The Saint and the Hanged Man

I think this must be the state-of-the-art in contemporary feature making. A layered mix of animation, dramatisation, funky music, clever talking heads, whizzy video techniques and a fair amount of cheeky supposition. It’s all about the sanctification of a middle-ranking medieval bishop called Thomas Cantilupe and it involves the miraculous resurrection of a twice-hanged Welsh [...]

Briefings - Stephen Fry

Jem recently put us on to Briefings. In this most recent lecture, Stephen Fry shares his thoughts on the future of public service broadcasting. He’s as intelligent and perceptive as you’ve expect. Here’s a short quote (from around 19m50s).
…It has the iPlayer on its site too, streaming content to UK users only. But hell, there’s [...]

Love Soup: Whose God is it Anyway?

I should start by saying that the best comedy on British telly at the moment is toe-curlingly rude secondary school sitcom The Inbetweeners. It’s on Channel 4, though, which means I can’t embed it here. So here’s episode 10 of Love Soup series two instead: also brilliant (and pretty rude too). Love Soup’s quite difficult [...]

Briefings - David Attenborough

Probably as out of step these days as you could be and with several BBC Directors looking on in the front row this is a sober and welcome reminder of Reithian/Carleton Green values from the BBC’s longest serving employee (1952 and counting)
This lecture from David Attenborough and commissioned by the BBC as part of Ofcom’s [...]

The Age of Terror: The Paris Plot

Did you know this? Did you know that Algerian Islamists planned and set out on a 9/11-style attack on Paris in 1994? Did you know that the plane actually made it into French aerospace and onto French soil? Did you know that the terrorists shot and killed three passengers and were subsequently killed themselves when [...]

I’m just going to say it: Basil Brush is brilliant. Funny, fast-paced, clever and cheeky. The canned laughter is weirdly appropriate, the funny sound and video effects make the thing seem really contemporary, and the super-ironic scripts respect the parents watching. Basil, a very small fox as I’m sure you’ll remember, has been integrated into [...]

Humphrey Lyttelton, 1921—2008

Humphrey Lyttelton, who died earlier this evening, loved Buddy Bolden, a troubled, almost mythical jazz trumpeter from turn-of-the-century New Orleans. In his later life, Humph attempted a kind of reconstruction of Bolden’s music, which can’t have been easy because it was never recorded in his lifetime. I’d like to have featured one of Humph’s Bolden [...]

The Holy Show

Terrific documentary about an Irish Catholic priest with a secret. The anchor for the story is the 16mm footage taken by student film maker Alison Millar years before the secret was revealed. The story has drama, pathos, humour and some truth about Irish society. The film is a BBC Northern Ireland/RTE co-production.

Carrie and David’s Popshop

I like this a lot. I think Carrie and David are telling us they take kids’ media seriously. They’ve made the scary transition from primetime to daytime to playtime and the result is clever and life-enhancing: a show encouraging little kids to sing and dance and make music. Of course, I could be wrong. The [...]

Doctor Who Confidential

I can’t remember exactly when we acquired a taste for this kind of ‘making of’ material. Was it when DVDs came along with all that extra room for stuff? Or was it something to do with the gaping maw of multichannel TV and the pressing need for hundreds of extra hours of programming? Or—bit more [...]