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Ancient Greece: The Greatest Show on Earth, BBC FourWednesday, 28 August 2013
Brush up your geography and dust down your history – Dr Michael Scott is investigating the sources of Greek drama and their influence on all theatre to the present day. But he isn’t going to make it easy. The opening instalment of Ancient Greece: The Greatest Show on Earth, a three-parter, was a giddying ride out of Athens to the farthest-flung regions of Google. Read more...
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What Remains, BBC OneMonday, 26 August 2013
It’s a while since BBC One served us up for Sunday night primetime something with so much black humour as there is to enjoy in What Remains. The tone of the script from Tony Basgallop (Inside Men) is as sardonic as it comes, and the cast of characters he assembles around its south London location doesn’t look like it will be presenting the human race in its most redeeming light. Read more... |
Flamenco: Gypsy Soul, BBC FourMonday, 26 August 2013
Here's an association test - what's next in the sequence: flamenco, gypsy, soul? Yes, you win the free tourist trip to Andalucía along with writer Elizabeth Kinder, with whom you will almost certainly enjoy weak sangria and tapas while stumbling amusingly in bad Spanish, and you won't be troubled by a single unfamiliar thought about this alluring form of dance, music and poetic song. Read more... |
How To Be A World Music Star, BBC FourSaturday, 24 August 2013
This was a somewhat nostalgic look at the rise of “World Music” as a genre, starting in the Eighties when the term was first used, essentially as a marketing tool. As the ever ebullient Andy Kershaw put it, the problem was where in record stores “you could put a choir of Bulgarian tractor drivers next to some hot shot guitar slinger from Guinea-Bissau". Read more... |
The Man Who Collected the World: William Burrell, BBC FourThursday, 22 August 2013
Had the wealthy William Burrell had a son, Glasgow might not have acquired the world-class art collection that the shipping entrepreneur amassed during his long life. But with the birth of a sole daughter came both ambitions and suspicion – he raised Marion to succeed to his art empire, then imagined every suitor to be a gold-digger, breaking off her third engagement with a public announcement in the newspaper that took even her by surprise. Read more... |
Top Boy, Series 2, Channel 4Wednesday, 21 August 2013
After the almost complete absence of the police from the first series of Top Boy, the sirens are blazing as the follow-on to Ronan Bennett’s tough drug-dealing drama kicks in. Specifically, they’re exhuming the corpse of Kamale, who fell victim to Dushane’s ascendance to the position of Top Boy in the East London estate of Summerhouse. What’s left of Kamale a year on is no pretty sight, even though the scene’s got some spectacular background illumination from the O2 stadium. Read more... |
The Great British Bake Off 2013, BBC TwoWednesday, 21 August 2013
Amongst my friends, I am known as an admirer of the baked good in just about all of its forms: the loaf, the sponge, the ubiquitous cupcake. And yet something about The Great British Bake Off has always put me off. The relentless commercialisation of certain stereotypes of post-war frugality, typically practised by female heads of house, over the past few years has left a progressively nastier taste in my mouth as national austerity has hit harder.... Read more... |
Southcliffe, Series Finale, Channel 4Monday, 19 August 2013
The shipping forecast is never going to sound the same again after Southcliffe. Each time it came back over the four episodes of Tony Grisoni’s drama, set against a background of the limpid dawn sky of marshland Faversham, which stood in for the drama’s fictional market town, we knew that Stephen Morton (Sean Harris) was about to embark on his shooting spree. Terror came out of nowhere. Read more... |
Top of the Lake, Series Finale, BBC TwoSunday, 18 August 2013
“Everything you think you are, you’re not,” pronounced Holly Hunter’s inscrutable GJ in the final episode of the chilly Top of the Lake. Certainties crumbled as the series progressed, with Elisabeth Moss’s Robin Griffin discovering that almost everyone in the remote New Zealand town of Laketop had something they would prefer to hide. Read more... |
Big School, BBC OneSaturday, 17 August 2013
Boldly not going anywhere near things like Grange Hill or Teachers, Big School is more like a throwback to the St Trinian's of the 1950s. Co-writer and star David Walliams plays a man known only as Mr Church, Deputy Head of Chemistry at Greybridge School (the nod to Billy Bunter's Greyfriars presumably being the whole point). Read more... |
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