TV
Jasper Rees
They always say that women over a certain age are, in televisual terms, extinct. Well, it seems that science is going to have to get back to the drawing board. Palaeontological reports are coming in from last night of strange terrestrial sightings - sightings of creatures whose skeletal remains were long since thought to be fossilising in the Jurassic substrata known as US cable. And not just one. People caught fleeting glimpses of the Trinnysaurus and the Susannadactyl while others say they saw a Nigellatops chomping greedily in her own pastures. But they can't quite be sure.Yes, plummy Read more ...
toby.young
"You do understand you'll have no editorial control? None. The BBC and Channel 4 are very clear about that. Control will rest solely with the broadcaster. There's absolutely no wiggle room." The speaker was Alan Hayling, editorial director of Renegade Pictures. We were sitting in Soho House and he was one of over 40 television producers who approached me last autumn with a view to making a documentary about my group's efforts to set up a Free School in west London.I liked the fact that Alan was so clear on this point. My biggest anxiety was that the documentary would make us look like a Read more ...
howard.male
If you have fond childhood memories of either the Born Free book or movie, you might want to stay away. From the opening moments of this documentary, the knowledge that lion-loving conservationist George Adamson was fatally shot in the back on a dirt road in Kenya will immediately stop John Barry’s epic and optimistic theme song from swelling to life in your head. But that’s only the beginning of a systematic dismantling of the Born Free myth from a documentary which, ironically, was made to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the publication of Joy Adamson’s unexpected bestseller.With the Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Those of us who occasionally still wake abruptly at 3am, a cool, clammy film of sweat creeping across our brow, as we recollect the full horror of Lenny Henry’s Chef! (God, that cruelly mocking exclamation mark), could be forgiven for approaching this new kitchen-com with a degree of trepidation. Thankfully Whites, starring Alan Davies, turned out to be a far more appetising proposition, and not just because there’s nary a sniff of the dread Mr Henry to be found lurking behind the pots and pain.Whites has two major factors in its favour: a talented, eminently watchable cast and a script Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
With the BBC still in the middle of shooting their revival of Upstairs, Downstairs, ITV1 have nipped in ahead of them with Julian Fellowes's spiffing new sundown-on-the-aristocracy drama. In a battle of the stage dames, the Beeb has bagged Eileen Atkins, whereas ITV has signed up Maggie Smith as Violet, Dowager Countess of Grantham. So far she has not been called upon to say, "A handbag?"The extended opening sequence of this 90-minute scene-setter fixed the date as April 16, 1912, and the camera rambled around the sprawling pile of Downton Abbey as the carefully delineated echelons of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
How did vampires manage to stage a near-total hijack of the popular media? It used to be just Christopher Lee in a cloak with Hammer Films’ home-made cardboard bats hanging on wires over his head, but now we’re up to our throats in Buffy, Angel, The Twilight Saga, Blade, Van Helsing… and True Blood, HBO’s somewhat superior exercise in blood-squirting southern Gothic, now back for its second series on Channel 4.Is the lionisation of vampires a way of embracing the “other” in a suffocatingly formatted society? Is it an artistic metaphor for sexual liberation? Or is it just a celebration of Read more ...
theartsdesk
To most the music will be more familiar than the name. Geoffrey Burgon, who has died, devoted only a minor portion of his career to composing for television.He also wrote for piano, for trumpet (which he studied at Guildhall School of Music and Drama), for guitar quartet and all manner of chamber group. In 1991 he composed an operatic version of Dickens's Hard Times. Above all he composed for choirs - most notably his Requiem for the Three Choirs Festival in 1976.From the sublime he was quite happy to accept commissions with a more ridiculous flavour, among them Monty Python's The Meaning of Read more ...
theartsdesk
They say women past a certain age can’t get work in broadcasting. In more enlightened times, Mavis Nicholson was the first woman to interview on daytime television. She had given up a career in advertising, married, and had children by the time she started presenting in 1972. She was talent-spotted by Jeremy Isaacs on the dinner-party circuit, where her penchant for asking searching questions was deemed ideal for the new dawn of daytime. By 1997, when she last worked in television, she had interviewed David Bowie and Elizabeth Taylor, Peter Cook, Kenneth Williams, Morecambe and Wise, Liberace Read more ...
fisun.guner
There’s an equality gap in our education system. Poor kids come bottom of the class, while rich kids are destined for the elite universities. In the eloquent words of education minister Michael Gove: “Rich thick kids do better than poor clever kids.” And we’ve got loads of stats to back this up. The stats were duly trotted out by John Humphrys, the genial BBC broadcaster with the savage bite. By the age of three, children from socially deprived backgrounds are already a year behind their better-off peers; by 14 it’s two years, and by 16 they’re half as likely to get five good GCSEs. When Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Looks like being a chilly autumn in Spooks world. In time-honoured fashion, the new series waved goodbye to another former stalwart with the funeral of Ros Myers (Hermione Norris), blown to bits in the last series and thus freed up to splash about in the moral squalor of ITV1's new Bouquet of Barbed Wire. Amusingly, that put her just a click of the remote control away in the same Monday, 9pm time slot. Can't say I'll miss Ros's stone face and rather lacklustre Terminator impersonations, but new addition Beth Bailey (Sophia Myles) looks poised to bring a refreshingly brash self-confidence to Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Alan Plater wrote to the end. When he died earlier this year, he had completed a final screenplay which found him returning whence he came. Joe Maddison’s War was set in his native North-East, and portrayed the impact of wartime on ordinary working-class lives. With the help of nostalgic singing and dancing, the tone was comic and affectionate, but with an undimmed glint of good old socialist indignation. They don’t make dramas like this any more. But whenever they do, the more senior couch potatoes are entitled to lament once more the passing of Play for Today.It’s quite a thing to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The double act between screenwriter Peter Morgan and his favoured leading man Michael Sheen has given us some of the most teasingly enjoyable dramas of recent years, but how much genuine insight they've given us into Tony Blair or New Labour remains a moot point. A typically sour Alastair Campbell told Radio Times this week that this third shot at Blair was well wide of the mark - "The gap between what actually happened and what is portrayed is even bigger in The Special Relationship than in The Queen." Maybe he's right, but since it's Campbell saying it, there's little incentive to believe Read more ...