When Simon Hales, a 20-year-old university student, fell from a 20ft wall during a tipsy night out, nobody knew whether he would pull through. He'd suffered a horrific brain injury and would spend the next five weeks in a coma. Luckily, he did pull through, though nobody could recognise the newly awakened Simon from the old Simon. His mother told us that her son "evidently wasn’t Simon”. She loved him, she said, but “what I'm looking for is the son that I had to come back".
tv reviews
howard.male
There is a lot of talk about the contestants' experience of Big Brother but little about the viewer’s experience. During its decade on air there was a drop-off of both the red tops' shock-horror coverage and the intellectualised justifications put forward by the quality press, and inevitably this resulted in viewing figures also declining with each passing year. But I confess I remained an avid viewer. It’s not what you watch, it’s how you watch it, I would say to baffled friends to justify my addiction.
Ismene Brown
People are lured to behave like animals for TV now - Big Brother, Celebrity Jungle, The X Factor - so it merely completes the idiotic equation to have animals insistently transfigured into little humans in wildlife TV. Or big, hairy humans in the case of mountain gorillas and Martin Clunes.
graeme.thomson
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.
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.
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.