TV
william.ward
Golfing for Cats: Alan Coren once invented the perfect book title on the basis that if you combined those who follow the activities of Tiger Woods with those who adore smaller domestic felines, you have a massive demographic primed to buy your last tome. Likewise for TV commissioning editors, there must be something tempting about the high-concept hybrid. As part of a season designed to interest the Great British audience in the arcane delights of the operatic tradition (which other shows in the series remind us was born in Italy), what better way to sugar the pill than to stick a much- Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister joins an ever-lengthening list of dramas detailing the joys, the struggles of lady-on-lady love. It’s never quite clear who these entertainments are for. Blokes, as we know, have a response to this stuff that hovers between complex and Neanderthal. Sometimes you wonder why the schedulers don’t always screen them during major sporting tournaments, when the chaps are all looking the other way. On the other hand, do fans of six-hanky chick flicks, legs curled on sofas across the land, really want to watch girls getting it on with girls? So you never know Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“Are you looking forward to Christmas?” was always going to be a difficult question. Anthony looked forward to spending it with his daughter and grandchild – as long as he kept taking the medication that allowed him to stay out of hospital. Andrew should have had a happy gathering lined up, except his latest bout of mania had seen him leave the family home. Richard was wrapping presents. A whisk for his mum, because she’d stopped eating; some liqueur chocolates for his gran, the only way to get a drop of alcohol into the old girl. Trouble was Richard had something else to look forward to: the Read more ...
howard.male
It was never going to work now, was it? Martin Amis’s dense yet surging 400-page novel condensed down to just two hours of primetime TV? But director Jeremy Lovering, along with writers Tom Butterworth and Chris Hurford (Ashes to Ashes) certainly have a good bash at it. On the plus side, many of Amis’s original words, dialogue and set-pieces were left intact. On the minus side, where do I start? The first problem is that Nick Frost was miscast. Not woefully miscast - physically he fits the bill – but Simon Pegg’s comic sidekick is more cuddly koala than dead-eyed grizzly, as Amis’s morally Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Is there anywhere Stephen Fry will not go? I mean in documentaries. We’ve had Fry on depression and Fry on America, Fry on HIV and Fry on endangered species. Movingly, we’ve had Fry on who he thinks he is, an odyssey in which he discovered that much of his family fetched up in the gas ovens. Fry on Wagner? Admit it, you weren’t surprised. You didn't think, not another bloody comedian investigating, in pursuit of ratings, a subject of which he knows next to nothing. Fry, as everyone knows, knows everything. “My love affair with Wagner”, he began, “began when I was a child.” Of course it did, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I always liked that line in the 1960 Spartacus movie when Spartacus's lover Varinia (Jean Simmons) is bidding a silent farewell to the crucified rebel gladiator. "Tell da lady no loidering," growls the Roman sentry standing guard nearby. I can't tell you whether the line will appear in this new and lurid rehash of the Spartacus legend, though if it does it won't have quite the same Bronx ambience about it since most of the accents are from the Antipodes, the series having been shot in New Zealand. It also arrives tooled up with all available digital technology, and whatever it lacks in Read more ...
David Nice
The backlash begins here with the first of Flavia Rittner's three documentaries: not an operatic wannabe or a gushing celebrity outsider to present, only a conductor who knows and loves his job inside out and a parade of gorgeous, energetic singers all at the very top of their hard-working game in state-of-the-art productions.It was a tall order for irresistible Royal Opera music director Antonio Pappano to whizz his way through Monteverdi, Handel, Mozart and Rossini in one hour, but by going straight to the heart of each matter, choosing a scene from a key opera and working on it in the most Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Aptly, this new documentary about how the Rolling Stones fled from England to the South of France to record Exile on Main Street was premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, with a supernaturally healthy-looking Mick Jagger on hand to give it a promotional shove. Jagger (along with Keith Richards and Charlie Watts) produced the film, working closely alongside director Stephen Kijak to knit together an evocative and emotional portrait of "the greatest rock'n'roll band in the world", at what many would argue was their peak.The fact that the project is an authorised job from the heart of the Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
After the final episode of The Prisoner was aired in February 1968, Patrick McGoohan had to go into hiding after being besieged at home by viewers demanding an explanation about his teasingly obscure (and, I think, rather brilliant) ending. It’s unlikely that Matthew Graham and Ashley Pharoah will have similar problems after last night’s send-off to Life on Mars/Ashes to Ashes - after all, these days you can delve into the limitless speculation of the internet to compare their interpretations, maybe even read Graham and Pharoah’s Tweets on the matter.And, anyway, the creators of BBC One’s Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Martin Amis always had his own idea of who should play John Self, the anti-heroic slob narrator of Money. "The only regret I have in the whole book-to-film department,” he told me, “is that Gary Oldman never played John Self. We had a meeting with Gary and he was so unbelievably good, and so instinctively got the character and made me laugh so violently when he did it, that I thought that was a great shame.” Oldman was even prepared to go the extra mile. “He said, 'I'm going to give up smoking and take up drinking and put on the weight.'" That version never happened. But Money has finally Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Most people’s experience of the 120 or so Victorian asylums that littered the UK landscape for more than a century is, thankfully, oohing and aahing over the “sophisticated and sensitive” conversions they have become, providing “astonishing, unusual and stylish” apartments, as estate-agent-speak has it. Those fortunate enough to move into these beautiful new homes are doing so of their own accord, of course, but many of those held in their previous incarnations would have preferred to be anywhere else at all.This documentary, made by Chris Boulding for the BBC’s Open University strand, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Where were you? For those of us too young to experience Kennedy’s assassination, which realistically is anyone under the age of 55, the Royal Wedding is the next event along the chain of history that simultaneously impinged on much of the globe’s consciousness. In July 1981, I was on a French course in Clermont Ferrand and the whole group watched Lady Di get Prince Charles’s names in the wrong order on a TV in class. There must have been French commentary. Were you anywhere in particular?For the inhabitants of a Welsh pit village in Abi Morgan’s drama Royal Wedding, the nuptials up in London Read more ...