tv
Hattie, BBC FourThursday, 20 January 2011
The way the BBC keeps knocking out these little biopics about the lives of various household names (John Lennon, Gracie Fields, Margot Fonteyn etc), you'd think there was nothing simpler than to get inside the mind of some complex public figure, deftly sketching in a bit of socio-historical background on the side with a bit of help from the props and archive department. And, as this low-rent effort to drill into the emotional life of the beloved comic actress Hattie Jacques amply... Read more...
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Mary Portas: Secret Shopper, Channel 4Wednesday, 19 January 2011
She’s back: the retail guru and style icon, with her sharp red bob, sharper tongue and enviable sense of style. In two series of Mary, Queen of Shops on BBC Two, she whipped ailing businesses into shape and established herself as one of television’s most striking and engaging personalities. If online message boards are to be believed, she also – thanks to her much-discussed mid-life divorce, relationship with Grazia fashion editor Melanie Rickey and sexy combination of... Read more... |
Storyville: Pablo's Hippos, BBC FourMonday, 17 January 2011
It’s not so much the children of mad celebs I feel sorry for as their animals. The private zoo stuffed with exotic, non-indigenous wildlife is a sure sign of money, power and hubris run riot. The tigers and chimps at the Neverland ranch became powerful symbols of Michael Jackson’s dislocation. Similarly, last night's Storyville told how an abandoned brood of pet hippos have come to define the worst excesses of the late Colombian drug baron Pablo Escobar. Read more... |
Horizon: What is Reality?, BBC TwoMonday, 17 January 2011
Horizon took a funny turn this week. The new series started off gently enough – there was a nostalgic look back at 60 years of science on the box, then an exploration as to what makes us clever (the fun this entailed when vaguely well-known people sweated through a series of IQ tests). But last night it wanted us to get to grips with something very slippery indeed, so slippery that even the eminent scientists responsible for unleashing some of the more frontier theories in particle physics... Read more... |
Gordon Ramsay: Shark Bait/ Dispatches: Fish Unwrapped, Channel 4Monday, 17 January 2011
With such weighty gastronauts as Heston Blumenthal, Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall all aboard Channel 4's Big Fish Fight jamboree, Gordon Ramsay obviously couldn't bear to be left standing on the quay. In fact, with Gordon Ramsay: Shark Bait he has made the most provocative film of the season, a punchy documentary in which the shouty superchef did some bold poking about in the hideous innards of the global trade in shark fins. Read more... |
The Godmother of Rock'n'Roll, BBC FourFriday, 14 January 2011
Question: which American star had their third wedding in the Griffith Stadium, Washington in front of more than 25,000 paying fans and recorded the whole thing for release as an album? If you’re wondering how you could have missed hearing about such a quintessential 21st-century publicity stunt it might be because, firstly, this extraordinary event occurred in 1951, and secondly, because the guitar-strumming bisexual bride (who hadn’t even found a groom when the event was arranged) has... Read more... |
Kidnap and Ransom, ITV1Friday, 14 January 2011
Notwithstanding his regrettable central role in the recent remake of Bouquet of Barbed Wire, Trevor Eve is an actor who has improved vastly with age. Once cursed with a kind of shiny smugness, the 21st-century Eve is rougher round the edges and indelibly lined with decades of thespian rough'n'tumble. Read more... |
No Ordinary Family, UKTV WatchWednesday, 12 January 2011
The idea of the suburban superhero isn't exactly a road not taken in the annals of TV history. We've had Heroes, Misfits, and even Ardal O'Hanlon as Thermoman in My Hero, not to mention generationally recurring stuff like Bewitched and The Bionic Woman. Read more... |
Glee, E4Monday, 10 January 2011
As with pornographic films, what those who watch Glee really want is the money shot. There may be far fewer naked people – although the first episode of the second season did have lascivious shots of two shirtless (allegedly) teenage boys – but you still don’t really care about the bits in between the songs, which are all trite teen drama with a smart-mouth twist. Read more... |
Episodes, BBC TwoMonday, 10 January 2011
Episodes may prove to be the zenith of television’s obsession with making television about making television. It was certainly a handy primer for anyone who fell asleep around 2000 (perhaps during My Hero; you are forgiven) and missed all the dominant strands of TV comedy emerging over the next decade. We hadn't simply been here before; Episodes was incubated in the post-ironic, multilayered comedic landscape in which we all now live. Read more... |
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