TV
Adam Sweeting
Can women have it all? (Stop me if you’ve already heard this one). This is the premise of Joe Ahearne’s new three-part drama, set in the offices of a successful firm of architects in Glasgow. But he’s a bloke, what would he know about it? Anyway, just as Ellen (Morven Christie) had joyously celebrated being appointed an associate, she found she was pregnant and would have to recruit somebody to cover for her in her absence.The pregnancy seemed to be as much of a surprise to Ellen as it was to everybody else, and she was only too well aware that her timing was not perfect. Nonetheless, her Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
To Westminster and Meet the Lords, a series which Radio Times assures me follows “the larger-than-life characters” in one of our “most idiosyncratic and important institutions”. Obviously it was shot well before the current Brexit deliberations in the Lords, and this first of three films was largely concerned with the passage of the government’s housing bill last year. This perhaps offered a taste of what their Lord and Ladyships hope to do with Brexit, as they roused themselves indignantly from their post-prandial slumbers against aspects of the housing legislation, and forced the government Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The first series of Broadchurch was a gigantic hit four years ago, though 2015’s follow-up suffered a bit of a slow puncture. Can this third and supposedly final outing restore the show to its former glories?Episode one made a tidy and reasonably tense starter, though with seven more to go, you knew that whatever happened here was merely slapping on the undercoat for the (presumably) astounding and stunning revelations scheduled for later on by writer Chris Chibnall. Also, revisiting the same picturesque Dorset coastal town for the third time inevitably means its original freshness and Read more ...
Ralph Moore
It’s a fairly big deal to be interviewing Stan Lee. Generations have been enthralled by his work, from the 1960s comics The Amazing Spider-Man and The Uncanny X-Men – which came to the UK first as US imports and later as black and white reprints via Marvel UK – to the more colourful world of Doctor Strange via The Incredible Hulk and Daredevil. Almost four decades on, the co-creator of Spider-Man (reclusive Spider-Man artist and co-creator Steve Ditko, 89, is alive and well too) and all those heroes and villains has now achieved a global level of fame and notoriety that he never quite Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Can something be gained in translation? From its title The Swingers promises much. Much more than the original Dutch title Nieuwe Buren, which the caption in the opening credit sequence translates as The Neighbours. Someone in syndication has asked themselves the question: who the hell watches Dutch TV dramas called The Neighbours (aside from captive Dutch audiences)? And made the decision to pep things up for the international audience.It’s a bold change. Will the show come good on the promise of what in the patriarchal 1970s they used to call wife-swapping? Channel 4 is positioning it as Read more ...
David Nice
Those of us who saw the first, 1977 TV adaptation of Alex Haley's Roots in our teens still remember the shock and horror at its handling of a subject about which we knew little, American slavery. We know a lot more now, but the visceral reaction to inhumanity and injustice is no less strong. That's thanks to the high production values of the latest version, its gift for finding the right actors, and the often giddying cinematography of an honourable mainstream parallel to a towering masterpiece among movies, 12 Years a Slave.Roots, originally commissioned by the History Channel, may be more Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now…One of the many ironies of Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon’s massive novel partly set in 1940s London, is that what follows these opening lines (760 pages in the original edition) actually occurs in the blink of an eye: the time it takes for the falling bomb to hit the sitting ducks in a picturehouse audience. Viewers of The Halcyon have known a bomb explodes at a party to celebrate the luxury hotel’s 50th year in November 1940 ever since the first episode eight weeks ago. Tonight we learned Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Slipped out in the Storyville slot without much fanfare, Life, Animated is the Oscar-nominated documentary which won a theatrical release and rave reviews in the US and UK last year. It’s a horribly clichéd word, but heart-warming is the best way to describe this tale of a young autistic man, Owen Suskind, who learnt to speak via his passion for Disney animations.We first see Owen in home movie footage, a chatty toddler play-acting Peter Pan with his dad. But soon after that footage was shot, he lost all his speech and began to display other worrying signs – problems with motor control, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
“What if the Germans had won the war?” has been a recurring theme in fiction, from Noel Coward’s Peace in Our Time to Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle and Robert Harris’s Fatherland. There was even a predictive pre-war “future history” version, in the form of Katherine Burdekin’s 1937 novel, Swastika Night.In SS-GB, tellified from Len Deighton’s novel by writers Neal Purvis and Robert Wade (who’ve written all the recent Bond movies), it’s November 1941. The RAF’s famous “Few” having failed to stem the Nazi onslaught – the blackly-ironic opening sequence showed us a Spitfire flown by Read more ...
Liz Thomson
“I’m not necessarily the ‘I’ in my songs” declared Tom Waits in James Maycock's documentary, its title a tipping of the proverbial hat to another artist who, in his 69 years on earth, inhabited many roles.Tom Waits has mostly kept journalists at arm’s length and he’s never been one to talk about his private life, so producer/director Maycock (whose subjects have included Yehudi Menuhin and Yoko Ono) relied on archives for this rewarding 60-minute film. But he found plenty of other figures prepared to speak intelligently about his work, and in some cases about the man.Role-playing is a way of Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
Tasmania, Down Under is like Canvey Island (although somewhat larger): everyone knows where it is but no one wants to go there. The Kettering Incident reveals why: the bleak but beautiful landscape is blasted by Antarctic gales and the natives, with few exceptions, are ugly devils, resentful of strangers and quarrelsome with their neighbours. And that’s just the humans.This eight-part “supernatural” drama began with a shot of a column of rock thrusting out of the sea between a V-shaped cleft in cliffs. Alas, what followed was also a load of cock. We’ve seen it all before, many times.This is Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Two years ago BBC Four had a film about a year in the life of Scafell Pike. Arriving at glacial pace is the sequel: Life of a Mountain: A Year on Blencathra. The star this time round is more of a best supporting character actor than a headline performer. It’s only the 18th highest of England’s peaks. As one photographer explained, you can’t get a decent shot of all of its five-felled south-facing expanse. For a long time it even had the wrong name imposed on it: Saddleback, on account of the dipping ridge between its peaks. Alfred Wainwright, who still has the final word on these things in Read more ...