TV
Jasper Rees
Forty years ago Whispering Bob Harris made a documentary about Queen. He eavesdropped on them as they recorded the album News of the World and then followed them around America on tour. The film was never broadcast but the footage was exhumed for this anniversary and stapled together in Queen: Rock the World (BBC Four), the latest in the BBC's prancing cavalcade of recent documentaries about the band (see sidebar).The reason for the film's non-appearance in 1977 was not made explicit. The charitable explanation is that this was the year of punk and the BBC were alive to a shift in popular Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Laughable though it frequently – oh go on then, always – is, Strike Back is obviously a target-rich environment for those of a thespian persuasion. The likes of Richard Armitage, Andrew Lincoln, Robson Green and Michelle Yeoh have passed through the show’s bullet-spattered portals over its previous five series, and for series six Warren Brown gets the gig as the special forces maverick out for retribution.The source of these vengeful sentiments was revealed in the opening set-piece, stylishly shot in panoramic high-def. A Black Hawk helicopter thudded purposefully across the hot, sandy wastes Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There was much more to Brendan J Byrne’s engrossing, even-handed documentary 66 Days (BBC Four) than its title might at first suggest. The timeline that led up to the death on 5 May 1981 of the IRA prisoner provided its immediate context – an increasingly dramatic one as the countdown of Sands’s hunger strike nears its inexorable conclusion. But the film’s interest was broader, not least in examining his role as a symbolic figure, both in the immediate context of the conflict in Northern Ireland, and across a much wider historical perspective.The drama of Sands’ life and death has already Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
And now the end is near… and so Inspector George Gently faces his final case. Deemed too political to be broadcast in its original slot in May – 10 days before the General Election – Gently and the New Age was postponed until 8.30pm last night. An ignominious time for a crime show that often burst the bonds of genre to create drama of real power. At least, in more ways than one, it went out with a bang.It is December 1970 and yet the winter of discontent seems to have already begun. A scab – or, as John Bacchus (Lee Ingleby) suggests, “a non-union worker” – is stabbed as he crosses Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Repetition can help clarity. It emphasises significance, and shines a light more directly onto something hidden. It can guide us gently into an area we might have otherwise circumvented, and urge us to stare at something for long enough to see beyond, and transcend previous, long-held opinions. It can also, of course, become very tired very fast and that was, sadly, the case with the third series of John Morton’s BBC mockumentary sitcom. It was, to be honest, struggling to find new things to say as early as series two.The joke, and there really has only ever been one, is the doublespeak and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The streets around Grenfell Tower on the morning after it was consumed by fire heaved with people. A stream of donors brought food, clothes and toiletries, while news crews and journalists came in vans or on foot as if arriving in a war zone. Not half a mile from the smouldering sarcophagus, I cycled past a primary school with children playing as normal in the playground, and wondered if this was what the Blitz was like. An unfathomable disaster on the doorstep. The only certain difference was in the camera phones aimed ravenously at the flames still licking the flanks of the tower.Stories Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Hyperbole be damned. The most iconic English classical recording was made on 19 August 1965 in Kingsway Hall, London. Like Maria Callas singing Tosca, Jacqueline du Pré simply was the Elgar Cello Concerto once the LP hit the shops in time for Christmas. Proud, diffident, exuberant, reserved – all those words the English once used of themselves became freely associated with both performer and work, the two almost indistinguishable from one another in popular imagination.Again like Callas, she was a heaven-sent gift for EMI, and not a moment too soon. By 1965 Callas was on the slide – she had Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Much is being made of the fact that Kit Harington is not only playing the Gunpowder Plot mastermind Robert Catesby, but is genuinely descended from him (and his middle name is Catesby). However, despite its factual underpinnings and screenwriter Ronan Bennett’s flowery 17th-century dialogue, Gunpowder is drama in a historical vein, rather than nailed-down fact.This first of three episodes (on BBC One, but all are now available on iPlayer) was broody, dark and menacing, history recycled into a Gothicky netherworld. Westminster, 1603 style, was portrayed as a stygian pile on the bank of the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Chris Packham, who devises and presents programmes about nature and animals, has described himself as "a little bit weird". This autobiographical documentary about himself explained what being on the autistic spectrum meant to him in particular in daily life and beyond.Autism is more and more discussed: more is known about its effects than its causes, and many high achievers have come out or are thought to be on the spectrum. The public hardly ever sees those who are so autistic that anything approaching a normal life is impossible, although a few brave families have made programmes about Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
You might expect a posthumous 90-minute documentary – and that’s before you insert the ad breaks – about one of the biggest stars in British pop music over the last 30 years to shed some light on how said artist became so huge, but also how his career slowed to a crawl and his life came to such a depressing end. Freedom gives you some of the former but absolutely none of the latter. There’s a brief introduction to camera by Kate Moss (all pout and cheekbones) which mentions George’s death last Christmas and says that the film is “his final work”, but other than that Michael’s death might Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
Now we know who sent Jonas Kaufmann the Union Jack boxer shorts for the Last Night of the Proms. Whether the sender’s identity is the bigger surprise, or the hint of ambiguity over whether the "Greatest Tenor in the World" had previously heard of one of Britain’s favourite baritones – well, you decide. And no, we don’t learn who threw the knickers at him from the arena.It’s all good clean fun in the Jonas Kaufmann show. The Last Night of the Proms 2015 was just one incident in an action-packed two years for the German opera star, whose popularity currently sweeps all before it. The Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“He has something of Dillane about him.” Thus Patrick Marber on David Oakes. “I rate him very highly indeed. One of the very best of his generation.” Audiences at the Theatre Royal Haymarket will be able to judge for themselves this autumn. Oakes, 34, stars opposite Natalie Dormer in Marber’s production of Venus in Fur, a sizzling two-hander by David Ives.Oakes’s main field of operation in recent years has been historical fantasy in the likes of The Pillars of the Earth, The Borgias, The White Queen and, currently, Victoria, in which he plays Prince Albert’s doomed romantic brother Ernest. Read more ...