TV
Adam Sweeting
He wasn't a jack of all trades, said his friend June Whitfield, "he was a master of all trades". The charge of "smarminess" dogged Bob Monkhouse throughout his career, but as this quietly penetrating documentary made clear, he was highly intelligent, multi-talented and had a lot of layers he kept to himself. Actor, scriptwriter, singer, novelist (though they didn't really mention that part), stand-up comic, cartoonist, radio star, gameshow host and posthumous campaigner against the prostate cancer that killed him - the only thing Monkhouse couldn't manage too successfully was his work-life Read more ...
fisun.guner
We know we’re in cut-price Sex and the City territory when it’s not iPhones that are getting top product placement billing but Clearblue pregnancy tests. A box was held aloft between the trembling fingers of Jess as the camera slowly caressed its glistening cellophane surface for a lingering close-up. Just as well, since this was about all the shine, glitz and sensuality we were going to get in Series Three of Mistresses - as if there wasn’t enough doom, gloom and sobriety to go round in this recession-hit world they’d taken away the Prosecco, the frilly knickers and the killer heels. And Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
My surname came to Britain with the Normans, and I must say that my forebears have had a bad press in their adopted homeland. From Hereward the Wake to Robin Hood, Anglo-Saxon legends have depicted us as despotic and cruel, whereas we were great builders of castles and cathedrals, brilliant horsemen and tip-top administrators, as well as being despotic and cruel. Anyway, it was good to have the refreshingly un-youthful and un-strident Professor Robert Bartlett (more Norman names) giving us his authoritative account of the antecedents and legacy of 1066 and all that. It’s about time we Viking- Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Now that Last of the Summer Wine has been strapped aboard the great Stairmaster to the Sky, there’s a gap in the market for a comedy in which the landscape has a starring role. Written by Kevin Cecil, whose credits include Black Books, and Andy Riley, The Great Outdoors is a bucolic al fresco sitcom following the members of a rambling club in the Chilterns as they trudge through their drab, rather lonely lives and negotiate their petty rivalries. Like the countryside it depicts, it's diverting and nicely put together without ever quite taking the breath away. Last week’s opening episode was a Read more ...
Veronica Lee
"Welcome to the new-look, high-risk, high-speed show,” said presenter Chris Tarrant at the top of the programme. Well, sort of new-look; the opening titles are new (although they still haven't managed to put the question mark in the logo), but the music is the same and the set appears to have had no more than a dust down since the last series. But let’s not quibble, as producers Celador have indeed rung the changes and in doing so have given the long-running show a much needed fillip.Who Wants to be a Millionaire? first aired in the UK in 1998 and is a broadcasting phenomenon. Its Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Wasn't The Deep the title of a 1970s movie starring Jacqueline Bisset and Nick Nolte? Something about sunken treasure and a stash of morphine off the coast of Bermuda. I have a hunch it may have been complete twaddle. No less preposterous is this five-part subaqueous saga from the BBC, in which a team of marine scientists take their research submarine, the Orpheus, into frozen Arctic waters to investigate the catastrophic wreck of another sub, the Hermes.This bunch would be nobody's first choice for this sort of Mission Impossible activity, since their proper job is combing the deeps for " Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
After a 20-year absence from British TV, Sir Tom Stoppard returns to the small screen next year with his five-part adaptation of Ford Madox Ford's novel, Parade's End, on BBC Two. When the BBC approached Stoppard (pictured) with the idea two years ago, he had never read the book, but says that it "has been my preoccupation since then. The title covers a quartet of books set among the upper class in Edwardian England, mostly from 1911 to the end of the Great War."Central to the story is the love triangle between the aristocratic Christopher Tietjens, his wife Sylvia and the young suffragette Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“Well! It is now publique, & you wil stand for your priuiledges wee know: to read, and censure. Do so, but buy it first...” In 1623, the First Folio edition of Shakespeare’s works was collected by the actors John Heminge and Henry Condell. It cost a quid. Whenever they come on the market nowadays, editions tend to shift for rather more. Not so long ago I was allowed to leaf through the copy belonging to the Guildhall Library in the City of London. Valued at perhaps £2.5 million, it leaves the shelves only rarely. Whenever it does, it rests on a judiciously arranged beanbag. All who Read more ...
Veronica Lee
This award-winning series, created by Tom Kapinos in 2007, is groundbreaking television even by Showtime’s daring standards. Californication is a dark - very dark - comedy drama about Hank Moody (David Duchovny), a bad-boy writer who has lost his literary mojo, but absolutely not his mojo mojo, as it were; it has nudity a-gogo, frequent sex scenes, recreational drug-taking and frank discussion of sexual matters.
Some have accused it of being a male fantasy writ large - and Duchovny’s admission that he had been treated for that most modern of conditions, sex addiction, appeared to give Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
There may be many benefits to living at the top of the Erno Goldfinger-designed Trellick Tower in north Kensington – the extensive views across London, perhaps, or the knowledge that one is inhabiting an iconic example of Brutalist architecture. Less obvious is the chance to earn a quick 50 quid for allowing Dan Witchalls to jump off your balcony.
Mind you, you’d have to let him into your flat at 5am, for base jumping (or "base", as parachuting from the top of tall buildings is known to its practitioners) is a secretive pastime with unsociable hours. It also carries identical odds to Russian Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
And first the bad news. The ABC network in the States has already declared Better Off Ted dead, after a paltry two seasons. Which is a pity, since acerbic, mildly surreal satires about the workings of corporate America don’t come along very often.One of Better Off Ted’s trademarks is its opening sequence, which takes the form of a commercial (new every episode) for Veridian Dynamics, the gargantuan conglomerate where the title character, Ted Crisp (Jay Harrington), heads the Research and Development department. Veridian’s ads are triumphs of PR gloss and technological triumphalism, with just Read more ...
fisun.guner
Rupert Everett knows who he is: he is English, he’s a toff and he’s a poof, thank you very much. And that’s just about all you need to know to tell you that, as a breed, they’re pretty damned sure of themselves, these English toffs, poofs or not. But he’s also a pretty memorable actor. Yes, really. Let me try to convince you. I once saw him – and this must have been just before Another Country hit the big screen, for his name didn’t mean much to me then – on stage in Webster’s The White Devil. He looked cute enough in his period costume, but his energy was a thunderbolt. Not only did he Read more ...