TV
Tom Birchenough
Cosmonauts: How Russia Won the Space Race (*****) arrived at a strange time. With its remarkable accumulation of Soviet archive material and interviews with key figures, including Alexei Leonov, the first man to walk in space, the programme must have been a long time in the making and the fruit of lengthy collaboration of a kind that might not be so readily forthcoming today. Michael Lachmann’s film rightly reminded us of the achievements of the Soviet space programme and how in many areas it “beat” the Americans. But given more recent events some of its assertions rang with a somewhat new Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was tempting to assume that Homeland [****] had died along with Damian Lewis's Brody, last seen dangling gruesomely from a crane in Tehran at the end of series three, but this tense and uncomfortable season-opener suggested that all may not be lost. Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) has been promoted to CIA station chief in Kabul, but she's finding that the personal price of professional success is growing exorbitantly high.At front and centre was the question of the legitimacy of killing the enemy at long distance by remote control (in Homeland's first series, it was a drone attack which Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It feels as though 2014 was the year in which the Twitter generation finally woke up and realised what it had done. For five years a quiet, unassuming baking competition had risen through the ranks to become the most polite BBC One ratings juggernaut in the corporation’s history. Frankly, the world was ready for a bearded ginger Irishman to throw his baked Alaska in the bin and storm off into the great British countryside.In the end (and let’s not pretend that there won’t be spoilers from the off), it was slow and steady that won the race. Retiree Nancy Birtwhistle’s creations rarely brought Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Red Shift is a fascinating, if flawed, gem of ambitious and disturbing 1970s TV drama. It was adapted by Alan Garner (The Owl Service) from his own novel, and set in the south Cheshire landscape he grew up and lived in. Its director, John Mackenzie, also helmed Play for Today dramas by Dennis Potter (Double Dare) and Peter McDougall, and would go on to make Bob Hoskins a star in The Long Good Friday.We begin in present time – the late 1970s – and the teenage travails of clever, wound-up Tom (Stephen Petcher) and calm, preternaturally knowing Jan (Lesley Dunlop), who’s about to leave for Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Brian Cox has a very beguiling way of expressing quiet wonder. He’s taken on the very largest of subjects in Human Universe, extending traditions of science and natural history broadcasting towards a wider study of how the human race has come to be what it is, where it came from and where it may be going, and he doesn’t raise his voice on a single occasion. Other BBC presenters carried away by their subject matter could certainly take a hint.This first episode of Cox’s five-parter was titled “Apeman-Spaceman”, and we first saw Britain’s favourite physicist at Star City outside Moscow, the Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Two moments of physical comedy from British sitcoms regularly fill the polls of viewers’ favourites: Basil Fawlty thrashing his broken-down car with a branch, and Del Boy falling sideways through a just-opened pub bar. So what are the chances that future polls will contain the episode of Bad Education in which Alfie Wickers takes viagra, mistaking it for a drug that will help him run faster, in order to beat the elderly Richard, an apparent rival for the heart of Miss Gulliver, in a race which he ends up completing on his stomach, in order to conceal the erection that the viagra creates, as a Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Cats have had a harder time adapting to humans than humans to cats, as this remarkable examination of contemporary feline habits points out. It is not always easy changing from wild animal to feline friend, as the programme put it. Nocturnal hunters now have a life in the daytime, but they are still solo rather than pack animals. While a dog will cling to his pack – his human family – the cat susses out the physical territory on its own, seeing how safe it is and where to hide if necessary.The hundred cats under observation in this three-part study – to come are hunters at night, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Despite a 47-year history which has taken them from pomp to pop and established them as a top-selling global institution, there's still a lingering sense that Genesis don't think they've been taken seriously enough. This was detectable in Phil Collins's comment included here that "we're just popular and there's nothing wrong with that... I won't take the credit and I won't take the blame."This "it's not my fault, guv" approach seemed curiously defensive in the light of their colossal string of successful albums and hit singles. Genesis have been one of a bare handful of major bands who Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
So we're off for another blast of between-the-wars ultraviolence with the Shelby gang from Birmingham, once again soundtracked by incongruous electric blues music. Time has moved on from the immediate aftermath of Great War hostilities and now we're into the Twenties, which are roaring as if they're in agony. The baleful Tommy Shelby (a curiously shaved and bleached-looking Cillian Murphy) is aiming to undertake "business expansion" by extending the Peaky Blinders' racketeering tentacles down to London.However, not everyone thinks this is a great idea. Younger brother John points out that the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Julian Fellowes, now the Conservative peer Lord Fellowes, left behind the fictional world of Gosford Park and Downton Abbey to give us this sumptuous tour of Blenheim Palace. Nor were its surroundings neglected as vista after vista showed us Blenheim’s lavishly landscaped gardens, fountains and columned monument to John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, victorious over Louis XIV. It was his military prowess that led to wealth and Blenheim itself, gifted by the grateful nation and thus an early example of government subsidy.But this was more than a gushing visit to yet another stately home. Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In a house in Nuneaton, a man calling himself Stinson Hunter lures paedophiles towards exposure, shame and possible prosecution. “We set the profile that is like the rope,” he explained. “And then if they choose to put that rope round their neck and hang theirselves [sic], that is their choice. We have not pushed them.”The bait is simple. Hunter loads a fake female profile on a casual dating site then awaits contact from men. His replies, in the voice of a fictional girl, make it repeatedly clear that she is underage. Undeterred, men turn up for what they assume is a rendezvous for illegal Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Marvellous reviews itself in its title. The story of Neil Baldwin starring Toby Jones was – and is, because you should catch it while you can on iPlayer – simply marvellous. As a dramatic character Neil Baldwin could be mistaken for unremarkable. He has no hidden depths. Positioned somewhere along the autistic spectrum, he is apparently away with the fairytales, but his grandiose fantasies mostly happened to be true. Though droll without always intending to be, he has an enviable gift for friendship. And his story has something to teach us about civility and good cheer and holding on to Read more ...