tv
Fresh Meat, Channel 4Thursday, 22 September 2011
How could you not immediately warm to a new comedy series that has almost as its first line, “Maybe you should tuck your cock away while I make us a nice cup of tea”? Read more...
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The Great British Bake Off, BBC TwoWednesday, 21 September 2011
Baking and competition are two of my favourite things, thus when BBC Two unveiled The Great British Bake Off last year, it seemed my gluttonous, pugnacious prayers had been fulfilled. Amateurs had every possible skill challenged by the good-cop-bad-cop combination of master bakers Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood, leavened (or leadened) by ever-quirky presenters Mel and Sue. (I will avoid all recipe-related puns henceforth, I promise.) Read more... |
Spooks, Series 10, BBC OneMonday, 19 September 2011
Am I being paranoid, or are there spies everywhere these days? A quick squiz at the telly guide recently, and you'd have been forgiven for thinking that everyone in London is either employed in the security services or in making films about them. According to last night's re-opening of the Spooks case-file, anyway, there are plenty around the red-brick side-streets of Hammersmith. Read more... |
Downton Abbey, Series 2, ITV1Monday, 19 September 2011
And now for that difficult second album. Downton Abbey’s stately progress last autumn revived in television audiences a taste thought long dead: for populist drama offering a sepia-tinted vision of the English class system in which the well-to-do are dressed for dinner by bowing/curtsying feudal underlings. With social mobility back roughly where it was a century ago. it could almost have been a snapshot of modern UK plc. Read more... |
Misfits: Vegas Baby!, 4oDThursday, 15 September 2011
Question. How do you kill off a TV character whom, just a few episodes ago, you and your fellow scriptwriters went out of your way to render immortal? How… and why? Read more... |
Timeshift: The Picture Postcard World of Nigel Walmsley, BBC FourThursday, 15 September 2011
Declaring that “everything in the world exists to end up on a postcard” is pretty courageous. But after watching the charming, gently funny Picture Postcard World of Nigel Walmsley you begin thinking that maybe, just maybe, everything was created to be depicted on a piece of card destined to be sent through the post. Holiday camps, motorways, hills, walls - all were created to become images printed on the postcards collected by deltiologists like Ronnie Barker and Michael Winner. Read more... |
The Body Farm, BBC OneTuesday, 13 September 2011
One didn’t keep a detailed log on the state of decomposition of each and every corpse in all umpteen series of Waking the Dead. Being cold cases, they were none of them too presentable. But did any make quite such a mess as ep one of The Body Farm, which took care to begin last night with a bang? To be more forensic, an explosion distributed blood and gristle evenly around a high-rise flat, leaving not much in the way of too too solid flesh. Read more... |
Little England, ITV1Monday, 12 September 2011
Why did I dislike this programme so much? At first I put it down to the stinker of a hangover I found myself watching it through. Perhaps it was the thought that my hangover would have been easier to bear under a yolk-yellow Dordogne sun than under a glowering grey London sky, and therefore the British couples featured here who’ve made just that move caused a twinge of jealousy. Read more... |
The Children of 9/11, Channel 4Monday, 12 September 2011
Over the course of the past weekend, not to mention over the last 10 years, it has been said often enough that there are no words to express the horror of 11 September, 2001. This hasn’t stopped people from trying, of course – and sometimes with commendable results. But basically there just isn’t much effective vocabulary when it comes to describing grief and torment on a grand scale: hence, perhaps, America’s seeming lack of closure regarding the whole episode, and the often slightly... Read more... |
The Story of Film: An Odyssey, More 4Saturday, 10 September 2011
After the first two parts of Mark Cousins’s magisterial The Story of Film: An Odyssey, I’m still in two minds as to whether it’s fair to call the presenter a generalist. He has already managed to piece together details from the cinema cultures of almost every film-making nation on earth with the authority of a specialist – and that’s before his narrative has formally progressed beyond the arrival of the talkies, let alone colour. Read more... |
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