TV
Lisa-Marie Ferla
The singer-songwriter Jesse Malin opens one of his songs with a monologue about a trip to Russia. Fresh out of a relationship, and invited by the gypsy punk troupe Gogol Bordello to open their tour of the country, he looked forward to seeing Red Square and spending time in a different world. He was disappointed, however, when the first things he saw there were a McDonald’s, a Starbucks and a Subway.The punchline to Malin’s story is that there are fewer and fewer differences wherever you go in the world these days - everywhere, people are just trying to make a living and getting on with their Read more ...
Jasper Rees
When watching an adaptation there are times when it's better to have no acquaintance with the original. That certainly goes for thrillers, in which the reveal is all, so it is with considerable smugness that one brandishes one’s ignorance of The Poison Tree. Wiki advises that it is a bestselling psychological thriller which has floated the boat of the likes of Richard and Judy and their estimable book club. And that author Erin Kelly has filched the title from one of Blake’s Songs of Experience. Whereafter similarities with romantic poetry cease.ITV’s two-part dramatisation tells of Karen, an Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Bulgakov gets about more than you’d think. As a character in the play Collaborators, the Russian novelist was most recently seen helping Stalin with his memoirs. Within the last couple of years his novels The Master and Margarita and The White Guard have both been adapted for the stage, while A Dog’s Heart was turned into an opera. All of these works were imbued with the Bulgakovian scent for phantasmal satire. So what's next for an author hooked on shape-shifting and the surreal?Don’t run a mile quite yet, but his memoir of serving as a young doctor in rural Ukraine has been turned into a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's routine to refer to violent thugs and vicious gangsters as "psychos", but the protagonist of Richard Cottan's four-part thriller faces genuine mental disintegration. Richie Beckett (Peter Mullan) is an abrasive Scottish crime boss who has built his own boardwalk family empire in Brighton, but now it's under threat from a merciless bunch of Albanian mobsters. Meanwhile, Richie's grip on his kingdom is being undermined by the onset of dementia.Cottan has set up a cunning opposition of sympathies. Richie and his family, notably his pallid and somewhat impotent sons Matty and Cal, inspire Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
You could hardly wish for a better subject for Imagine than Jeanette Winterson. When we see her at the Edinburgh book festival, promoting her recent autobiography Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal?, she’s got the audience eating out of her hand: they get the full "experience". Elsewhere, though, she’s quieter, reflecting on a short enough life - born in 1959, she’s only just over the half-century mark – that has been so full that Roger Parsons’ immaculate 80-minute programme took a 25-year intermission in the middle.We jumped from the end of her Oxford years, culmination of that strangest Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The latter years of Michael Jackson were a sorry saga of debt, lawsuits and sordid allegations about his private life, with the artist seeming an increasingly desperate and isolated figure. Director Spike Lee aims to salvage Jackson's artistic reputation, and this sprawling two-hours-plus documentary keeps its lenses firmly focused on Jackson's musical and performing gifts.Lee's theme is the creation of Jackson's album Bad, released in August 1987 and the follow-up to Thriller. The latter was not an easy act to follow, and became the world's all-time bestselling album with (by some estimates Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“It’s an expression of our collective souls coming together,” said The Beach Boys’ Mike Love of his band, in this celebration of their 2012 50th anniversary world tour and recent album That’s Why God Made the Radio. Subsequent to the making of Doin' it Again and during the ensuing global jaunt, Love announced he was ditching fellow Beach Boys Alan Jardine, David Marks and Brian Wilson, whom he had been sharing the stage with. Not much of a shelf life for this collective expression, with little chance of doing it again. Love’s own Beach Boys – without that trio – picked up the baton after Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It would be unreasonable to describe Charles Gordon-Lennox, Earl of March and Kinrara and heir apparent of the 10th Duke of Richmond, as one of the idle rich. Certainly his Goodwood estate on the Sussex Downs must be one of the most idyllic in the country, and on the face of it he appears to enjoy the most desirable lifestyle imaginable, hobnobbing with the flat-racing elite and mucking about in vintage racing cars. He does not appear to suffer from a shortage of champagne. But the bottom line is, he always has to keep his eye on the bottom line."If I'm sleeping fine every night then I'm not Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Is scatophilia on the loose at the BBC? After The Secret Life of Rubbish, billed as "a view of the history of modern Britain - from the back end where the rubbish comes out", creatively programmed with a repeat of The Toilet: An Unspoken History on the same night, you might be forgiven for thinking so. Both reach, so to speak, the parts that most other television documentaries don’t.I’ll leave the toilet, or rather its energetic presenter Ifor ap Glyn (pictured by a privy, below right), to speak for himself. Ap Glyn covers familiar and not-so-familiar historical ground, from Thomas Crapper to Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Was it a fluke that Secret State concluded its business on the day Lord Leveson handed in his homework? Maybe they really are that clever at Channel 4. Where Leveson has investigated the invisible nexus connecting the press, the police and Westminster, Secret State has delivered its verdict on a comparable ratking of vested interests linking government, banks, oil, the military, defence contractors, MI6, old uncle Tom Cobbleigh et al. By last night’s closer, every man jack of them was clamouring for a lucrative war with Iran, and they were all somewhat miffed when hyper-idealistic Prime Read more ...
graeme.thomson
During a previous Imagine about neurologist Oliver Sacks, Alan Yentob listened to Jessye Norman singing Strauss while scanning equipment showed his brain “bathed in blood”. It provided powerful visual evidence that music physically alters our emotions – instantly and dramatically. The job of this latest film was to find out how and why. As composer George Benjamin pointed out, it’s “a mystery that has eluded scholars for thousands of years”. Enter Yentob and a veritable legion of talking heads to clear up any misunderstandings. In the event they ended up exactly where they started.There is Read more ...
Tim Cumming
There’s a shot of the six of them running across a railway line in Belfast, running for their lives, Brian Jones at the rear, "Satisfaction" at the top of the charts, and there he is, the one who set light to the whole thing, between Mick and Keith. For a time virtually a sixth member of the band, the teenage hustler-manager with the vision thing who walked into the Station Hotel in Richmond to see the Rollin’ Stones and said hello to the rest of his life, Andrew Loog Oldham is one of the few of his caste of Sixties svengalis to survive the ensuing five decades."Surely you’ve seen the blond Read more ...