TV and Brian Donaldson

Brits Get Rich in China

22 May 2007

BUSINESS DOCUMENTARY Paul Merton recently recalled with some anxiety how he forced down a portion of cooked donkey penis in the name of travel shows. And in this documentary, a marginally traumatised businessman dines briefly on the same delicacy.

Gavin and Stacey

8 May 2007

SITCOM With ITV and Channel 4 still flailing around from one comedy outrage to another and dishing out sitcom calamity after sitcom calamity, it’s BBC3 who can proudly wear the telly crown when it comes to making this digital nation laugh. And main…

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Brian Donaldson finds that the schedules have an even more rancid stench of death than usual

23 Apr 2007

Millionare socialist with a heart of gold? Or moneygrabbing wretch with less scruples than Stalin? During his lifetime, public opinion was heavily divided on Robert Maxwell, but history will probably prove to be less kind. In Maxwell (BBC2, Fri 4 May…

The Seven Sins of England

Channel 4, Tue 8 May, 10pm

23 Apr 2007

SOCIAL DOCUMENTARY Before anyone gets on their high horse, let’s admit straight off the bat that the Scots might claim to have a largely pacifist Tartan Army, but the seven sins of our Anglo Saxon brethren could be matched and probably surpassed by…

Ghosts

More4, Tue 17 Apr, 10pm

9 Apr 2007

SOCIAL DRAMA When you think about Nick Broomfield and his work, you probably don’t think grimy, subtle and slow. Though, you might conjure up an image of a posh guy with a camera upsetting all manner of ruthless crooks and political outcasts with his…

The Mark Of Cain

Channel 4, Thu 5 Apr, 9pm

27 Mar 2007

WAR DRAMA As the full weight of the war in Iraq continues to bear down on us, the related dramas and documentaries will just keep on coming. After Peter Kosminky’s The Government Inspector and Michael Winterbottom’s Road to Gauntanamo, here comes…

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Brian Donaldson finds some new dramas about madnes

13 Mar 2007

Without wishing to be cruel, Jessie Wallace isn’t the kind of actress you’d associate with roles which anyone could dub as ‘classy’, not in the stereotypically glamour sense of the word anyway. Maybe feisty, shouty and boozy, but never ever classy. The…

The Trap

BBC2, Sun 18 Mar, 9pm

13 Mar 2007

SOCIAL DOCUMENTARY Writer and director Adam Curtis gained waves of acclaim and acres of flak for his Power of Nightmares series which suggested that the threat to the West from a network of Arab terrorist cells is nothing short of a…

Feature - Ashley Jensen

Funny lady

12 Mar 2007

Who would have thought that Ashley Jensen, the mild-mannered, meek Maggie from Extras, would have a guilty secret from her dark past as a student in Edinburgh? ‘I got banned from a pub on the Grassmarket,’ she admits with a barely hidden mix of remorse…

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Brian Donaldson finds some new dramas verging on t

27 Feb 2007

It’s never been an easy task to translate the work of Harold Pinter onto the small screen. Some wags might suggest it’s difficult enough trying to make sense of it on stage. As part of More4’s mini-Pinter extravaganza, Celebration (More4, Sat 3 Mar, 9pm…

Occult Week TV

OCCULT WEEK

27 Feb 2007

SPOOKY DOCUMENTARIES It’s long been believed that with the death of mass popular religion in Britain the paranormal plays a much larger part in people’s belief systems. But if the double-bill opener to this short season is anything to go by…

15 Storeys High

12 Feb 2007

DVD With questionable wisdom, voters in the BBC’s Best Sitcom Ever poll back in 2004 utterly ignored 15 Storeys High, instead opting to find slots near the business end of the top 100 for the risible likes of ‘Allo Allo’ and Vicar of Dibley. History…

Life on Mars

12 Feb 2007

CRIME DRAMA BBC1, Tue 20 Feb, 9pm It should barely register a flicker of surprise that the Americans are all set to remake Life on Mars on their own terms, in their own way. David E Kelley, AKA Mr Ally McBeal, is behind plans for the US version…

