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Television / Radio

A Brit doing well in the USA

James Corden – he of improvised comic skills in providing assistance to Comic Relief and ‘live’ presenting of the BBC Sports Review of the Year – is now apparently, after somewhat mixed early reviews – knocking the ball out of the park on his Late Late Show in the [...]

September 16, 2015 // 0 Comments

An Inspector Calls

I have a terrible confession to make: I have never seen a JB Priestley play nor read any of his books nor essays. Whilst reviewing a programme about Churchill’s electoral defeat of 1945, I spoke to Henry Elkins about him. He told me that he was the son of a headmaster from Bradford and [...]

September 16, 2015 // 0 Comments

ITV IN THE SEVENTIES

Sporting Rusters often advocate the seventies as the Golden Age of sports commentary so here I make the claim that it was equally a peerless epoch for tv serial dramas. I chanced upon The Professionals rather by fluke a few months ago. Now it’s a rare day when I do not watch one episode on [...]

September 9, 2015 // 0 Comments

Sue MacGregor and The Reunion

Following on from yesterday ‘s piece by Tom Hollingworth on the relative abilities of female presenters I would like to champion Sue MacGregor, in my opinion the best female broadcaster ever. She cut her teeth on the Today programme. She is so versatile that she presented the book programme A [...]

September 7, 2015 // 0 Comments

The Nick

The Nick is a fly on the wall documentary on Brighton police. The problem, like all fly on the walls, is the filmed never quite behave as naturally as they would otherwise. They are aware of – and in some cases perform to – the camera. I have heard it said that after a while they forget [...]

September 4, 2015 // 0 Comments

The Trials of Jimmy Rose

Superannuated actors are having a field day: Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay in 45 days, Bill Nighy in everything and anything and now Ray Winstone in The Trials of Jimmy Rose, ITV’s latest effort for the Sunday evening audience. It dealt in too many cliches, it was edgy but not [...]

August 31, 2015 // 0 Comments

It’s too late to stop now

If Life teaches us anything it is that everything around us – flesh or machine – has a built-in obsolescence, and therefore shelf-life, in terms of usefulness. Arguably, anything that does not move forwards is standing still … or indeed, potentially – depending upon the perspective you’ve [...]

August 27, 2015 // 0 Comments

Churchill: the artist

When I saw that a programme on BBC 4 about Winston Churchill the artist was to be presented by Andrew Marr, I sighed as I anticipated it would be as much about Marr as Churchill. I imagine as he is one of  BBC’s star turns it was he who insisted on making the programme which was called Marr [...]

August 19, 2015 // 0 Comments

And here’s a ‘V.A.T. on the house’ from me, Arfur …

Way back in the 1980s and early 1990s, though I never really bothered with it once Terry McCann (played by Dennis Waterman) had departed, because – well – Arfur without Terry wasn’t the same was it? – Thames Television’s series Minder was a staple of my recreational [...]

August 7, 2015 // 0 Comments

Life In Squares (review)

Yesterday I noticed that the second episode of Life In Squares, the BBC’s new three-part drama series on the lives and loves of the Bloomsbury Group, was nestling in the advance BBC2 schedule at 9.00pm and decided that I might as well give it a go. I should perhaps point out here that literary [...]

August 4, 2015 // 0 Comments

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