documentary
Rupert Murdoch: Battle with Britain/United States of Television: America in Primetime, BBC TwoMonday, 29 April 2013![]() "For youth, for change and always for the people" was the slogan with which Rupert Murdoch relaunched The Sun in 1969, having bought it from its previous owners IPC for a mere £800,000. Murdoch, the Aussie iconoclast who kept a bust of Lenin in his... Read more... |
The Eagles at Sundance - History in the MakingSaturday, 27 April 2013![]() The Eagles recorded their first two albums in London in the early Seventies, though they couldn't have imagined they'd be back 40 years later to present their new documentary, History of the Eagles Part One, at Sundance London. There is, as you may... Read more... |
Panorama - Secrets of Britain's Shari'a Courts, BBC OneTuesday, 23 April 2013![]() It feels a little as if BBC journalists are getting themselves into trouble every other week at the moment. As news emerges that new BBC chief Tony Hall will appear before MPs to discuss why they allowed a Panorama journalist to use a university... Read more... |
The Genius of Josiah Wedgwood, BBC TwoSaturday, 20 April 2013![]() As a self-taught chemist, innovative industrialist, a businessman who exploited and developed new means of distribution and marketing, an anti-slavery campaigner and a man dealing with his own disability, the Staffordshire potter Josiah Wedgwood was... Read more... |
Syria: Across the Lines, Channel 4Thursday, 18 April 2013![]() Covering both sides of a conflict is never easy. Apart from the physical dangers, warring parties are wary of journalists who've reported on and established ties with the enemy. Afghanistan showed this as clearly as anywhere, when the US forces were... Read more... |
The Spirit of '45Thursday, 14 March 2013![]() Ken Loach’s first solo documentary since The Flickering Flame, The Spirit of ‘45 is an indispensable agitprop movie that might have been subtitled Days of Hope, after Loach and Jim Allen’s 1975 drama serial about the political struggle of a... Read more... |
Walking Wounded: Return to the Frontline, Channel 4Thursday, 21 February 2013![]() The public rarely sees the human cost of journalists covering war. More rarely still does it see the real civilian cost. That makes Walking Wounded a frank and refreshing insight into the world at either end of the lens. Siobhan Sinnerton’s... Read more... |
Storyville: Google and the World Brain/How Hackers Changed the World, BBC FourThursday, 21 February 2013![]() At what stage will the trend among journalists and documentarians to regard anything relating to the internet with suspicion or, worse, ignorance come to an end? Although I recognise that my relationship with information technology has never been... Read more... |
Her Majesty's Prison: Aylesbury, ITVTuesday, 19 February 2013![]() Television is a regular prison visitor. You can’t keep Louis Theroux out of the grimmest Stateside penitentiaries, the drama departments drop in now and then for a stretch inside – most recently in Prisoner’s Wives. And then there’s ITV. A couple of... Read more... |
Berlinale 2013: The Grandmaster, Promised Land, More Than HoneySaturday, 09 February 2013![]() Ecology at the first full day of the Berlin film festival. An intriguing Matt Damon city-versus-country movie, Promised Land, puts fracking into the mainstream for the first time. Damon plays Steve Butler, an eager corporate buyer of leases in rural... Read more... |
Timeshift: Eyes Down! The Story of Bingo, BBC FourThursday, 31 January 2013![]() In the Sixties, self-appointed guardians of the nation’s morals were pretty steamed up about bingo. More so even than about Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Fyfe Robertson, the BBC’s bewhiskered roaming chronicler, said the game was “the most mindless... Read more... |
10 Questions for James MarshThursday, 10 January 2013![]() Five years ago James Marsh won an Academy Award for the documentary Man on Wire. It thrillingly told the story of Philippe Petit’s audacious walk on a tightrope between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in 1974. Marsh stayed on in the 1970s... Read more... |
