drama
Mistresses, BBC OneFriday, 06 August 2010
We know we’re in cut-price Sex and the City territory when it’s not iPhones that are getting top product placement billing but Clearblue pregnancy tests. A box was held aloft between the trembling fingers of Jess as the camera slowly caressed its... Read more... |
Film: Beautiful KateFriday, 30 July 2010
Finding a cheerful Australian film these days is quite a challenge. Having discovered the particular affinity between Australia’s parched and expansive landscape and the genres of horror and misery memoir, the nation’s filmmakers have set about... Read more... |
Californication, FiverThursday, 29 July 2010
This award-winning series, created by Tom Kapinos in 2007, is groundbreaking television even by Showtime’s daring standards. Californication is a dark - very dark - comedy drama about Hank Moody (David Duchovny), a bad-boy writer who has lost his... Read more... |
Dive, BBC TwoFriday, 09 July 2010
Dominic Savage’s new two-part film, part of BBC Two’s renewed commitment to intelligent and challenging drama (we shall see; fewer biopics please), comes billed as a look at modern teenage life, although it seemed more drawn to long silences - or... Read more... |
Justin Fashanu in Extra TimeTuesday, 06 July 2010
Ten years after Justin Fashanu - not only the first openly gay footballer, but the first black player to command a £1 million transfer fee - committed suicide in a lock-up garage in the East End, his former agent, Eric Hall, breezily... Read more... |
Reunited, BBC OneWednesday, 30 June 2010
It occurred to me halfway through Reunited that you could map the characters of This Life – the epochal house-share drama of the Nineties – on to those featured in Mike Bullen’s one-hour pilot feature and see little change in the terrain. All the... Read more... |
Alan Plater, 1935-2010Saturday, 26 June 2010
They don't make television writers like Alan Plater any more. He entered the profession when there was still an audience that could be relied upon to sit down in their millions and watch challenging drama from strands such as Armchair Theatre and... Read more... |
Brooklyn's FinestTuesday, 08 June 2010
For the past decade or so, New York City has been bragging about its crime figures. Homicides are through the floor, whole fleets of firepower-toting cops are out there hassling hustlers, and the mean streets have been swept pretty much clean. I don... Read more... |
The Late Middle Classes, Donmar WarehouseWednesday, 02 June 2010
The late Simon Gray, who died in 2008, lived a ragged, bruised and battering life. I usually think of him as the John Prescott of playwrights, except that he was miles more articulate, and eventually rewarded by a CBE rather than a peerage. Anyway,... Read more... |
The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister, BBC TwoTuesday, 01 June 2010
The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister joins an ever-lengthening list of dramas detailing the joys, the struggles of lady-on-lady love. It’s never quite clear who these entertainments are for. Blokes, as we know, have a response to this stuff that... Read more... |
Ingredient X, Royal Court TheatreWednesday, 26 May 2010
Nick Grosso is a good example of the “now you see him, now you don’t” playwright. In the mid-1990s, he was feted as a lads’ writer for his funny plays about masculinity, such as Peaches, Sweetheart and Real Classy Affair. Then he dropped out of view... Read more... |
Money, BBC TwoWednesday, 26 May 2010
It was never going to work now, was it? Martin Amis’s dense yet surging 400-page novel condensed down to just two hours of primetime TV? But director Jeremy Lovering, along with writers Tom Butterworth and Chris Hurford (Ashes to Ashes) certainly... Read more... |
