TV
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 ...
Adam Sweeting
Take a spoonful of paranoia thriller Arlington Road and shake'n'bake it with a dollop of Homeland and you'd have the bare skeleton of The Americans, tonight's new import from the American FX channel on ITV. It's 1981, and in the midst of Washington DC suburbia, where the lawns are manicured and dad washes the car on Sundays, lurks an unseen threat. It's married-with-kids couple Elizabeth and Phillip Jennings, who are sleeper agents of the KGB.Opening with a speedy extended chase sequence, eccentrically soundtracked by the percussive yomp of Fleetwood Mac's "Tusk", this pilot episode skilfully Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Unfortunate title aside, Psychobitches is a wonderfully original idea - what if famous women through the centuries were alive today and seeking treatment from a psychotherapist? In a quasi-sketch format using the talents of 10 credited writers, it's a neat construct that allows writers' imaginations free rein, unconstrained by time, place or actual facts, and gives a roll call of talented actresses (and the occasional bloke) a chance to do their very best impersonations.Last night's opener of a five-part series (expertly directed by The League of Gentlemen's Jeremy Dyson) started with Rosa Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Did they get the president? That’s the benchmark question viewers will ask of any new film from documentary house par excellence Brook Lapping and producer Norma Percy ever since they secured an interview with Slobodan Milosevic for their landmark The Death of Yugoslavia. Their strike rate has rather dropped off lately. Even though – or because? – he was the subject of the outfit’s recent Putin, Russia and the West, that wasn't enough to convince the current master of the Kremlin to participate.Brook Lapping's new three-parter, The Iraq War, has a similar dearth of the number-one men: George Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
They say that the most important part of any drama is the journey that it takes its leading characters on. Whatever events have taken place - and after 139 episodes and nearly a decade, this show has had a lot of them - you can expect them to have shaped the characters, who will likely have learned valuable life lessons and evolved. Despite this, it is no great surprise to see Shameless patriarch Frank Gallagher (David Threlfall) begin the show’s final episode from jail - where he has spent three months for benefit fraud.Shameless has experienced diminishing critical returns as the years have Read more ...