Clowns
This is marvelous.
I’m Tommy Tickle. I bought this round off a guy called Timmy Tickle. He moved to Essex to become Silly Billy Blue-Hat.
In addition to Tommy, we also meet Potty the Pirate and Mr Pumpkin. All have everyday worries and real lives.
The fact that Tommy Tickle wears a cricket box to protect his genitals [...]
Wonderland - The Curious World of Frinton-on-Sea
This is surreal documentary. As sad as it is strange.
Frinton is clearly an unusual place. It didn’t get a pub until the year 2000, though the documentary focuses on the more recent struggle against the modernisation of the railway crossing. The real treasure here lies in the more eccentric (sometimes lovable, sometimes worrying) characters [...]
Storyville: All White in Barking
I think this is the second programme from BBC2’s ‘White‘ series we’ve featured here. This one, from the venerable Storyville strand, has quite a lot in common with Henry Singer’s Last Orders from last week: lingering, uncomfortable head-shots, difficult questions posed from behind the camera and a refusal to gloss over awkward opinions. It’s a [...]
Last Orders
I was struggling to know what to say about this. Then I saw that David Hepworth had said it all for me. Have a look at Mr Hepworth’s words, and have a look at the programme. Only telly could do this.
Masterpieces of Vienna
Thirty minutes of television about a sofa: and it’s a repeat, too.
Masterpieces of Vienna is an arts documentary series of the old school. Don’t expect expensive looking camerawork, CGI reconstructions or Andrew Graham-Dixon buzzing around in a mini; you’ll be getting some nice solid rostrum work, talking heads, a smattering of archive footage and a [...]
The Cult of The Onedin Line
Its hard to believe they are the same man; those two images of the late Peter Gilmore as either the cheeky young hospital portal eying up Nurse Barbara Windsor in the Carry On Films but also as Captain James Onedin SHOUTING his way through the seventies. THAT theme tune (Spartacus by Aram Khachaturian) was [...]
Portillo on Thatcher: The Lady’s Not for Spurning
Or how we all learned to love Portillo. Gradually he’s become the Brian Walden of his day. Shining on the Moral Maze, on the underrated This Week and making documentaries on seemingly anything he fancies. He was also the best thing in last years celebrity trial drama-doc; The Verdict keeping Archer in check.
And finally [...]
Life in Cold Blood: Dragons of the Dry
I’m convinced that David Attenborough could narrate a bowl of noodles and it would seem fascinating. Fortunately (for him and us) the reptiles covered in this week’s Life in Cold Blood would actually have been interesting even before he started talking about them.
In this hour-long wildlife extravaganza, you’ve got geckos from Bangkok, wrestling lizards, Sir [...]
The Wigan Casino - This England
Tony Palmer’s 1977 wonderful celebration of the Northern Soul club; the Wigan Casino (part of the “This England” series of docs) for Granada TV is an incredibly bleak half hour. Obviously there’s some priceless archive from inside the club (it showed up most recently in Dance Britannia), impressive shapes being thrown [...]
Magnetic North
God bless Jonathan Meades. First time I saw him I was a bit alienated. Another man in a suit, I thought, talking to camera. But no, he’s anything but. His programmes are an amazing combination of high-brow and low-brow - lots of big words and high-falutin’ ideas that end in spectacular revelations about the commonplace. For [...]
