TV
Jasper Rees
Let’s be honest, you never expect much sense from BBC Three. You don’t count on it for, say, depth of perspective. The channel which each week spews fresh torrents of hectic DayGlo entertainment in the specific direction of a desensitised demographic tends to steer clear of the big subjects. War and such. Girls on the Frontline, therefore, did not inspire much hope. That title. On any other BBC channel, it would have been women, not girls. Still, a camera crew was allowed to follow several women on a six-month tour in Helmand province. And either the British Army press office had the channel Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
Sophie Dahl made her debut as a TV chef last night in The Delicious Miss Dahl (try and imagine Leslie Phillips saying that), a BBC Two confection even more absurdly artificial than the various Nigella Lawson food-porn shows. At least you believe Nigella can and does make food and eat it - with Dahl (despite two cookbooks to her name) it just came across like another modelling job. And while the saucer-eyed beauty may be easier on the eye than Bill Buford, there was only one destination for viewers serious about food. It was back to Lyon, or “Lee-own” as Buford insisted on pronouncing it in Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Seven Ages of Britain began in the same week as A History of the World in 100 Objects on Radio 4. You wait a prodigiously long time for a massive cultural overview and then two come along at once. Do they think in a joined-up way about these things at the BBC? Or has this double helping been a sign of a wider moral and structural chaos that characterises the new world disorder? Last night David Dimbleby concluded his tour of two millennia of British art. It has, inevitably, been a bit of a sprint. In this final episode, the horror of the trenches was wrapped up in less screen time than Read more ...
josh.spero
What emerges from tonight’s Culture Show on Henry Moore, which examines how the sculptor exploited the media (and vice versa), is not the difference between the media of sculpture and television but the similarity. Rather than a simple programme on Moore’s career – one fawning talking head after another – to coincide with the retrospective of his work at Tate Britain, Alan Yentob has instead chosen the meta-route, talking about TV talking about art. It is a topic which resonates today, where the one thing we love as much as looking at art is hearing people discuss art, and is well chosen Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
Imagine if Rory Bremner had been banned from British television for the past 20 years, and Gordon Brown had put pressure on the BBC to get rid of Question Time because it had been critical of him. In the Italy of Silvio Berlusconi these things happen. The country’s top satirist, Beppe Grillo, has effectively been denied access to the airwaves since Berlusconi became prime minister in 1994, while just this week allegations emerged that Berlusconi had tried to block transmission of a state television talk show, Annozero, that had discussed the alleged mafia ties of members of his government. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Rarely has a TV series been so easy to like and so tricky to define. If you shoved High School Musical, American Idol and The Breakfast Club in a blender, you'd be in the right ballpark, though you still wouldn't quite have captured Glee's unique tone of sweetness, campness, tragic teenage confusion and satire.On the face of it, the setup is simple. McKinley High School’s earnest, optimistic Spanish teacher Will Schuester (Matthew Morrison) seeks to revive the school’s after-hours glee club, partly out of nostalgia for his own glory days in the high school choir. But the cool Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The only time I've ever been to Detroit was in 2004, in pursuit of assorted rock stars on the Vote for Change tour. Reader, it was weird. The atmosphere in the deserted streets was deathly, as if an invading army had swarmed into town, committed hideous atrocities and then moved on. The decaying architecture from America's golden industrial age looked unsettlingly like the set for The Omega Man, in which Charlton Heston fought a solitary war against an army of nocturnal psychopaths.These feelings returned vividly as I watched Julien Temple's stupendous Requiem for Detroit?, a thrilling piece Read more ...
Jasper Rees
OK, let’s flop it out into the open. Let’s show the cards I was dealt way back when. Those boaters you saw at the start of Cutting Edge's Too Poor for Posh School? I may well, in another lifetime, blameless aeons in the netherworld of one’s past, have been seen wandering along a high street on a hill north-west of London underneath one of those. The tailcoats worn by pews full of adolescents on Sundays? Yep. Once upon a time that was oneself. (Thank God they didn’t show the top hats we had to wear as monitors.) My name is Jasper and I am an Old Harrovian. Thought I’d better get that out the Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
There must have been gnashing of teeth and the rending of heavily discounted garments in the marketing departments of Marks & Spencer, House of Fraser et al, when they realised that their commercial rival had been granted a three-hour advertisement on the BBC, but then there has always been something about John Lewis that seems to elevate it above the ruck and maul of the high street. What that something was – and whether or not it was purely mythical – was the subject of Liz Allen’s ultimately interesting documentary foray behind the façade of Middle England’s favourite department store Read more ...
Jasper Rees
We know the grammar now by rote. Some local institution is on its uppers. A traditional way of life is threatened by changing times. Sic transit etcetera and so forth. What’s wanted is a shot in the arm, a kick in the seat, preferably administered by a famous well-known celebrity star, one if at all possible followed at all times by their own bespoke camera crew. And yea, lo, not to mention verily, they will sprinkle their fairy dust, twinkle their pixie bits, and an impossible task of a horridly hard nature will by some completely predictable miracle be achieved, all thanks to grit, graft Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
You don't have to be female to wonder where the feminist revolution went. You only have to look at the not-very-private lives of footballers and the gaggles of wannabe WAGs flinging themselves in their path, or the way female pop stars seem to relish the requirement to dress up (or down) like porno queens, to wonder if it isn't high time somebody wrote an update of Kate Millett's Sexual Politics. But they'd all be too busy Tweeting to read it.Millett was one of the pioneering feminist icons tracked down by Vanessa Engle in Libbers, the first of her three-part series, Women. Read more ...
Veronica Lee
“The Mob made Vegas,” says its mayor since 1999, Oscar B Goodman. And he should know, having defended plenty of mobsters in his time when - he and I are equally quick to point out - he was a defence attorney and didn’t know what they were really up to. What a trick presenter Alan Yentob missed here; he could have simply chatted to this wrinkly, wily New Yorker transplanted to the Nevada desert and The Lure of Las Vegas (shown as part of BBC Two’s Vegas night), produced and directed by Janet Lee, would have been a whole lot more entertaining.What we got, this being an Alan Yentob documentary, Read more ...