TV
Adam Sweeting
You have to wonder whether blood, squalor, flea infestations, DIY childbirth and urine-soaked tenements are really the perfect family viewing elixir for 7.30pm on Christmas Day, but the BBC has obviously decided that it's good for us. Or, considering that the ornate and crenellated shadow of Downton looms so large over the festivities, maybe they felt they had no choice but to deploy the Midwife weapon, the Beeb's biggest drama hit in a decade. If you could keep your lunch from launching itself across the carpet - the woman having her baby's head extracted from between her legs while she Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Over the past 29 years, annual screenings of the TV adaptation of Raymond Briggs's 1978 picture book The Snowman have become an integral part of Christmas. Now, on the 30th anniversary of its first broadcast, the original has friendly competition from The Snowman and the Snowdog, a new animation featuring the be-hatted, smiling fellow.Not written by Briggs but approved by him, The Snowman and the Snowdog was charming, and a treat to look at. It was sensitive, too; a real heart-string tugger. The snowdog was unreservedly cute. But as to whether this new seasonal offering was necessary? Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Joyce Hatto achieved a rare kind of immortality for being the pianist at the centre of an audacious classical music fraud, in which her husband faked "Joyce Hatto" CDs from the work of other artists and, for a time, enjoyed considerable success with them. The Hatto goose was cooked when the Gracenote music database used by iTunes detected that one of her albums was not her work at all.A couple of novels based on Hatto-like events have already appeared, but for this TV treatment, writer Victoria Wood stuck to the couple's real-life story, though she had clearly allowed herself plenty of Read more ...
Veronica Lee
There's nothing like a dame, as any panto fan knows. Michael Grade's enjoyable history of the pantomime Dame was shot through with affection as well as a deep knowledge of the subject, as befits a member of one of variety's most influential families and someone who fell in love with the artform at his first pantomime, in which his aunt Kathy was performing as principal boy, when he was just a young lad.Pantomime has a rich history of its own, with commedia dell'arte among its antecedents, and even if there are those who despise its popularity and commercial success, they should remember that Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Plaudits to ITV for their recent campaign of new drama, even if the results have been patchy. The best ones have been well worth persevering with, and The Bletchley Circle and Tony Marchant's Leaving have wedged themselves most firmly in the mind.So where does The Town fit in? Well, it would have had a better chance of evolving into something truly memorable if it had been given more than three episodes, and the curse of the short series has become the scourge of British TV drama on whatever channel. Interestingly, the makers of The Killing argue that it's actually cheaper to make longer Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Of all the festive institutions, the Christmas No 1 holds a special place in my heart. I was one of those kids who, over the month of December, would carefully plot which CD single I’d be pledging my allegiance to (usually not the ultimate winner, apart from that one year Gary Jules’s cover of “Mad World”, from the Donnie Darko soundtrack, fluked it). I’d then make sure I was in front of the television in time for Top of the Pops, while my Grandad would complain that these new songs were all just noise and at least the Beatles had tunes.He might have had a point: as The Christmas No. 1 Story Read more ...
Ismene Brown
They should use the whole Yeats line: "A terrible beauty is born". The programme, A Beauty is Born, being terrible, I mean, rather than the Beauty, which is Matthew Bourne's Sleeping Beauty, his latest dance work, which isn't terrible at all, just a mite disappointing. And it strives a great deal higher and with more aim to stimulate than Alan Yentob did in this stock documentary from the BBC's flagship arts strand. Is Yentob the most uninterested specialist presenter on TV?With that morose stare, he's a terrible advert for arts-loving for a start, leaving a chill as he wanders among the Read more ...
howard.male
I suspect that this cruel, clever sitcom is more loved by men than women, because what woman really wants to delve this deeply into the murky pool of the unreconstructed male psyche? But after a decade of Jeremy (Robert Webb) and Mark (David Mitchell) fucking up their lives and fucking off their girlfriends there’s a pall of foreboding lingering over proceedings in Series 8 that suggests this can’t go on forever. Or can it? Every show that focuses on a particular period of our lives – from the teenagers of The Inbetweeners to the 20-somethings of Men Behaving Badly - has had to free its Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Splendid summer, cataclysmic autumn. In the last six months, the BBC has tested to the limits the meaning of the phrase “good in parts”. The people at the top of the Corporation – and by March there’ll be a fourth rump in the DG’s hot seat within seven months – will have been looking forward to this seasonal beanfeast with more than usual avidity. There being no journalistic scoops to botch, no skeletons in the cupboard, no Panorama waiting in the wings – and for once no pictures to buy in from Sky - here was a chance for the BBC to cut a few shapes.And this year, for reasons which need no Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I hope it isn't giving too much away for iPlayer catcher-uppers to say that in the end Sarah Lund never did get that undemanding desk job. Instead, the third outing for this ferociously gripping Danish series dragged us screaming and biting our nails right down to the wire, and managed to reach a conclusion simultaneously shocking and saddening yet, in a way, satisfying too.From the start, the third series has been drenched in the anguish of loss and the pain of separation. The running theme has been the hunt for the kidnapped girl Emilie Zeuthen and the man who took her, but, apart from the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
When the first series of The Hour aired last year, there was a lot of excitable talk about how it was the "British Mad Men". Having sat through series two, I've concluded that in fact it's the British version of Pan Am, that bizarrely idiotic airline series where all the air hostesses were covert operatives for the CIA, and visits to exotic international locations were achieved using plywood props and big photographs of famous landmarks.Despite its superficial attention to 1950s detail (suits, hats, frocks, cars), the more The Hour tries to feel authentic, the less convincing it becomes. Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Simon Sebag Montefiore is a historian in a hurry - as well he might be when there’s a whole millennium to fit into an hour. A year ago we had his three-parter Jerusalem - The Making of a Holy City, now we’re well into Rome - A History of The Eternal City: no mean feat, given that these are major, impeccably researched and made projects. At least there’s no need for a costume change: Montefiore is back in his panama and chinos, outfit of choice for summer filming that lends him an almost Forsterian élan.Rome - or at least, things loosely Roman - has been cropping up a fair amount recently. The Read more ...