Television

Style trounces substance in small-screen Bond

Daniel Randall reviews The Night Manager (BBC, 2016) The Night Manager has a good go at being right on. The opening episode drops us right in the middle of Tahrir Square, days before the fall of Mubarak. Tom Hiddleston's Jonathan Pine, a dashing ex-soldier working as the eponymous night manager in a luxury Cairo hotel, is first motivated to go after Hugh Laurie's dastardly arms dealer Richard Roper because he's worried the weapons he's selling might be used to put down the uprising. There are some reasonable attempts at powerful moral moments: Pine tells Olivia Coleman's Angela Burr that he...

Trapped: The village against nature

Followers of Nordic noir will have been enjoying this new treat on BBC4. It has the typical features of the flawed policeman confronted with gruesome murders; but a dominant character in the drama, sometimes it seems the dominant character, is nature. It is set in a remote Icelandic fishing village, Seyðisfjörður, at the end of a fjord and surrounded by mountains. Shot in a similar fishing village, Siglufjörður, it is in Icelandic with English subtitles. The Icelandic language is a very soft sounding tongue, somehow reminiscent of Welsh, and not at all how one would imagine descendants of...

The “precariat” of the 19th century

The Newport rising of November 1839, when a few thousand men from the south Wales valleys, many of them armed, marched in protest at working-conditions and for the right to vote, was the subject of a recent BBC documentary presented by actor Michael Sheen. Sheen’s brief was to explore the reasons behind political apathy (e.g. very low turnouts in elections) in a place otherwise known for its restlessness and radicalism. Retracing and walking one of the routes taken by the rebels into Newport, Sheen retells the story of the Welsh Chartism which inspired the Rising which ended in violent...

A bitter dose of reality

Bitter Lake is a highly unconventional documentary, in equal parts haunting, chilling and moving. Like some of Adam Curtis’ earlier pieces, narration is kept to a minimum — quite fitting, considering the touching meta-narrative it tells. At over two hours long, it is like falling down the rabbit hole. Bitter Lake is titled after the one-time meeting place of President Roosevelt and the Saudi royalty. Curtis painstakingly puts together an array of scenes like a jigsaw puzzle, to create the story of our lives, with all of modern western civilisation and global socio-economic geo-politics as its...

Wealth trickling up

If you didn’t see The Super Rich and Us, I would really recommend you look at it on i-player. The first episode covered Britain’s property market and tax laws. The second focused on the growth of international financial markets. Presenter Jacques Peretti begins each episode with these stark observations: “The super rich are taking over. 85 people now own the same as half the world’s population. Never before has money been so polarised. The 21st century will be the most unequal in human history.” It is invaluable to have the facts about wealth inequality spelled out to a mass audience in this...

Eichmann on TV

"People say 'it cannot be true. You invent this. Such things are not possible.' I say, 'if I could make up such things, I would be in Hollywood, not running a cheap hotel in Jerusalem." Rebecca Front as Mrs. Landau, a Holocaust survivor, in The Eichmann Show. The Eichmann Show, the BBC’s dramatisation of the filming and broadcast of the trial of senior Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann, in Israel in 1961, is, perhaps, about too much. In its chilling use of archival footage from both the trial and of the genocide itself, the film tries to be a lesson in Holocaust history. In showing the struggle of...

The gothic reaction to industrial capitalism

What have Karl Marx, Dracula, a modern robotic production line and St Pancras station got in common? According to Andrew Dixon they all have more then a touch of the gothic about them. In this three part series, Dixon makes a convincing and fascinating case that the gothic sensibility has become a way of responding to and critiquing industrial capitalism and the urbanism, technology and pollution that comes with it. Dixon points out that the modern, world-wide obsession with the irrational, deranged, morbid and spectral that makes up gothic started out as little more then an aristocratic...

Big politics, real lives

It’s tempting to think of the The Village as the BBC’s anti-Downton. Set during roughly in the same time period as everyone’s favourite High Tory soap opera, the two shows were bound to draw comparisons, but they are totally different beasts. While Downton Abbey approaches the class system of early 20th century England with a sort of Things-Were-Better-Then gentility, at times The Village has been so bleak that it has drawn inevitable criticism for being a cover for lefty, kitchen-sink agitprop. Written by Peter Moffat (Cambridge Spies, Silk) The Village is inspired by Heimat, the long-running...

Bringing sex out of the closet

A TV drama that combines social commentary about a divided and changing America with fraught relationships, plenty of sex, and 50s outfits, Masters of Sex is a gripping watch. Now in its second series, Masters of Sex is the story of Bill Masters and Virginia Johnson, who in the late 50s embarked on an ambitious and daring study of human sexuality. Initially shunned for their work by most of the medical establishment, the series focusses on the struggles they faced both professionally and personally to get funding and recognition, and how their own attitudes changed along the way. The Masters...

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Article by William Morris and other letters on Trainspotting, Ireland, The X Files and Immigration. Download PDF

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