TV
Adam Sweeting
It must have been a toss-up for the BBC whether to scrap Waking the Dead or Silent Witness, but evidently the latter won the race against extinction by a putrefying nose, probably attached to a hideously-charred corpse which may or may not have been raped but had been stabbed 47 times and bludgeoned with a... Funnily enough there was one a bit like that in this first episode of Series 15, along with an asphyxiated child and a man killed by knife and stun-gun.It's hard to fathom how murder most graphic and the disgusting perversions of serial killers have become such a staple of middle-brow TV Read more ...
ash.smyth
A director who is “passionate about biology”; a humorist who “hardly ever mocks”; an artist who speaks fluently about the origin of species; a non-musician who has directed some of the best-received opera productions of the modern era; a doctor with his own profile on IMDB. In short, a man who puts the “poly” into “polymath” – and like as not does it in Greek. Don’t you just hate Jonathan Miller?No, of course not. As last night’s Arena portrait could simply not fail to convince you, all laud and honour be to Jonathan Miller: there ought to be one of him in every home.And in the Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
Now on its third showrunner and entering its sixth season, it’s perhaps not a surprise that this once pitch-black drama, centring on a disturbed forensic analyst who moonlights as a vigilante serial killer, has lost its edge. The latest episode begins on a promisingly perilous note as Dexter (Michael C Hall) staggers through an abandoned lot having been stabbed, but there’s a characteristically punch-pulling reveal in the offing. Dexter was never in any danger, but his long-overdrawn series is at risk of becoming, despite its provocative premise, wholly conventional. Where last Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
The most shocking moment in this feature-length episode of Mad Men – for which the phrase “long-awaited” seems an understatement after a 17-month hiatus – is a quiet one. It’s not a moment on the level of a man getting his foot severed by a lawnmower, or Don Draper’s (Jon Hamm) out-of-nowhere proposal to doe-eyed secretary Megan (Jessica Paré) in last season’s finale. The moment comes when Don, a man who has built a house-of-cards false identity around his passion and creative ingenuity as an ad man, casually admits to his new wife, “I don’t really care about work.”It’s just one of many Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It can't be often that producers are faced with the agreeable problem of trying to shoehorn in several talents when devising a debut solo vehicle for a stand-up making the transition to television entertainer, but Hit the Road Jack's makers had that challenge with Jack Whitehall. Can he do jokes, spoof sketches and documentary-style pieces, followed by a bit of Candid Camera-like comedy, then chat-show banter with a celebrity guest? Yes all of that, most of which he makes a decent fist of.Following hot on the heels of Sarah Millican, Whitehall has been launched on to our screens with his Read more ...
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 ...