The One Show
For the over 40’s like myself, there’s something strangely comforting about the early evening magazine show. Two presenters, one sofa, a view out of some windows, and a series of segments on everything from genteel comedy through to current affairs and the odd talking dog. Think “Nationwide“, with Frank Bough and his endless series of [...]
Class of 62
You know when they talk about the ‘British documentary tradition’? This is what they mean. A 90-minute doc made by Marilyn Gaunt to the exacting standards set before the war by those irreproachable pioneers and then again in the TV era by the extraordinary generation of documentary makers that includes Ken Loach and Paul Watson [...]
Panorama: predictions from 1960
Wasn’t the world a scary place in 1960? This programme does what we’d all like to do: have a good dig through the BBC’s prodigious archive material. It centers around Panorama clips from 1960, with Richard Dimbleby and Robin Day presenting predictions about what the 60s were going to hold for the world.
There’s a rather [...]
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 [...]
Basil Brush
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 [...]
