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The Hollow Crown: Richard II, BBC TwoSunday, 01 July 2012
There was some pretty serious hair on view in the BBC's new film of Richard II, a play better-known for its luxuriant verse, and well there might be, given that the adaptation came to us courtesy that most fulsomely-maned of theatre directors, Rupert Goold. Read more...
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Line of Duty, BBC TwoWednesday, 27 June 2012
Those quaint old TV shows in which we were invited to support and admire the police unreservedly have long been overtaken by real-life events. Now evolution has brought us to Line of Duty, a series that presents the police as a failing bureaucracy hamstrung by paperwork and political correctness. Read more... |
Veep, Sky AtlanticTuesday, 26 June 2012
Post-Dubya, post-Palin, (very) post-Yes We Can, the US sitcom appears finally to have arrived at the same point its more cynically inclined British equivalent reached decades ago. In a political age defined by dishonour and doublespeak, it seems the most effective means of responding to all that mendacious incompetence is to dropkick depressing reality into the realm of the absurd. Read more... |
Julius Caesar, BBC Four/Match of the Day Live, BBC OneMonday, 25 June 2012
“Let slip the dogs of war.” Somewhere in the bowels of Kiev’s Olympic Stadium, a football coach will have said something along these lines around the half seven mark. Meanwhile, over on the clever-clever channel, an alternative meeting between England and Italy took place. Read more... |
David Bowie and the Story of Ziggy Stardust, BBC FourSaturday, 23 June 2012
Given that Ziggy Stardust was a figment of David Bowie’s imagination it seems fitting that, for all intents and purposes, Bowie himself now appears to be a figment of our imagination. What’s he up to these days? Is he still living in New York with his beautiful Earthling wife and daughter? Read more... |
Simon Schama's Shakespeare, BBC TwoSaturday, 23 June 2012
With every new series, as he edges closer and closer to Dimbleby-ian National Treasure status, Simon Schama’s archly mannered drawl becomes more and more pronounced, his camp asides more central to his on screen persona. He is getting awful grand. And he now apparently “owns” our greatest dramaturge. Way to go. Read more... |
Silk, Series 2 Finale, BBC OneThursday, 21 June 2012
And so we came to episode six, where all the plotlines that have been hovering like vultures since the opener came screaming down to beat the closing deadline. Would Clive Reader's career be terminated by the Bar Standards Board? How would Martha Costello cope with being manoeuvred into defending the evil Jody Farr? Could Shoe Lane Chambers ever prise themselves loose from the malign tentacles of solicitor Micky Joy? Read more... |
Joely Richardson on Shakespeare's Women, BBC FourWednesday, 20 June 2012
Who better, you might think, than Joely Richardson, a member of the Redgrave acting dynasty, to front a programme about Shakespeare? He runs deep in the Redgrave-Richardson DNA, she told us, sitting in the Old Vic Theatre where her mother Vanessa Redgrave's arrival in the world in 1937 was announced onstage by Laurence Olivier, playing Hamlet to her grandfather Michael Redgrave's Laertes. It certainly trumps The Times' social pages. Read more... |
True Love, BBC OneTuesday, 19 June 2012
In traditional drama, actors are vessels for the written word. They do the looks, the sex, the tears - the dynamics: they perform. But the words are supplied by the writer. True Love gives the mummers the opportunity to go the extra mile. A series of five half-hour films going out across the week and set in a seaside town, it is the latest work from the defiantly lo-fi director Dominic Savage. Read more... |
South Bank Show: The Male Dancer, Sky Arts 1Monday, 18 June 2012
Male dancers are a puzzle to British audiences, where they are an uncomplicated, taken-for-granted treasure in Latin or Slav countries. I point this out gratuitously, as it's a point that wasn't touched upon by Melvyn Bragg's film about three iconic men of ballet, Rudolf Nureyev, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Carlos Acosta. Read more... |
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