This quirky, compelling little Cutting Edge film never really worked out what it wanted us to think about what we were seeing, which in the end played to its advantage. Because it avoided the sorry fate – namely, shoehorning its participants into an ironic cul de sac then pointing at them and sniggering loudly - of TV programmes whose entire raison d’être begins and ends with the creation of a cynically arresting title, the results ended up being opaque, neatly observed and even rather moving.
tv reviews
fisun.guner
After going on his murderous rampage earlier this summer, the police hunt for Raoul Moat was given rolling news coverage. Moat had critically injured his ex-partner Samantha Stobbart, he had murdered her new boyfriend and he had gone on to shoot and blind an off-duty policeman. Excerpts from the tapes he’d recorded over a two-year period, and those made during his subsequent week-long hide-out in the Northumbrian countryside, provided an audio backdrop to the story. But given that the case has been given so much coverage, given that relatives had already talked extensively to the press, and given that Moat had left almost 26 hours of recorded material providing a first-person account of what had led him to the point of murder, how much further inside the mind of Moat could we get? Or indeed want to go?
josh.spero
By complete coincidence, this afternoon I tuned in to Air Force, Howard Hawks's 1943 propaganda picture: chiselled young airmen fill a B-17 "flying fortress", dropping their payloads over Japan, both a news service and wish fulfilment for domestic audiences. Their sharp, sweaty features glow in the firelight. Their commanders are tough but fair. Their bombs fall crisply, in a noble cause. This is not that film.
howard.male
Every great novel is a world, and every great novelist responds to and recreates their own time in their own image. Therefore how could a three-part documentary series possibly cover that fertile period in British literature that took in both world wars and their aftermath? Of course it’s an impossible task but it’s one that is neatly circumvented here because these programs are really just an excuse for the BBC to dust off some old tapes of some of our greatest writers speaking about their work.
gerard.gilbert
Lucy Punch – what a great name for a comedian (or a female boxer). Unfortunately that is the only thing that’s great about Vexed, a new comedy drama written by Howard Overman, creator of Channel 4’s perky ASBO (RIP) superpower fantasy Misfits. His new show is that relative rarity, a comedy cop show, a genre of which Punch has some experience, having had a supporting role in Hot Fuzz, although it’s not in Vexed’s interests to start making such comparisons.
Adam Sweeting
The Yesterday channel’s ongoing “Spirit of 1940” season has provoked a giant surge in its viewing figures, another reminder of the grip World War Two still exerts on large chunks of the British public. The Battle of Britain in particular has become a self-contained historical moment emblematic of what the British regard, or at least used to regard, as their finest characteristics – patience, courage, stoicism and a dogged refusal to accept bullying European dictatorships. Maybe we haven’t quite let go of that last part. Perhaps the story of our Boys in Blue in the late summer of 1940 gains additional resonance from the way it contrasts so starkly with the meandering aimlessness of Britain’s recent military adventures. It was a battle with a purpose, won by the Brits without any help from the Americans.
josh.spero
What was originally a coincidence of reviewing – two dispatches from the Dark Ages, Treasures of the Anglo-Saxons on BBC Four and Domesday on BBC Two – in fact turned into a remarkably instructive diptych of how and how not to make history programmes for the television.
howard.male
Words such as horror, grotesque, shocking and bizarre are fired at us before the title has even appeared on screen: clearly this documentary is set on living down to its sensationalist title. One bleak sunless day in May 2008, Swedish twins Sabina and Ursula Eriksson ran into traffic on the M6. Both miraculously escaped with their lives but then turned on the police officers trying to help them. With a lack of subtlety and restraint typical of this kind of schedule-filler, director Jim Nally shows us the footage of Sabina being thrown off the bonnet of a car at least twice more, slowing it down, freeze-framing it, and then just flashing up fragments of it - hammering home the kind of imagery which will have stuck in the mind of any sensitive viewer anyway.
fisun.guner
There are many for whom Simon Amstell can do no wrong. He is clever, he is funny, and he fronted Never Mind the Buzzcocks. What’s more, although his appearance suggests a cute, geeky vulnerability, his exquisite sarcasm can skewer the most inflated, the most inured of celebrity egos. The egos queued up to be guest panellists on that cool music quiz, only to get shot down by some clever, insightful putdown. He’s like the Lynn Barber of pop telly, only he still looks barely out of adolescence.
Adam Sweeting
He wasn't a jack of all trades, said his friend June Whitfield, "he was a master of all trades". The charge of "smarminess" dogged Bob Monkhouse throughout his career, but as this quietly penetrating documentary made clear, he was highly intelligent, multi-talented and had a lot of layers he kept to himself. Actor, scriptwriter, singer, novelist (though they didn't really mention that part), stand-up comic, cartoonist, radio star, gameshow host and posthumous campaigner against the prostate cancer that killed him - the only thing Monkhouse couldn't manage too successfully was his work-life balance.