The City Uncovered with Evan Davis: Tricks with Risk
I’ll be honest: pretty much any programme with helicopter shots of big cities will get my vote – especially if it’s also got Nassim “Black Swan” Taleb in it. Do they download the aerial shots off the Internet or something? It’s also got lovely Evan Davis riding a motorbike (quite slowly) and explaining derivatives and [...]
All New Shooting Stars
The once yawning gap between the peerless silliness of Reeves and Mortimer and their obvious antecedents Morecambe and Wise is closing fast: the first episode of Shooting Stars went out fifteen years ago, which is nearly half as long ago as the 28-million viewer everest of the 1977 Christmas Show (if you get a move [...]
Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe
Brooker takes a week off from putting the boot into TV inanity to interview five top TV writers—the writers of shows like Doctor Who, Shameless, Hustle, The IT Crowd and Peep Show—about writing. How they got into it, how they get going in the morning, how they come up with characters and names and so [...]
Shopping for England
What a lovely, fascinating, useful programme. Proper scholarship (from Mica Nava, a clever historian who was once, in the distant past, my boss for a short while), great stories and really interesting and relevant insights into the translation of Britain from 19th Century manufacturing powerhouse into 20th Century shopaholic paradise. The two big names featured [...]
The Fallen
I’ve been thinking about this programme for a few days. I watched it with my wife and it left us literally speechless. I wasn’t at all sure I should put it up here, though, mostly because I didn’t think I’d be able to come up with anything to say about it. But really I think [...]
