TV
Jasper Rees
You always know where you are with Griff. You may be up a mountain or on a river or visiting any of the various topographical options the various TV companies deem it essential to send him. You may be doing up his house with him in Wales, where he freely admits he doesn’t really come from, or nosing round London, Paris or New York, as he did in the last series of Greatest Cities of the World. You may, as with the new series, be in Rome. But in the end, you never leave the Land of Griff.In the Land of Griff, all is bafflement, muddlement and of course chortlement. The lingua franca understood Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's difficult to reach a rational verdict in the midst of the blog-barrage, Twitter-frenzy and crass party point-scoring that surround our new national pastime, but as the party leaders neared the 90-minute time limit, it was at least obvious that this second debate had brought feistier and more committed performances from all three of them. David Cameron and Gordon Brown wasted no time in demonstrating how well they'd learned Nick Clegg's trick of looking straight into the camera and addressing us viewers, though frankly you'd have thought that should always have been pretty bleeding Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The opening episode of a new series is always an awkward blighter. You have to introduce the characters and establish the required tone, while squeezing in enough plot to keep the thing moving. Even mega-budget epics like FlashForward have struggled to make it work.And then along comes episode one of White Collar, a wry drama about a FBI agent and a master thief, and suddenly everything looks sublimely easy. Casting is all, and White Collar’s twin leads have an easy rapport that makes you believe that agent Peter Burke (Tim DeKay) really has spent three years pursuing the mercurial Neal Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
"The ultimate battle! Jesus versus Magneto!" raved one sci-fi blogger (ironically), on seeing that this Anglo-American remake of The Prisoner stars Jim The Passion of the Christ Caviezel and Sir Ian X-Men McKellen. If only. Unfortunately the new Prisoner's dominant characteristics are its sluggish tempo, limited vision and inability to drag itself out of the shadow of the Patrick McGoohan original.Critics were queueing up to dole out kickings to the new Prisoner even before the first episode, which seemed a trifle cruel. Even Private Eye's "Remote Controller" weighed in with a merciless pre- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The way the pundits were jumping up and down hailing a historic night in British politics, you'd think nobody had ever seen Nick Clegg, David Cameron and Gordon Brown on TV before. This, we were told, could be a historic 90 minutes that would transform our nation's political discourse. "The leaders' debate will be a direct confrontation with the voters that could change the election", according to a man wearing glasses in The Times.I had an inkling the Telegraph's Benedict Brogan could be nearer the mark when he wondered: "What if it's too boring for words?" Sure enough, the first-ever " Read more ...
graeme.thomson
When it first aired in 2007, Outnumbered finally allowed viewers to see children on television really being children (hitting each other, lying, being naturally witty, shouting “Dad attacked that lady” in public), while ruthlessly exploiting the child’s unerring ability to say aloud what we’re really thinking, whether it's about terrorism (“What other religions have blown up planes, Mummy?”) or other cultural hot potatoes.Written and directed by Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin, with the children improvising around the scripted adult actors, the show's main aim was to create a version of domestic Read more ...
howard.male
You might think that an hour-long documentary mainly shot around a slaughter yard and rubbish dump might not make for particularly agreeable television, but trust me, this opener of a three-part series is by turns amusing, life-enhancing and gripping. Producer Will Anderson and director Gavin Searle have done an excellent job of getting under the surface of one of the worlds great megacities. A place that in the space of 50 years has grown from a population of about 300,000 to 16 million today.At first, parts of Lagos society appear to be on the brink of meltdown, but as the documentary Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
At around the same time that Oliver Postgate, that singular genius of children’s television, was knocking up new worlds in his garden shed in Kent, so, in a garden shed in Wiltshire another remarkable maverick, Professor James Lovelock, was assembling a new world of his own. Postgate’s was a moon inhabited by Clangers, while Lovelock’s was a re-imagining of Earth as “Gaia” - and what is perhaps unexpected is that it is children’s entertainer Postgate who comes across as the more melancholy of the two men. Lovelock, by contrast, seems remarkably chipper for a doomsayer who predicts the Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Welcome to the grown-up rock mothership. I've seen bands play in TV studios plenty of times over the years, but walking into the Later... With Jools Holland recording at BBC Television Centre for the first time, as I did last night, is something else. Studios generally have a disappointing feeling of smallness, or of looking behind the curtain to reveal artifice, but this genuinely was like stepping into the TV screen: the circle of bands and punters exactly as you see it when the camera spins around in the show's intro.For full disclosure, I should say here that I have never been a fan of Read more ...
fisun.guner
Goldsmiths has produced 20 Turner Prize winners. It produced Damien Hirst and the majority of the Brit Art pack that caused such a Nineties sensation. It has attracted some pretty impressive tutors to its fine art department – ground-breaking artists in their own right, in fact. As such, the school is considered to be something of a star in itself. So what’s its secret? This BBC Four two-parter aimed to find out - and, you’ve guessed it, in keeping with a certain jaunty documentary-making tradition, it gave the participants just enough rope to hang themselves.If you tuned in last night, you Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Once upon a time, they all laughed at Inspector Morse because it was felt to be too "highbrow". In 2007, ITV axed Foyle's War, despite regular ratings of about 7 million, allegedly to go in pursuit of a "younger" audience. But people power swung into action, and a surge of protest caused ITV to think again. Hence, DCS Christopher Foyle returned for a sixth series, and now here he is again in a seventh.Although that means only three episodes, a two-hour Foyle can normally be relied on to pack in a nutritious mix of whodunnit, plausible characterisation and (the trump card) a well-researched Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
From Monday 12 April, retro channel History is airing a 10-part series called WWII Lost Films. It will present the story of the Second World War from the viewpoints of 12 Americans involved in the war effort, using a newly restored stash of rare and unseen colour footage.Providing a real-life counterpoint to the fictional saga The Pacific (showing on Sky Movies Premiere), the series draws on more than 3,000 hours of film culled from private collections and archives around the globe. The footage has been restored to HD quality and refurbished with Dolby-enhanced audio, with voice-overs Read more ...