TV
Adam Sweeting
James M. Cain's novel Mildred Pierce is best remembered for Michael Curtiz's entertainingly lurid 1945 movie version, starring Joan Crawford. Featuring William Faulkner among its screenwriters, it played fast and loose with Cain's book, but bashed it into crowd-pleasing shape successfully enough to win Crawford an Oscar.Cue Todd Haynes's five-part miniseries for HBO (brought to us, or to some of us, by Sky Atlantic) and the equation is reversed. Haynes has adhered to the original book with exaggerated reverence, so much so that the dialogue sometimes feels more like sequential monologues Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Last March’s Japanese earthquakes and tsunami, as we know, brought devastation to hundreds of thousands of Japanese. But it also caused a crisis in the 3D film industry, just as it is attempting to be born. The most important 3D tape stock finishing factory in the world was swept away by the waters.In the burgeoning 3D film world this caused consternation, and for no one more than the producers of the 3D version of Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake that was just about to be shot at Sadler’s Wells by Leopard Films. It caused a terrifying lurch in price for the making of what has to be seen as a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The Americans have form when it comes to creating superior remakes of British TV shows. Life on Mars with Michael Imperioli? You gotta love it. The Office without Ricky Gervais? We are eternally in their debt.
Now they've taken Paul Abbott's Shameless in for a full engine re-bore and respray, with Abbott himself on board as writer and executive producer. The formaggio grandissimo of the Stateside version, though, is John Wells, of ER and The West Wing fame, and it's the rather imperial-looking John Wells Productions logo that you see at the conclusion of each programme.
It's bound to take a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Continuing BBC Four's trend of creating surprisingly watchable programmes out of dowdy and unpromising ideas, this survey of the plants gardeners love to hate was a mine of information and offered plenty of food for thought. And for that matter, plenty of food, since it appears that wheat has only survived to become one of our top crops because, several thousand years ago, it was genetically beefed up by getting spliced to a weed.What is a weed, anyway? Presenter Chris Collins, a seasoned horticulturist despite his protection-racketish demeanour, came up with several plausible definitions. He Read more ...
josh.spero
The dramatic music, blue-tinged reconstructions and menacing voiceover all suggested that we should be sceptical of World War Two heroine Vera Atkins. The title of the programme indeed, Secret War: The Spymistress and the French Fiasco, told us how we should feel. We know that she was a brave member of the Special Operations Executive, the British department responsible for secret agents in occupied lands, but thankfully this programme came along to debunk her. Or did it?It certainly intended to. The story of how Atkins, a senior operator in charge of the F Section, which ran missions in Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I see there are still a few brave souls trying to peddle the "searing televisual masterpiece" line, often in high-profile BBC publications, but I suspect rather more of us may have been veering towards an ever-healthier scepticism as Hugo Blick's wilfully obtuse noirathon ran around in increasingly demented circles. I wouldn't go as far as theartsdesk commenter "Gengis Cohen", who characterises The Shadow Line as "dreadful plotless, sub-Pinteresque nonsense" before really warming to his theme... but after a couple of drinks, y'know, you start thinking maybe he's not all that wrong.Having Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Created in 2005 by its director Caroline Redman Lusher, the Rock Choir has become something of a populist phenomenon. It’s a “people’s choir”, which means the songbook leans more towards Robbie Williams than Vaughan Williams. Anyone is welcome to join. There are no auditions and no talent requirements, a fact which will scarcely surprise viewers who last night witnessed the Bristol Rock Choir inflicting a very vocal form of GBH on ABBA's “Waterloo”.Narrated with rather pained joie de vivre by Hugh Bonneville, The Choir That Rocks is a three-part series which follows several Rock Choirs as Read more ...
Jasper Rees
A year ago when Luther battered down the door like a wailing banshee in bovver boots on day release, it was all a bit underwhelming. People shrugged and wondered whether Idris Elba was condemned to roam in eternal script limbo. They weren’t at all sure about Ruth Wilson’s parricidal astrosphysicist, all beestung, flame-maned and frog-boxed. If it started loopy, across six episodes it got ever so subtly loopier until its audience began to accept it for what it was: somewhere between a thuggish police procedural and Alice Through the Looking Glass. NB Wilson’s character was called Alice. She Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The argument in Terry Pratchett's BBC Two documentary Choosing to Die boiled down to the sanctity of life versus the quality of life. Pratchett's own reasoning, that he has Alzheimer's disease and would prefer to choose the manner and timing of his own death before he becomes incapable of making that decision, is eminently logical.The subjects of his film, multiple sclerosis sufferer Andrew Colgan and Peter Smedley, who has motor neuron disease, had opted to end their lives at the Dignitas clinic in Zurich rather than endure the inevitable progression of their illnesses. You might not have Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
With The Tudors recently departed from BBC Two, the kindly Channel 4 has stepped in to fill the gap with this new cod-mythological romp through a Middle Ages that never existed. Funnily enough, it comes from the same Irish-Canadian production consortium that cooked up The Tudors, and shares similar attitudes to casting, production values and dialogue.The story so far: Arthur, an insipid blond wimp (Jamie Campbell Bower), spends his time bonking the local wenches, until Merlin (Joseph Fiennes) drops in one day and tells him he's the heir of Uther Pendragon (deceased) and is now King of Britain Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Chris Lilley may not be a household name, but he is well known to comedy connoisseurs. The Australian's work, which he writes, produces and appears in - in several roles, male and female, adult and teenager - is exceptional, and is by turns funny and challenging, offensive and poignant. You may have seen We Can Be Heroes, about teenage identical twins Daniel and Nathan (played by Lilley), and Summer Heights High, set in a secondary school where the egregious fool Mr G taught drama to the self-obsessed Ja’mie (both played by Lilley); now comes Angry Boys, about young men in modern society. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Fantastic! A new drama series in which the hero isn't a detective. Instead, William Travers (James Purefoy) is a criminal barrister who (after some sort of traumatic, nervous-breakdown-provoking experience we don't know much about yet) has moved from the pressure cooker of the London legal industry to the ostensibly more laid-back environs of Ipswich. He used to specialise in murder cases, but now he swears he's given them up.Purefoy makes rather a good barrister. He radiates middle-class solidity and a sense that he really would like to do the right thing by his clients, while commanding the Read more ...