The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Is it just me or are almost all TV documentaries completely unwatchable these days? I remember when I first started this job I’d review one almost every fortnight. Always there’d be something worth watching: on the horrors of the Pacific or the Eastern Front, say; or castles; or Churchill; or medieval sword techniques. But now
Viewers who like their TV journalism hard-hitting should probably avoid Hotel India, a new BBC2 series about the Taj Mahal Palace in Mumbai. The tone of Wednesday’s episode was set immediately when the narrator introduced us to ‘one of the oldest and grandest hotels in the world’, where ‘no detail is too small or demand
Where is Jessica Hyde? If those words mean nothing to you then I have some excellent news. If not, then you’ll already be aware that I have failed you totally. And not for the first time, either. I was about a series (sorry, ‘season’) late to Game of Thrones; not much quicker into Breaking Bad;
War can reshape the medium of television. The First Gulf War was a landmark moment in broadcasting: CNN had reporters in Baghdad when the first bombs fell, no one else did, America was riveted and the concept of 24-hour news (accompanied by thousands of graphics) suddenly took off. And now, just as a third conflict
Gomorrah (Sky Atlantic, Monday), the new, must-see Mafioso series, started promisingly. We met two hoods — one young, shaven-headed, good-looking; one weary, brow-beaten, middle-aged — filling up at a petrol station in Naples, an unfamiliar (to me anyway) setting that looks promisingly like a cross between Vegas and downtown Gaza. Clearly they were up to
Channel 4’s Kids and Guns (Thursday) began with an American TV advert in which a young boy’s eyes shone with gratitude when his parents gave him a large gun, proudly marketed as ‘My First Rifle’. And just in case that seemed a bit macho, the ad also pointed out that My First Rifle is available
If there’s one thing everyone knows about BBC comedy it’s that it’s going downhill. According to Danny Cohen, now Director of BBC Television, it’s too white and middle class; according to producer John ‘Blackadder’ Lloyd, it’s run by idiots like the bureaucrats in the BBC satire W1A who don’t understand what comedy is; according to
A few weeks ago, my eight-year-old son, who’s taken up the guitar, announced that he’d learned something new. He then played a sequence of chords — approximately, Duh-duh-duuh, Duh-duh-da-duuh — that I’ve been hearing from all guitarists since I was about eight myself. ‘It’s called “Smoke on the Water”,’ he informed me, unnecessarily. Of course,
‘Fingers on buzzers!’ says Jeremy Paxman on University Challenge. But technically this is inaccurate. Only one of the teams actually has buzzers. The other side has push-button bells, instead. I’ve been watching the programme religiously for God knows how many years without ever consciously noticing this. But, once you’ve been told, it’s obvious — in
BBC2’s The Honourable Woman (Thursday) began with a rather portentous voice-over bringing us the unsurprising news that ‘We all have secrets. We all tell lies just to keep them from each other and …pause to indicate psychological profundity …from ourselves.’ Luckily for the viewer, this was accompanied by the sight of man in a restaurant
Did you know that the 8th-century Kingdom of Northumbria was the epicentre of an international exotic reptile trade? I only discovered this myself from watching episode six of Vikings (History Channel, Tuesday) and being introduced to the snake-pit maintained by King Aelle. What particularly impressed me were not just the variety of pythons and boas
BBC4’s The Girl Who Talked to Dolphins (Tuesday) began with the overstated-sounding claim that it would be tackling ‘perhaps the most remarkable period in the history of animal science’. In fact, though, the longer the programme went on, the more convincing this claim felt — even if the word ‘period’ should possibly have been replaced
You know what the world needs most right now? What it needs is five good-looking-ish, talented-ish blokes dressed in a mélange of artfully deconstructed dove-grey suits singing one of the songs out of Les Misérables, like a boy band but one that does numbers from musicals rather than original compositions, oh, and preferably with the
The work of John Banville — Booker-winning novelist and impeccably high-minded literary critic — might seem an unlikely source for a primetime crime series. But since 2006, under the telling pseudonym of Benjamin Black, he’s also published a series of Celtic-noir novels set in 1950s Dublin about a pathologist-sleuth known, even to his intimates, only
