drama
Little Platoons, Bush TheatreMonday, 24 January 2011
The second play in this venue’s ambitious Schools mini-season is the first drama to tackle the currently contentious subject of Free Schools. While the earlier play, John Donnelly’s The Knowledge, was a powerful account of how a young teacher is... Read more... |
Hawaii Five-O comes to Sky1Thursday, 20 January 2011
Thirty years after the original series came to the end of its 12-year history, Hawaii Five-0 is about to burst back onto British TV. The new-look Five-0 kicked off in September last year on the American CBS network, and will debut on Sky1/Sky1 HD in... Read more... |
Hattie, BBC FourThursday, 20 January 2011
The way the BBC keeps knocking out these little biopics about the lives of various household names (John Lennon, Gracie Fields, Margot Fonteyn etc), you'd think there was nothing simpler than to get inside the mind of some complex public figure,... Read more... |
Tiger Country, Hampstead TheatreWednesday, 19 January 2011
Playwright Nina Raine has a gift for evocative play titles. Her 2006 debut was called Rabbit, and her sellout success at the Royal Court last year was Tribes. This time, we seem to be on safari with Tiger Country, but appearances can be deceptive.... Read more... |
Sky Atlantic seeks TV's higher groundFriday, 14 January 2011
Sky hasn't generally been synonymous with top TV drama, but its new channel, Sky Atlantic HD, is aiming to change that. Launching on 1 February, the channel has been built around Sky's deal with the American HBO network, which means viewers will get... Read more... |
The Boy James, Southwark PlayhouseFriday, 14 January 2011
We remember JM Barrie as the creator of Peter Pan, that quintessentially English fairy story which features Neverland, the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, and where “to die would be an awfully big adventure”. Generations have embraced this mythical tale... Read more... |
Kidnap and Ransom, ITV1Friday, 14 January 2011
Notwithstanding his regrettable central role in the recent remake of Bouquet of Barbed Wire, Trevor Eve is an actor who has improved vastly with age. Once cursed with a kind of shiny smugness, the 21st-century Eve is rougher round the edges and... Read more... |
No Ordinary Family, UKTV WatchWednesday, 12 January 2011
The idea of the suburban superhero isn't exactly a road not taken in the annals of TV history. We've had Heroes, Misfits, and even Ardal O'Hanlon as Thermoman in My Hero, not to mention generationally recurring stuff like Bewitched and The Bionic... Read more... |
The Good Wife, More4Friday, 07 January 2011
What better to brighten our morbid January nights than the return of this superior Chicago-based legal drama? The Good Wife has never attracted lurid publicity or been afflicted with cutting-edge trendiness, but instead relies on the somewhat... Read more... |
127 HoursTuesday, 04 January 2011
Made with the same furious energy which has characterised so much of Danny Boyle’s output, 127 Hours goes from the macro to the micro. It opens with a pounding split-screen assault of imagery depicting the frenetic, dehumanising nature of modern... Read more... |
Above Suspicion: Deadly Intent, ITV1Tuesday, 04 January 2011
What’s with the two titles? A crime drama so good that they had to name it twice? Or couldn’t anyone in production decide which one to ditch? Why not swap them around, or maybe call it "Prime Suspect", or "Prime Suspect: Deadly Intent", or... Read more... |
Toast, BBC OneThursday, 30 December 2010
All the time I was watching Toast last night, based on Nigel Slater’s memoir of his early years, I was wondering whether it was filmed for the benefit of the audience or of Slater himself. The final scene (no spoiler – we know how this story ends... Read more... |
