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Live Aid at 40: When Rock'n'Roll Took on the World, BBC Two review - how Bob Geldof led pop's battle against Ethiopian famineTuesday, 08 July 2025
“Bob’s not the kind of guy you can say no to,” said Sting, reminiscing about the origins of 1984’s Band Aid charity single “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”. “He’s persistent.” Read more... |
Hill, Sky Documentaries review - how Damon Hill battled his demonsFriday, 04 July 2025
Some world champion racing drivers make it look effortless, but it was never that way for Damon Hill. His path to the championship he won in 1996 had been fraught with difficulties, including not just his increasingly ill-tempered on-track battle with Michael Schumacher, but also the sometimes less-than-wholehearted support he received from the Williams team. Indeed, the team had already announced they were replacing him before he won the 1996 title. Read more... |
Outrageous, U&Drama review - skilfully-executed depiction of the notorious Mitford sistersMonday, 23 June 2025
If somebody submitted a treatment for a new costume drama series set in the 1930s in which not just one but two fictitious sisters from a fading aristocratic family pair off with leading fascists, while the cousin warning them off these liaisons is a future British PM, the pitch meeting probably wouldn’t last that long. Read more... |
Prost, BBC 4 review - life and times of the driver they called 'The Professor'Saturday, 21 June 2025
With Brad Pitt’s much-trumpeted F1 movie about to screech noisily into the multiplexes, it’s not a bad time to be reminded of the career of one of the sport’s indisputable greats. Read more... |
The Buccaneers, Apple TV+, Season 2 review - American adventuresses run riot in CornwallFriday, 20 June 2025
Edith Wharton hadn’t finished her novel, The Buccaneers, when she died in 1937, but it was completed in 1993 by Marion Mainwaring. The result was not considered an unalloyed triumph, but there was certainly a lot more Edith Wharton in it than you’ll find in Apple TV+’s dramatisation. Read more... |
The Gold, Series 2, BBC One review - back on the trail of the Brink's-Mat banditsMonday, 09 June 2025
The first series of The Gold in 2023 was received rapturously, though apparently it only told one half of the story of the 1983 Brink’s-Mat robbery at Heathrow airport. Read more... |
Dept. Q, Netflix review - Danish crime thriller finds a new home in EdinburghMonday, 02 June 2025
Netflix’s new detective-noir is a somewhat cosmopolitan beast. It’s written and directed by an American, Scott Frank, derived from a novel, Mercy, by the Danish crime writer Jussi Adler-Olsen, and set in Edinburgh (as well as other flavourful Scottish locations). There are plenty of Scots in the cast too, although it’s the very English Matthew Goode (Downton Abbey, The Crown etc) who takes the lead role of DCI Carl Morck. Read more... |
The Rise and Fall of Michelle Mone, BBC Two - boom and bust in the lingerie tradeThursday, 29 May 2025
As this two-part documentary vividly illustrates, it has been a wild ride for Baroness Mone of Mayfair, the self-made businesswoman who emerged from Dennistoun in Glasgow’s East End in the Nineties and created the Ultimo Bra. This revolutionary undergarment ingeniously enhanced the wearer’s cleavage, using a silicon gel to mimic the feel of real breast tissue. Read more... |
Code of Silence, ITVX review - inventively presented reality of deaf people's experienceThursday, 22 May 2025
In the guided tour of Britain’s cathedral cities that is the primetime TV detective series, the spotlight has now landed on Canterbury. Code of Silence frequently inserts a dramatic aerial shot of the city, its streets radiating out from the towering ecclesiastical landmark at its centre, to remind us where we are. Read more... |
The Bombing of Pan Am 103, BBC One review - new dramatisation of the horrific Lockerbie terror attackMonday, 19 May 2025
The appalling destruction of Pan Am’s flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1988 was put under the spotlight in January this year in Sky Atlantic’s Lockerbie: A Search for Truth. This focused on the dogged and agonising search for truth by Jim Swire (played by Colin Firth), whose daughter Flora was killed in the attack, and raised a host of possibilities and theories about who did it and why. Read more... |
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