TV
The Crimson Field, BBC OneMonday, 07 April 2014
The BBC is going to reap a rich harvest from The Crimson Field. Sarah Phelps’s drama impresses for a whole number of reasons that will score with viewers: there's the closed community and class elements we know so well from the likes of Downton, as... Read more... |
The Trip to Italy, BBC TwoSaturday, 05 April 2014
The Trip is a hall of mirrors put together with the help of Heath Robinson. It’s a comedy vehicle in which pretty much the only thing that’s real is the actual vehicle. The stars are two impersonators who above all impersonate themselves. Their... Read more... |
10 Questions for Screenwriter Sarah PhelpsFriday, 04 April 2014
In a hectic writing career spanning theatre, radio, film and TV, Sarah Phelps can lay claim to such milestone moments of popular culture as both the return of Den Watts to EastEnders and his subsequent demise in 2005, and writing the screenplay for... Read more... |
Jockey School, Channel 4Friday, 04 April 2014
Biança Barker's film was broadcast to coincide with the run-up to the Grand National this weekend, although one got no sense of where its subjects fitted into the horse racing world in general. In fact, one got no sense of where they fitted into... Read more... |
Kim Philby: His Most Intimate Betrayal, BBC TwoWednesday, 02 April 2014
History may be written by the winners, but its verdict is surely still out on Kim Philby. The presenter of Kim Philby: His Most Intimate Betrayal, Ben Macintyre, acknowledged that Philby is “the most famous double agent in history”, but though such... Read more... |
New Worlds, Channel 4Wednesday, 02 April 2014
It's been six years since Peter Flannery's lurid Civil War series The Devil's Whore, which ended shortly after the death of Oliver Cromwell. This sequel, co-written by Flannery and Martine Brant, speeds us forward to 1680, which means Charles II is... Read more... |
Storyville: Which Way Is the Frontline From Here?, BBC FourTuesday, 01 April 2014
The title of Sebastian Junger’s documentary comes from a casual remark made as a group of journalists set off towards conflict in the outskirts of the Libyan town of Misrata: it may sound like a standard question from a battle-hardened war... Read more... |
Endeavour, Series 2, ITVSunday, 30 March 2014
The last time the whippersnapper Morse was on our screens he was getting (a) orphaned and (b) shot. This double dose of pain seemed a bit punitive, but then when sorrows come they come not single spies. The second series of Endeavour seems... Read more... |
Listed: Celebrating Dylan ThomasSunday, 30 March 2014
It won’t have escaped the attention of anyone with an ear for poetry that Dylan Thomas turns 100 this year. He was born in a suburban house on a hill overlooking Swansea Bay a few months after the outbreak of war, and by his early 20s had been... Read more... |
Mammon, More4Saturday, 29 March 2014
Well, that was a bit of a brain workout for the first episode - I confess for much of the opening instalment (five more to follow) I didn't have a clue what was going on, who anybody was or how all the characters and a multitude of story strands... Read more... |
Believe, Watch / Person of Interest, Series 2, Channel 5Thursday, 27 March 2014
As pedigrees go, beat this - Believe [***] is the brainchild of Alfonso Cuarón, director of the Oscar-plundering Gravity, and JJ Abrams, mastermind of Lost, Fringe and the made-over Star Trek. This debut episode didn't live up to expectations, but... Read more... |
Rev, Series 3, BBC TwoTuesday, 25 March 2014
Perhaps the BBC didn't need to make W1A, its new self-satirising sitcom. In the clerical comedy Rev, the Church of England could be considered a very serviceable metaphor for the Corporation, with its unfathomable layers of bureaucracy, well-meaning... Read more... |
