unforgiving Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
"Maybe everything that dies someday comes back," Bruce Springsteen posited in "Atlantic City". The residents of the French Alpine village at the centre of The Returned may conclude that he had a point. The Returned (Les Revenants in the original French) might sound superficially as if it's the latest in the ongoing vogue for zombies which (along with a parallel strain of photogenic vampires) is exerting a stranglehold on the entertainment industry. Brad Pitt goes to war with a global zombie plague in the new movie World War Z, The Walking Dead needs no introduction, and we've had Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“My generation all were steeped in Bollywood.” Meera Syal, Wolverhampton born and bred, is recalling the cinematic influences of her youth. “It was our major link to India and was much more current than trying to make a phone call. You did feel that, though you were so far away, you were watching the same movies as your cousins.”We’ve moved on a bit since the 1970s. Bollywood is now much closer to the British cultural mainstream, helped along by entertainments as diverse as Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Bombay Dreams (co-written by Syal, pictured below) and Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, which Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Read theartsdesk's review of episode 1 of The ReturnedThe Returned, which hits our screens on Sunday night, is the first foreign language drama to appear on Channel 4 in 20 years. Under its original title Les Revenants, it was a ratings-topping hit in France when it was broadcast on Canal+ last year. It looks like having every chance of cashing in on the current British vogue for stylish European dramas with subtitles, predominantly (though by no means exclusively) Scandinavian, and Sunday's debut episode will even feature an all-French ad break.To make doubly sure of grabbing an audience, Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
They say that you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but I began to grow bored with Love and Marriage about halfway through the opening credits. What seemed like endless pairs of smiling, photogenic couples swung onto the screen against a twee, brightly-coloured backdrop, and I realised I was already struggling to care. I mean, get it, okay? Different branches of the family tree and all that? The new six-part comedy drama revolves around the trials and tribulations of the Paradise family, but the big problem with Love and Marriage is that there are too many characters, and very few Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Previous series of Mad Dogs have seen the quartet of middle-aged geezers embroiled with the Serbian mafia and tangled up in drug deals, conspiracies and murder. For this series three opener, the curtain rose on our bedraggled lads caged up in a derelict prison camp. They were wearing Guantanamo-style orange jumpsuits. Having expected to go to Barcelona on a container vessel at the end of series two, here they were banged up under a shrivelling Moroccan sun.Much of the piece was taken up with the quartet being baffled and bamboozled, amid some tight-lipped wiscrackery, as they tried to work Read more ...