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Versailles, Series Finale, BBC TwoThursday, 11 August 2016
So much has happened since the first of June when Versailles flounced on to our screens with its flowing locks and flashing cocks. The British people have voted to widen the Channel, the Conservatives have a new leader, Labour doesn’t have one and Christopher Biggins has been expelled from the Big Brother house. As Louis XIV might have said: plus ça change… Read more...
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Brexit: The Battle for Britain, BBC TwoTuesday, 09 August 2016
Did we really need to go through this all over again? The referendum campaign left roughly half the nation levitating on cloud nine, and roughly the other half feeling amputated. We all know what happened, but in this hour-long post-mortem Laura Kuenssberg went looking under rocks for extra titbits and morsels that could explain from the inside of the two campaigns how Britain voted for the trapdoor/sunlit upland marked Exit. Read more... |
The Living and the Dead, Series Finale, BBC OneWednesday, 03 August 2016
If Ashley Pharoah's superior chiller began with its 19th century protagonist, Nathan Appleby, trying to apply science and reason to seemingly irrational events, by the end of this sixth and final episode he had strayed way beyond the outer limits. Not only had the murky past of the Somerset village of Shepzoy reared up in numerous terrifying manifestations, but Nathan and his wife Charlotte were also receiving vivid and disturbing flashes into the future. Read more... |
The Girl from Ipanema: Brazil, Bossa Nova and the Beach, BBC FourTuesday, 02 August 2016
Some years ago broadcaster Andy Kershaw introduced on BBC World Service radio a piece of Brazilian music with this blunt dismissal: “When I hear a track by, say, Gilberto Gil, I tell myself: ‘Right, time to take the lift and go to bed’.” It wasn’t a terribly joined-up complaint, but (in Kershaw-speak at least) it made sense. Read more... |
Masters of the Pacific Coast: The Tribes of the American Northwest, BBC FourFriday, 29 July 2016
The American northwest is gorgeous: endless lakes, limitless ocean, mountains, forests, overwhelming blue skies in deepest summer, mists and of course rain, in one of the wettest places on earth – 4 metres of rain annually. Here were hundreds of islands too, archipelagos in a land almost infinitely rich in resources, from the Alaskan Panhandle and British Columbia south to Washington State. Read more... |
Naked Attraction, Channel 4Tuesday, 26 July 2016
Remember Sex Box? Perhaps you were wisely watching paint dry that night instead. Sex Box was part of Channel 4’s ongoing commitment to making the nation’s toes curl in horror. It involved couples getting it eponymously on in the titular container, after which they emerged blinking into the studio lights to give a blow by blow account to Mariella Frostrup. As if that wasn’t barrel-scrapingly unBritish enough, here for your viewing pleasure is Naked Attraction. Read more... |
Saddam Goes to Hollywood, Channel 4 / Keith Richards: The Origin of the Species, BBC TwoMonday, 25 July 2016
Incredible but true, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein really did hire a largely-British film crew to come to his country and make a movie called Clash of Loyalties, about how Iraq freed itself from British influence in the 1920s and blossomed into an independent state. It never made it as far as a cinema release, but the footage was recently rediscovered in a garage in Surrey by its producer, Latief Jorephani (pictured below). Read more... |
Imagine... Danger! Cornelia Parker, BBC OneWednesday, 20 July 2016
Squash! Bulldoze! Blow-Up! Tie Up! Break-Up! Re-Build! There is practically nothing the artist Cornelia Parker won’t and can’t do with found materials, offcuts, the discarded and the recycled, not to mention tieing up Rodin’s The Kiss at the Tate in miles of string. Read more... |
The Secret Agent, BBC OneMonday, 18 July 2016
Based on an abortive real-life attempt to blow up the Royal Observatory in Greenwich in 1894, Joseph Conrad's novel The Secret Agent has sometimes been held up as a harbinger of the kind of terrorist attacks the world has been subjected to by the likes of Baader-Meinhof, Al Qaeda and Isis. Doubtless this was part of the BBC's motivation for making this new three-part dramatisation. Read more... |
The Hunter, All4Saturday, 16 July 2016
Crime and detective drama often shows us who we think we are. Despite typically baroque plotting, and murder statistics in which the sleepiest of rural settings shades downtown Aleppo, there’s a sense that in how we respond to poisoning, stabbing and strangling, a quintessential national characteristic emerges. Be it Sarah Lund, Hercule Poirot, or any of Ray Winstone’s gravelly felons, television’s criminals and detectives hold a mirror to the soul. Read more... |
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