tv
Peaky Blinders, BBC TwoFriday, 13 September 2013
Much hype has been whipped up around this tale of a gang of thuggish, racketeering bookies in Birmingham just after World War One. It's a pretty good cast, with Helen McCrory's Aunt Polly laying down the law within the criminal Shelby family, Cillian Murphy playing her ambitious nephew Tommy and Sam Neill as sinister Belfast copper Inspector Campbell. But this opener still felt a little wobbly on its feet. Read more...
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Sound of Cinema: The Music that Made the Movies, BBC FourFriday, 13 September 2013
BBC Four’s new series Sound of Cinema: The Music that Made the Movies is shocking. The overwhelming majority of arts-based TV consists of programmes consigning specialist knowledge/presenters to the sidelines in favour of dumbed-down, easily digestible generalisations mouthed by all-purpose TV-friendly faces. But this three-part series is fronted by, gasp, a composer who uses insider knowledge to hook and hold the viewers. Read more... |
Who Do You Think You Are? - Sarah Millican, BBC OneThursday, 12 September 2013
It's a testament to how good an idea Who Do You Think You Are? is that well into its tenth series (and several others worldwide) it still provides great entertainment – and not a little emotion. Its secret, I suspect, lies in the fact that every family has its stories and dramas and last night's subject, comic Sarah Millican, uncovered some interesting tales buried several generations back, long lost from current family folklore. Read more... |
The Wipers Times, BBC TwoThursday, 12 September 2013
The last time we saw soldiers going over the top at the Somme with comic baggage attached was the tragic finale of Blackadder. Read more... |
Top Boy, Series 2 Finale, Channel 4Wednesday, 11 September 2013
Ronan Bennett doesn’t do protracted. The writer of Top Boy has whipped us through another series, in the course of which an awful lot of water has flowed under the proverbial bridge. Except that it’s blood rather than water that tends to flow in Summerhouse, and the first we saw of a bridge in that neck of East London was in the last seconds of episode four, with Dushane hiding underneath one. He looked more than a bit cornered – not how we’re used to seeing him. Read more... |
Blackout, Channel 4Tuesday, 10 September 2013
If the UK’s entire power supply were to fail, how long do you reckon it would take for society to regress to the point that people would begin eating cold chips they had rescued from a bin? According to Blackout, a feature-length docu-drama directed by Bafta-award winning Ben Chanan, the answer is a mere two days. Read more... |
The Guilty, ITVFriday, 06 September 2013
Scientists may have found a cure for insomnia. It’s thinking up names for television detectives. Have you noticed how elephant-tranquilisingly dull they are? Alec Hardy and Ellie Miller. Len Harper. Denise Woods. Tony Gates, Steve Arnott and Kate Fleming. Sergeant Geoff Plank. DS Fiona Photofit. Oh go on then, couple of ringers in there, but the rest have lately been busting crime on a mainstream channel near you (see sidebar to ID them all). Read more... |
Whitechapel, Series Four, ITV1Thursday, 05 September 2013
I can’t have been alone in my struggle to keep the two of them straight in my head: there’s the one set in the east end of London, in which a former BBC Spook tries to track down Jack the Ripper; and then there’s the one set in the east end of London, in which a former BBC Spook tries to track down a modern-day killer inspired by Jack the Ripper. Read more... |
Siege in the Sahara, Channel 4Wednesday, 04 September 2013
Bruce Goodison has been responsible for some of the more impressive television of the last decade, sometimes drama, sometimes straight documentary, and sometimes drama-documentary, like his Flight 93: The Flight That Fought Back. He was back in the latter genre in Channel 4’s powerful Siege in the Sahara, bringing the heightened tension of fictional reconstruction to the story of the assault on the Algerian gas plant at In Amenas by terrorists in January this year. Read more... |
The Newsroom, Series Two, Sky AtlanticTuesday, 03 September 2013
When The Newsroom’s first season started in 2012 the unthinkable seemed to have happened: Aaron Sorkin, creator of The West Wing and Oscar-winning writer of The Social Network, had lost his mojo. Not even his previous, erratic show, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, cancelled after its first season, had moments as excruciating as this. Read more... |
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