Tv

Here is a Japanese fairy tale for Christmas. An allegory of insight, opportunism and a fall from favour. It is 1945. Japan is devastated and disgraced, but two bright young men, Akio Morita and Masaru Ibuka, the first a salesman, the second an engineer, have a plan to turn toxic ashes into precious metal. They have discovered a curious typewritten document published by the Civil Information and Education division of the US Occupation Forces. It is called ‘999 Uses for a Tape-Recorder’. In those days, people needed to be told these things. Inspired, they form a company called TTK and Ibuka writes in its Purposes of Incorporation that it will

The best bit in I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! (ITV) will be when the prisoners finally revolt and turn on their evil captors, Ant and Dec. The sparky Geordie comedy duo will be imprisoned in a semi-submerged, rat-infested cage like the one in The Deer Hunter, fed on a diet of liquidised kangaroo bottom and wombat testicle, and released only to participate in a series of amusing challenges, such as a recreation of the Lemmiwinks episode from South Park, involving two giant funnels, a bunch of inserted eucalyptus leaves and a pair of ravening koalas. Though it hasn’t happened yet I’m going to keep watching every night,

Not that long ago the BBC trumpeted a new Stakhanovite project to big up the arts in its many and various hues. And praise be, this it is jolly well doing with all sorts of dad rock docs, homages to painters and poets, while Sralan Yentob (as he surely ought at the very least to be, and soon) continues to knock frock-coated on doors like a highly remunerated person from Porlock. Before multichannels and multi-platforms, great arts coverage was (if memory serves) done without much song and dance. Lest we forget, Yentob was once a progenitor of Arena. Long the haven of burgeoning filmmakers such as Mary Harron, James Marsh

Girl is back for half-term so I’ve been able to watch nothing but crap on TV this week. Some of you will say, ‘Oh come on! You pay the bills, so you get to control the remote.’ But that’s not how things work when you’ve got a teenage girl at home. Especially not one whose ankle you have been responsible for breaking. So crap, I’m afraid, is what I’m going to have to review. Not, it must be said, that the crap has all been crap. House of DVF (E! Online), for example. I’ve mentioned it before and the reason I’m mentioning it again is the matchless insights it offers

The opening caption for The Last Kingdom (BBC2, Thursday) read ‘Kingdom of Northumbria, North of England, 866 AD’. In fact, though, an equally accurate piece of scene-setting might have been ‘Britain, Saturday teatime, the 1970s’. The series, based on the novels by Bernard Cornwell, has been described in advance as the BBC’s answer to Game of Thrones — and, as various thesps in furs and long beards began to attack each other with swords, it wasn’t hard to see why. Yet, apart perhaps from the level of the violence, the programme’s real roots seem to belong to less sophisticated (and less expensive) shows than that: the kind set firmly in

Television used to employ entertainers to entertain the public. Back then you could count the channels on the fingers of one hand and still have a thumb left over to stick aloft in praise of the nightly parade of talent. That was decades ago, before every housing estate in the land pointed supplicatory dishes at the cosmos, which beamed back numberless multi-channels devoted to cooking and/or shopping, golfing and/or shagging. It’s all changed. Now television employs the public to entertain the public. It’s cheaper. So we have talent shows, reality shows, aspirational have-a-go shows from which contestants are expelled one at a time. It is always gripping to find out

Close to the Edge (BBC4, Tuesday) feels very much like an idea conceived during a particularly good night in the BBC bar. Why not take the ‘scripted reality’ methods of such youth hits as The Only Way Is Essex and apply them to a group of over-65s living in Bournemouth? So it is that the chosen oldies are given one main characteristic each, and required to act out events from their own lives — events that might or might not have happened if the cameras weren’t there. Or as Tuesday’s opening caption rather optimistically put it, ‘Some of the scenes have been constructed purely for your enjoyment.’ Which scenes these

For years, Ian Fleming was famously self-deprecating about the James Bond books. (‘I have a rule of not looking back,’ he once said. ‘Otherwise I’d wonder, “How could I write such piffle?”’) Towards the end of his life, though, he finally produced an essay in their defence — proudly pointing out, among other things, that however fantastical the plots may become, they’re always carefully rooted in a world recognisable as our own. Of course, this is not something that can necessarily be said of all the Bond films — but it certainly applies to ITV’s new three-part thriller Midwinter of the Spirit (Wednesday), based on the novel by Phil Rickman.

What a load of manipulative, hysterical tosh is An Inspector Calls. It wasn’t a work with which I was familiar till I saw the latest TV adaptation. Now, of course, I see exactly why the luvvies — see, for example, Stephen Daldry’s highly acclaimed early 1990s National Theatre revival — adore it so. It confirms everything they think they know about the world: rich people bad, heartless, oppressive; poor people the long-suffering and saintly salt of the earth. In case you’ve not had the pleasure, J.B. Priestley’s play is like a socialist game of Cluedo: a lovely innocent young working-class woman has died and the toffs all dunnit. Self-made millionaire

It’s hard to know whether the actor James Norton was being naive or disingenuous when he claimed in publicity interviews for BBC1’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover that ‘We are no longer shocked that people have sex.’ Either way, the tabloids soon proved him wrong. Days before the programme went out, the Sun had duly worked itself up into a state of delighted outrage about a TV drama that was apparently ‘so steamy it borders on porn’. In the event, this proved an exaggeration wild enough to suggest that none of the journalists involved had seen the programme —or, less likely, any porn. Sunday’s adaptation, written and directed by Jed Mercurio, was

Finally I realise why women are so pissed off. It all goes back to the first codified laws — circa 2,400 bc — when rules like this were invented by men: ‘If a woman speaks out of turn then her teeth will be smashed by a brick.’ Before that, apparently, women lived on a pretty equal footing with their future male oppressors. Indeed, in arguably the first civilisation — a hive-like collection of houses in central Anatolia called Çatalhöyük dating back to 7,500 bc, when mankind was just beginning to emerge from the Stone Age and living with semi-domesticated animals — not a single man was expected to put out