tv
Duran Duran: There's Something You Should Know / A Night In, BBC Four, review - chaps on filmSaturday, 30 June 2018
Forty years on. You could have got attractive odds on Duran Duran still being here when, on a yacht carving the seas off Antigua, a cream-suited Simon Le Bon mimed “Rio” astride an unapologetically phallic bowsprit. “A ripple in a stagnant pool,” sniffed the NME upon first catching them live. Read more... |
Reporting Trump's First Year: the Fourth Estate, BBC Two review - all hands on deck at the Gray LadyMonday, 25 June 2018
The cataclysm of Donald Trump’s election was like a second 9/11 for the East Coast elite (and not just them, obviously). It was a world turned upside down, the centre couldn’t hold, and, worst of all, why did nobody see it coming? Read more... |
Natural World: The Super Squirrels, BBC Two review - silliness and factsWednesday, 20 June 2018
Squirrels are a breed as diverse as they are ubiquitous: they inhabit environments as extreme as desert and tundra, and all the lush greenery, rainforest and urban jungle imaginable between. So bless the producers of The Super Squirrels who humorously avoid a straight-down-the-line profile of the nearly 300 species around the world and instead showcase their not inconsiderable abilities through a series of gleeful reality TV piss-takes. Read more... |
Julius Caesar, BBC Four review - electrifying TV launch of all-women Shakespeare trilogyMonday, 18 June 2018
Who would have thought, when Phyllida Lloyd's Donmar Julius Caesar opened to justified fanfare, that two more Shakespeare masterpieces would be sustained no less powerfully within the women's-prison context over the following years? Read more... |
Panorama: Putin's Russia with David Dimbleby, BBC One review - jolly football weatherThursday, 14 June 2018
There was a lovely moment at the beginning of this Panorama where David Dimbleby was chatting to a schoolgirl – not just any schoolgirl actually, because she came from a family of 10 children, which surely makes her a bit out of the ordinary, even in... Read more... |
Get Shorty, Sky Atlantic review - Elmore Leonard meets TarantinoThursday, 14 June 2018
Emma Daly (Carolyn Dodd) tells her estranged husband Miles (Chris O’Dowd): “There is always an angle, a shakedown.” Of course there is: Davey Holmes’s Get Shorty is “partly based on” the Elmore Leonard novel of the same name (“inspired by” would be more accurate). Read more... |
Hidden, BBC Four review - a death in SnowdoniaSunday, 10 June 2018
Nordic shmordic. Why travel to Scandinavia to get your dark, disturbing mysteries when you can find them in Wales? You even get subtitles for an extra frisson of otherness. Read more... |
Our Girl, Series 4, BBC One review - 2 Section versus Boko HaramWednesday, 06 June 2018
I’ve never been in the Army, but I can’t imagine anybody involved with the making of Our Girl (BBC One) has either. Read more... |
Line of Separation, All 4, review - handsome if soapy epicSaturday, 02 June 2018
You don’t see a lot of German drama imported to British television. France, Italy, Scandinavia, yes. But the biggest country in Europe is less of a player. The great exception – and it really was great - was Deutschland 83, a thrilling hit when shown on Channel 4. Read more... |
Africa: A Journey Into Music, BBC Four review - too little, too late?Saturday, 02 June 2018
BBC Four is the TV music equivalent of those oldsters music mags like Q and Mojo. Have there been five, or is it six, documentaries about Queen on the channel? Read more... |
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