tv
The Joy of Easy Listening/ The Prince and the Composer, BBC FourFriday, 27 May 2011
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. Read more... |
Paul Merton's Birth of Hollywood, BBC TwoFriday, 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. Read more... |
Prince Philip at 90, ITV1Tuesday, 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. Read more... |
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, BBC TwoMonday, 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... Read more... |
Sarah Palin's Alaska, Discovery Real Time/ Louis Theroux: Miami Mega Jail, BBC TwoSunday, 22 May 2011
Someone had moved in next door to the Palins. There was a camera shot of him, his face pixellated out. Apparently he was writing an exposé of the lady of the house. “I think it’s an invasion of our privacy and I don’t like it,” chirrupped Sarah Palin in that fingernails-on-a-blackboard voice of hers. Read more... |
The Mountain That Had To Be Painted, BBC FourWednesday, 18 May 2011
Half of Wales is visible from the blustery summit. “Of all the hills which I saw in Wales,” recalled George Borrow, author of the prolix Victorian classic Wild Wales, “none made a greater impression upon me.” He was not alone. Arenig Fawr, a southern outcrop of Snowdonia, was also the entry point for British art into Post-Impressionism. Read more... |
Wonderland: The Hasidic Guide to Love, Marriage and Finding a Bride, BBC TwoWednesday, 18 May 2011
Although in perhaps a less ostentatious manner than is familiar from Louis Theroux's documentaries, BBC Two's Wonderland last night nevertheless took the well-worn path of finding an odd-seeming community and examining its customs, morals and characters. In this case, it was the 20,000 Hasidic Jews of Stamford Hill, north-east London, who - we were led to believe - had some pretty funny ideas about love. Read more... |
The Street That Cut Everything, BBC OneTuesday, 17 May 2011
There’s nothing like a reality TV programme to bring a community together. Or maybe not. The Street That Cut Everything took one suburban cul-de-sac in Preston and shook up its residents thus: if they wanted their bins emptied, their street cleaned, their benefits paid and their elderly and needy looked after, they had to do it themselves. The council were going to withdraw all services - bar the emergency services and schools - for six whole weeks. And if that doesn’t sound...
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Perspectives: Hugh Laurie Down by the River, ITV1/ Operation Crossbow, BBC TwoSunday, 15 May 2011
America has been very good to Hugh Laurie. His starring role as Dr Gregory House has shot him to the top of the earnings tree in US television, while comprehensively demolishing existing preconceptions of him as the blissfully idiotic Bertie Wooster, or the half-witted Prince Regent in Blackadder the Third. You might even say that with House, Laurie finally got the chance to play Blackadder. Read more... |
The End of the World? A Horizon Guide to Armageddon, BBC FourThursday, 12 May 2011
“Some say it will end in fire, others say there will be a flood…” So began Horizon’s sobering look at past Armageddon-themed episodes. But why not both? As I was writing this review from a preview DVD, ahead of its original scheduled broadcast on 17 March, news came through that the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan had been upgraded to a level-six crisis, on a scale of seven. Two thoughts simultaneously occurred to me: firstly, that doing the review was... Read more... |
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