TV
Adam Sweeting
While a spot of home cooking can be a relaxing experience with a nice meal at the end of it, signing up to this culinary campaign with Michelin-starred mega-chef Jason Atherton is like being sent off to join the Foreign Legion. The plan is that Atherton and his trusted advisers Dale and Andy pick a squad of young, untried chefs from around Britain, then take them to top restaurants across Europe to see if they can beat the locals at their own recipes.They began in Puglia, southern Italy, at a restaurant called Osteria Origano, where they were greeted by the cheerful proprietor Alfredo and his Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s been nearly a decade since the sixth and final series of Lost, JJ Abrams’s baffling odyssey of time-travelling air crash survivors, but judging by Manifest, its influence still hovers over TV-land. Produced by (among others) film director Robert Zemeckis, Manifest is another mystical thriller that might make you think twice about boarding that holiday flight.This first episode began with vacationers gathering at the airport in Montego Bay, Jamaica for their flight home to New York. We zoomed in on the Stone family, comprising Ben, his wife Grace and two children, his sister Michaela and Read more ...
Veronica Lee
This episode of the celebrity genealogy show began with footage of Naomie Harris at Ian Fleming's former home in Jamaica, where she was helping launch Bond 25 (to be released next year), in which she is playing Moneypenny for the third time. It was a fitting location, as Harris’s folks hail from the Caribbean; her mother was born in Jamaica and her father's family are from Trinidad via Grenada.But, unusually for a subject of this consistently engaging show, Harris told us she was never interested in her origins. It was a strange admission – what really, no interest at all? – but one that a Read more ...
Tom Baily
Cindy Sherman predicted the selfie, so goes the claim. From our current standpoint, it is all too easy to analyse her many hundreds of photographic self-portraits made since the late 1970s as cultural forebears of the digital medium. What this BBC Arena film opens up, alongside that bold claim, is a question about the mystery of Sherman as a person: who is she and why has she done what she’s done? Always reclusive, refusing public appearances, and elusive about her work, Sherman seems to have designed the enigmatic tone with which she is publicly discussed. Here, a small but rewarding effort Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was a year ago that BBC One scored a smash hit with the first series of Keeping Faith, but as series two opens 18 months have passed since Faith Howells’s husband Evan (Bradley Freegard) disappeared and triggered a traumatic chain reaction of events. Apparently the patriarch of a close and loving family, with himself and Faith both working in the family law firm, Evan had become embroiled in all sorts of murky stuff (bribery, corruption, perverting the course of justice etc). Was this really the devoted husband and father that Faith had known?All will be revealed across these six new Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s a bold idea by director Dominic Savage, to create three improvised dramas for Channel 4 depicting women confronting different forms of crisis. To make it work he needed brave and powerful performers, and this first one starred Vicky McClure (the remaining two will feature Samantha Morton and Gemma Chan).McClure’s Nicola was a hairdresser, caught in a deteriorating relationship with her partner Adam (Perry Fitzpatrick, pictured below with McClure), and she was reaching her wits’ end trying to find a solution. The piece was mostly shot in the couple’s suburban home, the claustrophobic Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was on 16 July 1969 that Apollo 11 lifted off from Florida en route for the Moon, and exactly 50 years later, as we nervously anticipate the dawn of commercial flights into space, the event resonates louder than ever. Here, Professor Brian Cox called it “the greatest achievement in the history of civilisation.” According to veteran broadcaster Sir Trevor McDonald, it was “the most magnificent thing that ever happened.”The TV networks have been saturating us in moon-shot memorabilia, and in the cinema we’ve had Todd Douglas Miller’s imposing feature-length documentary Apollo 11, but this Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Not everybody is on Facebook, yet. So far, Mark Zuckerberg’s social media monolith has only managed to scrape together about 2.3 billion users, roughly one-third of the planet. But as this fascinating documentary revealed, Facebook’s plans are huge and its ambitions boundless.The title alluded to recent problems at Facebook, including the massive 2018 data breach in which the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica acquired information from 87 million Facebook users, and its struggles against online hate crime. These crises temporarily knocked 20 per cent off Facebook’s share price, and Read more ...
Tom Baily
The Apollo 11 mission remains the most celebrated journey humanity has ever made. It produced some of our most iconic images, as well as the greatest speech gaffe, and a documentary of epic scale could be made that focused solely on the influence it has had on our popular culture. 8 Days has a different aim, asking the question, “What was it really like for those three astronauts over the course of those eight days?” Using real recordings, archival footage and re-enactments, we are given the inside story of what happened inside the lunar capsules.Like other recent film productions (including Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
“I want to discover how our government could fall apart and the country become bitterly divided in just a few weeks,” historian Lisa Hilton announced at the start of her BBC Four account of the traumatic demise of Charles I. In a mere 50 days in 1641-2, it seemed that the foundations of the state were sawn away as England tumbled towards a calamitous civil war.Well, in outline it was fairly simple. Take one absolute monarch convinced that he enjoyed the divine right of kings and sublimely indifferent to the opinions of his subjects, and pitch him against the leader of the House of Commons Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Healthy, efficient and carbon-neutral, cycling ought to be a transport panacea. But in the dash for lycra, perhaps not enough attention has been paid to letting bikes and motor vehicles co-exist peacefully. This deliberately provocative Channel 5 documentary, which has sparked an angry backlash from within the cycling community, found plenty of ammunition from both sides.It took the easy option by rounding up some grouchy London black-cab drivers to have a sustained whinge about the two-wheeled plague which they see as yet another threat to their livelihood (nobody mentioned Uber). They Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s a topical idea, at least. Isaac Mensah, a child actor from a working-class family in London, has been cast in a Hollywood sci-fi blockbuster, and when he returns home his family and friends are agog to find out what his amazing movie experience was like. But the sky falls in when Isaac (Max Fincham) plays his parents a video he shot on his phone, containing evidence that he was abused by the film’s all-powerful producer, Jotham Starr, the boss of Yonder Starr Productions.Somehow though, the parts add up to less than a whole, with neither characters nor action feeling especially plausible Read more ...