I have been watching the latest series of Better Call Saul, the best thing on TV just now, despite some considerable competition. The series is a prequel to Breaking Bad, the 2008-2013 series about a high-school chemistry teacher, Walter White, who takes to a life of crime by manufacturing methamphetamine. The crooked lawyer Saul GoodmanRead More
Next up in these reviews of 2016 is television. Television as receivable in the UK is going through a purple patch, thanks largely to the box set phenomenon. There is as much trite tosh on conventional TV as ever there was, and I despair of supposedly informative history programmes which are little more than aRead More
In the Rio 2016 gold medal bout of the 80kg taekwondo between Lutalo Muhammad of Great Britain and Cheick Sallah Cisse of Ivory Coast, Muhammad was ahead on points with one second to go. In one second he would win the gold. The clock had been stopped while the athletes got once more into position.Read More
Following on from that post about the value of sport and live television for helping to define what television is, I saw something else to note about the BBC’s coverage of the Rio Olympic Games. The BBC used three terrestrial channels to broadcast Olympic video, plus its website and app – BBC One and BBCRead More
There was an interesting moment in the heat of the Olympic Games coverage on the BBC when the presenter Clare Balding told us to look to at some sport in progress – I think it was the golf – saying “let’s see what he does next”, or words to that effect, as some crucial puttRead More
Watching a BBC television programme on the history of the UK and the European Union the other night (Europe: Them or Us), I noted the great amount of archive footage used and how skilfully it had been woven into the argument. I looked, as I always do on such occasions, at the credits, to seeRead More
What sad news that there is to be no second series of Dickensian, the superlative mashup of Charles Dickens’ characters by Tony Jordan, the Eastenders writer. Over twenty episodes the series ingeniously wove together back stories to Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, Bleak House and A Christmas Carol, together with several other characters taken from Dickens’sRead More
Judi Dench played Barbara in Major Barbara (1962) with Edward Woodward who played Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard (1971) with Jenny Agutter who played in Hedvig Ekdal in The Wild Duck (1971) with Denholm Elliott who played Alan Quine in Donkey’s Years (1980) with Penelope Keith who played Amanda Prynne in Private Lives (1976) withRead More
It’s that time of the year when you feel compelled to sum up that year. Well, some feel so compelled, and the newspapers and web are full of people’s reviews of 2015 in art, literature, sport, news, whatever. So, setting aside the feeling that years are arbitrary concepts and that the idea of things beginningRead More
It may be hard to say for certain, but I don’t know that there has ever been a better title for a book than Too Naked for the Nazis. It’s the title of a biography by Alan Stafford of the legendary variety trio Wilson, Keppel and Betty, and derives from an apparently genuine reaction byRead More