The education system is failing our kids, says Jamie Oliver. Well few would disagree with that, but what to do, Jamie, what to do? The answer, of course, is to take 20 GCSE drop-outs and give ‘em a crash course at Jamie’s Dream School (Channel 4, Wedneday 9pm), where they will ... Read More...
Dabbler Review
Current TV and film
Sunday evening, you’ve gloomily ironed your shirts for the week and now it’s time to settle on the sofa with a dram and see what the BBC has to offer you. A train appearing through steam, a man on a horse galloping along the beach, cars with running boards and ... Read More...
Peter Kosminsky’s four-part drama The Promise reached the half-way mark on Sunday (if you missed them, you can watch the first two episodes on Channel 4 OD). Eight years in the making and filmed entirely in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (not the easiest places to work), each episode is ... Read More...
In the wake of its star, Natalie Portman, winning the BAFTA for best actress, Rosie Bell sorts the melodrama from the magic in Black Swan. This clip is my favourite piece of Black Swan, the melodrama that‘s doing the rounds at the moment. When I saw it one part of my mind ... Read More...
Ian Hislop kicked off his new television series, The Age of the Do-Gooders, (the third and final part is on tomorrow night at 10pm, on BBC4 - you can catch up on the iPlayer) by revealing that William Wilberforce was not only an abolitionist but also, by today's standards, something of ... Read More...
Much praise has been righteously showered on Out Of The Ashes, Tim Albone and Lucy Martens’ film about the Afghan national cricket team, screened as part of BBC Four’s Storyville this week (Catch up with it here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00ydj1r). All of the big and obvious themes are there, but what makes it ... Read More...
There are plenty of English language films about the Holocaust, but very few about the Soviet Gulag. It might be the obvious angle, but it’s difficult to consider Peter Weir’s new film, The Way Back, in any other light. The wastes of Siberia now have their very own Hollywood blockbuster. The ... Read More...
Faulks on Fiction (Saturday, 9pm on BBC2 and you can catch up on the iPlayer) kicked off with a look at The Hero. Faulks introduced the programme by telling us he was going to focus on characters rather than the biographical details of authors, which apparently we've been paying far ... Read More...
As I've mentioned before, on my own blog, one of the advantages of living in Australia is the access it gives you to European films and television programmes (odd, really, considering our geographical position, but no-one seems to be complaining). As a result, Danish programmes have become a staple of the Australian ... Read More...
Television ate itself a long time ago now. Monty Python were already monkeying around with accepted formats at the end of the 1960s: inserting phony voice-over links, rolling the end credits immediately after the opening ones, writing sketches that satirised sketches. Forty years of 'progress' later and we have Charlie Brooker: the TV obsessive who ... Read More...
