BBC
Adam Sweeting
If there's one big question hanging over the television industry, it's "how long can the old broadcast networks survive in the new era of subscription and downloading services?" No doubt there will be a variety of answers, with different hybrid arrangements and partnerships springing up to deliver programming across multiple formats. From the viewer's point of view, it's a pain to have to keep subscribing to multiple providers such as Netflix or Amazon, not to mention all the extra devices we now have sticking out of the back of the TV. On the other hand, have viewers ever had it so good? Read more ...
David Nice
Sheku Kanneh-Mason isn't just BBC Young Musician 2016 - he's the year's top player in my books, a master at any level. Despite a contract with Decca, starting with the Shostakovich First Cello Concerto he played in the competition finale, he looks likely to remain loyal to family and friends, including the Fantasia Orchestra, founded this year, in which he's already played as part of the cello section.You have to pinch yourself to realise the ages delivering this quality. Kanneh-Mason is 17, as was Mendelssohn when he composed the work of total genius which launched last night's concert; Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The procedure of introductions in Louis Theroux: Savile seemed somehow more elaborate than usual. Knocking on the door of those he was about to talk to for what might have been dubbed “Savile Revisited”, Louis Theroux was unusually careful about his greeting ritual: “I’m Louis”, “Can I come in?”, “Should I take off my shoes?” That last one was perhaps the fairest question here, because he was bringing all sorts of past horrors and dirty deceits into these clean and tidy homes.This was Theroux confronting Jimmy Savile – on his own behalf, for the BBC, and, by implication, all the rest of us, Read more ...
Bernadette McNulty
Trying to pip the release of Mat Whitecross’s documentary Supersonic to the post, this brief hack through the BBC’s archive throws together a galloping overview of Oasis’s rise and fall, narrated by their own interviews and quotes. Arguably Oasis built a career on the consistent entertainment value of their soundbites rather than the long-term quality of their songs, so this wasn’t exactly a hard search, nor does it throw up anything you hadn’t heard before. Throughout, the music plays second fiddle, barely named or dated, flaring up in the background like an ambulance alarm, creating a jive- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Women in Love was Ken Russell’s first cinema film to directly reflect his work in television. He had directed The Billion Dollar Brain (1967), but that was an adaptation of a Len Deighton book. French Dressing (1964) was a few steps removed from a Carry On film. As an adaptation of the DH Lawrence novel, Women in Love (1969) tapped into the ethos of his work for the BBC and featured Oliver Reed, with whom he had worked in television. While Reed’s naked wrestling scene with Alan Bates was a sure-fire attention grabber the film, nonetheless, didn’t have quite the free-spirited spark of Russell' Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Carla Lane, who has died at the age of 87, was the first from Liverpool. Before Alan Bleasdale and Willy Russell, long before Jimmy McGovern, hers was the loudest Liverpudlian voice on television portraying ordinary working people's lives. From The Liver Birds to Bread, from Butterflies to Solo, her comedies covered the waterfront of womanhood: husband-hunters, divorcees, matriarchal grandmothers, unhappy wives, mistresses.Later in her life she became at least as famous for her animal sanctuary in Sussex, situated on the grounds of a vast manor. When I visited her there in 2000, we talked in Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Penda’s Fen has so many constituent parts it could burst its seams. Almost-18 schoolboy Stephen Franklin is struggling with determining the nature of his sexuality. His school is about regimentation and promotes the army with drill, uniforms and expectations that commands are to be followed. With his father, the Reverend Franklin, Stephen has prolonged discussions about the nature of faith. The local landscape is mystical, and seems able to manifest historic and mythical figures from its own past. Reawakened Paganism is upsetting the Christian present. All this is happening against a backdrop Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
What larks! The first run of Zoo Quest – itself the first of the wildlife programmes – started 62 years ago, in 1954. It was thought it had all been filmed in black and white, on small 16mm cameras, but in fact a condition imposed by the BBC was to shoot in colour to produce a sharper image in black and white. Discovered in the archives a few months ago were perfectly preserved canisters of colour film, six hours' worth in all. This was all a decade before colour came regularly to television.So, perfectly timed for Attenbourgh's 90th birthday, the story of Zoo Quest was retold in this Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The most radical of the directors who forged a “cinema of resistance” at the BBC in the 1960s, Peter Watkins completed two groundbreaking docudramas there – Culloden (1964) and The War Game (1965) – before the suppression of the second prompted his eventual exile to countries more receptive to his internationalist films and his anti-capitalistic approach to financing and making them.Half a century hasn’t dimmed the seismic power of this pacifist diptych, now handsomely restored and packed with supplements by the British Film Institute for its release in a dual format edition. The antithesis Read more ...
graham.rickson
The earliest film collected here, 1963’s Elgar, stands up incredibly well. Some of its quirks were imposed from above: fledgling director Ken Russell was initially employed by the BBC’s Talks Department and was discouraged from using actors in his documentaries. So Elgar is packed full of reconstructions of scenes from the composer’s life, though the actors never speak and there are no close ups.All of which adds to the realism, aided by Huw Wheldon’s sonorous narration of Russell’s script. The images are glorious: the recurring scenes of Elgar traversing the Malvern Hills accompanied by his Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Virtuoso Violinists was an hour of unalloyed informative pleasure that toured televised highlights of great violinists playing great music. Its painless excursion into the western classical canon reminded us why the BBC is the NHS of culture, and we delighted here in a guide who proved as accomplished a presenter as she is a performer of genius.Nicola Benedetti has an Italian name, a Scottish accent, and an utterly charming manner as she enthused, with immense knowledge, over a series of clips from 60 years of television broadcasts of the leading violinists of the day. She made no attempt to Read more ...
Florence Hallett
With a raft of high-quality digital effects available, real stunts might seem a little old-fashioned. In truth, the art of the stunt is alive and well: according to veteran performer Tracy Caudle, not only is it often cheaper to film the real thing, but “a computerised fall never looks quite right.” She has filmed scenes for TV and film, and with credits including Skyfall, Shaun of the Dead, Midsomer Murders and Doctor Who, chances are you’ve seen her fall to her death, crash a car or come to grisly grief one way or another, many times over.Read the full article about Tracy Caudle on the site Read more ...