documentary
Oasis in Their Own Words, BBC iPlayerMonday, 03 October 2016
Trying to pip the release of Mat Whitecross’s documentary Supersonic to the post, this brief hack through the BBC’s archive throws together a galloping overview of Oasis’s rise and fall, narrated by their own interviews and quotes. Arguably Oasis... Read more... |
The First Monday in MayFriday, 30 September 2016
“I’m so tired of hearing that McQueen is the best show we’ve ever done. It’s become a bit of an albatross,” complains Andrew Bolton, curator of the New York Metropolitan museum’s costume institute (he’s from Blackburn, Lancashire, and loved the New... Read more... |
DVD: Fire at SeaTuesday, 27 September 2016
There’s a doctor on Lampedusa who has nightmares about the corpses the sea brings to his island: the women who give birth on sinking boats with umbilical cords left uncut, the diesel-poisoned skins, and those left to dehydrate and rot in holds.... Read more... |
Natural World: Jaguars – Brazil's Super Cats, BBC TwoThursday, 15 September 2016
In film and photography, zoos and on safari (we should be so lucky) we admire the great cats, kings of jungle and forest, top of the food chain, predators, and gorgeous to boot. But in spite of this admiration, some human populations hardly bear... Read more... |
British Sitcom: 60 Years of Laughing at OurselvesTuesday, 13 September 2016
Sixty years of sitcoms in 60 minutes? That's a big ask, but the makers of this whizz-through of British sitcoms tried, with a mega session of clips and comedy experts opining about them in a one-off documentary charting the importance of sitcom in... Read more... |
There's Something about Romcoms, Channel 4Sunday, 21 August 2016
Ever since Britain shipped Cary Grant across the Atlantic, the romcom has been a transatlantic English-language staple. This spirited and hilarious – whether intentionally or not – examination of the last 30 years of the genre, dominated as it is by... Read more... |
Almost HolyFriday, 19 August 2016
Tough love doesn’t get much tougher. Ukrainian priest Gennadiy Mokhnenko has spent two decades trying to keep children off the streets, and away from drugs, in his hometown Mariupol, using methods that elsewhere in the world would count as... Read more... |
DVD: The Killing$ of Tony BlairFriday, 19 August 2016
Much like Margaret Thatcher’s tearful tumble from Downing Street, the haggard, hoarse Tony Blair who materialised after Chilcot must have given even his enemies pause. The glib, youthful Nineties spin-master now recalled Scrooge’s reproachful future... Read more... |
Kate Humble: My Sheepdog & Me, BBC TwoTuesday, 16 August 2016
There is a grand ongoing project in Wales at the moment, the goal of which is to hunt for the deep ancestral DNA of the Welsh people. CymruDNAWales has already made some startling findings, in particular about a dozen all-powerful chieftains from... Read more... |
Bobby Sands: 66 DaysFriday, 05 August 2016
There’s much more to Brendan J Byrne’s engrossing, even-handed documentary Bobby Sands: 66 Days than its title might at first suggest. The timeline that led up to the death on 5 May 1981 of the IRA prisoner provides the immediate context – an... Read more... |
The Girl from Ipanema: Brazil, Bossa Nova and the Beach, BBC FourTuesday, 02 August 2016
Some years ago broadcaster Andy Kershaw introduced on BBC World Service radio a piece of Brazilian music with this blunt dismissal: “When I hear a track by, say, Gilberto Gil, I tell myself: ‘Right, time to take the lift and go to bed’.” It wasn’t a... Read more... |
Saddam Goes to Hollywood, Channel 4 / Keith Richards: The Origin of the Species, BBC TwoMonday, 25 July 2016
Incredible but true, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein really did hire a largely-British film crew to come to his country and make a movie called Clash of Loyalties, about how Iraq freed itself from British influence in the 1920s and blossomed into an... Read more... |
