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Peckham Finishing School For Girls, BBC Three

Fisun Güner Thursday, 17 June 2010

We know the format: take a bunch of posh, privileged types - held up as examples of cluelessness when it comes to how “ordinary” people live by privileged, overpaid TV executives - and plonk them down in the middle of some dodgy council estate. Remove their credit cards and give them £6.50 to last a week. Watch as they baulk at the amount of cash their new, jobless neighbour manages to spend on fags, kebabs and the occasional drug habit.

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True Stories: We Live in Public, More4

howard Male Tuesday, 15 June 2010

The fears of a clown: Dot-com pioneer Josh Harris learnt that the future isn't always bright

With the last ever series of Big Brother dominating Channel Four’s schedules for the rest of the summer, the first TV screening of this Sundance Film Festival award-winner couldn’t have been better timed. Because the chillingly disconcerting “art project” that dot-com pioneer Josh Harris devised back in 1999 (just before Big Brother came on air for the first time) made the world’s most controversial reality TV show look like Kenneth Clarke’s Civilisation, by...

Who Do You Think You Are? - Sarah Jessica Parker, BBC One

graeme Thomson Sunday, 13 June 2010

American television's desire to upgrade the BBC’s Who do You Think You Are? into a prime piece of emotional real estate was never likely to meet any serious resistance.

Father & Son, ITV1

Adam Sweeting Tuesday, 08 June 2010

Dougray Scott as Michael O'Connor, unable to escape his gangland connections

I always used to wonder why casting directors ever sent for Dougray Scott when they might just as well have used an old chest of drawers or a pile of deckchairs instead, but at last this gloomy Scottish actor seems to be coming into his own. Maybe his stint in Desperate Housewives kicked something loose, but he wasn't bad at all in BBC One's ...

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Gleeful: The Real Show Choirs of America, E4

howard Male Monday, 07 June 2010

An American show choir emoting for all they're worth

My excuse is that I was comfortably settled on the sofa next to my wife when the first episode of Glee aired, and I just got drawn in. I know, it’s not much of an excuse - and it hardly explains the fact that I then went on to watch the next 20 episodes - but there we are. And as a heterosexual middle-aged ex-punk rocker, I’m certainly not the obvious target demographic for this latest American television...

Doctor Who: Vincent and the Doctor, BBC One

Adam Sweeting Sunday, 06 June 2010

The Doctor Who crew are fond of their encounters with historical characters. In his time, and let's face it he has infinite supplies of it, the Doc has rubbed shoulders with Shakespeare, Charles Dickens and Agatha Christie, and recently weathered the Blitz with Winston Churchill. For this one, "Vincent and the Doctor", le Docteur voyaged back to 19th-century Provence to straighten out a puzzling temporal kink.

Pulse, BBC Three

Gerard Gilbert Friday, 04 June 2010

'Grey's Anatomy' it ain't: the interns in BBC Three's hospital horror pilot 'Pulse'

Call me a grumpy old man if you like, but on an average week it can be hard to see the point of BBC Three - unless the point is for an overly expansionist state broadcaster to patronise the nation’s youth as a generation of weight- and Wag-obsessed delinquents with an unhealthy taste for autism and Asperger’s. But then on rare good weeks – or perhaps even years - along...

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Atlantis: The Evidence, BBC Two

Fisun Güner Thursday, 03 June 2010

Did Atlantis really exist? Hughes’s infectious enthusiasm carried us along nicely

Here’s a question: what have the eminent Victorian statesman and four-times prime minister William Gladstone and the Nazi Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler have in common? Well, if you didn’t catch last night’s Timewatch Special, you'd probably never guess. They were both obsessed with discovering that great, drowned civilisation of antique myth, Atlantis. Gladstone thought it was located somewhere on the South Atlantic, so he proposed a government sponsored expedition but was turned down...

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What Makes a Great Tenor? BBC Four

Adam Sweeting Wednesday, 02 June 2010

Thus I approached What Makes a Great Tenor? in a spirit of moderate scepticism. Had appearing on Popstar to Operastar destroyed at a stroke the credibility of its presenter, the Mexican tenor Rolando Villazón?

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Rick Stein's Food of the Italian Opera, BBC Four

william Ward Wednesday, 02 June 2010

Golfing for Cats: Alan Coren once invented the perfect book title on the basis that if you combined those who follow the activities of Tiger Woods with those who adore smaller domestic felines, you have a massive demographic primed to buy your last tome. Likewise for TV commissioning editors, there must be something tempting about the high-concept hybrid.