TV
ash.smyth
There’s something in the water at the commissioning editors’ local, I think, resulting, of late, in a rash of rather good arts-n-culture biopics. This week, it was the turn of Roald Dahl, the Big Friendly Giant who made an absolute shit-load of cash telling really not-very-bedtime stories to young children.Our host for the evening – the channelling medium, more accurately – was David Walliams, comedian, campo supremo, and sometime quaffer of the Thames (oh, and he may have mentioned something about writing children’s books of his own). Walliams is not a world-beating comic talent, and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Explaining the difference between the first series of the uncompromising French policier Braquo and the second, which he has come on board to write, Abdel Raouf Dafri says his take is “even more violent, even more sarcastic. The line between the good guys and the bad guys is even more fluid”. Dafri knows about bad guys. He wrote Mesrine and A Prophet. He also knows series one of Braquo is a tough act to follow.With series two premiering on British TV this Sunday, Braquo joins Saturday night’s The Bridge to fill out the weekend’s foreign-language crime TV schedule. The pacing, shocks and tonal Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Where would America be without its diners? Or for that matter, where would US culture be without them? Now here's another dramatic piece set in America's version of the greasy spoon, a sassily scripted sitcom by Whitney Cummings and Michael Patrick King, who created Sex and the City. Whereas SATC was set in Manhattan, 2 Broke Girls is located in New York City's less monied, but nowadays more groovy, borough of Brooklyn.The set-up is very much of our times. Max Black (Kat Dennings) works two jobs to make ends meet: during the daytime, she is nanny to Brangelina, the twins of rich Manhattanites Read more ...
howard.male
Apart from the fact that it’s a razor-sharp piece of writing, what most delights and impresses me about Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion is how it gets under people’s skin. It has generated several books in fevered opposition to it and, needless to say, countless abusive emails land in the poor man’s inbox every day. If it wasn’t such a lucid, incisive and relentlessly powerful piece of work I doubt it would have got such fierce and sustained opposition.But what poor Richard needs now is not some other despiser of organised religion like myself singing his praises, but a well conceived Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It becomes increasingly difficult for a detective to create any sort of elbow room on the small flat screen in the corner. Up in Denmark they’ve been taking the extreme route, where the dour, bejumpered Sara Lund of The Killing looks like a Butlins entertainer next to Sofia Helin’s hatchet-faced autistic sleuth Saga Noren in The Bridge. In Blighty we churn out far more of these things than the Danes, but not much seems to have moved on much since Inspector Morse started feeling queasy around corpses and necking real ale two decades back. We still get our crimebusters from a strictly limited Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
"Does he know she's a bit odd?" asks one of Saga Noren's Swedish police colleagues, on hearing that Danish copper Martin Rohde (Kim Bodnia) is working with Noren on a new murder case. Well, he's begininning to get the idea. He's seen her forbid an ambulance to cross her crime scene perimeter, even though it was carrying a new heart for a critically ill patient. She drags Rohde out of bed in the middle of the night to track down a piece of evidence, then when he delivers it to her at police HQ she barely says thanks and shuts the door in his face. Apparently she never eats meals.With her long Read more ...
Jasper Rees
From the moment the first series came eyepoppingly to the boil, the loyal fanbase of Lip Service began clamouring for a second helping. That was back in November 2010. Eighteen months later, their wish has finally been granted, and audiences are once more free to plunge headlong into the world of the Glaswegian L Word. Some things are reassuringly very much as you were. Two characters were down to their smalls within a minute of the start, while the Friday-night bar scene is still a low-lit den of drugs, booze and casual same-sex nods, winks and frots. This remains in-your-face entertainment Read more ...
ash.smyth
Next week sees the release of Shimon Peres, the second instalment in Spirit Level Film’s The Price of Kings series. A president of Israel who refers to leadership as “not a very happy engagement,” a Nobel Peace Prize-winner who says he has never slept easy, Peres is about as good a subject for a political doco as you’re likely to get. He’s the world’s oldest elected head of state (his political career having begun in the early Fifties!) and the only Israeli PM (two-and-a-half times) to have made it to the top step in their political pantheon. Most famously, though, he shares his Nobel laurels Read more ...