tv
Mammon, More4Saturday, 29 March 2014
Well, that was a bit of a brain workout for the first episode - I confess for much of the opening instalment (five more to follow) I didn't have a clue what was going on, who anybody was or how all the characters and a multitude of story strands were connected. Actually, I'm not sure I did entirely understand by the end, but by then the Norwegian thriller set in the nebulous area where politics, finance and journalism collide had drawn me in sufficiently to tune in next week. Read more... |
Believe, Watch / Person of Interest, Series 2, Channel 5Thursday, 27 March 2014
As pedigrees go, beat this - Believe [***] is the brainchild of Alfonso Cuarón, director of the Oscar-plundering Gravity, and JJ Abrams, mastermind of Lost, Fringe and the made-over Star Trek. This debut episode didn't live up to expectations, but it would be rash to write it off too soon. Read more... |
Rev, Series 3, BBC TwoTuesday, 25 March 2014
Perhaps the BBC didn't need to make W1A, its new self-satirising sitcom. In the clerical comedy Rev, the Church of England could be considered a very serviceable metaphor for the Corporation, with its unfathomable layers of bureaucracy, well-meaning but slightly pitiable niceness, a self-image that belongs to a forgotten century, and self-flagellation before other cultures. Though the BBC does have rather more money to spend. Read more... |
The Widower, ITVTuesday, 25 March 2014
It was something of a relief when the police were finally alerted to the sinister motives of Malcolm Webster in last night’s second episode of The Widower. ITV’s three-part dramatisation of the killer’s exploits (he was convicted in 2011 of murdering his first wife and trying to kill his second) raises interesting questions not only concerning how we tell stories about crimes from real-life, but whether we actually tell them at all. Read more... |
Louis Theroux's LA Stories: City of Dogs, BBC Two / Mr Selfridge, Series 2 Finale, ITVMonday, 24 March 2014
In the same week that ITV was rounding up Britain's dangerous dogs, the Beeb aired Louis Theroux's report [****] on the unwanted canines roaming the streets of gang-infested South Los Angeles. LA has six dog pounds (we learned), through which 35,000 ownerless dogs pass annually. A lot of them, even healthy ones, end up being euthanised because it's impossible to find homes for them all. Read more... |
A Very British Renaissance, BBC TwoSaturday, 22 March 2014
The miscellany, a varied collection of works on different topics, was originally a Renaissance concept, an opportunity to bulk up a single volume with a diverse assortment of topics. The concept kept coming back to me, watching this peculiar programme, in places coherent and persuasive, in others curiously perverse, as if form and content had been devised by different people. Read more... |
Arena: Whatever Happened to Spitting Image? BBC FourFriday, 21 March 2014
“You can never embarrass politicians by giving them publicity.” Michael Heseltine’s verdict on Spitting Image – he claimed, of course, he never watched it – was surely one of the truer things said in last night's Arena memorial Whatever Happened to Spitting Image?, marking the 30th anniversary of the beginning of the satirical puppet show. Read more... |
Line of Duty, Series 2 Finale, BBC TwoThursday, 20 March 2014
If nothing else, this second series of Jed Mercurio's brutalist police thriller has done wonders for Keeley Hawes. Not that she was in much need of a career pick-me-up, but the way her haunted portrayal of the much-abused DI Lindsay Denton has brooded over the story like a funeral shroud deserves to land her a few gongs and is doubtless already bringing in heaps of job offers. Read more... |
W1A, BBC OneThursday, 20 March 2014
If anybody is daft enough to argue that the television licence fee isn't worth it, then just usher them before this superb mockumentary, brought to you by the team behind Twenty Twelve. Read more... |
I Was There, BBC TwoSaturday, 15 March 2014
We have already seen a lot of World War I on television this year, and clearly we’re going to be getting a great deal more before it's out. Whether it’s a “celebration” season, or the diametrical opposite, or just that looser term, commemoration, is something each individual viewer will have to decide for themselves. Read more... |
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