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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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The Apprentice, BBC One/ The Apprentice: You're Fired, BBC TwoThursday, 07 October 2010
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... Read more... |
Horizon: The Death of the Oceans?, BBC TwoTuesday, 05 October 2010
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. Read more... |
DCI Banks: Aftermath, ITV1Monday, 04 October 2010
”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. Read more... |
The Genius of British Art, David Starkey, Channel 4Monday, 04 October 2010
“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... Read more... |
Trinny & Susannah: From Boom to Bust, Channel 4/ Nigella Kitchen, BBC TwoThursday, 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... Read more... |
The Born Free Legacy, BBC FourTuesday, 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,... Read more... |
Whites, BBC TwoTuesday, 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. Read more... |
Downton Abbey, ITV1Monday, 27 September 2010
With the BBC still in the middle of shooting their revival of Upstairs, Downstairs, ITV1 have nipped in ahead of them with Julian Fellowes's spiffing new sundown-on-the-aristocracy drama. In a battle of the stage dames, the Beeb has bagged Eileen Atkins, whereas ITV has signed up Maggie Smith as Violet, Dowager Countess of Grantham. Read more... |
True Blood, Channel 4Friday, 24 September 2010
How did vampires manage to stage a near-total hijack of the popular media? It used to be just Christopher Lee in a cloak with Hammer Films’ home-made cardboard bats hanging on wires over his head, but now we’re up to our throats in Buffy, Angel, The Twilight Saga, Blade, Van Helsing… and True Blood, HBO’s somewhat superior exercise in blood-squirting southern Gothic, now back for its second series on Channel 4. Read more... |
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