TV
Tom Baily
The Apollo 11 mission remains the most celebrated journey humanity has ever made. It produced some of our most iconic images, as well as the greatest speech gaffe, and a documentary of epic scale could be made that focused solely on the influence it has had on our popular culture. 8 Days has a different aim, asking the question, “What was it really like for those three astronauts over the course of those eight days?” Using real recordings, archival footage and re-enactments, we are given the inside story of what happened inside the lunar capsules.Like other recent film productions (including Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
“I want to discover how our government could fall apart and the country become bitterly divided in just a few weeks,” historian Lisa Hilton announced at the start of her BBC Four account of the traumatic demise of Charles I. In a mere 50 days in 1641-2, it seemed that the foundations of the state were sawn away as England tumbled towards a calamitous civil war.Well, in outline it was fairly simple. Take one absolute monarch convinced that he enjoyed the divine right of kings and sublimely indifferent to the opinions of his subjects, and pitch him against the leader of the House of Commons Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Healthy, efficient and carbon-neutral, cycling ought to be a transport panacea. But in the dash for lycra, perhaps not enough attention has been paid to letting bikes and motor vehicles co-exist peacefully. This deliberately provocative Channel 5 documentary, which has sparked an angry backlash from within the cycling community, found plenty of ammunition from both sides.It took the easy option by rounding up some grouchy London black-cab drivers to have a sustained whinge about the two-wheeled plague which they see as yet another threat to their livelihood (nobody mentioned Uber). They Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s a topical idea, at least. Isaac Mensah, a child actor from a working-class family in London, has been cast in a Hollywood sci-fi blockbuster, and when he returns home his family and friends are agog to find out what his amazing movie experience was like. But the sky falls in when Isaac (Max Fincham) plays his parents a video he shot on his phone, containing evidence that he was abused by the film’s all-powerful producer, Jotham Starr, the boss of Yonder Starr Productions.Somehow though, the parts add up to less than a whole, with neither characters nor action feeling especially plausible Read more ...
Joseph Bullman
The Left Behind is a television drama marinated in real-world research. It tells the story of a young man unable to break free from his bullshit job, zero-hour existence, thrown out of his family home when the council decide that as a single man with no dependents he isn’t a housing priority. He is seduced by a far-right, anti-migrant explanation for his plight and eventually drawn into a sickening hate crime. But very unusually our film takes the perspective of the perpetrator of the hate crime. And this is why we felt we had to hear this side of the story.Last year we made Killed Read more ...
Owen Richards
It sometimes feels like an age between Stranger Things seasons. Blame Netflix. The binge-watching trend that it helped solidify means that most people consume all eight hours of content in a single weekend. It comes and goes in a flash. But don’t let that fool you into thinking it’s a disposable snack, the TV equivalent of those famous Eggo pancakes. Stranger Things 3 is blockbuster television, full of the laughs, jumps and exaggerated nostalgia that made it such a hit in 2016.After a mixed-bag second season, creators The Duffer Brothers have returned to their winning formula. Gone are the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Not too long ago it would have been unthinkable for a BBC One Sunday-night period drama series to tell of one woman’s love for another. Whatever anyone thought of it – and not everyone bade it the hearty welcome it merited – Gentleman Jack has shifted the dial.Was it a coincidence that it completed its run the day after a reported one and a half million people in London turned out to celebrate the freedom to love whoever you choose? (And the day the mauve-maned Megan Rapinoe completed her apotheosis as a gay icon in the final of the Women's World Cup?) Anne Lister, so cussed and crotchety in Read more ...
Tom Baily
Should the Ritz catch up with modernity? This question is posed and immediately answered with another question: Does it need to? Not really, say the staff, clients and celebrity guests that populate this bubbly, formulaic and unashamed celebration of what is, rightly, a gorgeous and historic venue. Sticking tight to tradition and celebrating it – with the help of some very famous talking heads – is what is on offer in ITV's latest show. But viewers in search of history, intrigue, scandal, or an insight that slides even an inch beneath surface description will not find it in this overtly Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The BBC is pleased with itself for having insinuated a documentary team inside the Bank of England, but was this august custodian of the nation’s finances really going to let slip any juicy revelations? The Bank’s role is too powerful and too political for its employees to be anything other than extremely tight-lipped. In fact a major theme of this film (the first of two parts) was the lengths the Bank goes to to protect its secrets, with a strict “purdah” regime in place to prevent leaks and electronic sweeps for listening devices a routine occurrence. It was safe to assume that director Rob Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Ecological awareness has become de rigueur for any self-respecting celebrity, and if the chances of saving the planet were in direct proportion to the number of renowned personages criss-crossing it on well-intentioned missions, we could all stop worrying. Still, one would much prefer to have Dame Judi Dench doing it than…. others we might mention.Having adopted a trio of orangutans in Borneo, Dame Judi ventured to the Malay Archipelago to immerse herself in the island’s astonishing array of wildlife and vegetation and see the animals in their natural habitat. But you can’t just drop an 84- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As an aid to meditation, Professor Brian Cox’s latest series The Planets (BBC Two) could hardly be faulted. A majestic tour of the Solar System awash with computerised imagery, an eerie soundtrack and a travel budget the president of the United States might envy, it exerted a narcotic allure as Cox’s gaze roamed billions of kilometres into deep space. His whispery commentary is a bit like having a scalp massage.Mind you, you could probably glean most of the facts from assorted scientific publications or even Wikipedia, but Cox has a gift for making you feel that he’s telling the story for the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
According to the Manchester drag collective the Family Gorgeous, “drag should be for everyone.” And on the evidence of Drag SOS (Channel 4) , engagingly voice-overed by Hugh Bonneville, the British public is eager to embrace them in all their spangly, fantastical glory.The Gorgeouses visit different towns looking for volunteers to get out of that closet and undergo a ravishing, 360-degree drag makeover. They started in Dover, where their candidates included Shaun, a 55-year-old supermarket supervisor who they pulled off a rain-soaked football pitch, to the amazement of his old boy-buddies. Read more ...