TV
Jasper Rees
They have period names in the foreign country we call the past. In last night’s documentary about a brilliant wartime trick practised upon Hitler, we came across a coroner called Sir Bentley Purchase, a love interest called Peternel Hankins and a Welsh tramp with the stirringly patriotic if implausible name of Glyndwr Michael. Charles Cholmondeley, one of the authors of the deception, would even draw attention to the absurd discrepancy between the way his name looked and sounded. More or less the only person in this entire story who didn't sound like a character in a novel was Major Read more ...
james.woodall
The couples profiled in the series included the likes of Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, Sartre and de Beauvoir, Monroe and Miller, and remoter figures from the German 19th century. Pop hadn’t made it onto the list, though I learnt, once embarked on the commission, that Lennon-Ono had been considered but no author found. In 1996, I happened to be in the right place (Berlin) at the right time.John Lennon und Yoko Ono - zwei Rebellen, eine Poplegende (the last four words mean “two rebels, one pop legend”: the publisher's, not my, subtitle) went on to be one of the series’ bestselling books. My Read more ...
Ismene Brown
And so Mad Men 4 rode into the sunset, Don perched on yet another horse (sorry, love interest), a fifth series in production, and it’s all become a soap opera rather than a drama series. It should be called Madly Men. Fast diminishing returns, one of them me, diminishing possibly to zero next time. I’d held hopes that series 4 would see Don come to the picturesque fall promised in the credit sequence, probably off a cliff far away in the wilderness where his body would lie unnoticed like an empty Lucky Strike packet. His hidden identity would tear through his careful carapace and his Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Frankie Boyle’s Tramadol Nights is an interesting beast. A mix of stand-up, sketches and cartoons, it’s neither fish nor fowl, but many will certainly find it foul - with the comic’s penchant for sexually explicit material, unPC humour and determinedly bad-taste jokes, it’s bound to upset some viewers. But that’s why Channel 4 poached him from the BBC in the first place and have put his name in the title.His acerbic humour on Mock the Week gained a devoted following - but also the opprobrium of the BBC Trust over a number of offensive gags, after which it was only a matter of time before Read more ...
theartsdesk
The relationship between stage and screen has always been fraught with antagonism and suspicion. One working in two dimensions, the other in three, they don't speak the same visual language. But recent events have helped to eat away at the status quo. On the one hand, theatre has grown increasingly intrigued by the design properties of film. Flat screens have popped up all over the place, notably in Katie Mitchell’s National shows and at the more ambitious work of the ENO. Meanwhile, theatre and opera have been encouraging those who, for reasons of distance or price, can’t make it to Read more ...
fisun.guner
There is probably only one thing that Ann Widdecombe and I have ever agreed upon: we both think it might be a really good idea to stick William Wilberforce on the Fourth Plinth. Why not? It’s nice to have contemporary art in Trafalgar Square, of course, but surely there are few other reforming characters as worthy as the great abolitionist? And Wilberforce was many other things besides – though not all of them would necessarily impress the nation to quite the same degree.In his youth – which here means before the age of 25 when he had already spent a year as a Tory MP in the county of Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Few theatrical collaborations have been as successful as that achieved over five plays, two films, several decades, and numerous awards by the playwright Alan Bennett and the director Nicholas Hytner, who had jointly made a habit of art well before Bennett decided to write a play of that very name, premiered in November 2009 at the National Theatre. Now, More4 has come along with a documentary chronicling the two men's collaboration on a work that is itself about a collaboration. And if Adam Low's behind-the-scenes take on an essentially private meeting of minds leaves you wanting more, well Read more ...
Veronica Lee
What a pair of teases Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain are. The co-writers (and co-creators, with Andrew O’Connor) of Peep Show write only one short series of this sitcom each year but such is its pull that fans don't forget and move on to other offerings. No, we wait with mounting glee for the programme to return to our screens and, let joy be unconfined, the seventh series started last night.At first sight this limited but beautifully formed output appears to reflect rather neatly the personalities of Peep Show’s two main characters - the slacker Jeremy (Robert Webb) and the anally retentive Read more ...
howard.male
There’s a surreal sitcom waiting to be written about the often-told story of when Charlie Higson and Paul Whitehouse were Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie’s plasterers for a while in the early 1980s. Here’s the pitch: F and L would play caricatures of themselves in the mould of the posh twits they played in Blackadder, and – for extra comic frisson – H and W would play it straight while appearing (as the story goes) naturally funnier than their professional Oxbridge comedy-writing superiors.If the old wags themselves didn’t have the time or inclination to knock up six episodes, The IT Crowd Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The title could have used a bit more work, I'd have thought. No, Peter Mandelson was never "the real PM", and won't be now. As for the real Peter Mandelson, there is no evidence that any such mythical beast exists. And why hadn't Lord Mandelson become prime minister, film-maker Hannah Rothschild asked him in one of her deferential voices-off moments? Because Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had entered parliament in 1983, Peter explained with exaggerated patience, while he himself had only got there in 1992. He was stuck at the back of the queue and had to wait his turn. This being the Labour Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Any period drama that crops up on Sunday nights is now automatically billed as a potential replacement for Downton Abbey. Any Human Heart has duly been described thus, but isn't. Converted into a four-part series from William Boyd's 2002 novel, with a screenplay by Boyd himself, it's the story of the writer Logan Mountstuart, whose long life spanned the major events of the 20th century while bouncing around between various continents and relationships. In accordance with the timespan and the authorial notion that every individual becomes several different personalities en route to the grave, Read more ...
graeme.thomson
The renaissance enjoyed by Leonard Cohen over the past few years is not only thoroughly welcome and entirely justified, but also partly a testament to the strange and powerful alchemy that sometimes occurs when the defiantly high-brow is swallowed whole by popular culture. The adoption of Cohen’s 1984 song “Hallelujah” by everyone from Jeff Buckley and Shrek to a parade of desperate X Factorettes made it an “Angels” for the noughties; the only point, I'd be willing to wager, where Cohen and Robbie Williams will ever find communion.More prosaically, the decision – forced upon him by the Read more ...