Category Archives: Television & radio

Death on the Nile review – Kenneth Branagh makes heavy weather of Christie caper

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Branagh’s spirited performance as Poirot and a big-name ensemble cast can’t keep this stale and two-dimensional whodunnit afloat

Long coronavirally delayed, Kenneth Branagh’s latest Agatha Christie movie puffs effortfully into harbour. It’s the classic whodunnit about a murder on a steamer making its way down the river in Egypt with an Anglo-American boatful of waxy-faced cameos aboard. The horrible homicide means that one of the passengers will have to spring into action, and this is of course the amply moustached Hercule Poirot, played by Branagh himself. It is Poirot who interviews suspects, supervises corpse-storage in the ship’s galley freezer cabinet and delivers the final unmasking – and all without the captain insisting that the Egyptian police should possibly get involved.

Screenwriter Michael Green has adapted the 1937 novel with some new inventions: some people of colour are introduced, and Christie’s intense dislike for her wealthy-hypocrite leftwing character has been dialled down. Most startlingly, Green invents a very good prelude showing the young Poirot’s service in the trenches of the first world war, and the origin of that moustache. Nothing in the rest of this rather stale and two-dimensional tale matches the brio of that opening.

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‘I’ve had letters from klansmen’: Jennifer Beals on Flashdance, The L Word and fighting to get diverse stories told

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The actor, who broke through in 1983 playing a welder who dreamed of being a dancer, reflects on a life of activism, why gen Z give her hope and joining the Star Wars universe

Jennifer Beals is talking to me by Zoom from … “Do I have to say?” she asks. Not really, I tell her. “I can tell you there’s a blizzard outside and it’s really beautiful.” Her reticence, which lasts about 30 seconds, is because she is in New York, filming a yet to be announced new season of Law & Order. You could imagine her taking a friend’s secret to the grave; she is very cagey about where she lives, tending to call herself “nomadic” and describing her home as “the middle of nowhere” (in reality, somewhere near Los Angeles). Commercial discretion, though? Not so much.

It is creepy to go on about how young actors still look, as though that were a goal in itself, but Beals, 58, is so unchanged – since she first played Bette in The L Word in 2004; since Devil in a Blue Dress in 1995 – that my brain thinks it is making a mistake. She definitely, positively starred in Flashdance in 1983, her breakthrough role after a tiny part in My Bodyguard three years earlier, yet that can’t be right – it was 40 years ago! It is like walking past someone you think you knew at school, then realising that it can’t be them because this person is 21.

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Goodbye Ramsay Street? Why we’re not ready for Neighbours to end

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The drama won hearts by showing the world Australian suburbia – albeit with regular light plane crashes and bouts of amnesia

When they let you through the security gate at the Neighbours studio, something magical happens. It’s not finding out the food at Harold’s is real, though it is. And it’s not realising the Erinsborough High quad is also where they filmed Prisoner, though that’s true too.

No, stepping into that Nunawading studio is a wormhole to a simpler time, where no one has a real job, drama is just drama, and the people next door have become good friends.

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How Neighbours was shunted off air by All Creatures Great and Small

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Longest-running programme in Australian television history loses out to homegrown British drama

The residents of Ramsay Street have survived almost four decades of affairs, disasters and terrible haircuts – but in the end it might be the popularity of a 1930s Yorkshire vet that finally kills off Neighbours.

The long-running soap opera that launched the careers of Kylie Minogue, Guy Pearce and Margot Robbie faces the axe after Channel 5 confirmed it would stop airing the series this summer. The broadcaster no longer wants to spend millions of pounds a year on the show and is instead looking to use its programme budget to reach upmarket audiences with original British dramas – driven by the success of All Creatures Great And Small, its hit revival of the series about rural life in the Yorkshire Dales.

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‘A regressive, embarrassing disappointment’: how And Just Like That ruined Sex and the City

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The final episode of the sequel did nothing to redeem it. It was bafflingly tone-deaf, cringe-makingly crass and seemingly written by people who had never heard of the original

That sound you can hear – that faint but persistent chuckle – is Kim Cattrall laughing. The actor was the only one of the original Sex and the City cast to decline to join And Just Like That …, the sequel to the much-loved, era-defining show. The rest of them stayed, and suffered. But at least they were getting paid. Viewers – if they did stay, which many of us did out of a potent blend of desperate hope that things would improve, and fascinated horror as they did not – had no such solace. The end of the 10-episode run has now been reached, with the finale refusing to redeem anything that had gone before.

It could have, should have, been great. The idea of best friends Carrie, Charlotte and Miranda returning to navigate the complexities of female life and friendship in their 50s – a rare televisual sight – was a fine one (even if Cattrall’s Samantha would be missed). New writers and characters were brought in to address the glaring whiteness and heteronormativity of the original. Michael Patrick King was in charge, as he had effectively been for much of Sex and the City.

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Rudy Giuliani doesn’t need a monster costume to scare children | Sam Wolfson

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Trump’s lawyer was revealed to be a contestant on The Masked Singer – and when Robin Thicke storms off in protest, you know you’ve got problems

It’s like something from a Guillermo del Toro film: a grotesque fantasy creature disrobes, only to reveal an even more horrifying monster underneath. But that’s what viewers will see when the US version of The Masked Singer, Fox’s incognito singing competition, returns at the end of this month.

The show, in which a panel of judges and the audience try to guess the identity of celebrity vocalists dressed in furry theme-park costumes, is taped in advance of airing. But Deadline reports that at the first episode’s climax, when the eliminated singer reveals their true identity, it was Rudy Giuliani whose head popped out of the costume. Judges Ken Jeong and Robin Thicke walked off the set in protest. Quite a good reflection of how bad a guy you have to be when rape-culture chanteur Thicke, the singer of Blurred Lines, decides you’re beyond the pale.

