TV
fisun.guner
Say what you like about the posh – they know their place. Equipped from an early age with a sense of entitlement, they also have access to the oldest and most powerful social network there is: call it what you will, but the old boys' network remains, and you’d be hopelessly naïve to think otherwise. Where would our current prime minister be without it? Tony Parsons, who, as a working-class boy made good, is among a pitifully declining breed, thought he knew: “If David Cameron had gone to a comprehensive school he’d be lucky to be digging ditches,” he spat. That seemed unduly harsh, but after Read more ...
howard.male
Don’t you just hate it when your favourite cult show becomes everybody’s favourite cult show, and then to make matters worse even the damned Americans embrace it? But how could you not love a scarier, bloody version of the sitcom Spaced, or a funnier version of the horror movie Let the Right One In? Yes, the latter does sound particular unlikely, yet in 2008 Toby Whithouse managed to create a central trio of characters who are first and foremost endearing and achingly vulnerable, and only secondly a ghost, a werewolf and a vampire.Lenora Crichlow plays the goofily sexy, touchingly optimistic Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's a strange mixture, this Tudors malarkey. The opening episode of the fourth and supposedly final series spent an age spinning through the back story as if earnestly trying to educate us in the history of the bloodthirsty English ruling family. Then the credits rolled and everything returned to business as usual, in other words murder, lust, sadism, gluttony, treachery and avarice.It makes for a televisual mixture bursting with calories and MSG, especially when combined with the opulent camerawork and Kerrygold Country Irish locations. It's a formula which has plainly rubbed off on other Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Medical dramas have a never-ending appeal to television viewers; but whereas British versions are more about the heartstrings than open-heart surgery, America prefers its programmes to be done with scalpel-sharp wit and incisive social commentary. So a warm welcome back to Nurse Jackie, a sassily written and joyously dark work set in a New York emergency room, for a second series.The Showtime programme follows in a distinguished line of well-written and pacy ensemble American medical dramas and comedies, including St Elsewhere, ER and Scrubs, and the more recent addition of House (although I Read more ...
hilary.whitney
It’s a fairly safe bet that when director Beeban Kidron made her first film, the documentary Carry Greenham Home (1983), she never envisaged that 20 years later she’d be directing a whopping great blockbuster about a Chardonnay-swigging young woman’s desperate quest to get a ring on her finger - Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004). But then Kidron’s career trajectory has never been predictable.Her CV ricochets from the classic television series Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1990) to a documentary about the sculptor Antony Gormley to the film Wong Foo! Thanks for Everything! Julie Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Thirty years after the original series came to the end of its 12-year history, Hawaii Five-0 is about to burst back onto British TV. The new-look Five-0 kicked off in September last year on the American CBS network, and will debut on Sky1/Sky1 HD in the UK in February.A pilot for a new Hawaii Five-0 was made in 1996, starring Gary Busey and Russell Wong, but it never aired. This time, the chemistry feels right and American audiences have been enthusiastic. The new version uses several of the same principal character names from the original, including of course Steve McGarrett (originally Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The way the BBC keeps knocking out these little biopics about the lives of various household names (John Lennon, Gracie Fields, Margot Fonteyn etc), you'd think there was nothing simpler than to get inside the mind of some complex public figure, deftly sketching in a bit of socio-historical background on the side with a bit of help from the props and archive department. And, as this low-rent effort to drill into the emotional life of the beloved comic actress Hattie Jacques amply demonstrated, you'd be completely wrong.Throughout most of its 85 minutes I was poised on the edge of my seat, Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
She’s back: the retail guru and style icon, with her sharp red bob, sharper tongue and enviable sense of style. In two series of Mary, Queen of Shops on BBC Two, she whipped ailing businesses into shape and established herself as one of television’s most striking and engaging personalities. If online message boards are to be believed, she also – thanks to her much-discussed mid-life divorce, relationship with Grazia fashion editor Melanie Rickey and sexy combination of attitude, intelligence and eye-catching elegance – inspired happily married women up and down the land to fantasise about Read more ...
graeme.thomson
It’s not so much the children of mad celebs I feel sorry for as their animals. The private zoo stuffed with exotic, non-indigenous wildlife is a sure sign of money, power and hubris run riot. The tigers and chimps at the Neverland ranch became powerful symbols of Michael Jackson’s dislocation. Similarly, last night's Storyville told how an abandoned brood of pet hippos have come to define the worst excesses of the late Colombian drug baron Pablo Escobar.Escobar was not a conventional star, but he enjoyed all the trappings of celebrity: wealth, glamour, infamy. He was hailed as a hero at Read more ...
fisun.guner
Horizon took a funny turn this week. The new series started off gently enough – there was a nostalgic look back at 60 years of science on the box, then an exploration as to what makes us clever (the fun this entailed when vaguely well-known people sweated through a series of IQ tests). But last night it wanted us to get to grips with something very slippery indeed, so slippery that even the eminent scientists responsible for unleashing some of the more frontier theories in particle physics readily admitted their conceptual limitations in understanding their own formulations.So when the off- Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The Facebook film The Social Network and TV's Glee were the big winners at the Golden Globes last night, though much attention has focused on the best acting awards to Colin Firth for The King's Speech and Natalie Portman for Black Swan. Not to mention Ricky Gervais's British sense of humour as host. Christian Bale was another eminent British actor who won an award, for his supporting role in The Fighter, but Helena Bonham Carter, Judi Dench and Romola Garai missed out despite nominations.The British have traditionally done well at the Globes, which are awarded by film and television Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
With such weighty gastronauts as Heston Blumenthal, Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall all aboard Channel 4's Big Fish Fight jamboree, Gordon Ramsay obviously couldn't bear to be left standing on the quay. In fact, with Gordon Ramsay: Shark Bait he has made the most provocative film of the season, a punchy documentary in which the shouty superchef did some bold poking about in the hideous innards of the global trade in shark fins.Shark-fin soup used to be a delicacy reserved for Chinese emperors, but has subsequently grown into a staple of Chinese restaurants and even street vendors Read more ...