Child Genius

Channel 4, Thu 8 Feb, 9pm

29 Jan 2007

DOCUMENTARY Most of us would like to have a few more brain cells than we currently have at our disposal. But who would really want an IQ of 170, putting us into the top 0.002% of the population? And what if we had that mental ability and were around…

Comedy Cuts

ITV2, Thu 18 Jan, 10.55pm

16 Jan 2007

COMEDY Some people hold the view that since the demise of The Tube, TV’s commissioning heads haven’t really taken live music seriously. Well, what of live comedy then? Apart from the Stand-Up Show, Scotland’s Live Floor Show, and the odd bonanza on…

Remote Control - TV round-up

Remote Control

3 Jan 2007

Amid the bespectacled blundering and the wide-eyed naivety, Louis Theroux has made some witty and insightful documentaries in his time. Whether it’s been the all-too real worlds of the porn industry, white supremacy or Christian fundamentalism, he has…

Ugly Betty

Channel 4, Fri 5 Jan, 9.30pm

3 Jan 2007

COMEDY DRAMA At 9.30pm on the first Friday night of 2005, Channel 4 introduced us to the most popular new American comedy in years, My Name is Earl. So, when the exact same slot is filled by another heralded US import, you may well be steadying…

When the Levees Broke

BBC4, Mon 18 & Tue 19 Dec, 9pm

11 Dec 2006

DISASTER DOCUMENTARY ‘Only in America’ is often a phrase you hear when some weirdness occurs or a mad technological advance has been made. But surely only in a Bush America could hundreds of thousands of people (the bulk of them black and poor) be…

After Thomas

STV, Tue 26 Dec, 9pm

11 Dec 2006

FAMILY DRAMA It may well be the season to be jolly, but that has never stopped the humbug-riddled TV schedulers from dumping misery, fear and despair upon us from a great height. So, in fine Christmas (and ITV all year round) tradition, After Thomas…

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11 Nov 2006

It’s a sign of how life moves on for all of us that Jennifer Saunders’ new sitcom should be about a women’s guild in a sleepy Devon village. Perhaps because it’s so far from the madding it-crowd of Ab Fab, Jen has surrounded herself with reliable old…

Pitcairn Story, The

The Pitcairn Story

11 Nov 2006

CRIME DOCUMENTARY Sometimes, you think that you’ll have heard it all when it comes to child sex abuse stories. And then something like this comes along. In 2004, in the remote British colony of Pitcairn Island (population 47), six local men were…

Young@Yeart

More4, Mon 6 Nov, 9pm

27 Oct 2006

MUSIC DOCUMENTARY It’s easy to poke fun at or get annoyed with the old, what with their doddery, drooling, deaf ways and their less than exemplary table manners. So, it will come as a major shock to the most hard-hearted anti-senior that this…

Torchwood

BBC3, Sun 22 Oct, 9pm; BBC2, Wed 25 Oct, 9pm

17 Oct 2006

SCI-FI DRAMA It could all have been such a disaster. Revamping an old TV series tends to end in calamity and/or tedium (Randall and Hopkirk, The Basil Brush Show, The Price is Right for just three) but the all-new Doctor Who has defied nature and…

Death of a President

More4, Mon 9 Oct, 9pm; Channel 4, Thu 19 Oct, 9pm

2 Oct 2006

DRAMA DOCUMENTARY Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, North Korea. Possibly being added to the candidates listed as America’s public enemy number one is the United Kingdom, when this goes out on air. The international incident sparked by ITV’s 1980s Saudi drama…

David Icke: Was He Right?

Five, Mon 2 Oct, 11pm

18 Sep 2006

SOCIAL DOCUMENTARY When a mound of grass in Peru started talking to David Icke, his life was never to be the same again. Having plied his trade as a goalkeeper for Coventry City before introducing snooker coverage for the BBC, his overnight…