TV
Veronica Lee
For those not of Jewish heritage and who may not know the significance of the title, Friday-night dinner is the hub of a Jewish family’s week, when they gather together for a special dinner and prayers. It’s a (very) rough cultural equivalent of a Sunday roast or the Thanksgiving meal, and even for many non-religious Jews who dispense with the traditional menu and prayers, there’s a three-line whip on attendance.Creator and writer Robert Popper grew up in a non-religious north-London Jewish family and freely admits Friday Night Dinner is about his family, if a little exaggerated for comic Read more ...
howard.male
Why on earth did I volunteer to review this? I suppose it was because it would show me a world I had little knowledge of and therefore would be able to offer a fresh, objective perspective on. But 15 minutes in and I’m feeling like Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange being subjected to images of sex and violence, his eyes clamped open and his head held fast so there’s no escape. Except of course that would be loads more fun than this new reality TV show set in a London modelling agency, which unfortunately is more like watching nail varnish dry.And the Clockwork Orange comparison isn’t as Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There was a moment in last night’s Silk when a young solicitor turned up late for a trial. He was also an actor, he explained to his client’s counsel, and had to attend an audition. For a Head & Shoulders ad. The USP of Peter Moffat’s courtroom dramas is that, more than any writer since John Mortimer, he knows whereof he speaks. Having once been a barrister himself, the serpentine ins and outs of chambers, the politicking and skulduggery etc etc are his area of expertise. So you take it on trust that the events dramatised here are the truth and nothing but.Thus a barrister Read more ...
fisun.guner
Ross Kemp won a Bafta for his documentary about being on the frontline in Afghanistan, so perhaps I should begin by saying all due respect, and all that, but how much can you ratchet up the hardman image before it threatens to dissolve into self-parody? And with a title like Ross Kemp: Extreme World showing on Sky 1, well, where else could we be heading?For this new series we’ll see him talking to child soldiers and victims of mutilations and rape in the Democratic Republic of Congo, he’ll be sniffing out bloody turf wars in Mexico, and then he’ll be back on home turf with sex trafficking Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
You can see why the BBC's drama gurus wanted to have a go at remaking South Riding, which last came around in 1974's hit version from Yorkshire Television. It has drama, romance, social conflict, lofty ideals and looks a bit like a parable for our cash-strapped times. Processed through the screenwriting circuitry of Andrew Davies, TV's novel-adapter par excellence, it has emerged as a superior soap tailored with mercenary expertise for that demographic sweet spot that is 9pm on a Sunday night.Winifred Holtby's 1936 novel, which was published the year after its author's death, is a story of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The legal drama has become a staple of stage and screen, for a variety of excellent reasons. All of human life really is there, from love and hate to good and evil, crammed into the claustrophobic cockpit of the courtroom. Adding an extra squirt of kerosene to an already explosive mix is the fact that, as Dr Gregory House likes to say, “Everybody lies.”The latest cab on the telly-lawyer rank is Silk, BBC One’s sizzling new six-parter from Peter Moffat. A former barrister himself, Moffat has carved out a prestigious legally orientated screenwriting career, which has taken him from Kavanagh Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
When Treme debuted on HBO in the States, some excitable critics watched the pilot episode and instantly proclaimed it a masterpiece superior even to The Wire. David Simon, who created both shows, may have been delighted. Or on the other hand, he might have wondered how anybody could assess a complex, long-term portrayal of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina so categorically on so brief an acquaintance.Now Treme is here, though at the moment sadly confined to the elite mini-monde of Sky Atlantic. Having watched the pilot, I felt ill equipped to deliver a definitive judgment of Read more ...
graeme.thomson
There is little danger of our nation wasting away for the lack of culinary-themed televisual roughage: hairy bikers, domestic goddesses, campaigning wide boys, chicken-liberating poshos, alpha-male bully boys, Michelin-starred French fusspots. Channel hopping some nights feels more like flicking through the world's least coherent cook book.But it’s Masterchef – and its inevitable D-list-led Celebrity offshoot – that has become the firm favourite of the armchair gourmand. It's not fine dining by any stretch of the imagination but it's reliable and terribly moreish. Part contrived reality telly Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
News reaches us of discontent within the so-called "travelling community", where not everyone appreciates the portrait of Romany life which has been emerging from Channel 4's hit series. Perhaps they didn't like all that stuff about hairy-knuckled male chauvinism, women being married off as teenagers and kept in the kitchen, and the gypsies' habit of settling disputes by staging punch-ups in car parks."I think the show's a bad thing, and I'm not the only one saying it," complained Hughie Smith, president of the Gypsy Council. Roxy Freeman, a traveller who has written a book called Little Read more ...
howard.male
I only needed to see the trailer of this new eight-part science-fiction series for the words “Battlestar” and “Galactica” to spring depressingly to mind: the neutral colourlessness of everything, the characters looking meaningfully into the middle distance, the scrubby Earth-like landscape of Carpathia (rather than its almost anagrammatic Caprica from Battlestar), and the fact that this was another bunch of disenfranchised humans trying to settle on a new planet. But then to top it all, one of the leads from that cult American series (British actor James Bamber) also appeared in the opening Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
BBC Four's Britannia series keeps it simple - it tells the story in a straight line, illustrates it with as much archive material as the budget will allow, and interviews as many key protagonists as it can find. If the subject is strong enough, you'll get a good film out of it.And so it was with the reggae edition (part of the Reggae Britannia season), which took a brisk 90-minute march from reggae's arrival in Britain from Jamaica in the Sixties to the point where it disappeared into Soul II Soul's dub/soul/R&B mixture. They'd rounded up pretty well everybody who ever had a stake in Brit Read more ...
Jasper Rees
@Wossy seems to have been cast as second baddie in #PiratesduCaribbean 4This intro is entirely about namechecking the films so they can cut away to the US stars who've jetted in from #TinseltownLame string of Little Fockers jokes.These clips montages always make films look like the complete Shakespeare. Then you go and see them...@Wossy seems to have been cast as second baddie in #PiratesduCaribbean 4This intro is entirely about namechecking the films so they can cut away to the US stars who've jetted in from #TinseltownLame string of Little Fockers jokes.These clips montages always make Read more ...