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Top Gear: Fifty Years of Bond Cars, BBC Two

Adam Sweeting Tuesday, 30 October 2012

The appearance of the Goldfinger-era Aston Martin DB5 in the new Skyfall is prompting cheers from audiences, and as Richard Hammond commented in this celebration of Bondmobiles down the ages, the Bond movies have been unique in their ability to turn cars into personalities. From the absurd to the spectacular, 007's transport has rarely been less than memorable, apart from a disastrously lacklustre flirtation with BMWs during the Pierce Brosnan era.

Sex, Death and the Meaning of Life, More4

howard Male Monday, 29 October 2012

Perhaps only someone as supremely confident of his world view as Richard Dawkins might think he could come up with a TV series that would live up to such an all-embracing title. But at least in this three-part series the evolutionary biologist gets off his militant atheist’s high horse to tackle the God question from a more constructive angle.

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Misfits, Series 4, E4

Jasper Rees Monday, 29 October 2012

Is Misfits now a misfit on E4? When it first announced itself three years ago, the series about probationers with sci-fi superpowers straddled the bridge between the WTF generation and the can-do ethos of the comic strip. It was quite a lot of fun, even for those outside the target demographic. As is natural with any series targeted at a youth audience, success breeds the one thing that no cult series wants: staff turnover.

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Chas & Dave: Last Orders, BBC Four

Kieron Tyler Saturday, 27 October 2012

Chas & Dave’s run of hits up the mid Eighties made them an alternative to the gloss of Wham!, Duran Duran and Culture Club. They had three chart albums in 1983. But was there more to their “rockney” music than a first take suggests? Were they more than a cockney slanted, pie ‘n’ mash Wurzels? This programme, prompted by their 2009 retirement, made a valiant – heroic – attempt to elevate them to the level of the greats. Peter Doherty declared them “just like The Clash, The Smiths, Keats...

Brazil with Michael Palin, BBC One

Jasper Rees Thursday, 25 October 2012

We got to the beach around the 10-minute mark. Or “semi-naked suburbia”, as Michael Palin called it. And started patrolling the sands for rounded Brazilian rumps (female). Apparently only adolescent boys do this sort of thing, and television cameramen. A local scholar explained the terms deployed to describe the various body types. The melon, the guitar, the ... you don’t want to know. Palin certainly didn’t look as if he did.

Painting the Queen: A Portrait of Her Majesty, BBC Four

Fisun Güner Wednesday, 24 October 2012

Has there ever been a successful portrait of the Queen? Not a photograph - there are been plenty of those (with its delicious air of ambivalence, Thomas Struth’s portrait of the Queen with Prince Philip stiffly occupying two ends of a sofa at Windsor Castle, is among the best) but a painted portrait.

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Elementary, Sky Living

Adam Sweeting Wednesday, 24 October 2012

Last year at the National Theatre, Jonny Lee Miller appeared in Frankenstein with Benedict Cumberbatch ("two excellent performances", according to theartsdesk's Sam Marlowe). Maybe something rubbed off, because now here's Miller following in Cumberbatch's footsteps as another 21st-century Sherlock Holmes, in this new series from CBS in the States.

You've Been Trumped, BBC Two

graeme Thomson Tuesday, 23 October 2012

It has never been easier to get sucked into a warm, simplistic sensibility which portrays every rich capitalist businessman as corrupt and amoral, but you spend 90 minutes watching Donald Trump in action and you start to wonder. If Trump didn't exist you suspect Martin Amis would invent him. He would probably call his caricature of a dastardly US business tycoon Donald Shit.

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Panorama: Jimmy Savile - What The BBC Knew, BBC One

Jasper Rees Tuesday, 23 October 2012

From 10pm last night to around 11.40, the BBC did what no other broadcaster in the world would have the stomach for. It turned its guns with maximum lethalness on itself. The result was extraordinary television.

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Girls, Sky Atlantic

Lisa-Marie Ferla Monday, 22 October 2012

While it’s not unusual for an imported television show to have been downloaded, discussed and dissected at length long in advance of of its UK transmission date, HBO’s Girls is even harder than most to approach with an open mind.