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Hillary Clinton: The Power of Women, BBC TwoThursday, 26 March 2015
If the mark of a good documentary is that it teaches you something new, then the awkwardly titled Hillary Clinton: The Power of Women was a very good documentary indeed. Read more... |
Storyville: Masterspy of Moscow - George Blake, BBC FourTuesday, 24 March 2015
“The righteous traitor” must be as provocative a subtitle as any when the subject is espionage. Director George Carey nevertheless used it in this highly revealing film about George Blake, the “spy who got away”, which proved as much about the anatomy of treachery – its correlation with the uneasy relationship of the outsider to a dominant establishment – as it was an investigation of the intelligence world in which Blake played so notable a role. Read more... |
Written By Mrs Bach, BBC FourSaturday, 21 March 2015
The Australian musician and musicologist Martin Jarvis, connected with Charles Darwin University in the Northern Territory, has been obsessed for the past 25 years with proving that Anna Magdalena Wilcke, Johann Sebastian Bach’s second wife, was not only muse, inspiration, and copyist but a composer of pieces that now bear her husband’s name. Read more... |
Ordinary Lies, BBC OneWednesday, 18 March 2015
Screenwriter Danny Brocklehurst has some stellar credits on his CV (Shameless, Exile and The Street among others), though I don't know if Ordinary Lies is going to rate among his finest achievements. Over six episodes, the series will tell the stories of six employees of a car showroom, JS Motor Group Ltd (seemingly somewhere in the north-west), and how being frugal with the actualité blights their lives. Read more... |
Raised by Wolves, Series One, Channel 4Monday, 16 March 2015
For somebody who never seems to be short of things to say, journalist and author Caitlin Moran doesn’t half like to repeat herself. Raised by Wolves is, for those of you keeping score at home, her third attempt to tell the story of growing up chubby, eccentric and poor in Wolverhampton. Read more... |
Nina Conti Clowning Around, BBC FourMonday, 16 March 2015
Ventriloquist Nina Conti, along with her wisecracking sidekick Monkey, has emerged as one of the sharper comedy acts of the past few years but Nina Conti Clowning Around was an uneasy, far from comic film. Read more... |
Britain's Racist Election, Channel 4Monday, 16 March 2015
The story of the 1964 Smethwick election, with its unofficial Tory slogan, “If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour,” is well known. The successful Conservative candidate, Peter Griffiths, subsequently became MP for Portsmouth North, 1979-97, where he advocated the similarly opportunistic but less controversial cause of the naval dockyards, and died in 2013. Read more... |
The Irish Rock Story: A Tale of Two Cities, BBC FourSaturday, 14 March 2015
When a documentary about Irish rock music starts with footage of late-period Bono shuffling about awkwardly dressed in black, my first impulse is to check my iTunes in case he’s surreptitiously shat another album into my computer. The second is to reach for the remote. Thankfully though, this was just a glimpse of what was to come down Ireland's rocky road. Read more... |
Stop Cutting Our Girls: a Comic Relief Special, BBC ThreeThursday, 12 March 2015
Earlier tonight, I read - on Twitter, so I’m not vouching for its accuracy - that more people have now signed a petition to reinstate Jeremy Clarkson at the BBC than to take stronger action against female genital mutilation (FGM) in the UK. FGM, as actress Zawe Ashton (Fresh Meat) quickly finds out in a moving documentary for Comic Relief, is a hard thing to talk about, because vaginas are hard to talk about. Read more... |
In and Out of the Kitchen/BBC Four; Nurse/BBC TwoThursday, 12 March 2015
In and Out of the Kitchen (***), created and written by Miles Jupp, was first heard on Radio 4, a delightful spoof of celebrity chefs and our modern obsessions with food and having the perfect kitchen. Now Jupp and director Mandie Fletcher have brought it to television. Read more... |
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