BBC Three
Jasper Rees
This debate about the future of the BBC might be missing the point. In the black corner scowls the Dark Lord of Swingeing Arts Cuts John Whittingdale, while in the fluffy corner is everyone who doesn’t want anything to change. By their “I heart Lyse Doucet” shall you know the latter. We’re all of us, on both sides of the fence, of a certain vintage. The kids, who like it or not seem an absolute dead-cert shoo-in to inherit the future, haven’t got a dog in this fight. Why? Because they don’t watch TV. Any more than they buy newspapers. They watch YouTube. If they like the BBC it’s as a Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Josh Widdicombe is the tousle-haired guy at the end of the sofa on Channel 4's The Last Leg – where, as in his stand-up, he's permanently baffled by life and quickly reaches screaming pitch about the most minor of controversies. And so, in his new sitcom – written with Tom Craine, a fellow stand-up and his former flatmate – he plays to type as a tousle-haired guy who's permanently baffled by life and quickly, etc, etc.Widdicombe plays Josh, a twentysomething who shares a flat with two former university chums - Kate (Beattie Edmondson) and Owen (Elis James). Their landlord Geoff ( Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
All the politicians lined up to chorus "Je suis Charlie" after the nauseating massacre of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists in Paris in January, but three months later, how is that emotional declaration of solidarity against murderous extremism holding up? For this documentary, British Muslim Shaista Aziz went to Paris to find out.Her inquiries suggested that France is split in two over the issue of Western values versus Islamic fundamentalism. So is much of the rest of Europe, but France's rigorous insistence on maintaining the state's secular status, and therefore banning such faith-based Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Earlier tonight, I read - on Twitter, so I’m not vouching for its accuracy - that more people have now signed a petition to reinstate Jeremy Clarkson at the BBC than to take stronger action against female genital mutilation (FGM) in the UK. FGM, as actress Zawe Ashton (Fresh Meat) quickly finds out in a moving documentary for Comic Relief, is a hard thing to talk about, because vaginas are hard to talk about. But as she looks further into the practice both in the UK and abroad - speaking to survivors, activists and even a "cutter" - Ashton discovers that education is already beginning to make Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Commissioning new sitcoms is a notoriously imprecise science. The first episode, and sometimes the first series, finds a sitcom at its least sure-footed. Keen to tell you all about itself, it tends to behave out of character, gabbling nervously and exaggerating every gesture. It might never find its feet, but you can rarely tell from one half-hour introduction. My own personal hostage to fortune was to have a sense of humour bypass when reviewing Father Ted. (But then episode one wasn't that funny.)Channel 4 used to hold an annual sitcom festival which searched for wheat among the chaff of TV Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
A few months ago, Glasgow Girls - Cora Bissett and David Greig’s 2013 musical based on the true story of seven teenage girls from Drumchapel, Glasgow and their campaign to end the forced removal of school-age asylum seekers - returned to the city’s Citizens Theatre for another sell-out run. It makes the timing of this all-new reinterpretation of a story that has already been the subject of two TV documentaries a little strange, particularly as it too was billed as a “musical drama”: surely a more effective approach, I thought, would have been to adapt the existing critically acclaimed show, Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
The BBC might have convinced itself that the only thing that will change in the way it caters to the youth market next autumn is the method of delivery, but Murdered By My Boyfriend makes the case for retaining BBC Three as a channel that can be idly flipped onto on a Monday night. Previews of the short drama, inspired by real-life events, were full of the usual cliches: the story that writer Regina Moriarty told was both “tragic” and “depressingly familiar”. But the fact remains that young women between the ages of 16 and 24 are statistically most at risk of being abused by a partner; and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Vivacious blonde presenter Cherry Healey’s latest three-part series aims to show how a dangerously large proportion of the nation’s youth are abusing themselves with booze, drugs and food “until their young bodies and minds are ready for retirement". Part one – about alcohol - opens, predictably, on the streets of Newcastle where the usual array of working class Geordie pissheads they snag for these programmes are staggering about Bigg Market and slurring that they just don’t care. “Why dwell on something you may not get?” runs the typical response from a young woman who Healey’s breathalyser Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Last year I spent the summer reading A Life Too Short, a biography of former German national goalkeeper Robert Enke by his friend, the sports journalist Ronald Reng. It’s an incredibly emotive book that uses Enke's diary entries to tell the story of his playing career, his family life, his depression and, ultimately, his suicide in 2009 at the age of 32. It seems that although no end of campaigns try to break down the stigma of depression, or trot out statistics that one in four of us will ultimately suffer from it, in the end it’s usually the sufferers themselves left asking why something Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
I must confess that I do not understand the zombie as pop culture phenomenon. Why otherwise sensible people would dress up as shuffling, mindless automatons interested only in the consumption of human brains for an annual “zombie walk”, or why somebody would rewrite Jane Austen to give the undead a co-billing is beyond me. As far as the former is concerned, certainly, it seems as if the zombie meme is a satire that has eaten itself.There are also very limited ways that the zombie narrative can play out - we’ll see how Brad Pitt handles it in the big screen adaptation of World War Z when it Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The television channels have been making documentaries about our boys, and indeed girls, in Afghanistan for the best part of a decade. We’re used by now to the imagery, which mainly consists of dust, joshing, weaponry and boredom. Prince Harry: Frontline Afghanistan was an occasion to stir an extra ingredient into the brew: dust, joshing, weaponry and boredom, plus a chap who when he loses at strip poker makes the front page of every newspaper in the western world.For reasons which won’t need much unpacking, the channel which normally brings you things called Sun, Sex and Suspicious Parents Read more ...
graeme.thomson
The Special Relationship might be on a sticky wicket politically, but in telly at least it seems to be thriving. Spooks, Downton and Episodes have all recognised the sound commercial sense in bringing together marquee names from both sides of the pond. Now comes Cuckoo, a new six-part comedy series which pitches budding US film star and Saturday Night Live stalwart Andy Samberg against our very own comic giant Greg Davies. The third lead, Helen Baxendale, presumably ticked several boxes simply for being known on either side of the Atlantic seaboard for her (terrible) turn in Friends.So much Read more ...