BLOGS
Joan Collins Does Glamour
- Posted at 4:59pm
- 15 October 2009
- by DavidButcher-RT
When Joan Collins first met her victims in ITV1's one-off makeover show Joan Does Glamour (13 October), there was a moment when she worried they might not recognise her. But honestly, how could they not?
Her Joan Collinsness shines from every powdered pore, it radiates from every thread of her big cream trouser suits and swirly silk blouses. She's spent decades ensuring she looks more and more glowingly like herself. Now she has decided she wants the rest of Britain looking like her, too.
Hence the makeover show, where she set out to bring "the...
Harper's Island
- Posted at 11:23am
- 17 September 2009
- by AlisonGraham-RT
It's impossible to resist Harper's Island, the US murder-mystery series (Sundays BBC3, BBC HD). Short of pitching my tent on a mountain and refusing to come down until it's over, I've tried everything, even sitting with my back to the telly while reading an improving book (Ulysses last week). But nothing works and I've always cracked by the end of the opening credits.
Because Harper's Island is brilliant. It's as shallow as a drained swimming pool and has shamelessly borrowed every convention and set-up in the known horror/slasher film and TV-crime universe. It's packed with cheap...
MasterChef: the Professionals
- Posted at 6:00pm
- 15 September 2009
- by PaulJones-RT
There are three levels of MasterChef: Celebrity, where school dinners will usually do; the main series, where "cooking doesn't get any tougher"; and the Professionals, where the cooking, um, gets even tougher.
Then again, you wouldn't have known you were watching professional cooks in Monday's series opener. Asked to spatchcock a poussin (a phrase I can't help thinking sounds vaguely rude), one contestant apparently heard "in the style of Jack the Ripper" because he slashed the tiny bird to pieces, stopping just short of slinging its guts over its shoulder.
It was no...
Tina Hobley on 'attractive' Jeremy Clarkson
- Posted at 6:36pm
- 14 September 2009
- by Tina Hobley
The Holby City star tells us what's taking her fancy - and what's not - on TV at the moment.
At the top of my list is Waking the Dead. The stories are excellent and not too predictable, which is always refreshing. I was particularly keen to watch this series because my friend Sharon Maughan, who played my mum in Holby City, was in the first episode. Not only did she have to work with her husband, Trevor Eve, but she played twins - it can be tough enough playing one character! I would love to be...
Peter Andre: Going It Alone
- Posted at 10:50am
- 20 August 2009
- by AlisonGraham-RT
For anyone who followed Katie Price and Peter Andre's ITV2 reality series, with its laboured sexual innuendos, shallowness and naked materialism, our worlds made a little less sense when the couple split up. The final sequence of Katie and Peter: The Last Chapter earlier this year showed a solicitous Andre help a limping, injured Price over the finishing line of the London Marathon. Then - nothing. Fade to black. All over.
But ITV2 knows when it's on to a good thing and has neatly exploited the split with an Andre special and a six-part Price series,...
The Street
- Posted at 6:02pm
- 14 August 2009
- by AlisonGraham-RT
I've never been a fan of The Street. I've always thought it was aimed at armchair poverty tourists; people in velvet slippers who peer through their expensive spectacles at The Street's gallery of ill-used northerners shouting at one another in public. As our tourist reaches for a sunblushed tomato, he or she can be heard to murmur: "What ghastly people, how lucky we are not to live somewhere so horrid."
It's The Street's queasy mixture of the tough and the saccharine that I've never been able to get over, and the fact that its endings are always...
Top Gear
- Posted at 5:35pm
- 10 August 2009
- by DavidButcher-RT
First, a confession. For all its faults, I love Top Gear. Always have. So what I'm about to say comes from a caring place.
It's losing it. It has peaked. It has become the TV equivalent of the Royal Bank of Scotland a few years ago - swaggeringly successful around the world, headed by cocky men, everyone riding the crest of a big wave. But riding for a fall.
At its best it's still sublime TV, but at its worst it's embarrassing. Much of the latest series felt laboured, forever trying not to sound...
Peter Kay on children's TV
- Posted at 4:02pm
- 30 July 2009
- by Peter Kay
Children's television has become a huge part of my life once again, now that I have my own family. My Sky+ planner is continually clogged up with episodes of Balamory, The Wiggles and Timothy Goes to School (it's like Little House on the Prairie with animals).
