BBC One
fisun.guner
Tracey Emin once made a tent for which she gained some notoriety. On it, she’d appliquéd the names of everyone she had ever slept with – including, as a child, her beloved Granny Hodgkins. Sadly, the tent, called Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995, was destroyed in a fire at Momart, the art-storage warehouse, in 2004. The loss of her tent was keenly felt, and she refused to recreate it. But genealogists in Who Do You Think You Are? gave Emin something to smile about when they dug deep into her family history: Emin comes from a long line of tent-dwellers. When she was shown Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
One has learned to approach high-profile BBC dramas with mild apprehension, since apparent promise and oodles of hype frequently turn out to be fig leaves for feeble plotting and a half-baked script (The Hour, this means you. And possibly you too, The Shadow Line). Too many recent series should have "promising idea, pitifully executed" chiselled into their neglected, overgrown headstones.After a single episode, is it too much to hope that Hidden may be the one that has triumphantly broken the mould? Probably, but let's enjoy the moment anyway. The first thing they got right was casting Phil Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Sixty-five-year-old Penny was exceptional. Unfortunately, just how exceptional was revealed after her death from a brain haemorrhage. In life, she was in the minority of people - 29 per cent - who have placed themselves on the Organ Donor Register. Transplant was a sobering, measured examination of what happened to her organs after death. All participants had waived their right to anonymity.Retrieval surgeons found that Penny's heart, liver and kidneys were fully functioning and in perfect condition. Evidence for heart disease is usually expected. Sixty-five is the age limit above which Read more ...
Jasper Rees
One didn’t keep a detailed log on the state of decomposition of each and every corpse in all umpteen series of Waking the Dead. Being cold cases, they were none of them too presentable. But did any make quite such a mess as ep one of The Body Farm, which took care to begin last night with a bang? To be more forensic, an explosion distributed blood and gristle evenly around a high-rise flat, leaving not much in the way of too too solid flesh. Or as Dr Eve Lockhart put it, “a carpet of decomposing carrion covering walls, floor and ceiling”. It looked as if the sloppier sort of decorators had Read more ...
howard.male
From the long shot of the suburban London semis onwards, I couldn’t help but think of the 1960s BBC sitcom Not in Front of the Children which similarly focused on a middle-class couple with three children. There’s no laughter track on Outnumbered but there’s also no escaping the fact that - apart from a colourful new range of insults the kids casually fire at each other (“numb-chuck”, “toss-piece”) - this could easily be one of Wendy Craig’s naughty but nice TV families, bickering over breakfast and complaining about the burnt fish fingers. Oh and look, there’s John Sessions playing the Read more ...
fisun.guner
Six months after giving birth to a child conceived through anonymous sperm donation, Sylvia decided to become an egg donor. It was her way, she said, of “giving something back”. It was 1991 and she was to become one of Britain’s first anonymous egg donors. Once she'd left the clinic, she was expected to think no more about it: she was helping an infertile woman realise her dreams, just as she, lacking Mr Right, had been helped to realise hers. She never thought for a minute that her act of altruism would come back to haunt her.Six weeks after donating her eggs, Sylvia came across an article Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Does anyone else ever feel a mite sorry for the North Pole? It always takes second billing to its more famous namesake, and you can see why. The South Pole belongs to a continental land mass. Antarctica has penguins, historic huts, and chaps going outside, maybe for some time. The North Pole, stuck up there on basically a huge floating icicle, is hedged about with ifs and buts. Who got there first? No one knows. And when you stand precisely at 90.00.00 degrees north, the drift of the ice soon shifts you off it. If the Poles were siblings, the South would inherit the land and the title. The Read more ...
josh.spero
The overwhelming impression given in television of urban Scotland in the Eighties is of a land where people had discovered neither vegetables nor lightbulbs. The Field of Blood on BBC One last night went no way towards correcting this: as tenebrous as you might expect for a mini-series about child-killing, everything was shadows.There was light in the offices of the daily paper the plucky, plump heroine Paddy Meehan (Jayd Johnson) worked in as a copyboy, but it only served to illuminate her unappealing colleagues: the boozy, sexist, obese, balding, stony-hearted, grandmother-selling Read more ...
fisun.guner
Just as we thought we were getting tired of the format, the BBC rang in the changes. It was no longer an apprentice Lord Sugar was after, but a partner in a business that he would invest a quarter of a million in. The candidates – 16 freshly laundered suits kicked us off – did the usual strutting and rustling of peacock feathers (a large part of the programme’s success is surely due to these cringeworthy failures of self-insight). But still, this year things seemed a little subdued on the bravado/bullshit front – though Northern Ireland Jim, a cliché machine, yes, but an impressively Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The return of Russell T Davies’s second most famous creation arrives coated with a transatlantic sheen, courtesy of an injection of co-production money from the USA’s Starz cable network (home of Spartacus and Camelot). Happily, this has not obliterated the homegrown roots of the Doctor Who spin-off, since this opener cut fearlessly between portentous action scenes at CIA headquarters and a judicial execution in Kentucky to Cardiff city centre and expanses of rugged Welsh coastline, where Gwen Cooper (Eve Myles) was trying to live an anonymous post-Torchwood existence with her Read more ...
fisun.guner
Does James Fox fancy himself as the Niall Ferguson of art history? I ask because clearly this latest addition to the growing pantheon of television art historians wants to do for British art what Ferguson sought to do for the British Empire. He wants us to stop apologising, and to admit that we’re simply the best, better than all the rest. And though I grant you he is similarly photogenic (with a touch of that swarthy, swaggering arrogance, too) the ratio of plausible statement to incredulity (my own, whilst spluttering and tweeting my incredulity) was considerably weighted towards the latter Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
What a strange, shape-shifting thing Luther is. Storylines ebb and flow around Idris Elba's dauntingly huge central character like flotsam and debris borne along on a heaving swell, but the man himself wades imperiously through it all like the Colossus in an old Jason and the Argonauts movie. Gross professional misconduct, subterfuge and blatantly aiding and abetting criminal behaviour are all part of Luther's daily routine. It's quite easy to forget that he's supposed to be a copper.The show's disorientating aura gets an additional boost from the way seemingly crucial characters just go Read more ...