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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...
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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... |
Unequal Opportunities, BBC TwoTuesday, 21 September 2010
There’s an equality gap in our education system. Poor kids come bottom of the class, while rich kids are destined for the elite universities. In the eloquent words of education minister Michael Gove: “Rich thick kids do better than poor clever kids.” And we’ve got loads of stats to back this up. |
Spooks, BBC OneTuesday, 21 September 2010
Looks like being a chilly autumn in Spooks world. In time-honoured fashion, the new series waved goodbye to another former stalwart with the funeral of Ros Myers (Hermione Norris), blown to bits in the last series and thus freed up to splash about in the moral squalor of ITV1's new Bouquet of Barbed Wire. Read more... |
Joe Maddison's War, ITV1Sunday, 19 September 2010
Alan Plater wrote to the end. When he died earlier this year, he had completed a final screenplay which found him returning whence he came. Joe Maddison’s War was set in his native North-East, and portrayed the impact of wartime on ordinary working-class lives. With the help of nostalgic singing and dancing, the tone was comic and affectionate, but with an undimmed glint of good old socialist indignation. They don’t make dramas like this any more. But whenever they do, the more... Read more... |
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