If you know David Mitchell and Robert Webb from Peep Show on Channel 4 (written by Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain), in which Mitchell plays the insufferably self-important Mark and Webb the self-deluding idiot Jeremy, then you will easily recognise similar stock types being used in That Mitchell and Webb Look on BBC Two, which goes to show you should never mess with a winning formula.
tv reviews
howard.male
As an 11-year-old boy, I was awestruck from the first moment I saw Concorde on our three-channel black-and-white television, seemingly rearing up from its runway like a cyborg swan. At that age - and during that era - fact and fiction became vertiginously blurred when it concerned the fast-forward march of science and technology. While Factual-man was taking one slow-motion giant leap for mankind, Fictional-man was going where no man had gone before.
Adam Sweeting
Great comedy may be timeless, but that's probably because of the great comedians performing it as much as the material itself. Could you imagine Dad's Army being anything more than a shadow of its former self if it was remade with a new cast? Would Frasier achieve the same transcendent mix of bourgeois self-regard and millisecond farcical timing with James Corden and Mathew Horne in place of Kelsey Grammer and David Hyde Pierce? Do we want to hear anybody reciting the "Dead Parrot Sketch" ever again?
Adam Sweeting
The BBC just can't stop showing that flipping Lennon Naked drama. No sooner have we emerged from the Fatherhood Season, where it first appeared, than we're into a John Lennon Night on BBC Four, featuring Lennon Naked again under a new temporary flag of convenience.
gerard.gilbert
Dominic Savage’s new two-part film, part of BBC Two’s renewed commitment to intelligent and challenging drama (we shall see; fewer biopics please), comes billed as a look at modern teenage life, although it seemed more drawn to long silences - or the sound of the wind in the trees - and the seemingly desolate land and seascapes of the Lincolnshire coast. Your eyes kept being drawn to the edge of the screen, away from the young protagonists, Lindsey and Robert, which I suppose was meant to lend Dive a fatalistic edge, or a sense of universality.
fisun.guner
He may be a writer, a director, an actor, a historian, and, of course, a former member of Monty Python, yet rather than being a Renaissance man, Terry Jones is clearly a mediaevalist at heart. We know this not only because he has written well-received books on Chaucer and medieval history, but an amiable half hour spent in his company at the National Gallery shows us just where his sensibilities lie. He was the first guest in a series inviting celebs to talk about their favourite artworks and Tim Marlow, whose televisual style is so effortlessly smooth and mellow that you might mistake him for a brand of instant (decaff) coffee were it not for his serious, but never heavily worn erudition, proved to be the perfect host: unlike more excitable presenters in the genre of television arts, he never upstages his guests.
Jasper Rees
The voice, being 70, isn’t quite the untamed beast of yore. But it retains a certain feral throb. Alan Yentob stands across the recording studio, listening donnishly as Tom Jones belts one out. “You still feel the presence and power,” he reports. Not that you’d know from the way Yentob sways ever so imperceptibly in his BBC execuspecs. Yentobs don’t dance. Go on, man, do the done thing. Whip off your drawers and lob them lovingly at the Pontypridd Pelvis.
Adam Sweeting
Another new cop show? How marvellous! I feared the worst, hearing that this one was about a special unit set up by DSI Martha Lawson (Keeley Hawes) to combat the ever-growing threat of identity theft. It sounded rather po-faced and bureaucratic, frankly, but I’m pleased to report that it hasn’t turned out badly at all.
howard.male
Joe, Sam and Bruce may be three callow teenagers from southern Utah but they’re still smart enough to realise that the only world they have ever known is wrong, deeply wrong. So wrong, in fact, that they make the hardest decision of their lives by leaving their family, friends and community behind forever, as this is the only way to escape the madness.
Jasper Rees
I once sat in a rehearsal room in a brick-box theatre on the outskirts of Cape Town. The cast was warming up for Carmen. First, the choreographer put 40 mostly black South African singers through a gruelling physical warm-up. Opera singers are rarely slender, and they were all in a muck sweat by the time the vocal coach stepped forward to lead them through a vocal warm-up. But when they opened their mouths it was as if someone has strapped you to a chair in a wind tunnel. The noise was transforming, majestic, all-powerful. So I knew roughly what sound to expect in Singing for Life, a documentary about the miscegenation of the black township choral tradition and the white man’s most exclusive art form, opera.