tv
Sherwood, BBC One review - a traumatic journey through a painful pastTuesday, 14 June 2022
Renowned for an impressive body of work that includes This House, Quiz and Brexit: The Uncivil War, playwright and screenwriter James Graham has looked inwards and backwards for his new six-part series Sherwood. Read more... |
Borgen: Power and Glory, Netflix review - Birgitte Nyborg is back, more fascinating than everFriday, 10 June 2022
Has there ever been a smarter television series than DR’s Borgen? It’s regularly compared to The West Wing for its twisty interrogation of government shenanigans – and certainly it pays to get to grips with the coalition-driven political scene at the Castle, seat of the Danish government, just as it did with Aaron Sorkin’s take on the Hill. Read more... |
We Own This City, Sky Atlantic review - 'The Wire' creator David Simon is back on the Baltimore beatThursday, 09 June 2022
It has been 14 years since The Wire, David Simon’s labyrinthine epic about crime and policing in Baltimore, reached the end of the line. Yet it seems he couldn’t let it lie, because he’s back on the Baltimore beat with We Own This City (made by HBO, showing on Sky Atlantic). This time, the series is based on the eponymous non-fiction book by Baltimore Sun reporter Justin Fenton, with crime novelist George Pelecanos sharing the “Creator” credit with Simon. Read more... |
Ricky Gervais, SuperNature, Netflix review - a provocateur at workWednesday, 08 June 2022
Irony can be a trump card for a provocative comic such as Ricky Gervais, and he plays it right at the top of his SuperNature, an updated version of a show he started touring in 2019, which was rudely interrupted by the pandemic and is now his latest Netflix special. Read more... |
The Midwich Cuckoos, Sky Max review - the 1957 sci-fi classic is given a contemporary spinFriday, 03 June 2022
If your memory of the 1957 John Wyndham novel about an alien invasion of an English village by chilling children with blonde pageboy hair is still pin-sharp, probably best to back-burner it before you watch Sky’s new adaptation of The Midwich Cuckoos. Read more... |
Pistol, Disney+ review - Punk history repeats itself as farceTuesday, 31 May 2022
The fact that John Lydon has complained so long and so loudly about director Danny Boyle’s TV drama about the Sex Pistols has only served to pump up interest in the project. Read more... |
Prehistoric Planet, Apple TV+ review - David Attenborough presents life on earth, 66 million years agoThursday, 26 May 2022
With Jurassic World: Dominion due in June, which will mark the end of the “Jurassic” movie franchise, here’s Apple TV’s alternative, science-based history of dinosaurs and their world. It’s produced by Jon Favreau, a key player in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and narrated by David Attenborough in his trademark “Whispering Dave” style. Read more... |
Das Boot, Series 3, Sky Atlantic review - submarine warfare finds new horizonsWednesday, 25 May 2022
The challenge for the makers of Das Boot is to keep finding new ways to move the show forwards and outwards without losing touch with its foundations in World War Two submarine warfare. Read more... |
The Essex Serpent, Apple TV+ review - tradition and superstition versus the march of progressTuesday, 17 May 2022
Sarah Perry’s 2016 bestseller The Essex Serpent has been described as “a novel of ideas”, which almost sounds like a warning to anybody wanting to televise it. Happily, director Clio Barnard and screenwriter Anna Symon picked up the gauntlet, and have wrought a kind of contemplative television in which the story’s historical and philosophical preoccupations are expressed through landscape and imagery as much as dialogue and action. Read more... |
Ozark, Series 4 Part 2, Netflix review - crumbling consciences and a last standMonday, 16 May 2022
As the final slew of episodes in the last series of Ozark begins, Marty and Wendy Byrde, ever more the Macbeths of Osage Beach, are “in blood stepp’d in so far” that we don’t much care about their fate. Read more... |
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It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.
It followed some...
The Fifth Step, Soho Place review - wickedly funny two-hande...
The plays of David Ireland have a tendency to build to an explosion, after long stretches of caustic dialogue and very funny banter....
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Photographer Finetime and I have our first pints outside Dalton’s, a bar on...
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The appalling destruction of Pan Am’s flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1988 was put under the spotlight in January this year in Sky Atlantic’s ...
Ballet to Broadway: Wheeldon Works, Royal Ballet review - th...
Ballet is hardly a stranger to Broadway. Until the late 1950s every other musical had its fantasy ballet sequence – think Cyd Charisse in ...
Album: Robert Forster - Strawberries
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Music Reissues Weekly: Chapterhouse - White House Demos
Quoted in an early music press article on his band Chapterhouse, singer-guitarist Stephen Patman said their ambition was “to have our records on...