BBC Two
The Sarah Millican Television Programme, BBC TwoFriday, 09 March 2012
There comes a point in every successful stand-up's career when television executives start calling. First it's appearances on panel and quiz shows, then a solo programme that showcases their live talents - but what then? Not everyone is a Graham... Read more... |
Paula Milne on writing White HeatWednesday, 07 March 2012
Each decade is a response to and reaction again the previous decade. I’m a child of the Sixties, which were clearly to some extent a response to the post-war austerity of the Fifties. You felt the presence of the war. It was the elephant in the room... Read more... |
David Hockney: The Art of Seeing, BBC TwoTuesday, 28 February 2012
It’s hard to imagine a bad documentary on David Hockney. Hockney always gives good Hockney: the quotable sentences come thick and fast; his enthusiasm for his craft is never less than exhilarating, and like that other great British artist of his... Read more... |
Watson & Oliver, BBC TwoTuesday, 21 February 2012
Lorna Watson and Ingrid Oliver, purely by dint of being female, have a burden of expectation before they even open their mouths, as the ghosts of French and Saunders stalk the corridors of the BBC. It's horribly unfair to saddle the newcomers with... Read more... |
Lucian Freud: Painted Life, BBC TwoSunday, 19 February 2012
He was uncompromising, honest, personal. He didn't like doing what he was told. He never followed fashion. Is this an accurate picture of Lucian Freud, or is it a description of almost every great artist who ever lived? The intensely banal voiceover... Read more... |
Wonderland: A Dad Is Born, BBC TwoFriday, 17 February 2012
Is there anything new to say about becoming a parent? Not really. But about 20 years ago it certainly looked that way. It was around the time feminism had gone mainstream, and also when newspapers began swelling in size and needed extra content, so... Read more... |
Roger and Val Have Just Got In, BBC TwoThursday, 09 February 2012
It's a brave sitcom writer who dares to write a bleakly comic drama, without canned laughter, in which nothing very much happens and where a long-married couple natter away about the mundane details of their lives in the half-hour after they come... Read more... |
The Fixer, BBC TwoTuesday, 31 January 2012
It’s not a genre which springs too many surprises. Ever since Sir John Harvey-Jones strode into shot a good 20 years ago, the template was set for the sort-your-life-out documentary. Expert enters, throws up hands in horror, delivers a quantity of... Read more... |
Horizon: Playing God, BBC TwoWednesday, 18 January 2012
“So you’re telling me that somewhere on this farm there’s an animal that’s part spider and part something else?” No, this isn’t a snatch of dialogue from the climax of a shlocky B-movie. These words were spoken calmly if sceptically by biologist... 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... Read more... |
The Many Faces of Dame Judi Dench, BBC TwoSaturday, 31 December 2011
It's interesting to consider at what point in someone's career does he or she become a national treasure - as Alan Bennett once so scathingly remarked, “If you live to be 90 in England and can still eat a boiled egg they think you deserve the Nobel... Read more... |
Masterchef: The Professionals, BBC TwoFriday, 16 December 2011
There are all sorts of reality shows, but the best ones really do strip people bare. It’s the reason why The X Factor is more interesting than Strictly Come Dancing, why Don’t Tell the Bride is more revealing of the gamble of love than Snog, Marry,... Read more... |
