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Grand Prix: The Killer Years, BBC FourMonday, 28 March 2011
Following yesterday's season-opening Australian Grand Prix, McLaren's team boss Martin Whitmarsh was extremely unhappy that his driver Jenson Button had been given a drive-through penalty. Button had overtaken a Ferrari by cutting a corner, and should have yielded the position back, but McLaren requested guidance from the race controllers. Instead, all they got was a punishment from the stewards which retarded Button's progress by 23 seconds. Read more...
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This is Britain, BBC TwoSaturday, 26 March 2011
The history of the census is a fascinating one. The Babylonians and the Chinese held censuses mainly for military and taxation purposes, and Egyptians in order to organise the huge number of people required to build the pyramids and to redistribute land following the annual flooding of the Nile. Christians, meanwhile, give thanks for the census that recorded the birth of Jesus of Nazareth; during the five-yearly census ordered by Caesar Augustus, which required every man in the Roman Empire... Read more... |
Women in Love, BBC FourThursday, 24 March 2011
As preparation for this new account of Women in Love, I conscientiously picked up a copy of the novel for the first time since studying it at university. Big mistake. By half an hour into the drama I was in a state of some discombobulation. His adaptation may be called Women in Love but William Ivory has dipped back into The Rainbow, the novel’s preceding companion volume. At some point he seems to have lobbed both books into a cement mixer. Read more... |
Midsomer Murders, ITV1Wednesday, 23 March 2011
It'll be interesting to see what the recent race row - or more accurately, lack-of-race row - does for the ratings of Midsomer Murders. Possibly nothing, if the research that says that people from ethnic groups all hate the show and never watch it is to be believed. It certainly defies logic that producer Brian True-May has been made to walk the plank for saying that the programme has an all-white cast when... it does. Somehow, everybody has contrived not to mention this ever... Read more... |
Dispatches: Train Journeys from Hell, Channel 4/ Spartacus: Gods of the Arena, Sky 1Monday, 21 March 2011
It would take the cunning of the insane to invent the British railway network. Privatised 18 years ago, it offers the worst of all worlds - persistent overcrowding and cancellations, outdated rolling stock and fares rising vertiginously as services grow steadily more uncomfortable, while the taxpayer still has to stump up billions to keep this wheezing Heath Robinson nightmare functioning at all. Read more... |
Christopher and His Kind, BBC TwoSaturday, 19 March 2011
Is there a televisual instruction manual for Nazi-era dramas? Cabaret singers with heavily kohled eyes, champagne from unmatched glasses in a shabby-chic apartment, smoke-filled gay bars in cellars with muscled trade, Stormtroopers marching in lockstep and Nazi banners unfurling from windows would all be on it. If there is, Christopher and His Kind last night was following it - but then it also wrote it. ... Read more... |
Lily Allen: From Riches to Rags, Channel 4Wednesday, 16 March 2011
Why were any of us watching Lily Allen: From Riches to Rags last night, about the pop star's move from selling millions of tracks to stacks of vintage clothes? It was not because we need a lesson in the hardships of starting up a business - Allen bought all the stock out of her musical profits and her office was thick with roses. No, it was because the real intruded into a reality show: this was not car-crash TV - it was miscarriage TV. Read more... |
The Ricky Gervais Show, E4Tuesday, 15 March 2011
A show that began as that hippest of 21st-century technology, a podcast, gains new life in a transfer to the dinosaur of television having been given a makeover with old-school Hanna-Barbera-style cartooning. Read more... |
Twenty Twelve, BBC FourMonday, 14 March 2011
As it turned out, Irving Berlin's jauntily fatalistic Let’s Face the Music and Dance proved the perfect theme tune for BBC Four's new six-part comedy series. A mock documentary following the people responsible for delivering a successful 2012 London Olympics, the basic premise of Twenty Twelve was simple: give practically any loose coalition of personalities £9 billion to organise an event of global significance and they will almost certainly turn into gibbering idiots. Read more... |
Waking the Dead, BBC One/ Celebrity Naked Ambition, Channel 4Sunday, 13 March 2011
By the trail of dead shall ye know Detective Superintendent Peter Boyd, who bounces back irascibly for a ninth and final series of Waking the Dead. For once, British TV has the edge over its American counterpart. While Jerry Bruckheimer's US series, Cold Case, always feels dragged backwards by its clunking reconstructions of ancient crimes (especially the device of using young actors to impersonate now-elderly perps in their prime), Waking the Dead manages to... Read more... |
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