tv reviews
Joe Muggs

Welcome to the grown-up rock mothership. I've seen bands play in TV studios plenty of times over the years, but walking into the Later... With Jools Holland recording at BBC Television Centre for the first time, as I did last night, is something else. Studios generally have a disappointing feeling of smallness, or of looking behind the curtain to reveal artifice, but this genuinely was like stepping into the TV screen: the circle of bands and punters exactly as you see it when the camera spins around in the show's intro.

fisun.guner

Goldsmiths has produced 20 Turner Prize winners. It produced Damien Hirst and the majority of the Brit Art pack that caused such a Nineties sensation. It has attracted some pretty impressive tutors to its fine art department – ground-breaking artists in their own right, in fact. As such, the school is considered to be something of a star in itself. So what’s its secret? This BBC Four two-parter aimed to find out - and, you’ve guessed it, in keeping with a certain jaunty documentary-making tradition, it gave the participants just enough rope to hang themselves.

Adam Sweeting
Michael Kitchen as DCS Christopher Foyle: no breast-beating histrionics
Once upon a time, they all laughed at Inspector Morse because it was felt to be too "highbrow". In 2007, ITV axed Foyle's War, despite regular ratings of about 7 million, allegedly to go in pursuit of a "younger" audience. But people power swung into action, and a surge of protest caused ITV to think again. Hence, DCS Christopher Foyle returned for a sixth series, and now here he is again in a seventh.
Matt Wolf
That fame, and the pursuit thereof, is hurtful to the soul is the unexceptional if, I suppose, ever invaluable message of Starsuckers, the Chris Atkins documentary given genuine ballast by the details it selects with which to argue its case. Though overlong for what it is, and often veering off on tangents worthy of separate movies in themselves, it makes you laugh and wince in equal measure. Anonymity has rarely seemed a healthier place to be.
Adam Sweeting

For The Pacific, the 10-part saga of a group of US Marines involved in the campaign to drive back the rampant Japanese army in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, Spielberg has resumed the executive producer role he adopted to make Band of Brothers nearly a decade ago, once again in partnership with Tom Hanks.

Adam Sweeting
Johnny Mercer (right) with Nat King Cole, one of his discoveries for Capitol Records
Jazz enthusiast Clint Eastwood, who co-produced this film with the BBC's Arena, clearly harbours a particular regard for songwriter, singer, impresario and record company mogul Johnny Mercer. When Eastwood made his film of John Berendt's book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, which was set in Mercer's home town of Savannah, Georgia and partly shot in Mercer House, built by Johnny's grandfather, the accompanying soundtrack was a newly recorded collection of some of Mercer's most celebrated songs.
howard.male

Of course I’ve not been anticipating the appearance of the new Doctor with quite the counting-the-days excitement of many children, teenagers and anoraked adults across the land. But to invert the Jesuit motto, "Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man," my seven-year-old self has recently resurfaced, resulting in at least a frisson of excitement. After all, there’s also a new Tardis, a new assistant, some new bug-eyed monsters, and hopefully one or two scripts as scary as "Blink" or as inexplicably moving as "Human Nature/The Family of Blood".

gerard.gilbert

Take two sets of separated parents and observe their opposing response to sharing the children. Colin and Alison haven’t involved lawyers, and divide childcare equally and amicably. Sandy, on the other hand, has spent tens of thousands of pounds on legal fees in order secure access to his four children with Rose, a woman who was so inured to being dragged through the family courts by her ex-husband that not until fairly late on in the quietly excellent Who Needs Fathers? did she notice that she had now been pulled into the court of public opinion - and a trial by television. It gave a whole meaning to the term “in camera”.

Jasper Rees

The first cinema was two-thirds empty. A hundred seats had been laid out by the Lumière brothers in a Parisian salon, but only 33 of them were occupied. The small audience saw a film in which a crowd, mostly women in long dresses but also a large bounding dog, pour through a tall gate. None of them looks at the camera, as we would now. In 1895, stardom was not yet associated with film. The dog, as dogs will, gave much the most attention-seeking performance.

graeme.thomson