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Television / Radio

The demise of ITV and the rise of Talking Pictures

ITV has dropped out of the FTSE 500 which reflects a broadcasting company in trouble if not in crisis. Covid has ravaged advertising revenue and new productions. Britbox has not taken hold. It’s sad as ITV in its time though its local franchises like Thames produced much popular successful [...]

September 3, 2020 // 0 Comments

The Modern Garden: from Monet to Matisse

SKY ARTS continued their excellent series on exhibitions last night with this one at the Royal Academy. Gardens, like pictures of them, are intensely visual. So they work well in translation to television. The programme highlighted Monet and his garden at Giverny. A few years ago in Paris I made [...]

August 25, 2020 // 0 Comments

Bayern 1 PSG 0

You can pretty much know in advance that when the pundits talk in advance of a goal fest in a Champions League final it will be a cagey affaire. And so it proved. Only one goal divided the teams. In a game of few opportunities Bayern’s keeper Manuel Neuer – mainly with his right leg – [...]

August 24, 2020 // 0 Comments

Mervyn LeRoy, Sean Connery and Nazi Titanic

Over the weekend I caught up with The Directors series on Mervyn Le Roy, watched a tribute to Sean Connery on his 85th birthday and a documentary on a Goebbels-backed film on the Titanic. I suspect  that Mervyn LeRoy is a name with which you are unfamiliar. He made Little Caesar and Fugitive from [...]

August 23, 2020 // 0 Comments

Sevilla 3 Inter Milan 2

It was just as well for BT Sport that this match was a thriller as their pre-match coverage of it was dire. I had hoped, switching on at 7pm, that the issues of the game might be covered. There was an interesting Premiership element as Antonio Conte had managed Chelsea and now Inter with Lukaku, [...]

August 22, 2020 // 0 Comments

Weekend media coverage of sport

Michael Henderson, in The Times yesterday, thundered against the new look TMS. He observed that it tries too hard to be funny. He rued the absence of Christopher Martin Jenkins, I agree with Henderson the ultimate flag bearer of traditional cricket, to a certain extent. Brian Johnston laid down the [...]

August 16, 2020 // 0 Comments

Edvard Munch

Sky Arts have been running a weekly series on exhibitions by great artists and last Monday it featured the Norwegian colossus Edvard Munch. Tim Marlow interviews curators of the museum and there’s a visual treat of the pictures to view. Previous painters have been Heironymus Bosch, Edourd Manet [...]

August 12, 2020 // 0 Comments

The Riviera/A History in Pictures (Part Two)

Whilst I enjoyed the second part of this programme broadcast yesterday it was with certain  reservations. The main problem was that, by being a travel history of the Riviera from the end of the nineteenth century to the present day and a review of the artists that painted there, the scope was too [...]

July 31, 2020 // 0 Comments

The Plot Against America

I promise you this is the last review you will have to read of HBO’s Plot Against America but the editor asked me to put it in a historical context. I have to start with the observation that this was not a documentary but a drama based on the fiction of Philip Roth. This said, a number of [...]

July 30, 2020 // 0 Comments

Book review: Utopia Avenue (Part 2)

This is the second part (of two) of my review of Utopia Avenue, the latest novel by David Mitchell just released in the UK. To build upon the themes I touched upon in Part One, I must register that normally I avoid fiction like the plague and hitherto had neither been aware of Mitchell’s [...]

July 29, 2020 // 0 Comments

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