TV
Adam Sweeting
"For youth, for change and always for the people" was the slogan with which Rupert Murdoch relaunched The Sun in 1969, having bought it from its previous owners IPC for a mere £800,000. Murdoch, the Aussie iconoclast who kept a bust of Lenin in his rooms at Oxford university in the early Fifties and claimed to be an ardent socialist, decreed that his new tabloid would be free from party political affiliations and would refuse to kow-tow to the British establishment, which he instinctively loathed. His message resonated with a broad swathe of the British public, and within 100 days the paper's Read more ...
fisun.guner
Are we approaching some sort of Brontë anniversary? Or is it simply the 40th anniversary of this long-forgotten dramatization of the “Brontë story” that’s being marked with a two-disc DVD release? The Brontës of Haworth has hardly gone down in the annals of TV drama history, such as, for instance, I, Claudius, the 1976 adaptation of the Robert Graves’ novel currently being repeated on BBC Two. This is probably not surprising, since the Roman emperor’s life was hardly lacking in incident, and the same cannot be said of the talented siblings Emily, Charlotte, Anne and their troubled, Read more ...
Julian White
The first minutes of Paula Milne's new three-parter are absolutely hilarious. MP Aiden Hoynes (David Tennant) resigns from his post as Business Secretary and launches an attack on the Prime Minister from the backbenches in an attempt to trigger a leadership contest, only to find his comments greeted by embarrassed silence. In a split second he has turned from a Westminster high-flier into a social leper who can clear out the House of Commons Gents like a foul gaseous emission. He gambled, he lost and he has no one to blame but himself – well, himself and his best friend, Work and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
You wait years for a female comedy duo to take up where French & Saunders left off, then two come along within a calendar year. Which just about counts as at once. Anna & Katy, who recently had a run on Channel 4, rely for most of their wit on a wide range of silly voices. Watson & Oliver, who have returned for a second series, feel like more traditional sketch artists. They observe and they spoof and even hint at pathos.Not that they were entirely welcome last time round. The comment stream for theartsdesk’s review of the first series divided unequally between the appreciative Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
What if John Lennon had left The Beatles in 1962? What if they had continued without him? And what if he had still become the acid-tongued, ready-with-a-quip character the real world became familiar with? Snodgrass took those what-ifs and ran with them to depict a parallel world that was less the “hilarious comedy drama” trailed by Sky and more a gloomy, slightly creepy oddity made even more so by Ian Hart’s deft, second-nature portrayal of a Lennon floundering on life’s scrapheap.Hart has played Lennon twice before and this third outing took him into an imaginary scenario originally created Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Oh dear. Oh deary dear. Oh deary deary dear. To think that Ben Elton, who has a “written and created by” credit for this pile of poo, once helped to scale the heights of British comedy as co-writer of The Young Ones and Blackadder. Five minutes into this I was thinking, “How on earth did it get commissioned?” Oh I know, because Ben Elton, who once helped create...The story, for all that it amounts to, concerns Gerald Wright (see what he did there with the title?), a nit-picking, pedantic, monotonous drone of a local government health and safety inspector - no stereotyping there, then - whose Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
And the killer is... No, that would be telling, and you might not have watched it on catch-up yet. But was the revelation worth the wait?We often complain about the way British TV dramas are often squeezed into three or four (or two) parts, when an American series would stretch to 16 or 22 episodes. Hats off, then, to ITV and Broadchurch writer Chris Chibnall for picking up the baton to create an eight-parter designed to depict the impact of a boy's murder on a small, tightly-knit seaside town (Oskar McNamara as murder victim Danny Latimer, pictured below). Hats partly back on again, Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It feels a little as if BBC journalists are getting themselves into trouble every other week at the moment. As news emerges that new BBC chief Tony Hall will appear before MPs to discuss why they allowed a Panorama journalist to use a university field trip as cover for an exposé on North Korea, it's little wonder that the broadcaster's flagship investigative journalism programme has stuck with a far easier target this week.Shari'a law, and the enforcement thereof, is a headline-writer's dream, playing as it does into our fears of the "other". Broadly meaning "the way", Shari'a is the body of Read more ...
Julian White
“The best times I've ever had were in prison,” says Crystal, aged 23, one of the three inmates being followed in The Prisoners (this was originally planned as episode one, but was bounced from the schedules by the death of Baroness Thatcher). On the brink of being released after serving a 12-week stint for drink-related crimes, she's waxing nostalgic, while her girlfriend Toni – also due out very soon – is in tears. “I'm dreadin' getting out,” she quavers.We also get to meet Jayde, 18, a prolific offender prone to self-harm, and Emma, 23, a well-spoken middle-class girl whose drug habit has Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A new drama series at 9pm on a Friday? How often does that happen, eh? Friday is supposed to be reserved for quiz shows, comedies and BBC Four documentaries about disco music.Whether it should have happened is, for the time being, a moot point. After this first of three episodes (adapted by Kate Brooke from Dorothy Koomson's novel) we're left in that familiar position of having a crime, a victim, and some carefully-manufactured ambiguity about the perpetrator, or perpetratrors. We also have a double time frame, the present day and 1995, which can hardly help but bring on flashbacks to the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
As a self-taught chemist, innovative industrialist, a businessman who exploited and developed new means of distribution and marketing, an anti-slavery campaigner and a man dealing with his own disability, the Staffordshire potter Josiah Wedgwood was an important 18th-century figure, a pioneer whose achievements still resonate. But a genius?The historian, biographer and author AN Wilson has no doubt about this. Presenting this perambulation through Wedgwood’s life and vessels, Wilson began in Burslem – “a muddy village in the middle of nowhere” – and climaxed in the royal palaces of Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The new South Bank Show has glided into its second season with a seemingly effortless profile of multi-hyphenate Tim Minchin. In case we’ve forgotten what exactly we admire him for these days – so varied has been his decade-long career been, through satire, rock, musical comedy, stage performance, to co-creator of the RSC transfer-spectacular Matilda that's now storming Broadway – then this was a good reminder.Self-deprecation may be one of his fortes (not that he doesn’t excel at deprecating others), but Minchin proved a thoughtful guide to his achievements to date, in that beguilingly Read more ...