tv
Fry and Laurie Reunited, GoldWednesday, 24 November 2010
There’s a surreal sitcom waiting to be written about the often-told story of when Charlie Higson and Paul Whitehouse were Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie’s plasterers for a while in the early 1980s. Read more...
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Storyville: Mandelson - The Real PM?, BBC FourWednesday, 24 November 2010
The title could have used a bit more work, I'd have thought. No, Peter Mandelson was never "the real PM", and won't be now. As for the real Peter Mandelson, there is no evidence that any such mythical beast exists. And why hadn't Lord Mandelson become prime minister, film-maker Hannah Rothschild asked him in one of her deferential voices-off moments? Because Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had entered parliament in 1983, Peter explained with exaggerated patience, while he himself had only got... Read more... |
Any Human Heart, Channel 4Monday, 22 November 2010
Any period drama that crops up on Sunday nights is now automatically billed as a potential replacement for Downton Abbey. Any Human Heart has duly been described thus, but isn't. Read more... |
Leonard Cohen: Bird on a Wire, BBC FourFriday, 19 November 2010
The renaissance enjoyed by Leonard Cohen over the past few years is not only thoroughly welcome and entirely justified, but also partly a testament to the strange and powerful alchemy that sometimes occurs when the defiantly high-brow is swallowed whole by popular culture. Read more... |
Lip Service: Series Finale, BBC ThreeTuesday, 16 November 2010
When The L Word, an American drama series following the interconnected lives of a group of lesbians in Los Angeles, first aired in 2004, much of the acres of coverage it attracted made disbelieving mention of the cast members’ attractiveness, which is an implicit suggestion that lesbians are more usually at the back of the queue when good looks are being given out. Rather irritatingly, Lip Service, a drama series following the interconnected lives etc etc... Read more... |
Imagine: Ai Weiwei - Without Fear or Favour, BBC OneTuesday, 16 November 2010
If you found yourself thinking that you were watching Mission: Impossible rather than Imagine, you could have been forgiven. Alan Yentob had clearly been banned from meeting Ai Weiwei in China, and so one of their interviews was conducted over a webcam, with Yentob sitting in the dark, like some spymaster of the arts. Read more... |
Accused, BBC OneMonday, 15 November 2010
With a title like Accused it would be easy to imagine that Jimmy McGovern’s new series was going to be just another generic courtroom drama, but McGovern would never be that predictable. The man who made Brookside grittily unmissable back in the 1980s, reinvented the TV crime genre with Cracker in the 1990s, and then settled into full maturity with The Street which ended last year, would probably rather retire than deliver anything that wasn’t in some... Read more... |
Garrow's Law: Series 2, BBC OneMonday, 15 November 2010
With a Royal Television Society award in the bag for its first series, Garrow’s Law has shifted up a gear with a batch of new stories about such momentous issues as homosexuality in the 18th century, the callous treatment of injured servicemen and attitudes to women in a supposed Age of Enlightenment. Read more... |
Elgar: The Man Behind the Mask, BBC FourFriday, 12 November 2010
Where is the real Elgar to be found – in his boisterous self-portrait at the end of the Enigma Variations, the warm, feminine sentiment of the Violin Concerto and the First Symphony’s Adagio, or the nightmares of the Second Symphony? No doubt in each of them, and more. John Bridcut’s painfully sensitive documentary hones in on the private, introspective Elgar, the dark knight of "ghosts and shadows", always with the music to the fore. And by getting the good and great, young and old... Read more... |
The Only Way is Essex, ITV2Thursday, 11 November 2010
To vajazzle or not to vajazzle; it’s the question on everyone’s, er, lips. Thanks to ITV’s unlikeliest of hits, The Only Way is Essex, tans will be brighter, teeth whiter and bodies more diamante-encrusted across the nation this winter. It’s the aesthetic equivalent of missionary work, and boy are these guys devout. Read more... |
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It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.
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