tv
Psychedelic Britannia, BBC FourSaturday, 24 October 2015
As part of BBC4’s continued course of musical regression therapy, we revisited a time of wide-eyed innocence, when ideas were big and pupils even bigger. The Sixties had swung and now they were set to start spinning as people looked to the past for inspiration, and to the future with aspiration. Read more... |
The Last Kingdom, BBC TwoFriday, 23 October 2015
I always like watching Matthew Macfadyen, so I was appalled to see him horribly slain barely 20 minutes into this gutsy new adaptation of Bernard Cornwell's Saxon Stories. Not just slain, but then nailed to a post by the Vikings, who put a flipping great bolt in his mouth and hammered it through the back of his head. Read more... |
American Horror Story: Hotel, Season 5, FXWednesday, 21 October 2015
A haunted house, a mental asylum, a witch’s coven, a circus freak show. Check, check, check. And check. Is there no horror trope left unturned in American Horror Story? Nope. And that’s precisely the point – familiarity and postmodern camp go a long way to explaining the runaway success of the series. Read more... |
How Gay Is Pakistan?, BBC ThreeWednesday, 21 October 2015
As a YouTube comic Mawaan Rizwan is clearly at ease on screen, and right at the beginning of How Gay Is Pakistan? he was telling us about coming out as gay to his family last year: it was “the worst news ever for Pakistani parents”. Read more... |
Downton Abbey, ITV: Alien vs. DowagerMonday, 19 October 2015
It's been the most heavily signposted illness in drama history. A twinge here. An "Oof" there. Chekhov's roiling guts. And tonight, His Lordship's mystery complaint finally took centre stage, in a scene that led one to wonder exactly how to remove three pints of aristocratic blood from a pristine white tablecloth. Read more... |
China: Treasures of the Jade Empire, Channel 4Monday, 19 October 2015
Here comes the President, and with him a timely reminder about what the Chinese have been digging up over the past 40 years or so to further demonstrate their exceptional imperial history over the past two millennia. Read more... |
The South Bank Show: Benedict Cumberbatch, Sky ArtsThursday, 15 October 2015
It’s huge, it’s just huge, said Benedict Cumberbatch, struggling to express the scale of the challenge that playing Hamlet presents. Read more... |
The Apprentice, Series 11, BBC OneThursday, 15 October 2015
Where do they find them? The candidates for each new series of The Apprentice, that is. It's not as if they don't know the score by now - humiliation, first in the boardroom by Lord Sugar and his clunking putdowns, and then on nationwide television. But it makes good telly, so hoorah for series 11, with 18 more numpties vying for Sugar's £250,000 investment in their business plan. Read more... |
River, BBC OneWednesday, 14 October 2015
Crime drama is a bit like the wheel. There’s only so much scope for reinvention. People try to come up with novelties all the time, then you turn on the telly and realise everyone else has had the same idea. Rumpled cops in macs, ex-cops haunted by the past, cops with overbearing bosses descended from Jane Tennison – they’re all out there, all the time. Even the casting department is running on empty. Read more... |
Homeland, Series 5, Channel 4Monday, 12 October 2015
Stunningly reinvented in series four, Homeland sustained the momentum with this tense and menacing fifth season opener. Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) has now quit the CIA for a new job in Berlin, where she's working as head of security for billionaire philanthropist Otto Düring (Sebastian Koch). The past, however, is not giving up without a fight. Read more... |
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