documentary
Time Shift: Dear Censor, BBC FourFriday, 30 September 2011
I hadn't thought this one through very well. As someone who was put off horror films by a window crashing onto a hand in one of the Amityville movies at least two decades ago, watching Time Shift: Dear Censor last night, which promised to show some... Read more... |
Rex Appeal, BBC FourThursday, 29 September 2011
Dinosaurs. Even just seeing that word takes me back to a letter my seven-year-old self wrote to Blue Peter humbly begging them for “More dinosaws pleez”. Back then, a sighting of these lumbering beasts on TV or at the movies was a rare and thrilling... Read more... |
No Naughty Bits, Hampstead TheatreTuesday, 13 September 2011
You could call it the BBC Four effect. It’s fact-based fictions set in the past, more often than not about the absurdities of sexual mores or other changing customs. In the latest theatrical example, Steve Thompson’s new play - which opened last... Read more... |
Little England, ITV1Monday, 12 September 2011
Why did I dislike this programme so much? At first I put it down to the stinker of a hangover I found myself watching it through. Perhaps it was the thought that my hangover would have been easier to bear under a yolk-yellow Dordogne sun than under... Read more... |
The Children of 9/11, Channel 4Monday, 12 September 2011
Over the course of the past weekend, not to mention over the last 10 years, it has been said often enough that there are no words to express the horror of 11 September, 2001. This hasn’t stopped people from trying, of course – and sometimes with... Read more... |
The Story of Film: An Odyssey, More 4Saturday, 10 September 2011
After the first two parts of Mark Cousins’s magisterial The Story of Film: An Odyssey, I’m still in two minds as to whether it’s fair to call the presenter a generalist. He has already managed to piece together details from the cinema cultures of... Read more... |
Horizon: Are You Good or Evil?, BBC TwoWednesday, 07 September 2011
Scientists, eh? You can’t live with them and you can’t live without them: they cure life-threatening diseases and they threaten life with ever more powerful weapons. And in the instance of this documentary, they state the bloody obvious and then go... Read more... |
How Facebook Changed the World: The Arab Spring, BBC TwoTuesday, 06 September 2011
It seems unlikely that the founding fathers of social media had in mind a revolution of any greater magnitude than turning your teenager’s bedroom walls inside out and making themselves rich in the process. Still, here we are, less than a decade... Read more... |
Donor Mum: The Children I've Never Met, BBC OneWednesday, 31 August 2011
Six months after giving birth to a child conceived through anonymous sperm donation, Sylvia decided to become an egg donor. It was her way, she said, of “giving something back”. It was 1991 and she was to become one of Britain’s first anonymous egg... Read more... |
Harry's Arctic Heroes, BBC OneTuesday, 30 August 2011
Does anyone else ever feel a mite sorry for the North Pole? It always takes second billing to its more famous namesake, and you can see why. The South Pole belongs to a continental land mass. Antarctica has penguins, historic huts, and chaps going... Read more... |
American: The Bill Hicks Story, BBC FourSunday, 28 August 2011
Being hailed as “the comedian’s comedian” is all well and good after you’re dead; but – as is often the way with great artists – it didn’t much help to pay the bills while Bill Hicks was walking and talking.Early on in Matt Harlock and Paul Thomas’s... Read more... |
Gilbert O’Sullivan: Out on His Own, BBC FourFriday, 26 August 2011
While obviously not as seismic a Top of the Pops moment as Ziggy singing “Starman”, the almost contemporaneous appearance of the flat-capped Gilbert O’Sullivan hunched over his piano as if it were a dying coal fire certainly stuck in my memory as... Read more... |
