TV - The Arts Desk - Arts Reviews, Features and News

Bouquet of Barbed Wire, ITV1

Tuesday, 07 September 2010 09:23

Trevor Eve's Peter Manson lusts after teenaged daughter Prue (Imogen Poots)

Apart from a few nips and tucks, age has not withered Bouquet of Barbed Wire. Anyone who can remember the original steamy adaptation of Andrea Newman’s fine novel will recognise the changes. Prue, no longer the manipulative cow who graced our screens back in 1976, has been made-over as an unworldly innocent, while husband Gavin – still a deeply unpleasant wife-beater - is now a chippy, working-class Yorkshireman rather than a chippy American. And Peter, the daughter-obsessed patriarch, appears to be an altogether more anguished soul - though one suspects this has more to do with Trevor Eve’s ability to play complex, nuanced characters far better than the stiff, granite-faced Frank Finley.

U Be Dead, ITV1

Monday, 06 September 2010 08:45

Tara Fitzgerald and David Morrissey play victims of a deranged stalker in a story based on real events

The difficulty with fashioning real-life events as drama lies in the temptation to turn the central players into characters that an audience will naturally warm to. But real life isn’t like that. Bad things can happen to people you wouldn’t necessarily feel much warmth towards, or sympathy for. But a drama, especially a prime-time television thriller, requires us to root for the protagonist. It’s not enough to simply know that a just outcome has been achieved. We have to be on emotional tenterhooks, even if we know the outcome in advance.

The Case for God?, BBC One

Tuesday, 07 September 2010 00:00

Lisa Jardine attempts to convert Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks to a secular world view

Sometimes you get the impression the Beeb wishes religion would quietly go away. You see it in the gradual transformation of the Sunday morning slot from the lightweight Heaven and Earth Show to Nicky Campbell’s lighter-weight Big Questions and now the heroically worldly Sunday Morning Live. General Synod noticed it earlier this year when complaints were made about the lack of religious programming. And the secular society noticed it when they rushed to the Beeb’s defence commending its secular and rationalist output. From last night it seems that the secular agenda is even at work in the Chief Rabbi’s annual Jewish New Year address.

Who Do You Think You Were? Channel 4

Saturday, 04 September 2010 01:59

Fireman Neil Clarke gets the hands-on treatment from past-life regression hypnotist Trevor Roberts

“Do you realise what you’re letting yourself in for?” is surely the worst thing to say to someone in order to put them at their ease, especially when they are about to step into the subconscious unknown. But down-to-earth fireman Neil Clarke took these words from hypnotist Trevor Roberts in his stride. His main concern - if it turned out he had lived a previous life - was that he was “a nice bloke and not some sort of murderer”. But no, this wasn’t a Mitchell and Webb sketch.

Waterloo Road, BBC One

Thursday, 02 September 2010 06:31

'Waterloo Road': New head (Amanda Burton) doesn't know her deputy (William Ash) has already become acquainted with her teenage daughter

New viewers begin here: even if you know nothing of the previous five series of Waterloo Road, you could start to enjoy the drama set in a failing comprehensive in Greater Manchester with the opener to series six, as the writers have rather winningly taken the precaution of barely mentioning anything that went on in previous years - not even the teen suicide pact that ended series five. And, as with many a failing school, some of last term’s teachers have departed (also unmentioned), including those played by Denise Welch and Angela Griffin, but back comes former Waterloo Road pupil Janeece (Chelsee Healey), now up the duff and, defying our belief, she's the new school secretary.

The Tony Blair Interview with Andrew Marr, BBC Two: The Twitter Review

Wednesday, 01 September 2010 21:18

JasperRees Not long now till Tony Blair faces interrogation by A Marr. GraemeAThomson and I tweeting a live review

GraemeAThomson Nice to see they’ve scheduled it straight after Restoration Roadshow. Someone at the Beeb with a GSOH?

GraemeAThomson Marr's gone with the orange tie. Provocative

JasperRees Are you prepared to speculate about the timing of the Hague twin-bed allegations? Who wins? Who loses?

The Tony Blair Interview with Andrew Marr, BBC Two: The Overnight Review

Thursday, 02 September 2010 02:30

'Gordon Brown's people were perpetually dissing me,' says Blair, as he reveals more of thorny relationship

Tony Blair’s style of leadership was often mocked for being “presidential”, but last night it was Andrew Marr, in sober suit/ shocking orange tie combo, who gave off something of that self-assured “presidential” air. Standing outside No 10, Marr addressed the people in his smoothly measured, gently emphatic way. He is, of course, an interviewer we feel we can trust (not to be flim-flammed or bamboozled), but, really, we already knew that this was hardly going to be the political TV interview of the decade – just, more or less, a reaffirmation of everything Tony Blair always knew and believed in. And then, as the music started, we got a montage of Blair heads, a brief then and now encounter, which once again had us exclaiming “God, he’s aged.” Could it get any more exciting than this?

The King is Dead, BBC Three

Friday, 03 September 2010 07:26

Katy Wix, Simon Bird and Nick Mohammed can't manage a smile either

It's not that I feel like a middle-aged fuddy duddy exactly - although I was even almost too old for The Word and I'm clearly not the target audience for BBC Three. But if I were still in the 16-34 age group - even at its most juvenile end - frankly I’d be insulted by a show like The King is Dead. Is it a valid criticism of a BBC Three show to call it puerile? Perhaps not, but unfunny is unfunny.

I Am Slave, Channel 4

Tuesday, 31 August 2010 09:00

Incarcerated in London: Wunmi Mosaku in 'I Am Slave'

Television seeks out the stories thrown up by real life. On the one hand there is the obsessive interest in the private lives of the great and good (and not so good) from Margot Fonteyn to Tony Blair. Other dramatists eagerly accept the responsibility to hold a mirror up to society in all its ills from the Ipswich murders to the travails of 19th-century lesbians. But the task that all writers have to face, whoever’s story is being told, is to make the narrative dramatic. A tale of contemporary slavery ought not to struggle there.

In Their Own Words: British Novelists, BBC Four

Tuesday, 31 August 2010 00:55

Seventies' Salman Rushdie: 'Grappling with history, race and how and why to tell stories.'

“The empire writes back” was Salman Rushdie’s pithy summation of the process that changed British literature during the late Seventies and early Eighties, a shift epitomised by his novel Midnight’s Children winning the 1981 Booker prize. It wasn’t just the empire. Everyone else who had been, in one sense or another, colonised (women; the working classes; those once termed "adolescents") by literary fiction began articulating their experiences in a manner that often ran counter to past orthodoxies.