On Monday four British athletes (sailors and rowers – we still rule the little waves) convened in Trafalgar Square to unveil a giant digital clock designed to count down 500 days to the start of the 2012 Olympic Games. Yesterday, at 500 days, 7 hours and just under 6 minutes, it ... Read More...
Television
Sunday night on TV is Big Picture night. Professor Niall Ferguson (bottom) takes on the meaty subject of Civilization on Channel 4 at 8pm. However, he's trumped by Professor Brian Cox (top), who in the following slot takes on the biggest subject conceivable in Wonders of the Universe, BBC2, 9pm. They're both impressively ... Read More...
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...
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...
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...
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...
