TV
Lisa-Marie Ferla
By the time that In the Club reached its final episode, fans of Kay Mellor’s pregnancy-pals drama were probably ready for a happy-ever-after. Across six eventful hours we had seen car crashes, assaults, social workers, a bank robbery and Jill Halfpenny giving birth in a car park. We’d also witnessed the usually glacial Hermione Norris living off wine and pizza in a student flat for weeks before popping out one of the healthiest babies of the series - although by that stage it was hardly the least realistic plot development.But to concentrate on the drama - and boy, was there drama - was, I Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Artist and critic Matthew Collings purported to set out the rules of abstraction through taking the viewer on a very bumpy ride through 20th century painting, with a nod to Cézanne to get us started. He set the scene by telling us that abstraction as a concept in art has been around for 100 years and early on we were presented with a genuine surprise: the large canvases, in relatively soothing colours, of freehand geometric forms that appeared wholly abstract by the almost totally unknown female – yes, female – Swedish artist Hilma Af Klint, from 1907.The classic dating for abstraction in Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Presenter Alastair Sooke looked alarmingly fit, careering round the British countryside and the streets of Paris on his bicycle, talking all the while (and never out of breath) as he described the artistic trajectory of John Constable. In the opening sequence he set the scene, biking straight across – and not at the traffic lights, either – the Cromwell Road to get to the main entrance of the Victoria and Albert Museum; the film is timed to preview the major show “Constable: The Making of a Master” that there opens on September 20. That museum has the largest collection of Constable, which Read more ...
David Nice
“You feel like you’re walking into Fame, the movie,“ says one of three third-year drama students towards the beginning of this six-part documentary. That’s what we might have hoped of what, at least in the first episode, turns out to be a mere infomercial for New York’s prestigious academy of performing arts.The format ought to work: start of academic year in episode one - select, out of the lucky seven per cent chosen from auditions, a dancer, actors, violinist, jazz pianist, and follow their progress. I can only hope a singer will be in the offing, too; for now, there's a palpable imbalance Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Sofie Gråbøl as Danish royalty: it hardly stretches credulity. The face of Nordic noir has been a star in her home country ever since appearing in Bille August's Pelle the Conqueror in 1987, but is solely familiar on these shores as Sarah Lund, the jumpered Copenhagen detective from three unmissable series of The Killing. This autumn the only thing that will be recognisable about Gråbøl will be those big blue eyes as she is spirited back to the late Middle Ages, bewigged, bejewelled and billowing, to play a queen of Scotland.No, not that one. She is starring as Margaret, the very capable Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Bilko doesn’t date. The 143 episodes here are as deathless as Fawlty Towers’ 12, but occupy a very different place at the sitcom’s peak. When writer-producer Nat Hiken put Phil Silvers’ inveterate gambler and conman in charge of a motley platoon in the peacetime backwater of Fort Baxter, Kansas in 1955, it was a New York Jewish comic partnership as happy as S.J. Perelman’s with the Marx Brothers. Hiken ensured his series was shot in New York, where he knew Silvers from card games, to keep a crackling energy unavailable in Hollywood studios.Its original title, You’ll Never Get Rich, was Read more ...
Veronica Lee
On the face of it, it's one of the more counter-intuitive pieces of casting this year; surreal stand-up and possible future Labour Mayor of London Eddie Izzard as Robert Watson Watt, the Scottish scientist who helped develop radar. But on second thoughts, perhaps not, as Watson Watt had to overcome prejudice and entrenched opinion to see his vision through.Radar was at first dismissed by Winston Churchill (not Tim McInnerny's finest hour) as a fantastical project - “castles in the sky” - but he later acknowledged its huge importance in winning the war. Watson Watt and his team developed radar Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Well, it’s one way to cure shellshock. The centenary of World War One has produced quite a bombardment of dramas, none quite as curious as Our Zoo. The war is long since over in this new BBC One confection, and men have either come back from the trenches or not. Some have returned but without the full complement of limbs or, in the case of shopkeeper George Mottershead, marbles.You know he’s not quite the full shilling when he takes his daughter to the circus but has to run as soon as cowboys firing popguns. They didn’t go in for the talking cure in those days, not in the tight-lipped north, Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The Bennet family had an issue. Time to get the Austenesque quips out of the way. For the Bennets in Gems TV the truth universally acknowledged was, roughly: “That a £100 million family-run jewellery television channel risking running out of its best-selling African gem, not to mention suffering from a shortage of screen presenters who can flog the stuff, must be in want of a friendly television documentary format to get them out of their fix.” (For the record, no one seemed sure if it was a single “t” or a double one in Bennet: ITV gave them one – closet Janeites there, eh? – the Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Poet and campaigner John Betjeman, who died 30 years ago this year, still has a public profile most writers would die for tomorrow. He shares with Philip Larkin the distinction of having written some memorably, demotically quotable lines of verse, their respective denunciations of Slough and parents being possibly the two best-known pieces of 20th-century verse.Yet while Larkin has suffered from a perception of racism and misogyny, Betjeman’s reputation as a far-sighted architectural campaigner has, with his statue at St Pancras, one of the buildings he helped save, helped consolidate Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
You didn’t have to wait for the words in the closing credits, “written and presented by”, to know that The Writers Who Shaped a Nation was a project that Andrew Marr was involved with fully. Its sheer broadcasting quality showed it from the beginning. It’s the first project that has taken Marr out of the studio since his stroke, and it confirmed that his agility of mind (and legs, given the amount of mountain walking involved) was as powerful as ever.Simply put, viewers can really feel the difference when a presenter is clearly the master of the script from beginning to end. It’s far from Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“It looked like Dresden after the bombing.” Blondie’s Chris Stein may be a member of one of pop’s most-loved bands, but he also has a way with words. Describing 1970's New York City in this way is offensive to the memory of the 25,000 who died in the World War II air raids on Dresden. More pertinently for New York-dweller Stein, his comment also chimes badly with the destruction of the twin towers of Manhattan’s World Trade Centre in 2001.Blondie’s New York and the Making of Parallel Lines unquestioningly celebrated the band’s massive-selling, breakthrough third album but some care could have Read more ...