tv
The Special Relationship, BBC TwoSunday, 19 September 2010
The double act between screenwriter Peter Morgan and his favoured leading man Michael Sheen has given us some of the most teasingly enjoyable dramas of recent years, but how much genuine insight they've given us into Tony Blair or New Labour remains a moot point. Read more... |
Spitfire Women, BBC FourSaturday, 18 September 2010
“It was the best part of my life,” said one silver-haired lady in ringing tones, while another described it as “poetry” and a third as “the aeroplane and you were one”. What these doughty octogenarians were describing in this gem of a film was flying Spitfires during the Second World War. Read more... |
Herb Alpert, Tijuana Brass and Other Delights, BBC FourFriday, 17 September 2010
I used to have a childhood fascination with the music of Herb Alpert, because I liked the tunes and always felt there was a hint of melancholy behind Herb’s breezy, nonchalant exterior. Everybody else found Alpert laughably cheesy, but happily, this excellent documentary proved that I was right all along by building a watertight case for regarding him as something of a neglected legend. Read more... |
The Road to Coronation Street, BBC FourFriday, 17 September 2010
A drama about Britain’s (and by the time Coronation Street reaches its 50th birthday in December, the world’s) longest-running soap starts with a huge advantage - its producers could just quote lumps of the brilliant original scripts, written by Corrie’s creator, Tony Warren, and be done with it. But Daran Little, himself a former writer on the show, resisted that urge (well, mostly) when penning The Road to Coronation Street, an affectionate and witty prequel that... Read more... |
Dark Blue, Five USAWednesday, 15 September 2010
Jerry Bruckheimer’s production stable has already given us a lifetime’s supply of law-enforcement stories. The hydra-headed CSI franchise has become more ubiquitous than I Love Lucy in its heyday, while Cold Case and the FBI missing-persons yarns of Without a Trace are probably showing on a set near you whether you’re in Saigon or Santiago. Now here’s Jerry’s latest brainchild, Dark Blue, the saga of a crew of undercover Los Angeles cops led by... Read more... |
First Light, BBC TwoWednesday, 15 September 2010
How do you rescue a drama about Spitfire pilots from over half a century of cliché and pastiche, from Kenneth More in Reach for the Sky to Armstrong and Miller’s street-talking RAF officers? After all, put an actor in a flying jacket and a cravat, get him to smoke a pipe and read the paper as he awaits the call to scramble, and you’ve got a 24-carat stereotype. The answer, as the wholly admirable First Light illustrates, is to go back to basics – to find the authentic details... Read more... |
The Trouble with the Pope, Channel 4Monday, 13 September 2010
"The church shouldn't be interfering in the personal and private lives of people - we don't own them." The comment comes from a Catholic priest working with abused children in the Philippines, Father Shay Cullen. It would be good to hear from other men or women of God rather more liberal than Pope Benedict XVI, for whose visit to Britain later this week this programme sounds no trumpets. Read more... |
The Last Night of the Proms, BBC One: The Twitter ReviewSaturday, 11 September 2010
Part 2 @bbcproms. The madness begins. Ms Derham has not switched gowns in the interval. No sign of Titchmarsh, for which we must give thanks. The "traditional" necklace of laurels for Sir Henry Wood's bust. Wonder if he'd welcome his head being polished by a pink rag. How do they pick these pieces? Apols but the Marche joyeuse did not fill this tweeter with joy. On the other hand, here's Renée plus a mike. Read more... |
Mad Men, Series 4, BBC FourWednesday, 08 September 2010
That sobbing musical theme resumes, so does that hospital-white dreamlike cartoon of a male figure tumbling in a Hitchcockian fall from grace past huge ads of poster girls. Actually it’s almost as much Milton as it is Hitchcock. I say that to be deliberately pretentious, because the secret of Mad Men’s addictive draw is the human profundity you try to read into this fascinatingly surfaced drama about an empty man who doesn’t know who he is. This is the ultimate advert for TV, a... Read more... |
This is England '86, Channel 4Wednesday, 08 September 2010
For hundreds of thousands of people watching Shane Meadows’s TV debut last night, an updating (by three years) of the director’s skinhead movie, This is England (2006), the opening episode may well have been their first experience of a "Shane Meadows film". What will they have made of it? Because I’m not sure whether it was exactly a Shane Meadows film, or whether it was a Shane Meadows pastiche or a Shane Meadows homage - "in the style of".... Read more... |
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