TV
Adam Sweeting
You could sometimes begin to believe that the notion of original TV drama is dying out, replaced by an interminable stream of adaptations and remakes. Did somebody mention Dracula? Screenwriter Sarah Phelps is currently the BBC’s go-to specialist for makeovers of Agatha Christie, having adapted The Witness for the Prosecution, And Then There Were None, The ABC Murders, and Ordeal by Innocence.She’s unapologetic about the extensive changes she wreaks upon Christie’s source material (in Ordeal by Innocence, she notoriously changed the identity of the killer). “Have I changed a load of stuff? Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The nation’s public attics – museums – hold a huge jumble of objects collected and used in all sorts of ways to tell us stories of past and present. In this BBC Two film, we went behind the visible face of the Victoria and Albert, with its holdings of more than two million objects, to visit a complementary hidden world staffed by technicians, conservators and curators tending to their charges.The breadth and depth of the collections were truly startling. Bethnal Green’s Museum of Childhood, a branch of the V&A held the biggest collection in Britain of children’s toys. We met the deeply Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The L Word originally ran for six seasons between 2004 and 2009, and its then-revolutionary depiction of the lives of a group of lesbians in Los Angeles won it both a fanatical audience and acclaim for its game-changing content, exploring such topics as same-sex marriage, gay adoption and female sexuality which weren't being seen elsewhere on TV. But more than a decade later, how will this revamped version (on Sky Atlantic) fare?Whereas the prototype landed in a TV environment where viewers needed extra-sensory perception to detect a lesbian (let alone trans) character, that now feels like Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The benefits system is feared for its resemblance to a vast poisonous swamp, from whose clutches many travellers fail to return. Universal Credit began to be rolled out in 2013, having been announced in 2010 by Conservative work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith, and was supposed to bulldoze a path through the welfare jungle. However, it remains mired in controversy.Critics claim the system is complicated to navigate, and causes delays in payment which can drive claimants into homelessness or force them to rely on food banks. Only this week it was announced that the full implementation Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Inspector Muhsin al-Khafaji of the Iraqi police may be set to become one of those classically dog-eared, depressed and down-at-heel detectives who have proliferated in crime fiction. He could join a lineage that includes Martin Cruz Smith’s battered Russian sleuth Arkady Renko, or Bernie Gunther, anti-hero of Philip Kerr’s Berlin Noir trilogy. Or he may create his own category of one.Like the aforementioned, Khafaji finds himself battling for survival against a hostile regime (or at least the chaotic and combustible remains of one, as the heavy-handed Americans impose themselves on a Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Are you a fan of oysters or Marmite? Mary Beard is not to everybody’s taste, but love her or loathe her she is not only a distinguished academic but a ubiquitous writer and presenter of classical histories, connected travels, and ruminations on societal problems. She is enthusiastic, staggeringly energetic, erudite, profoundly knowledgable, the antithesis of fashionable in both opinion and appearance.Surprisingly, this survey (on BBC Two) of representations of the nude in Western art was unusually bland, at times banal, even though our presenter obviously set out to be provoking. There are a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz reminds us once again of the unfathomable horror of the Holocaust. The revival of anti-semitism in our own country and elsewhere is why it’s worth telling these terrible stories again and again.Belsen: Our Story (BBC Two) gathered together a small group of survivors – all looking remarkably healthy, considering their age and their experiences – to knit together the saga of the Belsen-Bergen camp in northern Germany. Originally an internment camp for prisoners of war, it was only later redesignated a concentration camp, and became steadily Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Journalist Sunny Hundal has a long track record as a writer and blogger concerned with issues of race, politics and ethnicity. He’s also the brother of the late Jagraj Singh, an influential preacher who encouraged a dramatic upsurge of interest in the Sikh faith among young people, not least through his hugely successful YouTube channel. The determinedly non-religious Sunny used to argue bitterly with his brother, so much so that they didn’t speak to each other for years.Perhaps they would eventually have come to a reconciliation had Jagrav not died of cancer (aged 38) in 2017, but Sunny will Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Drums away: Stewart Copeland, drummer with The Police and a score of other groups, composer for films, video games and operas, now beams enthusiastically at us from the small screen. He’s writer and presenter of this three-part Adventures in Music series for BBC Four, which has as its thesis his view that music is what made us human, differentiated us from the Neanderthal and was our earliest form of communication. Sounds came before words. Copeland was imprinted early. He remembered sitting in a dark room aged seven, listening to Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, and recognising in some way Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
We hear plenty of debate about climate change and its disastrous potential, but the ballooning growth of the world’s population may be the most critical issue facing humankind. Chris Packham thinks so (“it’s undeniably the elephant in the room,” he says, though lack of elephants is one of its many alarming symptoms) and in this documentary for BBC Two he criss-crossed the planet to show us the evidence.The earth’s population is about 7.7 billion now and is predicted to reach 10 billion by 2050. Packham touched down in Sao Paolo, Brazil, where the population is five times greater than London’s Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The race continues to create the most ridiculous cooking programme on TV. Channel 4’s new brainchild, Crazy Delicious, finds the culinary nutty professor Heston Blumenthal teaming up with fellow-judges Carla Hall and Niklas Ekstedt to become the “Gods of Food”.Each week, three amateur contestants turn up on a studio set which supposedly represents some kind of mythical garden or bosky glade from classical mythology (though with its warped scenery and funny-coloured foliage, it mostly looks like something out of an ancient episode of Star Trek), where they can find an exotic array of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Stephen King’s novels have generated an impressive lineage of successful adaptations. This HBO treatment (on Sky Atlantic) of his 2018 novel The Outsider, developed by Richard Price and featuring screenwriting input from Dennis Lehane, is shaping up as one of the best TV incarnations. If the first two episodes established an atmosphere of pervasive horror and dread, this third one began to lure the realistically-drawn world of Cherokee City, Georgia further into King’s familiar supernatural territory.It’s a town metaphorically shot in black and white, where nothing cheerful ever looks likely Read more ...