ITV
The Little House, ITV1Tuesday, 02 November 2010
I realise actors must be prepared to suffer for their art, but it was truly heroic of Francesca Annis to allow herself to be made up to resemble Cherie Blair after a bout of electro-convulsive therapy compounded by a facelift by Dr Mengele... Read more... |
Agatha Christie's Poirot: Hallowe'en Party, ITV1Thursday, 28 October 2010
David Suchet has been perfecting his impersonation of Hercule Poirot for more than 20 years, perhaps sympathising with Tina Turner’s maxim, “The longer I do it, the better it gets.” The way Suchet keeps finding new little tics and eccentricities to... Read more... |
TV Cops and KillersFriday, 08 October 2010
If you can’t play a cop or a mass murderer, steer clear of the acting profession. That would be the logical inference from the swarms of cops’n’killers series cramming the TV schedules. You’d think we’d have had enough, what with Luther, all the CSI... Read more... |
DCI Banks: Aftermath, ITV1Monday, 04 October 2010
”The domestic” over at 27, The Hill turns out to be decidedly undomestic. The murderer's basement lair so resembles the blood-splattered dens of every other serial killer that has ever graced the big and small screen (right down to the sickly green... Read more... |
Downton Abbey, ITV1Monday, 27 September 2010
With the BBC still in the middle of shooting their revival of Upstairs, Downstairs, ITV1 have nipped in ahead of them with Julian Fellowes's spiffing new sundown-on-the-aristocracy drama. In a battle of the stage dames, the Beeb has bagged Eileen... Read more... |
Joe Maddison's War, ITV1Sunday, 19 September 2010
Alan Plater wrote to the end. When he died earlier this year, he had completed a final screenplay which found him returning whence he came. Joe Maddison’s War was set in his native North-East, and portrayed the impact of wartime on ordinary... Read more... |
U Be Dead, ITV1Monday, 06 September 2010
The difficulty with fashioning real-life events as drama lies in the temptation to turn the central players into characters that an audience will naturally warm to. But real life isn’t like that. Bad things can happen to people you wouldn’t... Read more... |
Mountain Gorillas, BBC Two/ Horsepower with Martin Clunes, ITV1Sunday, 22 August 2010
People are lured to behave like animals for TV now - Big Brother, Celebrity Jungle, The X Factor - so it merely completes the idiotic equation to have animals insistently transfigured into little humans in wildlife TV. Or big, hairy humans in the... Read more... |
The Unforgettable Bob Monkhouse, ITV1Sunday, 08 August 2010
He wasn't a jack of all trades, said his friend June Whitfield, "he was a master of all trades". The charge of "smarminess" dogged Bob Monkhouse throughout his career, but as this quietly penetrating documentary made clear, he was highly intelligent... Read more... |
Who Wants to be a Millionaire? ITV1Wednesday, 04 August 2010
"Welcome to the new-look, high-risk, high-speed show,” said presenter Chris Tarrant at the top of the programme. Well, sort of new-look; the opening titles are new (although they still haven't managed to put the question mark in the logo), but the... Read more... |
Identity, ITV1Monday, 05 July 2010
Another new cop show? How marvellous! I feared the worst, hearing that this one was about a special unit set up by DSI Martha Lawson (Keeley Hawes) to combat the ever-growing threat of identity theft. It sounded rather po-faced and bureaucratic,... Read more... |
Alan Plater, thinking aloudSaturday, 26 June 2010
Alan Plater's final drama for television, Joe Maddison's War, is due to be screened on ITV this autumn. Fittingly, it gave the Jarrow-born Plater the opportunity to revisit his background in the north-east. The story is set on Tyneside during World... Read more... |
