tv
The Paradise, Series Finale, BBC OneWednesday, 14 November 2012
The BBC has other things on its to-do list at the minute. However, once all the newly installed acting heads have been replaced by actual heads, and the matter of the ex-DG’s severance pay sufficiently chewed over by the Corporation’s bosom pals in the Fourth Estate and the Conservative Party, perhaps someone at TV Centre could get around to other business. The search, for example, for a costume drama capable of giving Downton Abbey a bloody nose. Read more...
|
Chateau Chunder: When Australian Wine Changed the World, BBC FourWednesday, 14 November 2012
There was a memorable, very French moment in a television series hosted by the great British wine writer, presenter and Master of Wine Jancis Robinson. A French winemaker, asked to taste an Australian wine, swills in disdain and pointedly walks outside, on camera, to spit it out. It’s not good enough even to slosh the floor of his traditional wineshed. Read more... |
The Dark Charisma of Adolf Hitler, BBC TwoTuesday, 13 November 2012
So, another programme about Hitler and the Nazis. They mock the Brits all over Europe for our obsession with this subject. During the summer, I worked on a project with Italian associates who found this intense interest roundly bemusing. They subscribed particularly to the old joke that to create the British market’s most successful ever book, it would need to include cats certainly but, most of all, Nazis. Read more... |
I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here!, ITV1Monday, 12 November 2012
The 12th series of the jungle fun is another gathering of micro-celebs, wannabes and has-beens, and a smattering of people you have never heard of - and indeed by the end of the series would still have difficulty identifying in a police line-up, so interchangeable and unremarkable are they. Read more... |
Maestro or Mephisto - The Real Georg Solti, BBC FourSaturday, 10 November 2012
The one thing you can rely on when a programme is billed as "The Real" something-or-other is that that is exactly what you won't get. This film, commemorating the centenary of the birth of the great Hungarian conductor, did a thorough job of tracing his career through the great orchestras, concert halls and opera houses of the world, pulling in various stellar musical names and bags of excellent archive footage en route. Read more... |
Secret State, Channel 4Thursday, 08 November 2012
The political thriller may be alive and well but in recent years it has been spending time abroad. Elements of government conspiracy are intense flavourings of, for example, The Killing and Homeland, while back in Blighty there has been little to trouble the scorers since Paul Abbott’s State of Play nearly a decade ago. Why? British drama has been too busy scoffing at Blair and Brown, Cameron and Clegg to worry itself with shady Whitehall cover-ups. Read more... |
Imagine: Ian Rankin and the Case of the Disappearing Detective, BBC OneWednesday, 07 November 2012
Over the past couple of years, since my husband’s first book was accepted for publication, I have had the dubious privilege of becoming intimately acquainted with the behind the scenes day-to-day workings of the crime novelist. For that reason Miranda Harvey, the long-suffering wife of Ian Rankin, is now something of a hero of mine. Read more... |
Nick Nickleby, BBC OneMonday, 05 November 2012
No Dickens novel seems to come around the block more often than The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, possibly excepting Great Expectations, which is taking a bow on both big screen and small for the bicentenary year. Relatively recent assaults on the teeming 800-page doorstopper include adaptations by ITV, on the big screen, Radio 4 and Chichester Festival Theatre. That would surely count as enough Nicklebys already. Read more... |
Downton Abbey, Series 3 Finale, ITV1Monday, 05 November 2012
Julian Fellowes has often seemed to treat Downton Abbey as a speed-writing contest, with momentous events and the tide of history whirling past like roof tiles in a typhoon. Read more... |
Hatfields & McCoys, Channel 5Thursday, 01 November 2012
This factually-based saga of two feuding families in the woods and mountains of Kentucky and West Virginia might not look too prepossessing on paper, but two episodes in, Hatfields & McCoys is starting to grip like a knotted rope. The combination of powerful acting from all levels of the copious cast and the authentic-feeling depiction of primitive backwoods life in the bleak aftermath of the American Civil War isn't pretty, but it's morbidly compelling. Read more... |
Pages
latest in today
Our Mothers review - revisiting the horrors of Guatemala...
Director Cesar Diaz’s debut feature film was...
Britten Sinfonia, The Marian Consort, Milton Court review -...
Gesualdo was, in the words of New Yorker critic Alex Ross – “irrefutably badass”, a double murderer, sado-masochist and black magic enthusiast who...
Music Reissues Weekly: Little Girls - Valley Songs
The name, Caron and Michelle Maso explained to Los Angeles radio DJ Rodney Bingenheimer, was a literal description. “We’re both like five feet. We...
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes review - a post-human para...
Planet of the Apes is the most artfully replenished franchise, from the original series’ elegant time-travel loop to the reboot’s rich,...
Sappho, Southwark Playhouse Elephant review - a glitzy celeb...
Who is Sappho? What is she? Not much is known about the...
Gomyo, National Symphony Orchestra, Kuokman, National Concer...
No soloist gets to perform Shostakovich’s colossal First Violin Concerto without mastery of its fearsome technical demands. But not all violinists...
The Winter's Tale, Royal Ballet review - what a story,...
If there is a more striking, more moving, more downright enjoyable way to experience...
Sansara, Manchester Collective, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester...
Manchester Collective have come a long way since their early days of chamber music in dark and dingy Salford basements and former MOT test centres...