Reviews

Acceptable face of capitalism: in 'Gerry's Big Decision', the entrepreneur helps ailing businesses.

Last Night's Television:
Gerry's big decision, Channel 4
My Best Friend's Murder, BBC3

Here's to you, Mr Robinson

Inside Reviews

Last Night's TV: Getting On, Taking the Flak

Thursday, 9 July 2009

Right in the sick of it

Last Night's TV - Imagine..., True Stories: Maximum Prison

Wednesday, 8 July 2009

More than a prima donna

Last Night's TV - Torchwood: Children of Earth, Apollo Wives, My Breasts Could Kill Me

Tuesday, 7 July 2009

On another planet

The Weekend's Television

Monday, 6 July 2009

Total Wipeout, Sat, BBC1, Born Survivor: Bear Grylls, Sat, Channel 4, Timewatch – The Prince and the Plotter, Sat, BBC2

The sketch show: Can television teach you to draw like an expert?

Monday, 6 July 2009

As a week of life drawing classes begin today on Channel 4, one-time art student Gerard Gilbert picks up a pencil to see if television can really teach him to draw like an expert

Robin Scott-Elliot: Harmon all talk as French Tour hopes turn to Ashes

Monday, 6 July 2009

View From The Sofa: The Ashes / Tour de France, Sky, Eurosport

Imagine: David Hockney, BBC1
The Conspiracy Files: 7/7, BBC2

Sunday, 5 July 2009

After decades in LA David Hockney returns to his roots and goes on a northern landscape-painting frenzy

Beyond Belief, Radio 4
Night Waves, Radio 3

Sunday, 5 July 2009

Myths great and small were discussed by deists and rock refuseniks

Last Night's TV: Can I Get High Legally?, The Best Job in The World, Psychoville

Friday, 3 July 2009

He's the king of the stoned age

Last Night's Television: Life, ITV3
Nasa: Triumph and Tragedy, BBC2

Thursday, 2 July 2009

Life has a slightly sour twist to its title these days, now that Damien Lewis's oddball cop show has been cancelled in the States and is living on borrowed time. It isn't really the moment to get too attached to it, unless you're thinking of mounting a last-minute write-in campaign for a reprieve, but then I doubt that last night's episode would have persuaded a first-time viewer to reach for the Basildon Bond. The quirks of character that Charlie Crews started out with – a zen fatalism induced by a long stretch in prison for a crime he didn't commit, the Asperger's independence of his thought processes – have now stagnated into something just a little too perky and self-satisfied. I have a feeling, too, that there's something about the set of Lewis's mouth that disqualifies him from uncomplicated screen stardom – a tightness that isn't quite compatible with the quirkiness this series strives for. He can do furious and repressed like a trooper, but light-hearted and quippy is a bit of a stretch for him. The script itself does have moments though, such as a scene in last night's show in which Charlie's financial adviser started teaching at a California business school and found that every word he addressed to his class was followed by a hailstorm of key-clattering on their massed laptops. He paused, startled by the effect, and the hailstorm eased off, only to resume just as vigorously a couple of beats after he's started talking again. I quite liked Charlie's boss Tidwall too, whose role is not to bellow at his underlings about their breaches of police procedure (the canonical role of a police superior in an American cop show), but to make them wrinkle their noses at his sleazy cynicism at least four times in every episode. "Hold him on the charge of freaking me out," he said lazily, when Charlie is struggling to find just cause for holding a mouth-breathing murder suspect. Perhaps if he'd been the star and Charlie had been the sidekick they'd be getting ready for series four right now.

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