TV
Fiona Sturges
“Everything’s so bloody uphill, isn’t it?” whined kitchen salesman Ted (Douglas Hodge) upon realising that he’d left the charcoal for the evening's barbeque at the supermarket. But the charcoal wasn’t really the problem. There was the girl from the estate over the road - “all big earrings and attitude” - dropping litter outside his house and then shouting abuse when he suggested she pick it up. There was the unspeakable package shoved through the letterbox shortly after he complained to the girl’s school and got her suspended. And there was the lucrative deal with developers that Ted may or Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Imagine my surprise when we weren't much more than halfway through this first episode, and the flipping thing hit the iceberg. But of course writer Julian Fellowes was way ahead of me, and his four-part series about RMS Unsinkable is evidently going to circle around the vessel's fate from various viewpoints in assorted time frames.Judging by the trailer at the end, next week's is going to home in on such prickly issues as whether the Titanic was going too fast or keeping an adequate look-out for floating hazards, and whether or not she was as safe as the designers claimed. In this opener, Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The compulsive TV series about the Sixties advertising industry, Mad Men, opens its fifth season tomorrow night (on Sky Atlantic only, chiz), overflowing to the brim with its usual drinking, smoking, sex, sexism and wholesale un-PC liberality. Does it, however, miss the point of the real Mad Men? A new book by actual ad man Andrew Cracknell tells what he describes as "the remarkable true story of Madison Avenue's golden age, when a handful of renegades changed advertising forever".While it tends to be the sex lives and style of Don Draper, Roger Sterling, Peggy Olson and Joan Harris that Read more ...
ash.smyth
A couple of nights ago I went to a book launch at Waterstone’s, Notting Hill, for a collection of un-illustrated short stories (Household Worms) by a visual artist (Stanley Donwood) perhaps best known for his work in the music industry (producing iconic record covers for Radiohead).This invitation-only party was a circus of extroverted introverts: women in bow ties, men sporting double-breasted Van Gogh jackets, and almost everyone with “interesting” hair. Think the geekier end of the Radiohead fanbase crossed with, well, the west-London literary scene. Eyes closed, though, it was pretty good Read more ...
graeme.thomson
In the early Eighties Peter Gabriel was the ne plus ultra of arty, experimental margin-hangers, breaking cover occasionally with an improbable hit single before “retreating back into the bushes with my normal crowd”. His fifth studio album, So, changed all that. Its lead single “Sledgehammer” strutted over the dividing line between cult kudos and mass-market kerching, leading Gabriel and the rest of this darkly soulful album straight into the arms of the mainstream. After 1986, he was one of the big beasts.This absorbing Classic Albums film suggested there was little premeditation about any Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“A place of human bondage, a place of human suffering,” was how Hank Skinner described the Texas prison where he’s spent the 17 years. On death row, he's convicted of triple murder. The subject of the disquieting first entry in Werner Herzog’s series on condemned prisoners, Skinner was sanguine in the face of death but pursuing every means to prolong its arrival.Although unseen, Herzog was heard. The programme began with his voiceover stating that “the death penalty exists in 34 states of the United States of America. Currently, only 16 states actually perform executions. Executions are Read more ...
Veronica Lee
You may think that, eight series in, applicants for The Apprentice would rein it in a bit. Overblown egos, fantastical verbal imagery to describe their always unique talents, hyperbolic self-assessment - we had all of those, and so much more, in last night's hugely enjoyable series opener. Welcome to another bunch of hopelessly, and hilariously, deluded men and women in search of Lord Sugar's £250,000 investment.No longer about a serious search for a young business person or entrepreneur - it stopped being that in, oh, series three, perhaps? - The Apprentice is now pure entertainment but, Read more ...
Fiona Sturges
If you’ve ever had that cold, clammy feeling following the realisation that an email, in which you have been less than flattering about a colleague, has accidentally landed in said colleague’s inbox, then you will have experienced roughly a millionth of the pain felt by assorted US government officials in the wake of the WikiLeaks scandal.In late 2010, the website WikiLeaks posted around 250,000 secret communications between Washington and the scores of US diplomats stationed across the world, which were subsequently published in newspapers. Suddenly America’s private anxieties and political Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The eminence grise behind Touch is Tim Kring, who also devised Heroes, and it shows. Heroes was about a network of people with paranormal or superhuman powers, and so is Touch. In this case, we find ourselves in a universe which is underpinned by numerical patterns and mathematical probabilities. Only a select handful of humans can discern this astounding cosmic architecture and join the astral dots, one of them being Jacob "Jake" Bohm.Jake is the 11-year-old son of single father Martin Bohm (Kiefer Sutherland), a former ace newspaperman now struggling to bring up a boy who has never spoken a Read more ...
ash.smyth
If you’re one of those readers who likes to believe that a novelist’s work and the life he leads have little or nothing to do with one another, then I trust you were watching last night’s Arena: The Dreams of William Golding.After an upbringing of lower-middle state schooling, immersion in the Classics and archaeology, uncompromising atheism (father) and superstitious eclecticism (mother), eventual Nobel Laureate William Golding was spat out into the world – with a reference from Oxford marked “Not Top Drawer” – chippy, resentful, and deeply susceptible to the wishy-washy of the unconscious. Read more ...
fisun.guner
This programme wants to challenge certain stereotypes around English identity. It wants to challenge the notion that to be English is to be “tolerant, white and Anglo-Saxon”. But before it does any of that, it wants to address just one question, and that is this: just why are the English so damned full of themselves? That’s right. Just where does their sense of superiority and entitlement come from? And what makes them think they can strut around the world with missionary zeal interfering in other people’s affairs all the time? OK, that’s several questions, but you see the theme. This episode Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Despite an unfortunate title which seemed to have fallen from the pages of the latest Cosmo sex survey (“add some spice to the bedroom: try reverse missionary”), the first instalment of this three-part series about faith, community and religious history had honourable intentions. Its starting premise was that Britain is not just broken but “saturated in secularism”, and throughout it acted as though both presumptions were not only a) true and b) indisputably Bad Things, but also that one was directly responsible for the other.On paper the idea had a neat symmetry. A religious leader from a Read more ...