TV
Bear’s Wild Weekend with Ben Stiller, Channel 4Thursday, 11 December 2014
It’s only a few years since TV companies wouldn’t let Bear Grylls talk to anything more important than small, edible fauna. So he’s done well to progress so quickly to genuine A-Listers like Ben Stiller and Stephen Fry. By most objective criteria,... Read more... |
Brian Pern: A Life in Rock, BBC TwoTuesday, 09 December 2014
BBC4’s The Life of Rock with Brian Pern introduced us to the former frontman of Thotch and creator of world music. With a promotion to BBC2 for Brian Pern: A Life in Rock, it seems that Pern, the comic creation of The Fast Show’s Simon Day and Rhys... Read more... |
Karajan's Magic and Myth, BBC FourSaturday, 06 December 2014
There have been legendary conductors, and then there was Herbert von Karajan. He was a colossus of post-World War Two classical music, equipped with fearsome technical mastery allied to a vaguely supernatural gift for extracting exquisite sounds... Read more... |
The Story of Funk: One Nation Under a Groove, BBC FourSaturday, 06 December 2014
There is a tradition in oral storytelling of individual embellishments and flourishes, of one tale taking many forms – the more it is told, the finer the detail. Characters are added and the narrative extended. In this way, stories stand up to near... Read more... |
Imagine... Colm Tóibín: His Mother's Son, BBC OneWednesday, 03 December 2014
Watching this edition of Imagine… on Colm Tóibín, it was impossible not to be reminded of Graham Greene’s dictum about childhood being the bank balance of the writer. The key event in Tóibín’s childhood came at the age of eight, when his father’s... Read more... |
Britain's Bloodiest Dynasty, Channel 5Thursday, 27 November 2014
Dan Jones has turned up to narrate the dramatised story of the Plantagenets in history lite mode, perhaps aimed at capturing a young audience. In Plantagenet country, as shown on TV, we witness a medieval version of soap opera family sagas where all... Read more... |
The Legacy, Sky Arts 1Thursday, 27 November 2014
It’s a dark and Danish so of course there is a body. But it’s not that sort of body. The Legacy parts company from what we know of most Nordic television drama. It’s neither a fetid charnel house in which the cops are as freaky as the killers. Nor... Read more... |
Posh People: Inside Tatler, BBC TwoTuesday, 25 November 2014
It won’t come as much of a surprise to find that the staff at Tatler are a bit on the posh side – who’d have thought? – but I honestly doubt they’re that much posher than, say, those at The Times, or The Guardian, or that other esteemed people’s... Read more... |
Sci-Fi Week: Out of the UnknownMonday, 24 November 2014
The lightning speed of the past, Raymond Carver once wrote. There’s no epic distance of space larger than that between the imagined futures of decades past and the way things are now. It’s the Jet-Pack conundrum: it should be here but what have we... Read more... |
Confessions of a Copper, Channel 4Thursday, 20 November 2014
This will have brought a nostalgic tear to the eye of fans of The Sweeney (the TV show, not the Ray Winstone movie) or GF Newman's still-shocking 1978 series Law and Order. The producers had rounded up seven retired policepersons and got them to... Read more... |
Imagine... Anselm Kiefer, BBC OneTuesday, 18 November 2014
Anselm Kiefer reminds me a bit of someone I once worked for. Totally unpredictable, and possessed of a formidable intelligence and creativity, his mental leaps can be bewilderingly hard to follow, leading occasionally to truly breathtaking results,... Read more... |
24 Hours in Police Custody, Channel 4Tuesday, 18 November 2014
“Your law is too soft. Make it more strict.” An Albanian illegal immigrant suspected of handling stolen goods was unimpressed by the courtesy extended to him by Bedfordshire Police. Too many pleases and thank yous, he complained. In Tirana the... Read more... |
