tv
The Pillars of the Earth, Channel 4Sunday, 24 October 2010
It’s taken 20 years for Ken Follett’s doorstopping saga to storm the little screen in the corner of the room. According to Rufus Sewell, playing a stonemason who knows about these things, it takes only 15 to knock up a spanking new Gothic cathedral complete with the latest in flying buttresses. Not that it would be fair to compare The Pillars of the Earth with the pillars of any of the great churches erected in England in the period under observation here. Read more...
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The Event, Channel 4Saturday, 23 October 2010
Don’t you hate it when you have weeks like the ones poor Sean Walker, played by mini-Tom Cruise Jason Ritter, has been having? You go on a relaxing Caribbean cruise with your bride-to-be Leila (Sarah Roemer), you get friendly with another couple, then find out they're part of a huge conspiracy and have just kidnapped your fiancée. Then you discover that any trace of your presence on the cruise ship has been erased. Read more... |
Edgar Allan Poe: Love, Death and Women, BBC FourThursday, 21 October 2010
The recurrent image in this somewhat staid documentary is a monochrome photograph of Poe’s moon of a face with its panda-like eye sockets. Occasionally the camera moves in for a close-up on those eyes - perhaps hoping they’ll reveal something that mere biographical detail doesn’t - but appropriately enough the grim Gothic writer’s eyes are more black holes than windows on the soul, and they give nothing away. The horrors, scandals and tragedies of Poe’s life had to be exhumed from his words... Read more... |
The First Men in the Moon, BBC FourWednesday, 20 October 2010
Obviously the world has decided it needs Mark Gatiss, and it keeps finding things for him to do. An influential figure in the latterday revival of Doctor Who, as well as co-creator of the BBC's recent Sherlock, Gatiss's forte is turning out to be whimsical old-fashioned adventure stories, perhaps overlaid with a patina of science fiction. Read more... |
The Genius of British Art, Howard Jacobson, Channel 4Monday, 18 October 2010
Howard Jacobson, fresh from his Booker Prize triumph, was on an admirable mission last night: to rescue the good name of the Victorians. He wanted us to stop caricaturing our 19th-century forebears as prudish, self-righteous, pompous and hypocritical - you know, the sort of people who were so repressed that they went about covering piano legs in case thoughts should turn to the sensual curve of a lady’s well-turned ankle, but who were also notorious for sexual peccadillos involving underage... Read more... |
Wonderland: Boy Cheerleaders, BBC TwoWednesday, 13 October 2010
Nowadays it’s not so easy to find a doc you can trust. Since talent shows started supplying back stories as part of an all-in-one narrative package, it’s as if everyone has learnt how to behave when there’s a camera crew around. Meanwhile, in the cutting room film-makers can be quite as manipulative as colleagues who nakedly trade in fiction. But there are some things you can’t fake. A young male troupe of cheerleaders from rough working-class south Leeds? That’s one of them. Read more... |
Lip Service, BBC ThreeWednesday, 13 October 2010
Far more than gay men, lesbians are one of the great invisible minorities of British TV drama – British TV generally, in fact. Sure, there have been the milestone moments – the Brookside kiss that titillated the nation back in 1994 and was the making of the then 18-year-old Anna Friel, or Jeanette Winterson’s terrific 1989 adaptation of her own novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. Read more... |
Single Father, BBC One/ Thorne: Sleepyhead, Sky1Monday, 11 October 2010
The American networks have so far been able to resist the stick-insectish charms of David Tennant, but the BBC would probably start up a new channel just for him if he asked them. Read more... |
The Song of Lunch, BBC TwoSaturday, 09 October 2010
On the set of Downton Abbey I recently put some questions to Maggie Smith. She was reflecting on the end of her incarceration in Hogwarts. “Alan Rickman and I ran out of reaction shots,” she said, in exactly that mock-baffled tone you’d expect of her. “We couldn’t think what sort of faces we would pull. I remember him saying he’d got up to about 360-something and there weren’t any left.” On the glorious evidence of The Song of Lunch, Rickman was keeping some back. Read more... |
PhoneShop, E4Friday, 08 October 2010
For a workplace sitcom, an endorsement from Ricky Gervais must be a double-edged sword. On the one hand Gervais’s seal of approval seems to have helped persuade E4 to commission an entire series of PhoneShop even before its pilot aired as part of Channel 4’s experimental Comedy Showcase season last November – Gervais having been so excited by the early draft sent to him by his old friend Phil Bowker that he became the nascent sitcom’s script editor. On the other hand,... Read more... |
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