TV
josh.spero
Hot on the vulgar, vertiginous heels of The Only Way is Essex came E4's Made in Chelsea last night, where the stars were better shod but about as interesting as shoe leather. The first ill omen was the use of the angsty, vengeful riff from Adele's "Rolling in the Deep" - it wanted the passion and style of the music but could only grasp it on a fast-food level. Things got no better.This show was self-defeating, as is any reality show where "interesting" people have to put themselves forward. Truly interesting people would never want to parade their lives in a flash of fur, so we were left Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The story of the Pitmen Painters, a group of Northumbrian miners who decided to study art appreciation in their spare time and developed into a group of untrained but powerfully expressive artists, has been documented in a book by William Feaver and a play by Lee Hall. Robson Green's particular interest in the story stems from the fact that he's a miner's son, brought up in Dudley, a few miles south of the pitmen's hometown of Ashington.Green may be a successful actor, but he's no art critic - "I would actually think, why is he showing us this?" he said, confronted with a slide of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s got more derivations than a dictionary. The Wire has been mentioned in dispatches, as have British conspiracy dramas such as State of Play and Edge of Darkness (in which something is rotten etc). And talking of Denmark, it comes along with The Killing obsessives doing cold turkey. Even its creator has cited the guiding hand of cynical, labyrinthine Seventies crime thrillers – Flight of the Condor and The Parallax View. Put them all together and have you got a series which exists entirely in the long shadow cast by narratives which have passed this way before? Or can The Shadow Read more ...
fisun.guner
Dr Michael Mosley has been involved in some pretty hair-raising stunts in the course of filming various biology strands for the BBC. So, I imagine he might have felt something like relief filming his new series Inside the Human Body. With neither potholing nor bungee jumping, nor tearing down a steep hill in a giant, transparent ball in the offing, the only terrifying thing the engaging presenter was required to do, at least for this opening episode of a four-parter, was to hold an hour-old baby. This was a lovely, tender moment in a film that told the story of human conception and Read more ...
Veronica Lee
One of the great pleasures of being a critic is watching a career develop, and Stewart Lee’s is one that I’ve had the pleasure of, so to speak, for many years. I’m not a Stewart Lee completist but I enjoyed his early days on television with comedy partner Richard Herring in Fist of Fun (just about to be released on DVD for the first time) and This Morning With Richard Not Judy, his solo stand-up shows, his work on the wonderfully subversive Jerry Springer: The Opera and much, much more in between.I missed him in the early Noughties when Lee took a rest from stand-up and rejoiced when he Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In a week unfeasibly packed with new drama across the BBC and ITV, the three-part Exile may prove to be the one that lingers longest. It was a thriller and a detective story, but what gave it its formidable grip was the way the central mystery was intricately entwined with the painful personal story of Tom Ronstadt (John Simm) and his father Sam (Jim Broadbent).Simm's character was a burnt-out journalist from the fictional London-based Ransom magazine. Until he got the sack, he had specialised in high-octane sleaze, his dirt-digging zeal cranked to a frenzy by drink and drugs. His father Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
ITV1 really, really loves that succulent two-hour slot in the middle of Sunday evening, and anything that goes in there has the legacy of Morse, Lewis, Frost, Miss Marple et al to live up to. The latest cunning plan for Detective Sunday is to recruit the rather excellent Brenda Blethyn to play DCI Vera Stanhope in adaptations of Ann Cleeves's novels, set in the author's native North-East.In fact, with the lineage of TV detectives now long enough to stretch to the moon and back several times, choice of location is becoming critical as a means of telling them apart. Vera is well served by its Read more ...
hilary.whitney
Christopher Eccleston’s performances have a raw-boned, visceral quality which makes him a sometimes unsettling - but always compelling - actor to watch. Since his big break in the harrowing Let Him Have It (1991), playing Derek Bentley who at 19 was the last man to be hanged in Britain, Eccleston has played Hamlet at the West Yorkshire Playhouse and worked alongside some of Hollywood’s biggest names including Kate Winslet (Jude, 1996), Cate Blanchett (Elizabeth, 1998) and Nicole Kidman (The Others, 2001).However, his best work has undoubtedly been reserved for the small screen. He is, of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The flying Twitter fragments said more about The Wedding than the battalions of experts, "palace insiders", historians and friends ever could (couldn't somebody have put a bag over Simon "infinite loop" Schama's head and had him bundled away from the BBC studio in the boot of a car?) Everybody seemed to adore Kate's dress. Some suggested that princesses Eugenie and Beatrice were in drag. "The Royal Family is BACK", tweeted Piers Morgan. "#proudtobeenglish" added former England cricket captain Michael Vaughan. "Harry's thinking, how did I not end up in a carriage with Pippa Middleton?" Read more ...
howard.male
“There’s no place like home… there’s no place like home… there’s no place like home…” A wish became a mantra and then became a happy ending, when Dorothy wiggled her ruby-red shoes in the MGM movie version of L Frank Baum’s fairy story. But this documentary didn’t even get to the most watched film in the history of cinema until its closing 10 minutes: perhaps because its makers were concerned that if they’d called it “The Story of L Frank Baum” it wouldn’t have found an audience.And that would have been a pity because Baum’s story, as told by his great grandson, great granddaughter and Read more ...
josh.spero
There is little rational explanation for why Giles Coren and Sue Perkins are still on the television, other than that the trained ferrets have still not yet been found. They brought their inimitable, emetic style to royal weddings with last night's Giles and Sue's Royal Wedding on BBC Two. Were one forgiving (very forgiving), you could call their shtick - making every obvious joke going, hamming up their historical situations - ironic.Their series - Giles and Sue camp their way through historical meals - is perfect for wet Tuesday afternoons when the GCSE history students need some time off Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Molly Dineen would go on to make films about Tony Blair and Geri Halliwell, but her career began among cut-glass colonials of the (very) old school. Home from the Hill and My African Farm, two films for 40 Minutes in the late 1980s, portrayed a crusty pair of Brits in stately Kenyan retirement. One, a charming old cavalry officer who had spent his life in the colonies, decided to return to a Blighty he barely knew. The other, a childless widowed battleaxe, sold her farm but dug her feet in. Viewed together, they made for a double portrait of a dying species: the lesser-spotted casually racist Read more ...