ITV
Jasper Rees
When Michael Parkinson voluntarily took his talk shows off-air, he stayed away for rather more than a decade. Eventually he returned from the wilderness to his natural home on Saturday night and was rightly greeted as the prodigal son of chat. Jonathan Ross has unwillingly been away for a 10th of the time, having left under a storm cloud, but from the wall of squeals which welcomed him back to his regular gig you might have mistaken him for the Second Coming. Either that or those floor managers who encourage the audience to clap like stink are on double pay.It’s business pretty much as usual Read more ...
Jasper Rees
And so it begins again. Earlier this summer I attended what has become a regular British ritual, exactly like Wimbledon and Henley, the Chelsea Flower Show and Ascot, with only one or two small discrepancies. The forecourt in front of the O2 heaved with ticketed humanity, carefully caged into pens and queueing against the magical moment when the doors would open and officials in fluorescent jackets wielding digital barcode readers would usher them into that citadel of contemporary British culture. I refer, of course, to the X Factor auditions.One goes along to these things in the spirit of Read more ...
Joe Muggs
This series of supernatural dramas from the early 1980s is the sort of thing that could very easily be parodied – has been parodied, in fact, by everyone from Victoria Wood and French and Saunders to The League of Gentlemen and Garth Merenghi's Darkplace. Every shonky visual effect, every discordant stab of strings as the camera's point of view creeps up behind a character, every window that blows open extinguishing a candle: these are meat and potatoes to sketch writers, and this makes it hard to watch these episodes with a straight face... at first.Sit down and watch the episodes in full, Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Created in 2005 by its director Caroline Redman Lusher, the Rock Choir has become something of a populist phenomenon. It’s a “people’s choir”, which means the songbook leans more towards Robbie Williams than Vaughan Williams. Anyone is welcome to join. There are no auditions and no talent requirements, a fact which will scarcely surprise viewers who last night witnessed the Bristol Rock Choir inflicting a very vocal form of GBH on ABBA's “Waterloo”.Narrated with rather pained joie de vivre by Hugh Bonneville, The Choir That Rocks is a three-part series which follows several Rock Choirs as Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Fantastic! A new drama series in which the hero isn't a detective. Instead, William Travers (James Purefoy) is a criminal barrister who (after some sort of traumatic, nervous-breakdown-provoking experience we don't know much about yet) has moved from the pressure cooker of the London legal industry to the ostensibly more laid-back environs of Ipswich. He used to specialise in murder cases, but now he swears he's given them up.Purefoy makes rather a good barrister. He radiates middle-class solidity and a sense that he really would like to do the right thing by his clients, while commanding the Read more ...
howard.male
We all enjoy the moment when the detective loses his rag and lunges across the desk to grab the suspect by the lapels, but such scenes are in short supply in this new female crime-fighters series. Instead, the interrogative approach of “the new Cagney & Lacey” as it’s been called, is more slowly, slowly catchy monkey, but that doesn’t make it any less satisfying. Scott & Bailey was co-created by former detective inspector Diane Taylor, which is presumably why it seems to provide a more grounded, realistic look at the world of the Manchester murder squad.But whereas realism in the Read more ...
graeme.thomson
David Frost and Richard Nixon. Melvyn Bragg and Dennis Potter. Parky and Ali. The list of seminal TV interviews is a relatively short one, and it's not about to get any longer. Alan Titchmarsh’s hopelessly mismatched bout with Prince Philip saw the Queen’s "liege man of life and limb" endure not so much a meaty grilling as an obsequious basting in Titchmarsh’s uniquely bland brand of conversational oil.The royals are enjoying a distinct upswing at the moment, what with Wills and Kate's nuptials and last week’s trip to Ireland. On 10 June, Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark (“Philippos – Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Crikey, no gongs whatsoever for ITV1's Downton Abbey, but you can't grumble about Sherlock lifting the Best Drama Series award at last night's Baftas. Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss's ingenious update of Conan Doyle for BBC One was one of 2010's telly highlights, and you might have thought it would have earned the Leading Actor award for Benedict Cumberbatch. But no, that one went not to Cumberbatch, nor to Matt Smith for Doctor Who (BBC One) nor Jim Broadbent for Any Human Heart (Channel 4), but to Daniel Rigby (pictured below) for his portrayal of Eric Morecambe in BBC Two's Eric and Ernie. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
America has been very good to Hugh Laurie. His starring role as Dr Gregory House has shot him to the top of the earnings tree in US television, while comprehensively demolishing existing preconceptions of him as the blissfully idiotic Bertie Wooster, or the half-witted Prince Regent in Blackadder the Third. You might even say that with House, Laurie finally got the chance to play Blackadder.It's a mutual transatlantic love affair, and Laurie's triumph as the manipulative medic has given him a platform from which to record an album of his adored blues and New Orleans music, Let Them Talk. In Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The story of the Pitmen Painters, a group of Northumbrian miners who decided to study art appreciation in their spare time and developed into a group of untrained but powerfully expressive artists, has been documented in a book by William Feaver and a play by Lee Hall. Robson Green's particular interest in the story stems from the fact that he's a miner's son, brought up in Dudley, a few miles south of the pitmen's hometown of Ashington.Green may be a successful actor, but he's no art critic - "I would actually think, why is he showing us this?" he said, confronted with a slide of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
ITV1 really, really loves that succulent two-hour slot in the middle of Sunday evening, and anything that goes in there has the legacy of Morse, Lewis, Frost, Miss Marple et al to live up to. The latest cunning plan for Detective Sunday is to recruit the rather excellent Brenda Blethyn to play DCI Vera Stanhope in adaptations of Ann Cleeves's novels, set in the author's native North-East.In fact, with the lineage of TV detectives now long enough to stretch to the moon and back several times, choice of location is becoming critical as a means of telling them apart. Vera is well served by its Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The flying Twitter fragments said more about The Wedding than the battalions of experts, "palace insiders", historians and friends ever could (couldn't somebody have put a bag over Simon "infinite loop" Schama's head and had him bundled away from the BBC studio in the boot of a car?) Everybody seemed to adore Kate's dress. Some suggested that princesses Eugenie and Beatrice were in drag. "The Royal Family is BACK", tweeted Piers Morgan. "#proudtobeenglish" added former England cricket captain Michael Vaughan. "Harry's thinking, how did I not end up in a carriage with Pippa Middleton?" Read more ...