TV
Field of Blood: The Dead Hour, BBC OneFriday, 09 August 2013
There are not generally a lot of laughs in dead bodies. So Raymond Chandler saw the funny side of murder, and Carl Hiassen dresses felonies in a bright Hawaiian shirt. But Glasgow, you’d think, would tend to keep corpses and comedy in separate boxes... Read more... |
Legally High, Channel 4Friday, 09 August 2013
“How much risk are you willing to take when the only benefit is pleasure?” asks toxicologist Dr John Ramsey, as if pleasure in itself were not worth risking much for. He has a collection of over 29,000 psychoactive drugs but doesn’t seem to have... Read more... |
New Tricks, BBC OneWednesday, 07 August 2013
Moving the action to an exotic location is usually a sign of desperation when a character-based drama is flagging on home turf. New Tricks, most at ease in Soho and Stepney, hobbled into its tenth series with a two-parter set in Gibraltar – which is... Read more... |
Southcliffe, Channel 4Tuesday, 06 August 2013
The last time I noticed Sean Harris he was playing Micheletto Corella, the merciless assassin and enforcer for Pope Jeremy Irons and his Borgia clan. Unpleasantly good at it he was too.Perhaps it would be unfair to describe his appearance in... Read more... |
The Dealership, Channel 4Friday, 02 August 2013
Buying a used car is not for the squeamish at the best of times, but the notion of buying one from something called the Essex Car Company freezes the blood. Yet the idea of making a slice-of-life, fly on the wall, reality-tv-style doc about the... Read more... |
Caligula with Mary Beard, BBC TwoTuesday, 30 July 2013
Loving the title. Caligula with Mary Beard. Professor Beard has been mentioned adjacently to some rum types of late. Internet trolls. AA Gill. They pale into nothingness, do they not, next to the emperor who mistook his horse for a consul. And his... Read more... |
The Returned, Series Finale, Channel 4Monday, 29 July 2013
It could so easily have been The Walking Dead, where the living endlessly battle an ever-increasing tide of returnees from the beyond. The resurrected in the contemplative Returned weren’t zombies, but actual living people with a desire to pick up... Read more... |
The Mill, Channel 4Monday, 29 July 2013
Does it always have to be so flipping grim up north? In Channel 4's new four-parter, the Mill in question is at Quarry Bank in Cheshire. The date: 1833, during the Industrial Revolution. Villains du jour: the Greg family, industrialists and... Read more... |
Listed: Female buddy crimebustersSaturday, 27 July 2013
There's good cops and bad cops, hard cops and soft cops, old cops and young cops, funny cops and straight cops, maverick cops and by-the-book cops. The pairings are legion, the permutations endless. The movies teem with buddy cops, unlike paired... Read more... |
Notes from the Inside with James Rhodes, Channel 4Thursday, 25 July 2013
Most of us could compile soundtracks to our lives. We’d probably save our favourite songs and pieces for the worst bits. Pianist James Rhodes was sectioned in his twenties and maintains that a visitor who smuggled in an iPod stuffed with classical... Read more... |
Imagine... Woody Allen: A Documentary, BBC OneWednesday, 24 July 2013
You might wonder if anybody really deserves three and a half hours of TV biography, but after the first half of Robert Weide's immense survey of Woody Allen, the nebbish messiah, I was pawing the carpet in anticipation of part two. Documentaries don... Read more... |
Burton and Taylor, BBC FourTuesday, 23 July 2013
They’ve served BBC Four well, these dramas about the private lives of the stars. From writers to comics, presenters to chefs, the secret traumas of yesteryear’s celebs have entertained and enlightened. And, if we’re honest, embellished. Now that the... Read more... |
