TV
Jasper Rees
Nearly there. In one more day the phoney Games will be over and the real drama can begin. For the past weeks the television schedules have jostled with documentaries about past Olympians and current ones, while Chariots of Fire has been going for gold in both the theatre and the multiplex. There was just time last night for one final Olympic story to be smuggled under the wire. The remit of Bert and Dickie seemed clear: to remind us that we’ve done all this before, in much more trying circumstances, and the whole thing united the nation in a warm glow. So there.The on dit is that Team GB does Read more ...
fisun.guner
It’s a patchy history, the history of art told through the colour gold, though I suppose it would be. After all, despite the title of this new three-part series, we’re not actually talking about gold as colour, that seductively warm, buttery yellow of Italianate landscapes and Turner sunsets, but of gold itself. Actual gold. The Impressionists never used it, but those ancient Egyptian tomb builders did, and so did medieval icon painters. As for the kings, queens and emperors of Europe, their palaces are replete with decorative artefacts finished off with solid gold nymphs and nudes and Read more ...
Ismene Brown
So that’s all over then. Which isn’t good. The gnawing anxiety for followers of Twenty Twelve, the programme whose theme song is “There may be trouble ahead...", has been whether real-life events would become so like it - or even worse, more like it than it could be - that the programme would become redundant. The extempore absurdities of Jeremy Hunt, the lost Olympics taxi drivers and G4S have given its scenarios a tense run for their money, and I'd guess a lot of BBC nails are down to the quick by this week.This was an exceptionally bold TV idea, to keep apace with current events and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
At the end of episode four, we left ferret-faced copper Steve Arnott (Martin Compston) seemingly having his fingers hacked off with a bolt-cutter by a gang of hooded thugs and their poisonous little child-sidekick, Ryan. Boringly, the glum and dislikeable Arnott was rescued in this finale when the supposedly corrupt DCI Gates organised a police rescue, and got away with all his fingers mostly intact.It seemed to symbolise Line of Duty's annoying habit of setting up ever-murkier scenarios, then wriggling its way out of delivering a real punchline. It really, really wanted us to believe that it Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Jane Treays's previous film about diver Tom Daley was 2010's The Diver and His Dad, which followed the amphibious teenager as he sat his GCSEs and defended various titles. Ominously, it also charted the progress of his father Rob's struggle against a brain tumour.This sequel picked up the story in 2011, as the London Olympics loomed over the horizon and became the focus of Daley's ambitions. In July last year, he made the inaugural dive into the brand new Aquatics Centre pool in Stratford, a few days after he'd qualified for the 2012 Olympics at the World Championships in Shanghai. Daley only Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
We had Kevin MacDonald’s Bob Marley epic documentary earlier this year, and this is a similar film about another artist who became a symbol as much as a singer. I only saw Miriam Makeba in her sixties, by which time she had become a revered institution they called Mama Africa, as though she was the mother of an entire continent. This Storyville documentary took us back the amazing vibrancy and courage of her early years, with some terrific archive footage.By the 1990s, although her long exile from South Africa was over, Makeba had been bashed around by events, notably the death of her Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
The first anniversary of Amy Winehouse’s death seems like both a temptation and an opportunity for a sensationalist, hyperbolic tribute. Refreshingly, this Arena film, which told the story of the night that a superstar in the making performed to an 85-capacity church in the Irish fishing village of Dingle, for the most part avoided the clichés: the word “tragedy” wasn’t even mentioned until 38 minutes in.“You don’t just go to Dingle by accident,” Philip King, director of Irish music series Other Voices, explained by way of introduction. Every winter the show manages to attract some of the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Forget the ages-old talk of London buses arranging their schedules so that they all arrive at once. The capital's patterns of public transport have nothing on the rapidity with which Henry V has hoved into view of late, whether at Shakespeare's Globe, on tour from the all-male Propeller company, in repertory at Islington's Old Red Lion pub theatre or as a baleful conclusion to the BBC's impressive Hollow Crown series of the Bard-on-film. And one thing seems certain after this most recent version: a play often renowned for its braying jingoism has rarely seemed so mournful, as if the " Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s as well to be ready. There will come a time when our civilisation may enter a period of darkness which will be known, self-explanatorily, as After Attenborough. May it not arrive any time soon, or even ever. But if, or more likely when, it does, it won’t matter anyway because we’ll have already spit-roasted most species into extinction, as Sir David has been direly warning these past few years. By then, the familiar larynx will have described the life and times of more or less every creature who ever wandered in front of a lens (give or take the odd million subspecies).On this occasion Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
"What caused him to be so fast? Is he here for a purpose?" wondered Usain Bolt's father, Wellesley, in a mystical tone. Usain's mother, Jennifer, also seems to detect the workings of a higher power in her son's blindingly rapid progress around the world's running tracks. "Thank you, Lord, for what you have done," she said.It was hardly surprising that this profile of the so-called Lightning Bolt, multiple record-breaker and triple Olympic medallist, oozed with awe and dripped with reverence. Getting a film crew inside the Bolt entourage presumably depends on an understanding, possibly in Read more ...
Matt Wolf
One intends no discredit to the keenly judged monarch-to-be that is Tom Hiddleston's Prince Hal, who will reappear on the small screen next weekend carrying the story forward in Henry V, to point out that Richard Eyre's terrific BBC adaptation of Henry IV Part 2 was stolen by dad. Playing the ailing King Henry who will not go gently into the good night, Jeremy Irons gave a performance of equal parts fury and passion that ranks with this actor's very best. Can someone not accommodate Irons once more on the classical stage, and soon?It's tempting to think of both halves of the Henry IV duo Read more ...
Fiona Sturges
If your evening regime involves lying on the sofa with a KFC boneless banquet wedged between your knees and a bucket of Fanta, complete with multi-angled drinking straw to prevent unnecessary movement, under your armpit, then you would have been forgiven for avoiding The Men Who Made Us Fat. Who, after all, wants to spend their downtime being made to feel like a self-harming, NHS-crushing lard-arse? If, however, you subsist on twig tea and a diet of dandelions washed in spring water by tiny winged seraphs, you might have felt compelled to watch, if only to reaffirm your disdain for the junk Read more ...