TV
Jasper Rees
Getting On exists somewhere on the spectrum between Carry On and Samuel Beckett. Set in a hospital ward where mostly geriatric patients are tended by middle-aged staff all with problems of their own, it looks unflinchingly at the great maladjusted edifice that is the Health Service and all who ail in her. And in Vicki Pepperdine’s tightly coiled consultant Dr Pippa Moore it has perhaps the most delightful sitcom grotesque since Malcolm Tucker first started turning the air blue.For this third series it’s all change. The action has moved from a grotty small-town hospital to ward K2 of St Jude’s Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This film, promised Imagine's host Alan Yentob, would be "the nearest we'll get to the real Freddie Mercury, a shy man in search of love and a driven artist living behind the protection of his stage persona". Probably true, but the shyness and the protective persona, coupled with vigorous policing by the Queen organisation, meant that film-maker Rhys Thomas couldn't add a great deal to what's already known about Mercury.This looked very much like an addendum to last year's Queen - Days of our Lives, a two-part history of the band which was inevitably dominated by Mercury, yet which also Read more ...
Veronica Lee
If you asked a bunch of foreigners to describe the British, I bet one of the phrases most frequently used would be “a nation of dog lovers”, so it was no surprise to discover that film-maker's Vanessa Engle's latest bulletin about the British and the way they live (shown as part of the excellent Wonderland strand) was about this nation's love affair with canines.Engle and her assistant studied those walking their dogs on Hampstead Heath (London's largest open space) over the course of a year, after making contact with some owners first online and others by the simple method of accosting Read more ...
Jasper Rees
You suspected she was a goner the moment the doctors started to front up like King Kong and Godzilla. Having given birth to a girl, the rebellious bluestocking Lady Sybil got her marching orders last night on Downton Abbey and Jessica Brown Findlay’s husky larynx will be heard no more pouring oil on troubled waters. The rest of the cast can rely on a berth in Julian Fellowes’ gilded prison for all eternity. Ms Brown Findlay is available for work.Seasoned Downtonians should have known something of this order was on the cards. The second series was absolutely rife with death and doom and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was tough luck for Good Cop that the real-life killing of two female police officers in Manchester prompted the BBC to postpone its fourth and final episode, judging that its plotline of rookie cop Amanda Morgan acting as bait for a couple of knife-wielding thugs who preyed on women was too near the knuckle. This intrusion of headline events into the progress of the drama was also somewhat paradoxical, since while Good Cop presented some of the common symptoms of the mainstream policier, these were blended with an unusual mixture of morality play and psychological speculation.This lent the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It's always either a very good or a very bad sign when my notebook remains untainted by my scrawl when I'm reviewing; either I am too busy enjoying myself to make notes or I'm so unengaged that I can barely be bothered to lift my pen.It was the latter with last night's opener (part one of six) of Me and Mrs Jones, despite the presence of Sarah Alexander, a talented comedy actress, and Robert Sheehan, a very fine dramatic actor whom the camera loves. And also despite the writing talents of Oriane Messina and Fay Rusling, who worked on the wonderful Smack the Pony with Alexander, and then wrote Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Charm, politeness and glittering repartee are clearly not considered important qualities for the Yorkshire-based policepersons who work alongside DCI Banks. TV coppers are rarely a barrel of laughs but for this bunch, spitting, snarling and glaring are their default modes of communication. Banks himself, played by Stephen Tompkinson as though he's lugging an invisible York Minster around on his shoulders, has assembled his characterisation of the doleful detective from a mixture of gloom, depression and disgruntlement.Still, all this fits quite well with panoramic shots of windswept moorlands Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Isn’t the title a misnomer? Who Do You Think You Are? is the genealogical branch of the celebrity industry. It’s not really about who the subjects think they are: it’s who we think they are that counts. Inspecting the family trees of slebz is another way of confirming they are just like us. It’s the same as gawping at stars’ big bums in bikinis lovingly featured in the online Daily Mail’s sidebar of shame. Only nicer.The programme’s stock narrative reliably turns up a character or two, usually scrubbers and thugs, charlatans and chancers. For Celia Imrie’s turn rummaging among the archives, Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Even now, as revelation after revelation about what really went on backstage at Television Centre in the 1970s play out in the tabloids, there seems something almost wholesome about the heyday of the televised beauty pageant. Compared to the daily barrage of heavily sexualised images we are bombarded with from the moment we wake as consumers of contemporary culture - bare arses before the watershed, fake orgasms selling shampoo, Kate Middleton’s tits on the evening news - the swimsuits the contenders paraded up and down in looked positively demure.Beneath the surface, however, there’s Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Surfing in on the back of six Emmy awards, Homeland's second season opened with a sizzling episode which banished any lingering doubts about the improbabilities of the ending of series one. Like, for instance, the way zealous Marine-turned-suicide bomber Nicholas Brody had abandoned his mission because of a tearful phone call from his daughter, who somehow managed to get connected to a top-security bunker in the middle of a full-scale terrorist panic.But never mind all that, because we've now moved on several months, and Brody, cover un-blown and revered as an American war hero, has become a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Being told that Magical Mystery Tour was a home movie is bit tiring. Self-evidently, The Beatles’ filmic response to the psychedelic experience was not that. They tried, and failed, to hire Shepperton Studios. Known artists like Ivor Cutler and The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band were brought on board. Gavrik Losey, then hot from being an assistant director on Modesty Blaise, worked on it. Masses of extras were employed. Although a self-originated vanity project, none of this points to it being a home movie. The negative reception received at the time seems to have skewed the collective consensus. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I daresay some of you, like theartsdesk, have been pining for the sadly departed Spooks. Its production company, Kudos, knows how you feel, and has rustled up this pacey, knotty and deliberately complicated thriller in its place.The decision had clearly been made to seize the viewer's windpipe in a throttling grip even before the credits had stopped rolling, and the opening 15 minutes of this debut episode charged along like a herd of furious buffalo overdosing on amphetamines. We were in Tangier, armed with high-octane cinematography and a panicky sense of encroaching danger. Sam Hunter ( Read more ...