TV
Adam Sweeting
The second season of BBC Four’s artiest import began uncertainly, but season three took off at the gallop. The opening scene of the first episode prised open Don Draper’s closely guarded past with a flashback to his Depression-era infancy, depicting his adoption after the death of his mother (a prostitute). Then we jumped back to the present, where his wife Betty’s pregnancy picked up the childbirth theme. His employer, ad agency Sterling Cooper, is reeling from job cuts in the aftermath of a takeover by a British company, a problematic union which could spell rebirth or stillbirth.Some argue Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In his forbidding dark suit and heavy-framed sunglasses, declaiming his artfully wrought texts to camera with the ominous certainty of a hanging judge, Jonathan Meades is one of TV’s most unmistakable presences. While it may be lamentable that we don’t see him more often, it’s miraculous, in the current climate, that we see him at all.His films are densely layered brain-twisters where history, architecture and folklore collide, ripe with allusion, metaphor and facts carefully selected for their provocative value. His best-known series include Abroad In Britain, Further Abroad with Jonathan Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Early on in Michael Samuels’ unremittingly sombre film about Winnie Mandela, the star-crossed heroine made the observation that being married to Nelson meant you were also married to “the struggle”, and would inevitably end up in Nelson’s shadow. So it proved. Even as she went to meet Nelson (David Harewood) as he was finally released after 27 years in jail, Winnie (Sophie Okonedo) was advised to learn from the example of Prince Philip and the way he walks dutifully one step behind the Queen.With her husband sweating it out either in hiding or subsequently in Robben Island prison, Winnie was Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
Are we British turning French, shrugging our shoulders at political sex scandals? Or did Major and Prescott finally made the idea of the pants-down MP seem so grotesquely mundane that we have had no option but to laugh and concentrate on their second homes instead? Either way, for a good old-fashioned sex scandal these days you need to travel to America, where politicians still espouse (a word, ironically, from the same Latin root as “spouse”) family values to fundamentalist voters.The cleverly scripted and thoroughly entertaining new US drama series The Good Wife could have been inspired by Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The BBC launched today its own popular opera talent hunt (details below), while ITV's Popstar to Operastar has suffered heavy critical attack and disappointing public ratings. The BBC's Commissioning Editor for Music and Events, Jan Younghusband, added a private comment to our review of the ITV show here, pointing out: "My big struggle is how we bring this great entertainment [opera] to TV in a meaningful way without wrecking it."The BBC's Passion for Opera plans in brief:Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, Rolando Villazón and Danielle de Niese present specially commissioned films for BBC Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Only Fools and Horses, whose last new episode was broadcast to the traditionally bloated Christmas audience in 2003, has enjoyed several kinds of afterlife. It lives on lexically, in the form of the Peckhamspeak inherited by its viewers – “cushty” and “luvly jubbly”, “plonker” and “dipstick”. It is also frequently exhumed in clips packages and on repeat channels. Then came the spin-off sitcom The Green Green Grass, a fifth series of which is said to be in the pipeline. And now this: a prequel to Only Fools and Horses, a whole hour-and-a-half’s worth of back story explaining the birth of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Another day, another plot to destabilise the planet. Early scenes in the eighth series of 24 show us a mellow, semi-retired agent Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) playing grandad to his daughter Kim's child, and planning to return with them from New York to LA to re-establish his family ties. With his career in the Counter Terrorist Unit (CTU) behind him, Jack is thinking of taking up an offer of some private security work.Then, as he's about to leave, a wounded informant hammers desperately on his door. He blurts out a tale of foreign assassins planning to shoot President Hassan of Kamistan ( Read more ...
Veronica Lee
“New programme, new set, new city,” said Kirsty Wark by way of introduction to the BBC’s new flagship culture programme, The Review Show. It replaces Newsnight Review and goes out after the current affairs programme that spawned it, but now in its own discrete slot. The offspring has left London and moved to the BBC’s fabulous waterfront studios in Glasgow, has brightly coloured seats for its guests and even gets to stay up late: The Review Show lasts 45 minutes, as opposed to half an hour when it was part of Newsnight.It may seem perverse, then, that the opening hour-long special was about Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I’ve never been quite sure whether Brian Eno is a musician, or somebody for whom music happens to be the end product of a chain of cognitive processes. Certainly it was music that powered him to prominence, either as the inventor of ambient music, a performer with Roxy Music, or as a collaborator with artists ranging from rock gods U2 and David Bowie to composers Harold Budd and Philip Glass.But as this Arena film illustrated, these days Eno is as likely to be involved in art installations, software development, the study of mathematical systems or debates on the value of global governance as Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Born out of the spurious Radio 4 phone-in show Down The Line, created by Fast Show veterans Paul Whitehouse and Charlie Higson, Bellamy’s People takes bogus broadcaster Gary Bellamy out on the road and in front of the cameras to meet his public. On Radio 4 (before being unmasked as a spoof), Bellamy was bombarded with angry listeners decrying his sexism, racism and all-round witless stupidity.As portrayed on telly by Rhys Thomas, Bellamy seems slightly less likely to suffer a fat lip, and is a subtly calibrated mixture of vanity and ingratiating chumminess. Yet, as he trundles ostentatiously Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
Monty Don’s Fork to Fork is probably my desert island gardening book, while Don’s weekly articles in the Observer magazine are still sorely missed years after they last appeared. He is a marvellous writer, poetic and evangelical - although I’ve never been as enamoured of him as a TV presenter. The same goes for Don’s friend, Nigel Slater, whom I prefer in print than on television. I find their authorial voices more beguiling than their broadcasting ones.And I thought that the way that the bar has been raised in lifestyle television, particularly by Jamie Oliver with the likes of Jamie's Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It started ten years ago with The Second World War in Colour, continued with The First World War in Colour and Britain at War in Colour. You didn’t half get the picture. In series after absorbing series, the foreign country that is the monochrome past came closer. Colour footage flushed some pink into its cheeks. Grey flowered into khaki. Now here comes another war effort. Shooting the War tells the story of 1939-1945 from the bottom up. In part one, entitled “Men”, Tommy and Jerry laid down their weapons to wield cine cameras at the elbow of history.While it’s never a good idea to buy Read more ...