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Features

The Couch Surfer: 'Matt Damon's Green Zone is Bourne again, but this time in Baghdad'

Matt Damon has either the best taste in Hollywood, or the best agent.

Inside Features

Guilty? Hilton McRae plays a fictional Gary Glitter who maintains his innocence throughout the drama

A (fictional) trial of life and death for Gary Glitter

Monday, 9 November 2009

Capital punishment is back in Britain in a new TV drama. Rob Coldstream, its creator, explains the idea behind it

In classic portmanteau fashion, Collision follows the stories of the different individuals who are going to come together in the pile-up, including a millionaire property dealer (played by Paul McGann), a piano teacher with a guilty secret (David Bamber) and the great Phil Davis as a man taking his mother-in-law (Sylvia Sims) out for a spin.

Collision - Anatomy of an accident

Friday, 6 November 2009

Car crashes provide an endless source of intrigue for screen drama. As ITV's 'Collision' begins, Gerard Gilbert asks why pile-ups fascinate us

Tristram Hunt: 'We have a 30-year rule on public records and that's a good gap'

The Week In Radio: Keep taking a trip down memory lane

Thursday, 5 November 2009

There are times when the whole of BBC radio seems in the grip of one vast, unstoppable wave of reminiscence, like some garrulous granny of the airwaves whom no one likes to interrupt. Nostalgia is the order of the day. Here's just a small list of things people have been nostalgic about this week. The Berlin Wall. The M1 motorway. The BBC's Maida Vale studios. Victorian photography. Izal lavatory paper. Yes, lavatory paper! The nasty, hard, shiny kind. Incredibly there was an entire programme about this on Radio 4, Now Wash Your Hands, which examined how Izal was made, how it was good for writing on and playing with a comb. What it actually felt like on the skin. What feelings were aroused by its coal tar aroma. You can keep your madeleines, Marcel Proust. Here in Britain, we get misty-eyed over medicated loo roll.

The twins John and Edward have garnered much of the attention during this year's show

Should we switch off The X Factor?

Thursday, 5 November 2009

'Freak and geek show', says Pete Waterman. Highlight of her week, says Alice-Azania Jarvis. Who's right?

Terrorist bombs in London: A two-parter in 2005 about a terrorist bomb in a train station was filmed just before 7/7 happened. When the episodes were transmitted in September, one newspaper reported that, "the similarities were sufficient to cause BBC1 controller Peter Fincham to agonise over whether to drop the episodes."

Spooks: A drama that sees the future

Tuesday, 3 November 2009

The uncanny premonitions of its writers remain the key to the success of the BBC's MI5 series Spooks, says James Rampton

The Agitator: 'I have deceived my friends, and I had millions of them'

Monday, 2 November 2009

The 2nd of November, like each of its 364 essential cousins of calendar, is almost inevitably twinned with an historic anniversary snoozing somewhere in the catacombs of history

The Couch Surfer: 'If political parties insist on invading pop culture, they won't re-engage anybody'

Monday, 2 November 2009

Tim Walker: ‘If we elect the Tories, it won’t be because we’re impressed by Eric Pickles on Spotify’

When TV drama focuses on higher education, the results are excellent. Why, then, has it so often ignored academia?

How TV drama became university challenged

Friday, 30 October 2009

When TV drama focuses on higher education, the results are excellent. Why, then, has it so often ignored academia? Gerard Gilbert reports

Inside job: Larry David, left, Jerry Seinfeld, Michael Richards, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Jason Alexander pose on the re-created 'Seinfeld' set in latest series of 'Curb Your Enthusiasm'

Small world: How television ate itself

Thursday, 29 October 2009

Entourage, 30 Rock, Extras...TV shows about the TV industry are bigger than ever, and tonight's episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm takes the conceit a step further. So what's behind this trend for self-examination? Tim Walker switches on to 'meta-television'

Written by playwright Alan Bleasdale as a sequel to the television play "The Black Stuff", the series Boys from the Blackstuff followed five unemployed tarmac layers in Liverpool, with each of its five episodes focusing on one of the group. Hailed as television's best dramatic response to the Thatcher era, it was seen as a nostalgic farewell to a particular male working-class British culture

Can TV be radical again?

Wednesday, 28 October 2009

As a BFI season examines the golden era of political television, Gerard Gilbert meets some of the talents who made it, and asks where the cutting edge is today

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