Crooked House
This is only available for a couple more days but it’s worth it. BBC4 gives us a reminder that you don’t need a big budget to frighten your audience, however jaded by CGI they may be. In this spooky drama by Mark Gatiss there are hardly any special effects, just a clever script and your [...]
Puffin Island
Puffins are brilliant. They live up to their nickname of the clowns of the sea: I think they might even beat toucans and penguins to top comical bird status. It’s impossible to watch them here – bobbing on the waves, zooming about underwater, enjoying a clifftop party – without a smile on your face. That’s [...]
Saki: Who Killed Mrs De Ropp?
BBC Four is quietly developing a nice line in doing period adaptations for about £1.50. Here they’ve managed to get the essence of Saki’s sly, subversive short stories with nothing more than stylised colour schemes, drawings of pigs and really terrifying child actors. Not suitable for children - unless you want to turn them into [...]
Wild China: Shangri-La
You’d think after decades of nature programmes they’d have run out of weird creatures to show us, but this episode about Yunnan, a remote forest in southwest China, is full of jaw-dropping moments - from bats the size of bumblebees living in a bamboo stem, to villagers tying feathers to hornets, to the unearthly song [...]
The Worlds of Fantasy
This programme about Tolkien and Mervyn Peake tries to set itself up as a battle between the two heavyweights of fantasy, uptight map-making vs moody surrealism, but it’s really interesting when it starts excavating all the pieces that the pair made their imaginary worlds out of - which apparently included the Somme, Worcestershire, ceremonial [...]
