TV
fisun.guner
Uri Geller was famous once. Superstar, rock’n’roll famous, and though this is now hard to believe, kind of cool. He hung out with John Lennon, who gave him a thing that resembles a gold-plated egg and that was, Lennon told him, a gift from a friendly alien. What’s more, he was the darling of the chat show circuit – no, not those crank channels where psychic readings are available when you phone in with your credit card details, but ones hosted by David Dimbleby. But what’s really amazing is that no one one laughed at him, as they later did David Icke for being several spoons short of a Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Christopher Guest and his group of players have been responsible for some of the funniest, driest comedy films of the past 30 years, including Waiting For Guffman, Best in Show, A Mighty Wind and, of course, his masterpiece This Is Spinal Tap, in which he played the tight-trousered guitarist Nigel Tufnel. Now he's directed and co-created (with Jim Piddock) Family Tree, a US-British sitcom first shown on HBO in America.Like most of Guest's work, the mockumentary sitcom is improvised by the cast and it centres on Irish actor Chris O'Dowd's Tom Chadwick, a 30-year-old unemployed claims assessor Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Another week, another breakout performance from Olivia Colman. That chirpy face and sprite smile encourages a nation of fans to follow her into all manner of beastly nooks and dread crannies in the hope that somehow with Colman for company it’ll be all right. Increasingly, it isn’t. After Tyrannosaur (murders husband) and Accused (son murdered) and Broadchurch (investigates child murder), we have Run (sons murder).Run is running for four nights this week. In the style of The Street, there are several sketchily-linked narratives which tell of lives on society’s pitiless lower rungs where moral Read more ...
theartsdesk
There's the First Night and there's the Last Night. Nowadays among the staples of the two-month world-famous festival of music at the Royal Albert Hall, there is also the Doctor Who Prom. Last night, to mark the 50th anniversary of the resurgent TV sci-fi show, a celebration was laid on featuring Murray Gold's music from the last eight years of Doctor Who.Performed by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and the London Philharmonic Choir under Ben Foster, there was also, to tickle the musical tastebuds of the fans, some music not hitherto noted for its connection to Daleks, Cybermen, time Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Jane Campion's much-anticipated series is set amid hauntingly beautiful scenery on New Zealand's South Island, which in its remoteness seems to shake its head gently at the antics of the sparse human population. The people themselves are like a tribe that time forgot, living in a wilderness-bubble governed by the kind of attitudes you'd expect to find in some dust-devilled outpost of the Old West in about 1800.If they weren't born there, they've come to escape. Thus, in an early sequence, a cluster of containers was delivered to a lakeside piece of land called (either ironically or not) Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Rod Stewart isn't cool and he doesn't care. He made a complete pillock of himself with the likes of "Hot Legs" and "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?", but they were some of his biggest-ever hits. He plunged gleefully into the WAGS-and-riches fantasyland of Los Angeles, became a living cartoon of pop star excess, and loved it. "I enjoyed myself hugely, every hour of every day," he told Alan Yentob in this entertaining Imagine... profile.Nonetheless, the success of his recent album Time, and matching live shows, represent a resounding comeback for Stewart. They've restored a chunk of the credibility that Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Last year I spent the summer reading A Life Too Short, a biography of former German national goalkeeper Robert Enke by his friend, the sports journalist Ronald Reng. It’s an incredibly emotive book that uses Enke's diary entries to tell the story of his playing career, his family life, his depression and, ultimately, his suicide in 2009 at the age of 32. It seems that although no end of campaigns try to break down the stigma of depression, or trot out statistics that one in four of us will ultimately suffer from it, in the end it’s usually the sufferers themselves left asking why something Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Count Arthur Strong, the creation of Steve Delaney, is a bumbling, stumbling has-been variety turn and self-described thespian whose ego is inversely proportional to his talent. The character, a Harry Worth lookalike who mangles his words, became a cult hit at the Edinburgh Fringe and for several years Count Arthur Strong's Radio Show! ran on Radio 4. On stage there was much slapstick humour and visual gags (most famously wearing a dinner jacket with the coat-hanger still attached), while on radio the Count's utter lack of verbal dexterity (a phrase he would surely mangle) was given Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Back in the Eighties, Australian TV brought us Bodyline, retelling (with some extravagant exaggeration) how Douglas Jardine's 1932 England side caused an international rumpus by zapping Australia with "leg theory" bowling. Even more seismic for the somnolent world of international cricket was Kerry Packer's World Series Cricket of the 1970s, whose story is reconstructed in this two-part drama from Australia's Nine Network (itself a part of the Packer empire).In the days before the IPL, Twenty20 and Sky Sports had been dreamed of, cricket still retained a quaint, parochial air and a virtually Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s taken many years. Most thought they’d never see the day dawn. But this afternoon, the planets were in alignment, the winds were blowing in the right direction, and the obdurate muscle-clad star of many an epic with a face hewn from Scottish granite, famed around the globe for keeping its array of expressions to the barest minimum, was seen to crack into a series of girly gigawatt smiles.But enough about Gerard Butler, whom the BBC’s cameras sought out with gruelling regularity as a compatriot of his was sweating bullets out on the grass. The men’s singles final at Wimbledon always Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Even now, as Edward Snowden floats in the diplomatic neverwhere of Sheremetyevo airport, someone somewhere is plotting the movie. Currently the story of the man who blew the whistle on the National Security Agency looks like it could still play out as farce, but it may yet turn to tragedy.Whistleblowers are bad news for governments and major corporations but, as this week’s Listed demonstrates, gold-dust for storytellers. The narrative arc is more or less the same: hero or heroine of lowly status takes on big bad villain and gets to be heard, at some personal cost. Works every time. It Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
You've got a political scandal, so who ya gonna call? It had better be Olivia Pope, whose company Pope & Associates specialises in protecting the image and interest of the power-elite, frequently (though not exclusively) within the Washington DC Beltway.Olivia (a crisp, crunchy and aerodynamically power-dressed Kerry Washington) has serious crisis management credentials, having been Communications Director at the White House. Indeed, her connections reach right to the top, since she's also the ex-lover of President Fitzgerald Grant (Tony Goldwyn). In fact not all that ex, since the Prez Read more ...