Doctor Who
Jasper Rees
In their recommendations of the best of this year's BBC Proms, theartsdesk's music writers have been thunderously silent on the only event that will excite a certain section of the audience demographic. I refer, of course, to what will no doubt become the traditional Doctor Who Prom. Or Proms.In 2008 the inaugural Prom featuring music from the flagship BBC One drama was so successful, drawing a sizeable audience on television as well as many junior first-timers to a classical concert, that this time round the ever-inclusive Proms boss Roger Wright has scheduled two of them. So Prom 10 on Read more ...
howard.male
Of course I’ve not been anticipating the appearance of the new Doctor with quite the counting-the-days excitement of many children, teenagers and anoraked adults across the land. But to invert the Jesuit motto, "Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man," my seven-year-old self has recently resurfaced, resulting in at least a frisson of excitement. After all, there’s also a new Tardis, a new assistant, some new bug-eyed monsters, and hopefully one or two scripts as scary as "Blink" or as inexplicably moving as "Human Nature/The Family of Blood". So what’s not to get Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The BBC's reinvention of Doctor Who under the auspices of Russell T Davies has proved to be an inspired upgrade of a legendary 1960s marque fit to rank alongside BMW's resuscitation of the Mini, though it would hardly be sensible to argue that the new-look Doctor is distinguished by Germanic precision engineering or a coolly mathematical design philosophy. Quite the opposite. Although the cardboard scenery and risible special effects that used to lend Doctor Who much of its jerry-built charm have been digitally upgraded, the series is still a hard-to-define mix of soft sci-fi and a kind of Read more ...
Veronica Lee
This film was never going to be nominated for any awards, but then it probably doesn’t need critical acclaim - the first reworking of the glorious 1950s Ealing Studios comedies (which were based on Ronald Searle’s cartoons), released in 2007, was the third-highest grossing independent UK film ever. St Trinian’s 2 is more of the same: loud, silly and rollicking good fun.No joke is considered too old or too obvious in the immensely daft yarn scripted by Piers Ashworth and Nick Moorcroft, directed by Oliver Parker and Barnaby Thompson. The plot (using the term loosely) concerns a 420-year-old Read more ...