Whilst it hits all the cliches you’d expect – Paxman down a sewer, telling Bazalgette’s story – there’s a heady mix of architecture, art, literature and social realism presented to explain who the Victorians really were. As it’s in HD, too, there’s lots of sweeping shots and helicopters, a la Britain From Above.
I don’t agree with Rod Liddle about much but his views of the the first series of Outnumbered
“An exquisitely middle-class, middle-aged domestic situation comedy set in north London – maybe Crouch End or Tufnell Park – and starring one of those bloody stand-up comics who now festoons every network, it really should be hated before it is even seen…but Outnumbered is very funny indeed: despite its current bout of self-flagellation, the BBC still knows how to make people laugh”
pretty much nails it. Just look at the screen grab above for confirmation of the former.
The set up for this episode which is about parents struggling with the outcomes of banning their kids from using the TV and computers on a Sunday. “Spongebob is educational because it tells you how to make crabby patties and what goes on under the seas” pleads the youngest daughter when its taken away wasn’t far off my ludicrous attempts to impose a weekday Wii ban. I mean what’s the bloody point ?
The kids especially Daniel Roche who plays 8 year old Ben are astonishing, I can’t quite bring myself to take my eyes of Clare Skinner (Life is Sweet scarred me for life), and incredibly you might even warm to the sympathetic portrait of a confused 40something parent by Hugh “Now Show” Dennis.
Best sitcom of the year, alongside the underrated The Cup and Gavin and Stacey of course.
* This is one of those “stacked” series on iPlayer so if you’ve missed em you can go back and watch episodes 1 and 2 as they’re available longer than just yer 7 days.
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 I actually feel an obligation to do so. It’s brilliant TV—formally beautiful and quite heart-breaking.
And it’s really a kind of war memorial, the kind of war memorial we make now in the television age. The programme’s got quite a lot in common with those older war memorials too. It’s a granite slab of a programme—over three hours long—and it records every single British death (so far) in Iraq and Afghanistan in a kind of mesmerising ribbon of grief and memory.
War memorials, of course, don’t expire after seven days so I find myself wondering if The Fallen will disappear along with all the other iPlayer shows in a few days, which would seem wrong.
This is really remarkable TV. Self-confident, imaginative, visually fascinating. An example of what you get when you apply the BBC’s stock of extraordinary talent and insight (and all those connections) to a really important story. Matt Frei, the BBC’s top man in the USA, presents a useful survey of the strangeness and drama of the presidential battle in the USA.
If Panorama was rubbish or just irrelevant nobody would care if it went out in primetime or not. The trouble is that the BBC’s current affairs flagship is excellent—so everybody cares about it. And for that reason it must stay in primetime and it must continue to attract the budget and the resource that it always did. Hooray for Panorama!
The title of this week’s Holby City “Mad World” (sadly denied to us last week because of Big Cat Live) gave us all the clues we needed as to how the writers of this stellar hospital drama feel about mental health. It was encrusted with some diamond gaffs as Lola arrived at her new job as a medical officer at a residential mental home.
Art therapy was demonstrated by a couple of easels in a corridor, a couple of exterior shots of a lawn told us it was an opulent facility. But best of all was Lola’s response to her new environment from rolling her eyes at the cuts on the arm of a self-harmer, to laughing at an ex-colleague and victim of a mental breakdown because he wanted to be called by a different name to responding with a “God no!” when asked if she’d ever worked in a place like this before. You don’t have to be mad to watch it but…