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Single Father, BBC One/ Thorne: Sleepyhead, Sky1

Adam Sweeting Monday, 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.

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The Song of Lunch, BBC Two

Jasper Rees Saturday, 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.

PhoneShop, E4

Gerard Gilbert Friday, 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,...

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The Apprentice, BBC One/ The Apprentice: You're Fired, BBC Two

Veronica Lee Thursday, 07 October 2010

'The Apprentice': Alan Sugar's eyes and ears - Karren Brady and Nick Hewer

As any successful entrepreneur will tell you, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” - so the sixth series of both these shows returned with just a few cosmetic changes. The muted opening is in tune with the times, Sir Alan Sugar is now the more ennobled Lord Sugar, the wonderful Margaret Mountford (who has gone back to her papyrology PhD) has been replaced in aide-de-camp duties by businesswoman and West Ham Football Cub executive Karren Brady, and Adrian Chiles (recently departed to...

Horizon: The Death of the Oceans?, BBC Two

Adam Sweeting Tuesday, 05 October 2010

Scientists from the University of Queensland measure the effect of acidic seawater on coral reefs

Many of us enjoy a slap-up fish supper. Far too many, unfortunately. Now that the Earth’s population is approaching seven billion, the drain on the denizens of the world’s oceans is becoming insupportable, many aquatic species are hurtling towards extinction, and at this rate the international commercial fishing industry will collapse by 2050.

DCI Banks: Aftermath, ITV1

howard Male Monday, 04 October 2010

Is love in the air (along with the smell of decomposing human flesh) for DCI Banks?

”The domestic” over at 27, The Hill turns out to be decidedly undomestic. The murderer's basement lair so resembles the blood-splattered dens of every other serial killer that has ever graced the big and small screen (right down to the sickly green light) that it’s hard not to contemplate the notion that there’s some kind of grim finishing school that all blossoming sadistic bastards are obliged to attend before getting their licence to kill.

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The Genius of British Art, David Starkey, Channel 4

Fisun Güner Monday, 04 October 2010

Forgetting the rest of art history, David Starkey cunningly tries to convince us that the Tudors invented the portrait

“Henry VIII is the only king whose shape we remember,” David Starkey tells us in the first of a new series of “polemical essays” on British art. To demonstrate, he reduces the king’s form to its bare Cubist geometry. He sketches a trapezoid for the chest – an impressive 54 inches in life, as attested by his made-to-measure suit of armour; two “chicken-wing” triangles for the puffed sleeves; two simple parallel lines for the wide-apart legs. Oh, and a small, inverted triangle for the codpiece...

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Trinny & Susannah: From Boom to Bust, Channel 4/ Nigella Kitchen, BBC Two

Jasper Rees Thursday, 30 September 2010

They always say that women over a certain age are, in televisual terms, extinct. Well, it seems that science is going to have to get back to the drawing board. Palaeontological reports are coming in from last night of strange terrestrial sightings - sightings of creatures whose skeletal remains were long since thought to be fossilising in the Jurassic substrata known as US cable. And not just one. People caught fleeting glimpses of the Trinnysaurus and the Susannadactyl while others say they...

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The Born Free Legacy, BBC Four

howard Male Tuesday, 28 September 2010

If you have fond childhood memories of either the Born Free book or movie, you might want to stay away. From the opening moments of this documentary, the knowledge that lion-loving conservationist George Adamson was fatally shot in the back on a dirt road in Kenya will immediately stop John Barry’s epic and optimistic theme song from swelling to life in your head. But that’s only the beginning of a systematic dismantling of the Born Free myth from a documentary which,...

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Whites, BBC Two

graeme Thomson Tuesday, 28 September 2010

Those of us who occasionally still wake abruptly at 3am, a cool, clammy film of sweat creeping across our brow, as we recollect the full horror of Lenny Henry’s Chef! (God, that cruelly mocking exclamation mark), could be forgiven for approaching this new kitchen-com with a degree of trepidation.