documentary
The Truth About Your Teeth, BBC OneFriday, 05 June 2015
Teeth. Who’d have them? This documentary about the state of the nation’s gnashers came along at a timely moment for your reviewer. Earlier in the week I suffered my first ever extraction. Didn’t feel a jot of pain, of course, but by Christ you know... Read more... |
When Pop Ruled My Life, BBC FourFriday, 29 May 2015
A long time ago I went out into the field to research a feature about the three ages of obsessive fandom. At the entry level was a bog-standard legion of young teenage girls who simply hung around outside the mansion block in Maida Vale where one or... Read more... |
The Secret Life of Tinder, Channel 4Friday, 15 May 2015
Lucky old us. We are now living “in a techno-sexual era”. So claimed this documentary about dating apps which radar-guide you to the nearest available groin. If groins are your thing, that is, and they are by no means everyone’s. We heard about a... Read more... |
DVD: National GalleryThursday, 14 May 2015
A heretical thought. Films released on the big screen are designed to be devoured in one swallow. But if ever a three-hour epic was made for consumption in bite-sized chunks, it is National Gallery, Frederick Wiseman’s discreet profile of the much-... Read more... |
Lambert & StampTuesday, 12 May 2015
“I fell in love with both of them immediately,” says Pete Townshend of Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, the managers who took his band The Who to world-wide success. An hour into Lambert & Stamp, a documentary on the duo, the depth of that bond is... Read more... |
Britain's Greatest Generation, BBC TwoSunday, 10 May 2015
You can’t move for the World Wars on the BBC. Gallipoli (100 years ago) and VE Day (70) are this month’s on-trend anniversaries, and they’ll soon budge up for VJ Day and the Somme. And let’s not forget older victories: there’s Waterloo (200 years... Read more... |
Shark, BBC OneFriday, 08 May 2015
It is perhaps a clever piece of ironic perversity to have scheduled the first part of a three-part documentary on sharks on polling day, but the subject here is the comings and goings inside the complex world of the predators of the sea. The series... Read more... |
DVD: Turned Towards the SunTuesday, 05 May 2015
The phrase “improbable life” crops up more than once in Greg Olliver’s highly engaging documentary Turned Towards the Sun about the poet Micky Burn (its title is that of the writer’s autobiography). It’s a contradiction in terms, perhaps, but as a... Read more... |
I Wish to Die Singing, Finborough TheatreThursday, 30 April 2015
Agitprop is a term that seems to have dropped out of use. It has too many negative connotations; it smacks of political rant. Yet artistic director Neil McPherson, whose small and feisty Finborough Theatre at Earls Court receives no public funding... Read more... |
24 Hours in the Past, BBC OneWednesday, 29 April 2015
The past is a foreign country. Celebrities do things differently there. Programmes which put people in time machines and whizz them back to a less centrally heated era have been around for a while. Back in the day they’d pick on ordinary people and... Read more... |
The Decent OneSaturday, 18 April 2015
Remember the Hitler diaries? Stern and the Sunday Times were so eager for them to be true they went ahead and published even after historian Hugh Trevor Roper had changed his mind about their authenticity. Such was the hunger for stories about Nazis... Read more... |
Dennis Marks, 1948-2015Monday, 06 April 2015
Dennis Marks, who has passed away at the young age of 66, was in every way larger than life. A talented and prolific music and arts documentary filmmaker, an inspired head of music for BBC Television, and artistic director of the ENO, he latterly... Read more... |
