TV
Adam Sweeting
As the makers of The Kennedys discovered recently, turning history into TV drama can be like locking yourself in the stocks and inviting all-comers to hurl coconuts at your head. This dramatisation of the 1950s Manchester United team and its traumatic near-destruction in the 1958 Munich air disaster has been duly lambasted by Sandy Busby, the son of former Manchester United manager Matt Busby, and others who were affected by the real-life events.But it never set out to be a documentary (though writer Chris Chibnall seems to have stuck pretty faithfully to the facts), and it's difficult to Read more ...
theartsdesk
Comedy writer John Sullivan has died aged 64, writes Adam Sweeting, after spending six weeks in intensive care battling viral pneumonia. The creator of several hit comedy series for the BBC, Sullivan is guaranteed immortality for his masterpiece, Only Fools and Horses, which ran from 1981 to 2002. Featuring the escapades of the wide-boy south-London brothers, Rodney and Del Boy Trotter (Nicholas Lyndhurst and David Jason), it became one of the best-loved British comedies ever screened, and also gained a substantial international following. A 2004 poll named Only Fools... as the best Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Everybody knows One Thousand and One Nights, even if they don’t know they do. Ever been to the panto to see Aladdin? Watched Sinbad the Sailor on stage, or Sheherazade at the opera or ballet, or perhaps watched one the many film versions of The Thief of Baghdad? Yes to any of those and you’re a fan of possibly one of the greatest series of stories ever told.Richard E Grant, a rather pleasing actor and a thoroughly nice chap, presented this documentary because, he said, he wanted to know why the book he loved as a child still has such a hold on our imagination. Of course any idiot could answer Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Dan Snow's toxic trilogy climaxed in New York, where he crawled voyeuristically through the rotten core of the Big Apple. It was part Discovery Channel documentary, part Gangs of New York dirty realism, as Snow took a frankly indecent relish in regaling us with tales of death, disease and raw capitalism at its baby-eating worst.In the event, studying the development of America's greatest city from the bottom up, as it were, made perfect sense. In the mid-19th century, New York was a crude frontier settlement that occupied merely the southernmost tip of Manhattan island. Immigrants, for Read more ...
howard.male
I made the mistake of catching up with the darkly sumptuous The Crimson Petal and the White just before knuckling down to review this new two-part drama, and it was like moving from fine vintage wine to warm supermarket-brand lager. To begin with, I couldn’t dissociate Ashley Jensen from her perky but dim character in Extras, so the moment she found herself confronted with a game-show-from-hell scenario of committing a murder in return for five million quid, I expected Ricky Gervais to pop up in the next scene, giving her wisecrack-littered advice on what to do next.But unfortunately she was Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Seven works are collected on this sampler of the formidably prolific Plater’s television writing - a soupçon from a broth that is rich, flavoursome, and usually satisfying. Though omitting anything from The Stars Look Down, The Good Companions, Get Lost! and Selwyn Froggitt, among other series he wrote for ITV, the set fully demonstrates Plater’s affinity for the common man, his sensitive approach to the class struggle, and his taste for cryptic humour.
A Jarrow-born Humbersider, Plater (1935-2010) is considered a Northern dramatist, but the earliest play contained here, Brotherly Love ( Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Captain Scott's doomed 1910-1913 expedition to the South Pole has become one of the enduring myths of the later British Empire, a paradigm of pluck, grit and a refusal to surrender in the teeth of hideous odds. Subsequently, some historical revisionists have reached a different conclusion, that Scott was in fact an ill-prepared amateur who committed a string of fatal errors.A new generation of splendid chaps has been revisiting the bitter, haunted wastes once trudged over and sometimes died in by our great explorers. Jasper Rees wrote majestically about James Cracknell's programme The Great Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
So Monroe reached the end of series one, and I still couldn't read what its tone was supposed to be. Some artsdesk readers have expressed enthusiasm for the theme tune, but I find its jogging Celtic jauntiness symptomatic of Monroe's wider problems. Obviously you can't expect too much from a bit of title music, but surely it should give you a clue as to whether the show is a hard-hitting drama about life and death or a sitcom?Quips and badinage abound when Monroe (James Nesbitt) and his team are in action, and staff and patients alike are lucky to survive the barrage of one-liners Read more ...
fisun.guner
I prefer "living room", but I have a friend who insists on "lounge". For some reason that probably goes deep into the psyche, I cringe at "sitting room". Same goes for "front room". As for "reception room", I’ve only ever seen that in the windows of estate agents. "Parlour", too, is a rarity, confined now to TV period dramas, which is exactly where "drawing room" seems to be heading (or perhaps I’m not mixing in the right circles). And anyone who calls it a "dining room" should surely be consigned to lonely TV dinners in perpetuity.If Walls Could Talk: The History of the Home, the first of a Read more ...
josh.spero
The talent show search - not for another star but for another field to devour - has reached its logical conclusion. Whereas most such shows - The X Factor, for example - are ostensibly about one skill or another as a pretext for marketing, Britain's Next Big Thing last night on BBC Two was a talent show about finding a merchandising opportunity. Artisans were given the chance to pitch their products to major chains, and the first episode was set at Liberty (not Libertys, as most called it).Theo Paphitis of Dragons' Den made fleeting appearances, talking to ambitious artisans queueing up Read more ...
Veronica Lee
In 2004 Michael Collins wrote a fascinating book, The Likes of Us: A Biography of the White Working Class. It was part memoir of his south-London childhood, part history of the area and part polemic. Two-thirds was an excellent read, a thoroughly researched and well-written account of the many generations of his family who had lived in Walworth, but the last third was a confused mess of an argument about what he saw as the plight of the modern-day white working class - marginalised and despised by the middle-class media and forgotten by the establishment. I had a similar response to this Read more ...
theartsdesk
There is an intriguing heresy planted several paragraphs down in Adam’s review of Lewis, which resumed last night on ITV. “It’s the relationship between Lewis and Hathaway that makes the thing worth watching. In fact, it sometimes seems more interesting than the slightly ponderous master-and-servant routine Lewis used to go through with Morse.”
Can this really be so? Or maybe Adam has given voice to a suspicion millions of viewers have secretly nursed for a while. What do you think? On our Facebook page we have posted a question: “Is the partnership between Lewis and Hathaway actually more Read more ...