tv
A Secret History: The Grammar School, BBC FourFriday, 13 January 2012
This two-part documentary, which ended last night with teary recollections from a handful of well-known faces, wasn’t really a “secret history”. The history of grammar schools and their wholesale demolition by a Labour government is pretty widely known. But even that was fairly lightly skipped over. No, this was really a love letter, written to a long dead mistress who had served the writer well. Read more...
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The Good Wife, More4Friday, 13 January 2012
Much has been made of the quality of drama currently or recently on British television - Downton Abbey, Sherlock, Cranford, any number of Dickens adaptations we are about to see during 2012 - and rightly so. But as The Good Wife starts its third season on More4, it's worth noting that when it comes to modern-day serials, the Americans are more than a match for British bonnets and book adaptations. Read more... |
Freddie Flintoff: Hidden Side of Sport, BBC OneThursday, 12 January 2012
The recent suicide of Wales's football manager Gary Speed prompted angstful outpourings about the hidden menace of depression in top-level sport, even though there was no evidence that Speed was a sufferer. But depression clearly is an occupational hazard among sportsmen, with cricket incurring a disturbingly high rate of player suicides, and in this film former England superstar Freddie Flintoff (real name Andrew) probed into some high-profile case histories. Read more... |
The Mystery of Edwin Drood, BBC TwoWednesday, 11 January 2012
You can never have enough Dickens, doctors say. Or is it exercise? Either way, the BBC has gone to town on the 200th anniversary of Dickens's birth as if the moths are eating away in the Victorian closet and all the costumes need to be used as much as possible. Read more... |
Above Suspicion: Silent Scream, ITV1Monday, 09 January 2012
Since Prime Suspect introduced television viewers to the writing of Lynda La Plante, the concept of event television has lost a little of its lustre. Such was the remarkable heft of La Plante’s storyline about a serial killer and Helen Mirren’s performance as DI Jane Tennison that schedulers have ever since been sending out their pedigree crime dramas in great big lumpy chunks. Twenty years on, La Plante doesn’t quite kick down the door the way she used to. Read more... |
Borgen, BBC FourSunday, 08 January 2012
Knitwear fetishists won’t be as thrilled with Borgen as they were with The Killing, but based on the first two episodes of the Danish political drama, Birgitte Nyborg Christensen is a match for Sarah Lund. She’s as likely to stray from what she ought to be doing as Lund and just as adept as spotting what no else can see. Read more... |
New Girl, Channel 4Saturday, 07 January 2012
Since the departure of Friends and Frasier from our screens, fans of the genre have been waiting for the next generation of mates-based US sitcoms. Read more... |
Public Enemies, BBC OneThursday, 05 January 2012
I had been planning to speculate about what might happen in the finale of Public Enemies, but its three-night run was shifted back a day to accommmodate a Panorama special about the Stephen Lawrence case. Read more... |
Endeavour, ITV1Tuesday, 03 January 2012
Diehard Morsians have been harbouring murderous thoughts ever since it was announced. No doubt they communicate these to one another in fiendish acrostics and cryptic clues. It was one thing giving Lewis his own spin-off, quite another to bring Morse back to life in the form of a prequel. Read more... |
Treasure Island, Sky1Tuesday, 03 January 2012
Robert Louis Stevenson's classic swashbuckler has been made into countless films and TV series in several languages, and has survived Muppet Treasure Island as well as an interstellar Disney animation called Treasure Planet. Pleasingly, Sky1's new version made a fine addition to the lineage, combining a shrewdly picked cast with lush production values while retaining much of the darkness and menace of Stevenson's novel. Read more... |
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