TV
Rupert Murdoch: Battle with Britain/United States of Television: America in Primetime, BBC TwoMonday, 29 April 2013
"For youth, for change and always for the people" was the slogan with which Rupert Murdoch relaunched The Sun in 1969, having bought it from its previous owners IPC for a mere £800,000. Murdoch, the Aussie iconoclast who kept a bust of Lenin in his... Read more... |
DVD: The Brontës of HaworthFriday, 26 April 2013
Are we approaching some sort of Brontë anniversary? Or is it simply the 40th anniversary of this long-forgotten dramatization of the “Brontë story” that’s being marked with a two-disc DVD release? The Brontës of Haworth has hardly gone down in... Read more... |
The Politician's Husband, BBC TwoFriday, 26 April 2013
The first minutes of Paula Milne's new three-parter are absolutely hilarious. MP Aiden Hoynes (David Tennant) resigns from his post as Business Secretary and launches an attack on the Prime Minister from the backbenches in an attempt to trigger... Read more... |
Watson & Oliver, Series 2, BBC TwoFriday, 26 April 2013
You wait years for a female comedy duo to take up where French & Saunders left off, then two come along within a calendar year. Which just about counts as at once. Anna & Katy, who recently had a run on Channel 4, rely for most of their wit... Read more... |
Playhouse Presents: Snodgrass, Sky Arts 1Friday, 26 April 2013
What if John Lennon had left The Beatles in 1962? What if they had continued without him? And what if he had still become the acid-tongued, ready-with-a-quip character the real world became familiar with? Snodgrass took those what-ifs and ran with... Read more... |
The Wright Way, BBC OneWednesday, 24 April 2013
Oh dear. Oh deary dear. Oh deary deary dear. To think that Ben Elton, who has a “written and created by” credit for this pile of poo, once helped to scale the heights of British comedy as co-writer of The Young Ones and Blackadder. Five minutes into... Read more... |
Broadchurch, Series Finale, ITVTuesday, 23 April 2013
And the killer is... No, that would be telling, and you might not have watched it on catch-up yet. But was the revelation worth the wait?We often complain about the way British TV dramas are often squeezed into three or four (or two) parts, when an... Read more... |
Panorama - Secrets of Britain's Shari'a Courts, BBC OneTuesday, 23 April 2013
It feels a little as if BBC journalists are getting themselves into trouble every other week at the moment. As news emerges that new BBC chief Tony Hall will appear before MPs to discuss why they allowed a Panorama journalist to use a university... Read more... |
The Prisoners, BBC OneTuesday, 23 April 2013
“The best times I've ever had were in prison,” says Crystal, aged 23, one of the three inmates being followed in The Prisoners (this was originally planned as episode one, but was bounced from the schedules by the death of Baroness Thatcher). On the... Read more... |
The Ice Cream Girls, ITVSaturday, 20 April 2013
A new drama series at 9pm on a Friday? How often does that happen, eh? Friday is supposed to be reserved for quiz shows, comedies and BBC Four documentaries about disco music.Whether it should have happened is, for the time being, a moot point.... Read more... |
The Genius of Josiah Wedgwood, BBC TwoSaturday, 20 April 2013
As a self-taught chemist, innovative industrialist, a businessman who exploited and developed new means of distribution and marketing, an anti-slavery campaigner and a man dealing with his own disability, the Staffordshire potter Josiah Wedgwood was... Read more... |
The South Bank Show: Tim Minchin, Sky Arts 1Friday, 19 April 2013
The new South Bank Show has glided into its second season with a seemingly effortless profile of multi-hyphenate Tim Minchin. In case we’ve forgotten what exactly we admire him for these days – so varied has been his decade-long career been, through... Read more... |