Admit it. Say it! ‘My name is Blah and I am a boxaholic.’ Life on hold, marriage in bits, job swinging from a rusty nail, the box-set fanatic grabs every available minute to feed an addiction. I mean, you can’t leave, can’t breathe until you find out whether Jesse and Walter make it up before
On Harry and Paul’s Story of the Twos (BBC 2, Sunday), there was a particularly cruel sketch in which Paul Whitehouse gave Harry Enfield a Paxman-style grilling as to whether he felt bitter that his comedy series had never won a Bafta award whereas its big rival The Fast Show (featuring, inter alia, one Paul
According to its executive producer Griff Rhys Jones, A Poet in New York (BBC2, Sunday) sought to rescue Dylan Thomas from the ‘forces of sanctity and hagiography that now hover over his shade’. Instead, we’d be reminded that he was ‘a hollering bohemian roustabout’ — which is presumably Griff’s longhand for ‘a drunk’. By that
Which character are you in Game of Thrones? For me it’s got to be the imp, Tyrion Lannister. As Ed West suggested in his erudite Speccie article a few weeks ago, Tyrion is about the only character with a vaguely sympathetic 21st-century mindset as opposed to a ruthlessly pragmatic medieval one. Persecuted since childhood because
Whatever worries Kiefer Sutherland may have had about reprising the role of Jack Bauer in 24: Live Another Day (Sky1, Wednesday), learning his lines for episode one won’t have been one of them. After a four-year break, the show returned with its trusty digital clock standing at 11.00 a.m. — and, as ever, the events
I was so looking forward to Generation War (BBC2, Saturday) — a three-part drama series covering the second world war from the perspective of five young men and women on the German side. Any nation capable of producing the ME-109, the 88mm gun and the Tiger tank, not to mention Das Boot, really ought to
Television executives must be longing to make a programme about estate agents that casts the agents in a good light. There would be a national outrage, and in these Twittering, Facebooking times nothing is more appealing to a producer than a bulging digital postbag. Under Offer: Estate Agents on the Job (BBC2, Wednesday) is, sad
God bless the BBC. And I’m not being entirely sarcastic here. There are some things the BBC does very well and one of them, sadly, was The Review Show, its monthly critical round-up of theatre, film, books and new art exhibitions, that it has now, in its wisdom, decided to scrap. Presumably, the decision was
Sunday nights. What are they for? Eggs. Tea. Toast. Nerves about the week ahead. Something comforting on TV. But comfort comes in many forms. For some, it’s twee life at Downton Abbey. For others, it’s the thrill of Homeland. With the BBC’s latest Sunday-night offering, comfort takes on a new guise: one that includes gas
For me, by far the most surprising revelation in Martin Durkin’s documentary Nigel Farage: Who Are You? (Channel 4, Monday) was just how astonishingly vast, unwieldy, authoritarian, interfering, undemocratic, sclerotic, and sinister the European Union actually is. As a Eurosceptic, I suppose I ought to have known this already. But the secret of the European
A young pretender raises an army to take the throne. Having recently learnt of his father’s beheading, the adolescent — dashing and charismatic and descended from the old kings of the north — vows to avenge him. Despite his youth, he has already won in the field and commands the loyalty of many of the
One of the stranger things about Eton is its near-total lack of class snobbery. Yes, all right, you still get the occasional away match where their supporters will chant at the opposition ‘You’ll be working for our Dads’ but that’s just badinage, not animus. I doubt it was always thus. Probably there was a time
So BBC3 will be online-only from next autumn. If the Beeb had presented this news as the channel being the first one to take the daring step of migrating to the internet, instead of it being booted out to save the likes of BBC4, perhaps BBC3 fans would be feeling less aggrieved. After all, as
I’ve got this brilliant idea for a major new cop series. It’s called Chalk and Cheese and, though you won’t have guessed this from the title, it’s about these detective partners who couldn’t be more different. Why, they’re like two incredibly dissimilar things, one, maybe an edible, milk-based product, the other some manner of mineral
What if Bonnie Prince Charlie, as he swept down from Scotland towards London to lay claim to the throne, hadn’t lost his nerve at Derbyshire but had instead pressed on — and won? What would Britain be like today? In the year that the Scots vote on whether to stay in the UK, the art