In recent years, thanks to DVD, I've been able to revisit and watch some of my favourite children's programmes again. I've been delighted to find the successful ones still manage to capture the imagination of my own children. Classics like Jamie and the Magic Torch (the boy clearly suffered from insomnia),...
Baby Beauty Queens
- Posted at 3:35pm
- 24 July 2009
- by AlisonGraham-RT
In 1996, documentary-maker Jane Treays made Painted Babies, a film following two little girls from different backgrounds as they competed in the highly competitive Miss Southern Charm baby beauty pageant in Georgia, USA.
Alisa Pomeray did much the same thing with Baby Beauty Queens (20 July, BBC3) though her subjects were closer to home. Madison and Tyla, both nine, and Sasha, seven, were competing in Mini Miss UK, the first British child beauty pageant.
There was no analysis, so we were left to make up our own minds about why any mother would want her young daughter...
Personal Affairs
- Posted at 4:45pm
- 26 June 2009
- by AlisonGraham-RT
Let's not waste any time, let's shoot a poisoned arrow straight through the heart of Personal Affairs, BBC3's supposed comic drama about a clutch of secretaries in a City of London bank. It is inexplicably bad.
By that I mean how did a series so crunchingly awful actually make it to a television screen? Why did something that made me want to rend my garments and tear my hair out by its roots, arrive, fully formed, in my living room, without anyone noticing its desiccated plot and characters?
The quartet of PAs at the heart of Personal...
Martina Cole's The Take
- Posted at 5:00pm
- 19 June 2009
- by DavidButcher-RT
Every now and then a performance comes along that jumps up, grabs you by the throat and won't let go. Tom Hardy's 1980s gangster Freddie Jackson in the opening episode of Martina Cole's The Take was like that.
You couldn't take your eyes off him. It was like watching an angry bull-mastiff let loose in a petting zoo: whatever he did next, you knew it wouldn't be pretty. In every scene, Freddie gave off waves of brutal charisma: you try doing that in a spangly suit and grey loafers.
Early on, after being released from prison, he...
Holby City
- Posted at 4:35pm
- 11 June 2009
- by DavidButcher-RT
No-one expects a soap wedding to be a fun occasion, least of all in Holby City, but TV's most dismal medics excelled themselves when they celebrated - no, that's not the right word, so let's say marked - the marriage of Faye and Joseph.
It was a rivetingly joyless affair. An air of gloom seemed to hang over proceedings like a damp duvet. Stilted conversations, broken glasses, unfunny speeches - it had it all.
Grim-faced groom Joseph (Luke Roberts) was determined not to be late - and who can blame him: Faye already...
Britain's Got Talent - the Final
- Posted at 1:35pm
- 02 June 2009
- by AlisonGraham-RT
The right act won, of course. Diversity, the thrilling, exhilarating, endlessly inventive dance troupe thoroughly deserved to take the Britain's Got Talent crown in Saturday's final. They were breathtakingly good, their routines packed with humour and endless imagination.
They were nice boys too. My weary middle-aged heart fluttered at the decency and good manners of Diversity's choreographer and driving force, Ashley Banjo. My faith in human nature was restored by Banjo's politeness and charm, and the fact that there was no X Factor-y sobbing, pleading or over-emoting about "journeys". Banjo was the rarest of...
Pulling
- Posted at 5:30pm
- 22 May 2009
- by AlisonGraham-RT
Consider this: we live in a world where the risible Two Pints of Lager… exists and where the uniquely brilliant Pulling doesn't. Not any more, anyway, not since it was axed by BBC3, home of Two Pints. Even the baffling Ideal is still rumbling along on the same channel. Why?
But Pulling was allowed a swan song, an hour-long special (on 17 May). In this case special means "last one ever", an unpalatable fact made all the more difficult to swallow by the announcer, who did the introduction and called it "home-grown comedy genius". Rub it in, why...
Reggie Perrin is depressingly bad
- Posted at 5:05pm
- 30 April 2009
- by AlisonGraham-RT
Watching Reggie Perrin had a necrotising effect - I realised I was dying slowly when Reggie (Martin Clunes, left) made a joke to his wife's female friends about how he admired women because: "Anyone who can bleed for five days without dying deserves a bunch of flowers every now and again."
I wasn't sure I'd heard that correctly, so I had to watch again on iPlayer, just to make sure. No, I wasn't wrong, I really had heard a pathologically abysmal gag about menstruation on a primetime BBC1 "comedy".
Now, there's absolutely...
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