Reviews
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 - 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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