documentary
The Trouble with the Pope, Channel 4Monday, 13 September 2010
"The church shouldn't be interfering in the personal and private lives of people - we don't own them." The comment comes from a Catholic priest working with abused children in the Philippines, Father Shay Cullen. It would be good to hear from other... Read more... |
The Case for God?, BBC OneMonday, 06 September 2010
Sometimes you get the impression the Beeb wishes religion would quietly go away. You see it in the gradual transformation of the Sunday morning slot from the lightweight Heaven and Earth Show to Nicky Campbell’s lighter-weight Big Questions and now... Read more... |
Who Do You Think You Were? Channel 4Friday, 03 September 2010
“Do you realise what you’re letting yourself in for?” is surely the worst thing to say to someone in order to put them at their ease, especially when they are about to step into the subconscious unknown. But down-to-earth fireman Neil Clarke took... Read more... |
E Numbers: an Edible Adventure, BBC TwoFriday, 27 August 2010
Food writer Stefan Gates seems to have spent his whole life in wilder regions, whether clambering naked up a rain-swept Giant’s Causeway (yes, that‘s the six-year-old Stefan, with his sister Samantha, on the cover of Led Zeppelin’s 1973 album Houses... Read more... |
My New Brain, Channel 4Thursday, 26 August 2010
When Simon Hales, a 20-year-old university student, fell from a 20ft wall during a tipsy night out, nobody knew whether he would pull through. He'd suffered a horrific brain injury and would spend the next five weeks in a coma. Luckily, he did pull... Read more... |
Mountain Gorillas, BBC Two/ Horsepower with Martin Clunes, ITV1Sunday, 22 August 2010
People are lured to behave like animals for TV now - Big Brother, Celebrity Jungle, The X Factor - so it merely completes the idiotic equation to have animals insistently transfigured into little humans in wildlife TV. Or big, hairy humans in the... Read more... |
The Raoul Moat Tapes: Inside the Mind of a Killer, Channel 4Thursday, 19 August 2010
After going on his murderous rampage earlier this summer, the police hunt for Raoul Moat was given rolling news coverage. Moat had critically injured his ex-partner Samantha Stobbart, he had murdered her new boyfriend and he had gone on to shoot and... Read more... |
Bombing of Germany, National GeographicTuesday, 17 August 2010
By complete coincidence, this afternoon I tuned in to Air Force, Howard Hawks's 1943 propaganda picture: chiselled young airmen fill a B-17 "flying fortress", dropping their payloads over Japan, both a news service and wish fulfilment for... Read more... |
The Heroes of Biggin Hill, YesterdayThursday, 12 August 2010
The Yesterday channel’s ongoing “Spirit of 1940” season has provoked a giant surge in its viewing figures, another reminder of the grip World War Two still exerts on large chunks of the British public. The Battle of Britain in particular has become... Read more... |
Domesday, BBC Two/ Treasures of the Anglo-Saxons, BBC FourTuesday, 10 August 2010
What was originally a coincidence of reviewing – two dispatches from the Dark Ages, Treasures of the Anglo-Saxons on BBC Four and Domesday on BBC Two – in fact turned into a remarkably instructive diptych of how and how not to make history... Read more... |
Madness in the Fast Lane, BBC OneTuesday, 10 August 2010
Words such as horror, grotesque, shocking and bizarre are fired at us before the title has even appeared on screen: clearly this documentary is set on living down to its sensationalist title. One bleak sunless day in May 2008, Swedish twins Sabina... Read more... |
Benda Bilili!Friday, 06 August 2010
I must confess that when I first heard about Staff Benda Bilili - a Congolese band partly made up of paraplegics – I felt a little uneasy. The last thing that one wants as a (hopefully) trusted critic is to feel compromised by an obligation to give... Read more... |
