TV
Marina Vaizey
Philippa Perry, 20 years a psychotherapist, was the dashing narrator of this history of 300 years of agony aunts (or uncles). Wearing a bright orange coat, she cycled between libraries, universities, newspaper and magazine offices, looking at centuries-old publications and interviewing contemporary writers. It was a fact-studded visual essay, but in spite of the raciness of its subject, oddly bland.It all started in the 1690s with The Athenian Mercury, published for one of the new coffee houses which had sprung up in London. Its editor-in-chief John Dunton is given the accolade of inventing Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The world now knows him as Lord Crawley, stiff-backed in white tie and tails, regimental garb or, for relaxation, tweed. But before he became the face of Downton Abbey – and of bumbling institutional incompetence in Twenty Twelve and W1A – Hugh Bonneville could be seen in roles of considerable depth and range, including a moving Philip Larkin and a brutish husband in the BBC's Daniel Deronda.The evidence was The Cazalets (pictured below), a stately six-part tour of well-to-do town and country folk as Blighty prepares to stand alone against Hitler. It was broadcast all the way back Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Hooray! The BBC has learned its lesson from the "Mumblegate" furore that erupted around last year's adaptation of Jamaica Inn, and ensured that even the most unwashed and toothless Cornish yokel in this all-new Poldark is almost 90 per cent intelligible. As the central character Ross Poldark, Aidan Turner (of Hobbit fame) is a model of robust actorly diction. However, elsewhere Poldark displays potentially more damaging failings. The Corporation is indecently fond of bigging up its own creations, but the trailers for Poldark were better then the thing itself. It feels like a mash-up of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Another tough night in with Jimmy McGovern. Banished may have taken ship to 18th-century New South Wales, whither the first British convicts have been expelled to a penal colony guarded by red-coated soldiers. But peer past the uniforms, the rifles and the tricorn hats and we have been lured yet again to McGovern’s favourite hangout, stuck somewhere between a rock and a hard place.And this Australia is a very hard place. The sun may shine on a glinting azure sea, but there isn’t enough grub to go round, seeding routine theft of rations and mistrust among the convicts. Meanwhile the women, who Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The owl – symbol of wisdom, harbinger of death – is a powerful if disparate symbol in human mythology worldwide. But this outstanding visual essay provided a riveting array of astonishing facts to make of the bird something even more remarkable than the myth.The species (all 240 varieties) is a great survivor, at home on all the continents bar Antartica, inhabitating the world from the frozen north to the desert, with home county barns in between. The film alternated touchy-feely moments as the charming bird obsessives, Lloyd and Rose Buck, raised barn owl sisters Luna and Lily from Read more ...
Matthew Wright
“Something strident and stirring – play to us now, please!” demands Martin Clunes’ Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to the piano-playing vicar’s wife, on apprehending that their conversation is being eavesdropped on. Sherlock Holmes himself could hardly have responded more adeptly to frustrate the eavesdropper, and as Conan Doyle’s pursuit of the intruder leads him to a sinister, candle-lit shrine containing the vicar’s daughter’s long-lost favourite doll, it’s clear that ITV has a new thriller both strident and stirring on its hands.The story is based on historical events surrounding George Edalji, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There came a moment, around three years ago, when MyAnna Buring suddenly seemed to be in everything. "I'm so sorry!" she shrieks (ironically) when I point this out to her. She had given warning of her arrival by appearing in Ben Wheatley's Kill List and, rather more prominently, as Tanya (who as you'll know was a vegetarian vampire from the Denali coven) in the concluding pair of Twilight films. Then Buring popped up in BBC One's Blackout, was Edna the Maid in Downton Abbey (where she brazenly set her cap at Tom Branson), flitted across our screens in ITV's The Poison Tree, and materialised Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Judging by its early-evening slot and diddly-dee theme tune, Matt Lucas's latest project is aimed at family audiences – far removed from the wonderful ribaldry of Little Britain with his comedy partner David Walliams - something to stick the kids in front of while the adults snooze off their Sunday roast.Lucas (who directs and writes with four other credited writers) is Pompidou, an eccentric aristocrat, and Alex MacQueen (The Thick of It) is his faithful butler Hove. Pompidou has fallen on hard times and now no longer lives in the grand house at the top of the drive but in a dilapidated Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Wolf Hall divided viewers from the off. It mesmerised many and left a vocal minority cold, for whom apparently - mystifyingly - it has all been a bit dull. The dialogue was too elliptical, the politics tricksy and convoluted (who is this Holy Roman Emperor anyway?), there was a surfeit of men called Thomas and women stitching in bay windows and big dresses. And to cap it all director Peter Kosminsky, fetishising Mark Rylance’s inscrutable face, seemed to want every take to carry on into next week.In the end, the rewards for loyalty were rich, and never more than in the adaptation's final Read more ...
fisun.guner
So, Picasso’s last words turned out not to be, “Drink to me. Drink to my health. You know I can’t drink anymore” – yes, those famous last words that inspired a Paul McCartney dirge – but were, according to this TV biography looking at Picasso’s women and how each significant relationship informed the direction of his work, “Get me some pencils”. A more prosaic request, certainly, but he died in bed, aged 93, his pencils delivered and drawing to the last. It was a good and fitting end.It was, however, an unpromising beginning, for when Picasso entered this world it was feared he was still born Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Going into this programme, it dawned on me that I knew next to nothing about Mark Rylance's background – where he came from, who his parents were, what he does in his personal life. Having reached the end credits I was little the wiser, other than having learned that he has a wife called Claire, since none of it fell within the purview of Melvyn Bragg's interviewing.But I suppose there's always Wikipedia for the other stuff, and Bragg's close focus on Rylance the actor and his main spheres of thespian activity paid its own dividends. It prised out revelations about his approach to his craft, Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Hostages certainly whips along. We’re straight into conflict from the very start of the first episode, except it soon transpires that the real action will be taking place elsewhere. And it’ll be tighter, more excruciating than the bash-down-the-door atmosphere of the opening scene, which serves to introduce us to Adam Rubin (Jonah Lotan), a top operator in Israeli counter-terrorism who’s on his last day of service and concluding his final mission successfully. We’ll be seeing more of Rubin later, or at least realising it’s him when he takes off his balaclava, having changed role from siege- Read more ...