tue 19/03/2024

BBC Four

Prisoner, BBC Four review - jailhouse rocked by drugs, violence and racism

The notion of prison as a pressure cooker of human behaviour and emotions is hardly a new one, but it can provide formidable fuel for drama. It does so here in this ferociously gripping Danish series, which hails from the same production company as...

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TS Eliot: Into The Waste Land, BBC Two / Four Quartets, Starring Ralph Fiennes, BBC Four review - a great 100th birthday present to a giant of modern literature

Can you make modern poetry come to life on a TV screen? The BBC has had two stabs recently at answering this question, as part of the centennary celebrations for TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, seen by many as the greatest poem of the 20th century. One...

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Trom, BBC Four review - there's something fishy in the North Atlantic

In the middle of a pavement-cracking, railway-melting heatwave, what could be more refreshing than a visit to the bleak but bracing landscapes of the Faroe Islands? This 18-island archipelago midway between Norway and Iceland is where BBC Four’s...

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The Winter's Tale, RSC, BBC Four review - post-war poise colours a solid production

It has been a hard coming for this RSC Winter’s Tale. Erica Whyman’s production was cancelled by the virus days before its premiere last spring, with plans to stage it in the autumn frustrated by the second lockdown. This broadcast version,...

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Spiral, Series 8 Finale, BBC Four review - justice is done in stormy climactic episodes

If this had to be the end of Spiral, the final episodes of Series 8 (BBC Four) at least ensured that justice was done. We saw evidence that on occasion lawyers may be human after all, and there was even the somewhat disorientating semblance of a...

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Spiral, Series 8, BBC Four review - dark days in the City of Light

The discovery of a grotesque murder is the traditional way to begin a new series of Spiral, and this time around the cadaver belonged to a young Moroccan boy, nicknamed Shkun. He’d been beaten to death with an iron bar and stuffed into a laundromat...

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First Person: Paul Bullock on making BBC Young Jazz Musician 2020

Producing music programmes for TV with live performance during the past few months has not been without its challenges, but somehow doing so right now feels more important than ever – both for the pleasure it brings audiences and as support for the...

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Being Beethoven, BBC Four review – from grubby kid to grumpy genius

Documentaries like this one make me sentimental for a time, until about 25 years ago, when classical music was a more or less weekly presence on terrestrial TV. Now fast disappearing from view altogether, on mainstream media and in school...

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Storyville: Welcome to Chechnya, BBC Four review - trauma, tension and resistance

David France’s revelatory film may have been subtitled “The Gay Purge”, but from the start it was clear this wasn’t just another documentary from Russia charting the increasing pressure faced by that country’s queer community. Since “propaganda” of...

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The Hidden Wilds of the Motorway, BBC Four review - mysteries and marvels of the M25

The nightmarishness of the M25 motorway is well known, especially if you get stuck on the Heathrow section on a wet Sunday night, but as she perambulated around the motorway’s circumference for this idiosyncratic BBC Four documentary, naturalist...

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New Music Lockdown 12: Glastonbury Festival Special

This morning at 9.00 AM would be when Worthy Farm opened its gates to the hedonistic hordes. The weather is scorchio and Glastonbury 50 would have been such a party. Instead, that will all be Glastonbury 2021. So right now, those who love their...

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Tutankhamun in Colour, BBC Four review - amazing enhanced images bring fabled Pharaoh to life

Tut in colour, and he is! The new painstaking technique of colourising vintage black and white photographs and film was touchingly exploited in this documentary for BBC Four to narrate the most thrilling and best-known archaeological discovery ever...

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