TV
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 ...
Emma Dibdin
Following ITV’s resounding victory in the battle of the masters ‘n’ servants period shows – Downton Abbey vs. Upstairs Downstairs, for the uninitiated – the Beeb are overdue for a retaliatory blow. And so the gauntlet has been thrown down, in the unlikely form of what might be the very blandest title ever conceived of for a romantic drama.When it was announced in September that both channels had commissioned programmes called Love Life, it wasn’t hard to see where the smart money was going. Press for the BBC’s outing (now renamed True Love and set to air in May) promises a set Read more ...
fisun.guner
You know that kind of smoothly seductive but nonetheless ominous-sounding voice-over that loads of science programmes seem to love? You know, the kind that’s often used to lull us into thinking that what we’re about to hear is going to present us with some really seismic shift in our perceptions? Well, that’s what gets me about some science programmes. That, and the sense that the more dramatic the voice-over the less dramatic the content. That, and the graphics.In this week’s Horizon we had both the ominous voice-over and the useless graphic. A stick figure popped up early on, a fuzzy blue Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Contrary to what he said in 1963, US Attorney General Robert Kennedy did not close Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary. Although the last inmate appeared to leave the San Francisco Bay island fortress in leg-irons on 21 March 1963, the prisoners and guards had vanished into thin air, leaving it the Marie Celeste of prisons. The cover-up worked. But now, one-by-one, without having aged, the prisoners are back, blazing a trial of murderous mayhem across modern-day San Francisco.Mixing crime, conspiracy and the fantastic, JJ Abrams’s new series is made from familiar elements. Alcatraz isn’t Lost. Like Read more ...
Veronica Lee
There are any number of television detective shows and to differentiate themselves they all need a USP. The excellent Sherlock is a very knowing modern reworking of the original, Life on Mars was set in a time warp, Dirk Gently uses weird global interconnectivity and Whitechapel's coppers solve crimes by referencing Victorian cases. So a cop show that has none of the bells and whistles of the above is somewhat unique.That's sort of true, for Scott & Bailey has its own USP in its strong female slant. It's about two female detectives Janet Scott (Lesley Sharp) and Rachel Bailey (Suranne Read more ...