TV
Lisa-Marie Ferla
US drama is a funny thing. Given the obsession certain parts of the press have with the stuff, there are some shows whose names you will be familiar with regardless of whether you’ve ever seen an episode. But while your social media feed has been working itself up into a frenzy over Game of Thrones, and counting down the days until Breaking Bad is back on, there is one show that has been quietly brilliant throughout that you probably haven’t heard of.As its fourth season gets underway on this side of the Atlantic, Justified has only gotten better since the last time theartsdesk checked Read more ...
Veronica Lee
“My effortless superiority will take me all the way”, “I'm half machine. I can process things at a speed that is out of this world”, “I have the energy of a Duracell bunny, the sex appeal of Jessica Rabbit, and a brain like Einstein.” Yes, it's that time of year again when a bunch of deluded, fantastical egomaniacs line up to trouser £250,000 from Lord Sugar to invest in their business and jostle, connive and generally make themselves look silly for our entertainment.The eight men and eight women chosen (pictured below) are a pleasing collection of fools and future leaders. They have primped Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Although Peter Moffat's story of a Derbyshire village has been designed to evolve into a 100-year saga, this first series amounted to an extended requiem for the fallen in World War One. The monstrous thunder of the guns has reverberated incessantly throughout these six episodes, as the story has wound its way though a woefully predictable trajectory of patriotism, optimism, disillusionment, despair and bitterness.But Moffat, in his Not-Downton Abbey hat, has been at pains to stress the ways that responses to the conflict were determined by class or social standing. In an especially anguished Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Early on in Dangerous Edge: A Life of Graham Greene, John le Carré remembers Greene telling him that childhood provides “the bank balance of the writer”. Greene remained in credit on that inspiration front throughout his life, even while he struggled financially in his early writing days with a young family; later in life, too, he lost everything to a swindling financial adviser – the move to France was to avoid the Revenue.Greene went to Berkhamstead School, where his father was headmaster, and was bullied, not least for the assumption that he was a spy for paternal authority (the spy Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Marie Curie must rank right up there among the world’s achievers of greatness. She certainly wasn’t one of those who had it “thrust upon ’em”. In fact, fate stacked the odds against her achieving the eminence she did in just about every way possible.She was born Maria Skłodowska in Warsaw at a time when Poland was dominated by its Russian occupiers, and scientific training for Poles could only be had on the hoof in the underground, so-called “flying” universities. Through great good fortune she followed her sister to the Sorbonne, one of the very few universities accepting women at the time, Read more ...
william.ward
I was once the summer guest of friends in southern Calabria, where the head of a hapless “family traitor” in the nearby village of Taurianova had been hacked off and then kicked around the piazza like a football: the news was greeted by the locals with no more than raised eyebrows and a resigned shrug of the shoulders.These things are not often caught on film, and certainly weren’t on offer in The Mafia’s Secret Bunkers. Indeed it’s a good thing that eminent bespectacled academic John Dickie has a good head for heights, as he spends a good deal of this fairly breathless BBC documentary Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“A bunch of beardies rooting around with trowels. On the lookout for shinbones and such. It’ll be knockout.” There will have been naysayers at the meeting when they first pitched the idea for a series about archaeology and yet nearly 20 years on Time Team is still with us. It seems the viewing public’s appetite for digging is not restricted to Titchmarsh. Mirabile dictu, as the Romans no doubt said when they dug up three wooden crosses under a temple of Venus in Jerusalem, thus inventing archaeology.Hence what might be considered overdue: a telly history of archaeology. This being telly Read more ...
Veronica Lee
What a line-up for a sitcom; three of our most accomplished actors - Ian McKellen, Derek Jacobi and Frances de la Tour – star, and the writers are the super-talented playwright Mark Ravenhill and Gary Janetti, who used to work on Will & Grace, one of the classiest comedies on American television in decades. And what do you get? Well, not quite the laugh fest that it might have been (or may yet become), but an opener that had a reasonable hit rate.Vicious is another back-to-the-future comedy, a one-room sitcom with two of the queeniest gay men to grace our screens since the dear departed Read more ...
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 ...