tue 23/09/2025

tv

Pilgrimage with Simon Reeve, BBC Two

Matthew Wright

A cynic might say that the presenter of a series entitled Places that Don't Exist is perfectly qualified to go on a long walk to look for religious revelation. In keeping with his past explorations of wild places, Reeve's commentary was better on scenery than spirituality. Yet he didn't have the time to walk the entirety of any of his routes, giving his narration a slightly distant, disjointed feel.

Read more...

The Paradise, Series 2 Finale, BBC One

Tom Birchenough

The sense of an ending is a hard thing to achieve. The Paradise has garnered a loyal following over two series, and no doubt there will be viewers sad to see it depart. But unless options are still being kept open – no announcement either way seems to have surfaced from the BBC – last night’s episode looked like a finale.

Read more...

Get Folked: The Great Folk Revival, More4

Fisun Güner

I can’t say I ever tune into More4, so I confess that I don’t know whether its arts strand is any good, or even if it has one. But I suspect that Get Folked might have made a better three-parter on BBC Four, and not just for dedicated folk-heads. As it was, it tried to pack a lot into its 50 minutes (though allowing only 10 seconds for Mumford and Sons might be seen as a blessing by some) and it did so with a lot of seasoned hyperbole.

Read more...

The Silent War, BBC Two

Adam Sweeting

The cumulative effect of the BBC's Cold War season hasn't been to remind us that truth is stranger than fiction so much as to demonstrate how they swirled together into a miasma of delusion and uncertainty. We've seen Reds under the bed and spies in the ointment and revisited once again notorious episodes of the highest treason.

Read more...

Lionel Bart: Reviewing the Situation, BBC Four

Matt Wolf

These days, it seems you can't move without encountering musicals in some context or another on TV. Series like Smash and Glee trade on the genre to a degree hovering between the loving and the parasitic, while two contrasting documentaries, The Sound of Musicals and The Story of Musicals, have shed varying degrees of light on how shows get actually get to the stage (or not).

Read more...

Imagine: Who's Afraid of Machiavelli?, BBC One

Jasper Rees

There is a wonderful play to be written about the month in 1502 when Cesare Borgia was holed up in a castle in northern Italy with Leonardo da Vinci and Niccolò Machiavelli. Which of these two was working for the fearsome Borgia? Wrong. It was the creator of the Mona Lisa, not the author of The Prince. Machiavelli was a young diplomat of the new Florentine republic without a thought of realpolitik in his idealistic young head.

Read more...

Don't Ever Wipe Tears Without Gloves, BBC Four

Tom Birchenough

The bleak opening of Don’t Ever Wipe Tears Without Gloves is set in a nursing home where a man is dying of AIDS, tended by nurses who themselves know next to nothing of the disease. The phrase one nurse utters as a warning gives this Swedish drama its title: any human contact, even if it’s intended as the smallest act of kindness, risks passing on the infection.

Read more...

Blues America: Woke Up This Morning, BBC Four

Kieron Tyler

“Long may it stay a mystery,” said Keith Richards, the first talking head seen in this opening shot of a two-part excursion through blues music. Self-evidently, two hours devoted to this oft-explored subject wasn’t going to leave too many mysteries. Woke Up This Morning did tread new ground though – at least for British television – by recalibrating perceptions of authenticity and motivation.

Read more...

Legacy, BBC Two

Tom Birchenough

Did we really ever have it quite so bad? One-off drama Legacy, the latest addition to the BBC’s Cold War season, took us back to 1974, civil unrest, power-cuts and the three-day-week. And in Spyland, that nether world of lost certainties and perennial jadedness, the weather’s rarely great anyway. So the lack of sun in Paula Milne’s tight and nuanced adaptation of the Alan Judd novel was no surprise: the clouds of le Carré were lowering.

Read more...

The Culture Show: Vicky Featherstone - All Change at the Royal Court, BBC Two

Matt Wolf

I guess the BBC can't afford researchers or fact-checkers these days. If they could, perhaps something of substance might have arisen from their vacuous Culture Show profile of Vicky Featherstone, the gifted new artistic director of the Royal Court. Oh, and they have might have got the theatre's actual postcode right (SW1W 8AS, as per the Court website), rather than insisting twice on air that it's in (neighbouring) SW3.

Read more...

Pages

 

latest in today

'We are bowled over!' Thank you for your messages... ...
Mark Hussey: Mrs Dalloway - Biography of a Novel review - ec...

Writing in her diary just over 100 years ago on 19th June 1923, Virginia Woolf wrote: “In this...

Jansen, LSO, Pappano, Barbican review - profound and bracing...

Antonio Pappano and the London Symphony Orchestra last seared us in Britten’s amazing Violin Concerto, with Vilde Frang as soloist, on the very...

Jakub Hrůša and Friends in Concert, Royal Opera review - fle...

Between bouts of that far from shabby, still shocking masterpiece Tosca, Royal Opera music director Jakub Hrůša ...

The Weir, Harold Pinter Theatre review - evasive fantasy, bl...

Why are the Irish such good storytellers? The historical perspective is that the oral tradition goes way, way back, allied to the gift of the gab...

Hadelich, BBC Philharmonic, Storgårds, Bridgewater Hall, Man...

Concerts need to have themes, it seems, today, and the BBC Philharmonic’s publicity suggested two contrasting ideas for the opening of its 2025-26...

Album: Mulatu Astatke - Mulatu Plays Mulatu

The tour by the 81-year-old Mulatu Astatke which is currently under way and this album seem to be giving off different...

Music Reissues Weekly: Sly and the Family Stone - The First...

The remarkable The First Family: Live At Winchester Cathedral 1967 represents the first-ever release of a previously...

Monteverdi Choir, ORR, Heras-Casado, St Martin-in-the-Fields...

35 years ago, persona-now-non-grata John Eliot Gardiner revealed how performances of Mozart’s Idomeneo and La Clemenza di Tito...