tv
The Newsroom, Sky AtlanticWednesday, 08 August 2012
American critics haven't been too kind to Aaron Sorkin's new HBO series about a cable TV news programme, for a variety of reasons. At least they had the advantage of understanding the intricate partisan infighting of American politics which forms the show's backdrop, and which will be baffling to many British viewers. Read more...
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Hairy Dieters: How to Love Food and Still Lose Weight, BBC OneFriday, 03 August 2012
What do you do after nine series celebrating the cooking and eating of food? You make another, charting the effort to lose some of the weight gained. This time out, the bike-riding Si King and David Myers are still eating and travelling, but trying to adjust what they put in their mouths, to make it less calorie-tastic. Some exercise was on the menu too. As was selling copies of the tie-in book. Read more... |
Vexed, Series 2, BBC TwoThursday, 02 August 2012
It’s not usually a good sign when the second series takes two years to materialise. Vexed , a comedy drama with corpses, took its first bow a couple of years ago. It offered Toby Stephens as DI Jack Armstrong, a detective from the old school who’s rather more mouth than trousers. There can’t have been much confidence in it back then: August is the cruellest month for fresh television content when the target audience is generally off on its hols. Read more... |
Sex Story: Fifty Shades of Grey, Channel 4Sunday, 29 July 2012
Having begun as a piece of fan fiction derived from the Twilight movie series, EL James's Fifty Shades of Grey has blown up into the publishing phenomenon du jour. It's supposedly the UK's fastest-selling book of all time, and has sold nearly 50 million copies worldwide. Read more... |
Barenboim on Beethoven: Nine Symphonies That Changed the World, BBC TwoSunday, 29 July 2012
If he isn't careful, Daniel Barenboim is going to find himself on a plinth in Trafalgar Square. He was feted at the Olympic opening ceremony as a great humanitarian, and his West-Eastern Divan Orchestra is being held up as a model for how music can bridge political and ethnic divides, with particular reference to the Middle East. Read more... |
The Opening Ceremony, BBC OneSaturday, 28 July 2012
Oh to have been a fly on the wall at the Palace. “Your Majesty, we’ve had a request from a Mr Boyle. It concerns the Opening Ceremony of the Olympic Games.” “I’m already opening the blessed thing, aren’t I? What else do they want?” “Ma’am, they just want you to be yourself.” Read more... |
The Churchills, Channel 4Friday, 27 July 2012
So, how are we all feeling about David Starkey? The historian’s reputation has taken a battering lately, since he was seen last year taunting overweight schoolchildren on Jamie’s Dream School and more recently causing Twitter to combust after criticising black culture on Newsnight. But if Channel 4 is to be believed, such displays of bullying and bigotry haven’t dented his authority as a historian. Read more... |
Bert and Dickie, BBC OneThursday, 26 July 2012
Nearly there. In one more day the phoney Games will be over and the real drama can begin. For the past weeks the television schedules have jostled with documentaries about past Olympians and current ones, while Chariots of Fire has been going for gold in both the theatre and the multiplex. There was just time last night for one final Olympic story to be smuggled under the wire. Read more... |
The History of Art in Three Colours, BBC FourThursday, 26 July 2012
It’s a patchy history, the history of art told through the colour gold, though I suppose it would be. After all, despite the title of this new three-part series, we’re not actually talking about gold as colour, that seductively warm, buttery yellow of Italianate landscapes and Turner sunsets, but of gold itself. Actual gold. The Impressionists never used it, but those ancient Egyptian tomb builders did, and so did medieval icon painters. Read more... |
Twenty Twelve: The Finale, BBC TwoWednesday, 25 July 2012
So that’s all over then. Which isn’t good. The gnawing anxiety for followers of Twenty Twelve, the programme whose theme song is “There may be trouble ahead...", has been whether real-life events would become so like it - or even worse, more like it than it could be - that the programme would become redundant. Read more... |
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