TV
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 ...
Graham Fuller
British film noir followed two courses in the 1980s. Whereas the American neo-noir revival of the 1970s prompted such contemporary crime thrillers as The Long Good Friday, Mona Lisa, and Stormy Monday, three superior BBC drama serials, though also neo-noirs, drew more rigorously on Hollywood’s classic noir era.Troy Kennedy Martin’s Edge of Darkness (1985) and Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective (1986) were acknowledged as masterpieces. Howard Brenton’s Dead Head (1986) was admired but not lauded to the same extent. The red tops’ predictable reaction to a sex scene that showed the woman Read more ...
terry.friel
Covering both sides of a conflict is never easy. Apart from the physical dangers, warring parties are wary of journalists who've reported on and established ties with the enemy. Afghanistan showed this as clearly as anywhere, when the US forces were suspicious of any journalists with Taliban contacts.British film-maker Olly Lambert’s Syria: Across the Lines strode confidently over that hurdle, giving a unique insight into the people on both sides of Syria's civil war as it continues to veer in and out of the headlines after two years of fighting and more than 70,000, mainly civilian, deaths. Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Where will it end? Inspector Morse keeled over all the way back in the year 2000. Then the faintly unimaginable happened. Morse’s plodding sidekick Lewis got a promotion and started solving Oxford’s apparently inexhaustible supply of murders himself. When Lewis retired this January, the logical choice would have been to hand the baton on his lanky junior. Hathaway sounds like a series, doesn't it? But no, ITV have long been hatching other plans for the brand that keeps on printing money.A year ago we were spirited back in time to look in on the junior Morse as he made his first Read more ...
Joe Muggs
In six and a half years of existence, SBTV has redefined what youth culture broadcasting can be. It began as nothing more than a YouTube channel where Jamal Edwards would put up videos he had filmed of his favourite grime MCs – but his natural ambition and charm ensured it kept expanding from that base.Covering sounds that were just starting to form the basis of a new British pop music, Edwards not only built an admirable contact book, but demonstrated an understanding of branding which turned SBTV into the viewing destination for “urban” music fans – more so than any terrestrial or cable Read more ...