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Appropriate Adult, ITV1

graeme Thomson Sunday, 04 September 2011

Appropriate Adult began with a series of jumpy scenes mapping the bustling domestic landscape of trainee social worker Janet Leach. It was as though we were being offered one last hit of the oxygen of conventional family life (though not, we later learned, one without its own troubles) before we descended into the dead, airless realm of peepholes, incest and floodlit excavations for bones and buried nightmares.

The Jonathan Ross Show, ITV1

Jasper Rees Saturday, 03 September 2011

When Michael Parkinson voluntarily took his talk shows off-air, he stayed away for rather more than a decade. Eventually he returned from the wilderness to his natural home on Saturday night and was rightly greeted as the prodigal son of chat. Jonathan Ross has unwillingly been away for a 10th of the time, having left under a storm...

Outnumbered, Series Four, BBC One

howard Male Friday, 02 September 2011

From the long shot of the suburban London semis onwards, I couldn’t help but think of the 1960s BBC sitcom Not in Front of the Children which similarly focused on a middle-class couple with three children. There’s no laughter track on Outnumbered but there’s also no escaping the fact that - apart from a colourful new range of insults the kids casually fire at each other (“numb-chuck”, “toss-piece”) - this could easily be one of Wendy Craig’s naughty but nice TV families,...

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Donor Mum: The Children I've Never Met, BBC One

Fisun Güner Wednesday, 31 August 2011

Six months after giving birth to a child conceived through anonymous sperm donation, Sylvia decided to become an egg donor. It was her way, she said, of “giving something back”. It was 1991 and she was to become one of Britain’s first anonymous egg donors. Once she'd left the clinic, she was expected to think no more about it: she was helping an infertile woman realise her dreams, just as she, lacking Mr Right, had been helped to realise hers. She never thought for a minute that her act of...

Harry's Arctic Heroes, BBC One

Jasper Rees Tuesday, 30 August 2011

Prince Harry turns out to be a natural in front of the camera, whatever the weather

Does anyone else ever feel a mite sorry for the North Pole? It always takes second billing to its more famous namesake, and you can see why. The South Pole belongs to a continental land mass. Antarctica has penguins, historic huts, and chaps...

The Field of Blood, BBC One

Josh Spero Monday, 29 August 2011

The overwhelming impression given in television of urban Scotland in the Eighties is of a land where people had discovered neither vegetables nor lightbulbs. The Field of Blood on BBC One last night went no way towards correcting this: as tenebrous as you might expect for a mini-series about child-killing, everything was shadows.

Page Eight, BBC Two

ASH Smyth Monday, 29 August 2011

I think I owe David Hare an apology. When I sat down to watch Page Eight, last night – being, as it is, his latest probing of our moral and political universe – I just assumed that our national intelligence services would be in for a trendy-lefty-type shoeing. But I was wrong.

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American: The Bill Hicks Story, BBC Four

ASH Smyth Sunday, 28 August 2011

Being hailed as “the comedian’s comedian” is all well and good after you’re dead; but – as is often the way with great artists – it didn’t much help to pay the bills while Bill Hicks was walking and talking.

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Gilbert O’Sullivan: Out on His Own, BBC Four

howard Male Friday, 26 August 2011

Maybe the young Tom Waits got one or two sartorial ideas from our Gilbert?

While obviously not as seismic a Top of the Pops moment as Ziggy singing “Starman”, the almost contemporaneous appearance of the flat-capped Gilbert O’Sullivan hunched over his piano as if it were a dying coal fire certainly stuck in my memory as clearly as Bowie’s androgynous space-age carrot-top. Although the flat cap was quickly ditched in favour of casual knitwear and even a hairy chest phase (see pic below), today’s 64-year-...

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Too Much, Too Young: Children of the Middle Ages, BBC Four

Kieron Tyler Thursday, 25 August 2011

'Too Much, Too Young''s Dr Stephen Baxter. A rare moment at rest

Although billed as “a fresh look at the Middle Ages through the eyes of children”, presenter Dr Stephen Baxter had to admit the bulk of historic evidence for how medieval children lived their lives was written by adults. Unfiltered accounts from a child’s perspective are rare. Poring over the 1086 Domesday Book, the census of who, what and where, he noted that children aren’t mentioned. Evoking the barely known is a hard log to roll, and this frustrating programme barely nudged it...