TV & Radio Reviews
Last Night's TV: Snowdon and Margaret: Inside A Royal Marriage, Channel 4
Jews, BBC4
A snappy portrait of a royal scoundrel
Inside TV & Radio Reviews
Last Night's TV: Extermination without inspiration
Monday, 30 June 2008
It would take a fair amount to make me watch Doctor Who these days, but the prospect of both Richard Dawkins and Paul O'Grady taking cameo roles in a script written by Russell T Davies did the trick. That must be interesting, I thought, curious as to exactly how he was going to deploy them. Could they possibly be in a scene together? Would they, in some way, interact with the Doctor himself, perhaps offering their respective expertise in evolutionary theory and cross-dressing comedy to help the save the world? It all seemed rather promising. So you'll understand that I felt a little gulled when they came and went during a bit of in-drama channel flicking, as some of the characters hunted for information about the day's big news story: the instantaneous removal of Earth from the solar system and its arrival in a planetary cluster of 26 alien worlds.
The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain, Radio 4
Sunday, 29 June 2008
The ukelele marches inexorably on. A year ago, Tom Hodgkinson, editor of the Idler, magazine proposed on Radio 3 that learning and playing the ukelele would soothe the passions to the point where even levels of world peace might be affected.
Primark: On the Rack, BBC1
Jews – The Next Generation, BBC4
British B-Movies: Truly Madly Cheaply, BBC4
Sunday, 29 June 2008
It was a good old-fashioned exposé. We might have hoped for a good, modern exposé, but nevertheless, Panorama, Primark: On the Rack was a powerful programme. It showed us sights we never wanted to see, curdling our pleasure in fast, cheap fashion. It even sparked a demonstration outside the Primark store on Oxford Street, the first time since I've been reviewing TV that a programme has caused a placard-waving turn-out that wasn't confused, hysterical and Big Brother-related.
Last Night's TV: Gok's Fashion Fix, Channel 4
Scrubs, E4
Grey's anatomy, Five
Heroes, BBC2
Friday, 27 June 2008
Naturally, I get a lot of enquiries from members of the public eager, having seen the above photo, for my style advice. To save you the trouble of asking, this season's big look is: lots of hair! Corduroy suits! And glasses! Just like last season, in fact, and several seasons before that. Because style never goes out of fashion. Still, for those who can't carry off the corduroy look, there's always programmes such as Gok's Fashion Fix, in which Gok Wan offers fashion advice to the nation. He is assisted in this by Alexa Chung, who, I am assured by my friendly neighbourhood teenagers, is cool to a world-historic degree – so cool, in fact, that in dating the lead singer of the Arctic Monkeys, she is actually slumming it a bit. But it's undoubtedly Gok who is the main attraction here, partly because of his encouraging manner – where Trinny and Susannah would offer a sharp intake of breath, he's more likely to give a joyous shriek of "Girlfriend!" – but more because he is one of those few blessed or cursed beings who swim through television as naturally as an otter through a stream, never seeming as if he is consciously performing. In this, he is the natural heir to, say, Davina McCall and Robert Robinson (whose ability to stand utterly unfazed in front of a camera is the subject of some grousing in his memoirs). To be fair, I can't imagine Mr Robinson ever congratulating Geri Halliwell on purchasing a pair of gold shorts from River Island for a mere nine quid with the words "Girlfriend, that's a Gok high-five", and not only because his name isn't Gok.
The Week In Radio: East meets a lacklustre West
Wednesday, 25 June 2008
One of the central themes of Jonathan Spence's Reith Lectures (Radio 4, Tuesday) has been the way that China and the West have circled round each other in the 20th century, each side regarding the other with a mixture of fascination and distrust. One thing he didn't talk about was the peculiar influence Maoism has had on the Western left. In Living Memory (Radio 4, Wednesday) exhumed the scandal surrounding The Little Red Schoolbook – since overshadowed by other scandals, but a fair-sized furore back in 1971.
Last Night's TV: Class act from a man of many parts
Wednesday, 25 June 2008
Some reviewers seemed to feel that Chris Lilley had been a little bit greedy in taking all three lead roles in Summer Heights High, a spoof documentary account of a term in an Australian high school, which is a bit like saying that Rory Bremner should stop hogging all the best characters in one of his shows. That's the point, surely: that one actor can turn his hand to an effete drama teacher, a surly Polynesian teenager and a head-flicking rich girl on an exchange from a private school. But even if the charge of artistic selfishness strikes you as a bit misplaced, it might alert you to one shared characteristic of all the people Lilley plays: their solipsistic insistence on always being the centre of attention.
Last Night's TV: Snog, Marry, Avoid?, BBC3; Upstairs Downstairs Love, Channel 4; Identical Triplets: Their Secret World, ITV1
Tuesday, 24 June 2008
As a child I was keenly aware that a great big slice of television was not intended for me. The news, for example, which my parents watched with rapt attention night after night even though the stories were always the same: war in Northern Ireland, war in Vietnam, war at British Leyland. That same feeling of disenfranchisement descended on me, for the first time since 1969, as I sat through Snog, Marry, Avoid?, billed as the world's first "make-under" show, in which Jenny Frost – a former pop star with Sugar Girls or Atomic Kitchen, I forget which – introduced a pair of young women "hiding under layers and layers of slap" and in urgent need of styling advice. No part of this primetime programme, I realised forlornly, was intended for the likes of me, although happily I have a 15-year-old daughter, so I was at least able to enjoy it vicariously. Eleanor loved it.
The Weekend's TV: British B Movies – Truly, Madly, Cheaply, Sat, BBC4
Doctor Who, Sat, BBC1
Monday, 23 June 2008
One of the great problems with television today is that it doesn't offer children enough opportunities to see rubbishy old films. Back when I was growing up, in the Seventies, television had very little to offer on a wet weekend afternoon beyond wrestling on ITV and the occasional film on BBC2. Not being one for the wrestling, I grew up with a thorough grounding in early British thrillers, the Westerns of Randolph Scott, and the comedies of the Boulting Brothers – the kind of knowledge you can't put a price on. But now, when the weather turns nasty and I'm too busy Facebooking to let them on the computer, my children are faced with reruns of Friends, and programmes actually intended for children. What is that going to teach them?
Tribal Wives, BBC2
Dickens' Secret Lover, Channel 4
Money Programme Special – Bill Gates: How a Geek Changed the World, BBC2
Sunday, 22 June 2008
After two minutes of Tribal Wives we know quite a lot about Sass. She's 34, from Oxford, a workaholic who gets an hour's rowing in before the office. But one thing she's not is a wife. Sass suspects there's something missing in her life, because every so often she has moments of panic when her stomach flips and she doesn't know why. E M Forster wrote about people like Sass. But these days it's not India or Florence our heroine visits for an epiphany but a remote island off Panama, for a six-week stay with the primitive Kuna tribe, with a camera crew in tow.
Paul Morley's Guide to Musical Genres, Radio 2
Sunday, 22 June 2008
One does not automatically connect Radio 2 with the avant-garde. But every so often it happens that a slot for it is made available, and the collision of the two makes for enormously uplifting radio. Such was the case with this week's Paul Morley's Guide to Musical Genres, which went out last Tuesday at 11.30pm, so as not to scare the infants.
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