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Case Histories, BBC One

Jasper Rees Sunday, 05 June 2011

Thanks to her evergreen bestseller Behind the Scenes at the Museum, Kate Atkinson can call on an army of fans to buy her work whenever it appears in print. Its debut on screen is, perhaps, another matter. Will they buy the BBC’s rendition of Case Histories? Those who have not had the pleasure of reading it are less advantageously placed to grumble about hideous revisions, outrageous changes and all manner of infidelities.

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Stephen Fry: In Confidence, Sky Arts

Fisun Güner Friday, 03 June 2011

When a celebrity lets their public mask slip, something wonderful and also disconcerting can happen: they can noticeably become someone else. If they’re lucky, that change can be so marked that they become just another face in a crowd.

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Wonderland: The Men Who Won’t Stop Marching, BBC Two

Jasper Rees Wednesday, 01 June 2011

Not long after the Good Friday Agreement, BBC Northern Ireland broadcast a charming drama featuring a tale of two drums. An Ulster Protestant was too wedded to the marching season to join his wife on holiday in Donegal, so she wrought her revenge by destroying his bass drum and replacing it with its Catholic antithesis, a bodhrán. If last night’s The Men Who Won’t Stop Marching is any indication, that won’t be happening on the Shankill Road any time soon.

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Lead Balloon, BBC Two

Jasper Rees Wednesday, 01 June 2011

It’s been more than two and a half years since the third series of Jack Dee’s comedy about a comedian. Everyone in Rick Spleen's world looks a little bit older, a mite more pinched and drawn, as if proximity to the man about the house is draining the blood out of its occupants. Time has not at all been kind to Rick himself (but then, when was it ever?). His temples are awash with grey, his skin is sallow with failure, and his self-important delusions seem ever more steeped in bitterness and...

Queen - Days of Our Lives, BBC Two

Adam Sweeting Tuesday, 31 May 2011

Despite selling 300 million albums, being memorialised in stage musicals and computer games and with a feature film about their early career in the works, Queen are still moaning about the press. It's a theme that simmered steadily through this two-part history, with drummer Roger Taylor especially splenetic about the cruel and unusual treatment doled out to his band by first the music papers ("the evil empire"), then later the tabloids.

Scott & Bailey, ITV1

howard Male Sunday, 29 May 2011

We all enjoy the moment when the detective loses his rag and lunges across the desk to grab the suspect by the lapels, but such scenes are in short supply in this new female crime-fighters series. Instead, the interrogative approach of “the new Cagney & Lacey” as it’s been called, is more slowly, slowly catchy monkey, but that doesn’t make it any less satisfying.

The Joy of Easy Listening/ The Prince and the Composer, BBC Four

Adam Sweeting Friday, 27 May 2011

James Last in the heyday of easy listening - don't worry, they don't make them like this any more

Once upon a time, "easy listening" was a term of abuse and contempt, intended to evoke everything uncool, unhip and musically middle-aged. It meant pipe, cardigan, golf and Bing Crosby, and it was the last thing you'd hear before you were felled by your thickened arteries and under-exercised heart.

Paul Merton's Birth of Hollywood, BBC Two

Veronica Lee Friday, 27 May 2011

Paul Merton started his three-part series on the origins of the American film industry with a deliberately clichéd shot, greeting us while standing with the Hollywood sign in view. But he quickly whizzed over to New York City, the true location of the birth of movies - or American ones at least - for it was on the East Coast that Thomas Edison, after inventing the phonograph, developed the Kinetoscope, a basic viewing device for moving pictures.

Prince Philip at 90, ITV1

graeme Thomson Tuesday, 24 May 2011

David Frost and Richard Nixon. Melvyn Bragg and Dennis Potter. Parky and Ali. The list of seminal TV interviews is a relatively short one, and it's not about to get any longer.

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All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, BBC Two

Adam Sweeting Monday, 23 May 2011

As The Observer once put it, an abiding theme of Adam Curtis's documentaries "has been to look at how different elites have tried to impose an ideology on their times, and the tragicomic consequences of those attempts". This neatly sums up the essence of Curtis's new three-part series - though it looks like being more tragic than comic - which began with a daring parabolic narrative which soared from the monomaniac philosophies of Ayn Rand across California's Silicon Valley to the...