tv
Servant, Apple TV+ review - shocks, shivers and black humour in missing-baby sagaTuesday, 19 January 2021
The oeuvre of M Night Shyamalan has tended to veer between unsettling creepiness and sometimes hilarious misfires, but, working as Executive Producer with screenwriter Tony Basgallop, he’s hit the spot with this unnerving series for Apple TV +. Read more... |
Finding Alice, ITV review - thriller, comedy or melodrama?Monday, 18 January 2021
Or, What The Durrells Did Next. Read more... |
Spiral, Series 8, BBC Four review - dark days in the City of LightSunday, 10 January 2021
The discovery of a grotesque murder is the traditional way to begin a new series of Spiral, and this time around the cadaver belonged to a young Moroccan boy, nicknamed Shkun. He’d been beaten to death with an iron bar and stuffed into a laundromat washing machine. Read more... |
Steve McQueen: The Lost Movie, Sky Documentaries review - the classic motor racing film that never wasWednesday, 06 January 2021
The motor racing passion of movie star Steve McQueen is well documented, from his motorcycling exploits in The Great Escape to the rubber-burning car chase around San Francisco in Bullitt to his weird but mesmeric sports car odyssey Le Mans. Less widely known, however, was his plan to shoot a movie about Formula One during the mid-Sixties. Read more... |
The Great, Channel 4 review - Russian history gets a whirl in the fictional blenderMonday, 04 January 2021
History ain’t what it used to be, not on television at any rate. Recently we’ve witnessed the ongoing furore about the factual accuracy or otherwise of The Crown, while Bridgerton has cheekily galloped bareback over the conventional cliches of telly costume dramas. Read more... |
The Serpent, BBC One review - tracking down the hippie-trail murdererSaturday, 02 January 2021
“They’re only rich assholes.They don’t merit your concern,” serial killer and psychopath Charles Sobhraj (Tahar Rahim, A Prophet, Heal the Living), aka rich French gem-dealer Alain Gautier, tells his girlfriend Marie-Andrée in The Serpent as he steals passports and money from a couple of unconscious Read more... |
Doctor Who: Revolution of the Daleks, BBC One review - a perfectly predictable rompSaturday, 02 January 2021
The Doctor (Jodie Whittaker) has a simple routine: she gets up at the same time every day, tramps out for her allotted hour of exercise, and spends the rest of the day staring out of the window, yearning for freedom. Sound familiar? That’s a bit worrying, she’s in prison. Read more... |
Best of 2020: TVTuesday, 29 December 2020
Okay, so some people taught themselves the violin or wrote a novel, but under this year’s circumstances, it was inevitable that television (terrestrial, cable, online or otherwise) was going to clean up. Read more... |
Black Narcissus, BBC One review - a haunting in the HimalayasMonday, 28 December 2020
It’s dangerous territory, remaking a classic British film as a TV mini-series. In 1947 when Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger created Black Narcissus, a heady adaptation of Rumer Godden’s 1939 novel, they never set foot in the Himalayas. Read more... |
Roald and Beatrix: The Tail of the Curious Mouse, Sky One review – twinkly tale for troubled timesFriday, 25 December 2020
They say "never meet your heroes". That may be true, but it forms the premise of a new TV drama concerning two of the world’s most famous children’s authors – Beatrix Potter and Roald Dahl – who encounter each other at opposite ends of their life. 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.
It followed some...
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The Bombing of Pan Am 103, BBC One review - new dramatisatio...
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Music Reissues Weekly: Chapterhouse - White House Demos
Quoted in an early music press article on his band Chapterhouse, singer-guitarist Stephen Patman said their ambition was “to have our records on...