TV
Adam Sweeting
Blame it on J.J. Abrams. With the success of the unfathomable Lost, Abrams altered the consciousness of American TV drama, and made it obligatory to think in at least four dimensions. Hence we had Heroes, in which people could fly, were indestructible, or could alter the course of history. Abrams himself is back on the paranormal beat with Fringe (due back imminently on Sky 1), a kind of X-Files-through-the-Looking Glass.Now here’s FlashForward, Five’s big new buy-in for the autumn, and a series which many reckon looks uncannily like ABC's potential replacement for Lost. The brainchild of Read more ...
william.ward
“Guarda, è come se fosse morta la regina Elisabetta, sai?” I didn’t really need the comparison with the hypothetical demise of our own beloved monarch to be spelled out for me by my partner, a somewhat reserved professor of Paediatric Neurology at one of Rome’s leading hospitals, in order to drive home the deep shock engendered by the sudden death of Italy’s best-loved veteran TV compère on the collective psyche of a nation.True to his quietly heroic and endlessly energetic persona, Mike Bongiorno did not die what our Anglo-Saxon warrior forebears used to call a “cow’s death” – ie in bed, or Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
David Mitchell’s smarty-pants TV panel show ubiquity – over-exposure even by Stephen Fry’s standards - may have started eroding the goodwill built up over five series of Peep Show, but all is forgiven once he’s safely re-garbed in the horribly plausible, drab office-wear of nerdish flatmate Mark. It’s difficult to imagine any other comic actor giving quite the same defeated peevishness to the line: “A new boiler... surely the least enjoyable way to spend a thousand pounds.”The gag belongs of course not to Mitchell but to Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain, the writers who have worked miracles to Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Michael Palin (b 1943) has had - is having - an amazing multi-pronged career. One of the original members of the Monty Python team, he has subsequently reinvented himself as a prolific author, a film and television actor and, more recently, a hugely popular and successful travel show presenter and writer. Palin has a lot to celebrate these next few weeks with the publication of the second volume of his diaries, Halfway to Hollywood, and, next month, Python's 40th birthday (can it really be possible?) Tomorrow Palin is giving a public interview in Ely Cathedral for the Cambridge Film Festival Read more ...
michael.palin
This second volume of my diaries covers my life from the beginning of the 1980s to the night before I set out from the Reform Club in September 1988 on Around The World In Eighty Days, the journey that was to change my life.For me the 1980s was the decade when I could have become a Hollywood star, but didn’t. I made plenty of films, seven in seven years, but they were all incorrigibly British. Two were with Terry Gilliam. Time Bandits, British to the core, nevertheless topped the US box-office charts for five weeks. Brazil is constantly voted one of the world’s favourite movies. The diaries Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
They say you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone, and despite its sometimes erratic quality control, the loss of The South Bank Show (ITV1) is going to be like having a leg sawn off TV's arts coverage.The final season got off to a thunderous start last week with Tony Palmer’s film about the Wagner family. Wives, children and grandchildren elbowed each other aside in their eagerness to accuse each other of barbaric behaviour or rabid anti-Semitism. When Richard Wagner composed Parsifal, apparently he was creating nothing less than the complete blueprint for the Third Reich. Who knew? Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
Secondary school teachers accused of not pointing their brighter students towards Oxbridge might feel vindicated by ITV2’s Trinity - although the messages were a little mixed. On the one hand the fictional elitist university college in this new teen dramedy-thriller is dominated by sadistic, floppy-fringed toffs and their debauched secret societies. On the other hand some state-educated freshers might quite like the idea of being asked by lithe, blue-blooded blondes, “Have you ever come on a member of the royal family?”This unsubtle entreaty – addressed to Reggie Yates’s Lewisham lad Theo - Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“If you've been affected by any of the issues in this episode, click here.” I wouldn’t bother. Really. In fact I haven’t put the link in. They are – trust me - just ticking boxes. Some kind of Ofcom diktat. “If you’ve been affected bla bla bla,” it says when you click, “here are the details of organisations that can provide help and support.” It’s a long old list. You’ve probably not got the time, but here goes.There's a whole Rotadex of numbers for the Samaritans, Childline, Missing People, Drinkline, the Terence Higgins Trust, the Lesbian and Gay Switchboard, helplines offering advice on Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Though our French cousins like to boast of their superiority to the Anglo-Saxons in every sphere of endeavour, the Paris-based police dama Spiral, returning after a three-year absence, suggests that the Cartesian paradise across the Channel is under siege. Already, it’s clear that the ghoulish murder that opened this first episode of series two has triggered an examination of the interplay of police, politicians and judiciary which threatens to uncover hideous secrets in the loftiest eyries of the French establishment.You could say that Spiral’'s subject matter makes it a kind of Gallic Law Read more ...
Jasper Rees
I have a little story concerning correct usage. Several years ago, when BBC Three had yet to overtake Channel 5 and VH1 as perhaps the world’s leading purveyor of documentaries about breasts and suchlike, I received a press release in the post. The young channel’s fresh approach to quality control on screen had percolated through to its publicity department. The release contained a motorway pile-up of typos. A red mist descended, not unadjacently to where I sat, and I confess that I wrote off. To the head of publicity, BBC, Wood Lane, postcode, the whole bit.The letter was delicately phrased Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Last night the latest segment of the BBC’s new online soap for teens played on computer screens across the land. OK, if we’re splitting hairs, it wasn’t technically last night. The show is streamed every afternoon at ten past five. However, the grand Panjandrum who pulls most of the strings round here advises that frontloading your opening paragraph with last+night this and last+night that will hoik you rapidly up the squash ladder that is Google Search. Which is why last night - around about teatime - I got to thinking about the title. Why The Cut? A quick recap of the plot, if you will, up Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Beeb’s bold new experiment continues: to dish out a daily online teen soap in five-minute episodes. Am just about over the cyber-stress of Sunday’s part one. Couple of streaming issues were in play. Basically my laptop took to it like a boa wolfing down a rhino. All ironed out now. I can happily report that part two didn’t even touch the sides.The Cut is available to view from 5.10pm every afternoon on something called BBC Switch. If anyone knows why it’s called BBC Switch please advise promptly in the comment box below. Anyway, that scheduling decision seem a bit pernickety? A bit OCD? Read more ...