tv
Harper's IslandFriday, 11 September 2009Caught in a crossfire between licence-payers and rival media groups, the BBC has reached the frankly surreal conclusion that the answer is to cut down on imported programmes. Luckily Harper's Island (BBC3) has snuck in under the wire. Read more... |
Lunch MonkeysThursday, 10 September 2009BBC3 must sometimes feel very strange to its target audience – reflecting back a gallery of skunk-addled obese teenage single-mums not far removed from the nightmares of a Daily Mail reader. There’s no doubting the fruits of its comedy department however, and the likes of Man Stroke Woman, Monkey Dust, The Mighty Boosh, Gavin and Stacey and Being Human are shows that any averagely well-adjusted 16-34-year-old might actually enjoy. The sparky... Read more... |
The Last Days of Lehman Brothers, BBC Two review - big money gone badWednesday, 09 September 2009
In July the BBC brought us Freefall, writer/director Dominic Savage's credit crunch drama. It was a crude morality tale of greed and gullibility, just about compensating for its blatantly schematic characters with sheer pace. Read more... |
Beeb Babes Go To WarTuesday, 08 September 2009Slickness is not always a virtue in a television presenter, and Katherine Jenkins (The Week We Went To War, BBC1) has some way to go before she risks being accused of it. Her chief weapons are her blonde hair, cleavage and searchlight smile -- she isn't so much the new Vera Lynn as one of those pneumatic dream-babes that American aircrews used to paint on the noses of their B17s -- but even so she struggles to... Read more... |
Beatles For (Multiplatform) SaleMonday, 07 September 2009
Oasis have split up, but The Beatles keep getting bigger. This week, in a synchronised splurge of Beatle product of almost D-Day like proportions, their complete remastered albums are being reissued, the group appear in virtual form in the computer game The Beatles: Rock Band, and the BBC continues the Beatles Week which kicked off in a blaze of Kleenex-moistening nostalgia on Saturday. Read more... |
Pages
latest in today
Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, Disney+...
Director Thom Zimny has become the audio-visual Boswell to Bruce Springsteen’s Samuel Johnson, having made...
The Buddha of Suburbia, Barbican Theatre review – farcical f...
Hanif Kureishi’s 1990 novel The Buddha of Suburbia begins like this: “My name is Karim Amir, and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost...
Help to give theartsdesk a future!
It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.
It followed some...
Rigoletto, English National Opera review - another hit for M...
How we used to mock those stuck-in-the-mud opera houses that wheeled out the same moth-eaten production of some box-office favourite decade after...
How To Survive Your Mother, King's Head Theatre review...
It is unsurprising to learn in the post-show Q&A that each audience receives Jonathan Maitland’s new play based on his 2006...
Album: The Cure - Songs of a Lost World
Could melancholia be an elixir of creative youth? Or is it that sad people were never really that youthful, so age suits them? Certainly it seems...
Industry, BBC One review - bold, addictive saga about corpor...
All three seasons of Industry are now on iPlayer, and after watching the most recent one and then backtracking for another...
theartsdesk at Wexford Festival Opera - let's make thre...
Name three operas framing dramas within, and you’d probably come up with Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos...
Dr Strangelove, Noël Coward Theatre review - an evening of d...
Even by Stanley Kubrick’s standards, Dr Strangelove went through an extraordinary evolutionary process. After starting it off as a...
Aci, Galatea e Polifemo, La Nuova Musica, Bates, Wigmore Hal...
Last time I saw the lovelorn Cyclops from Handel’s richly turbulent cantata, Aci, Galatea e Polifemo, he was in a warehouse at Trinity...