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 [...]
Legends: Jacques Brel
My Dad used to play Jacques Brel LPs when I was a kid. No one in the house spoke French but you could tell that there was something going on there, something dark and clever. He was skinny and intense and unafraid. We learn from this edition of Legends, which is animated by a lot [...]
Citizen Smith: Corby
I really don’t know why this terrific series about being English works. It’s very unassuming. Presenter/writer Michael Smith is opinionated but modest, setting out with no assumptions. He travels around the country talking to people. In the end, there’s no resolution. He didn’t figure it out: being English is just complicated. The final sequence of [...]