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Coming down: why has shock teen show Euphoria become such a drag?

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In its second season, the hit HBO drama on drugged-out and love-crazed teens has finally tipped into too much style over substance

Euphoria, the slick, explicit, high-budget teen drama halfway through its second season on HBO, has from the start been a soap layered in heady seriousness. The show, adapted by Sam Levinson from an Israeli series of the same name and co-produced by Drake, took on a near encyclopedia of Today’s Teen Issues – sex shaming, drug addiction, body insecurity, web personas, revenge porn, pregnancy and abortion, emotional abuse, toxic masculinity, self-harm and depression, and more – with a bracing, revelatory frankness and thick lacquer of gloss (and full-frontal nudity).

By its first season finale in 2019, in which main character Rue (Zendaya, who won an Emmy for the role) nearly dies in a graphic drug overdose, Euphoria had drawn a legion of fans (the finale drew 1.2 million night-of viewers and became HBO’s most second-most tweeted-about series ever, behind Game of Thrones) and managed to balance shock with sensitivity. It established beloved characters – in particular the fragile, alchemical bond between Rue and Jules (Hunter Schafer), a trans character – as well as a distinctive visual palette: saturated color, shimmery beats, high-voltage fantasy, meta narration, a zeitgeist-aiming show with a small hint of irony and a large dollop of excess.

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Scam the bereaved, defraud the dead: the shocking crimes of America’s greatest psychic conman

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He was the fake medium from Florida whose scandalous cons almost got him shot. So why did M Lamar Keene then blow the whistle on psychic swindlers? A new podcast finds out

What does it take for someone to impersonate a dead teenager to the grieving mother of the deceased? For M Lamar Keene, a prominent Tampa-based medium in the 1960s and 70s, it was a cinch – all it required was a cocktail of cunning, charisma and sheer audacity. In front of the congregation of his spiritualist church, Keene would enter a trance state and appear to speak as the deceased 17-year-old, Jack, and ask Jack’s mother, Lona, to donate thousands of dollars to the church. One day, Lona asked Jack about the secret name he used for her, to prove it was really him, and Keene was stumped – until he attended a gathering at her house and feigned a headache. While pretending to rest in her bedroom, he searched her belongings and found the name scribbled in a family Bible: “Appleonia”. He pulled it off.

Keene confessed to being a conman in his 1976 book, The Psychic Mafia. Jack and Lona’s was just one of many audacious cases he revealed in the exposé, which shook the world of spiritualism so much that it led to an attempt on his life. Someone took a shot at him on his lawn but missed, leaving a bullet in the side of his house. In the book, Keene described how mediums shared client information so that they could conduct “hot readings” based on solid facts. He recounted how they would steal jewellery from clients for a few months, only to pretend a dead family member’s spirit had made it reappear (which usually resulted in generous tips). Ultimately, he confirmed that mediums formed a vast network to fraudulently monetise people’s grief. So why did Keene – the so-called Prince of the Spiritualists – choose to blow the whistle on everyone?

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The return of Jackass: ‘It’s never not funny to see someone get hit in the nuts’

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Paramedics at the ready! Ten years after their last bone-crunching outing, the juvenile daredevils are at it again

The first episode of Jackass is a seminal work of the 21st century. It is titled Poo Cocktail, and features in quick succession the early stunts, pranks and goofs that make up Jackass’s enduring DNA: the show’s breakout star Johnny Knoxville flies out of a cannon into a net; another of its regulars, Bam Margera, roly-polys down a hill through a group of nonplussed golfers while a cameraman giggles from inside a nearby bush; Ehren McGhehey, the most viscerally headlockable man ever committed to film, intercepts someone’s drive-thru order and throws it for a touchdown. Jason “Wee Man” Acuña, painted orange and dressed as an Oompa Loompa, skates down Venice Beach in a way that astonishes a bystander in wraparound shades.

When Jackass first launched on MTV in October 2000, I was 13 and it was the funniest thing I had ever seen. Now I’m 34 and, well, there’s a bit in the first episode of Jackass where Knoxville knocks over someone’s drinking water with a fake erection while politely asking: “Where do you get sodas around here?” and it’s still the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. Its cast of daredevil idiots took vomiting, falling off things, and brief-but-agonising pain and made it into high art.

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Kiefer Sutherland: ‘I said: I can do a really good Donald Sutherland for half the money’

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Answering readers’ questions, the actor and musician talks about how he tried stealing a job off his father, his favourite item from Greggs and his Mickey Mouse tattoo

Hi, Keith … What’s your favourite English expression? ClassicMacGruber

I’m sure they meant to say Kief? Or maybe not? I get called Kief in England more than any other place. I met some young parents in about 2001 who had named their son Kiefer, but I’ve never met anyone called Kiefer that is my age. As for my favourite British expression, there’s “bit and bobs”, which is really sweet and reminds me of my grandma, and “Oi!” which is not technically British, but any time I go “Oi!” it stops the room.

Does your twin sister have as many middle names as you? emzsam

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‘The godfather of alternative comedy’: Eddie Izzard, Paul Merton and more on Spike Milligan

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He was the shellshocked genius who channelled his anarchic brilliance into The Goon Show. Ian Hislop and Nick Newman explain why they’ve written a play about Spike Milligan – while comedians remember a legend

The tortured lives of comedians form a biographical genre all of their own; there’s always an audience for the tears of a clown. No wonder Nick Newman and Ian Hislop chose Spike Milligan as the subject of their new play. Milligan, who died 20 years ago next month, is the troubled comedy genius to end them all. Shellshocked in the second world war, repeatedly admitted to hospital for mental ill health, subjected to electroconvulsive therapy, and increasingly embittered as his career failed to deliver on early promise – the Spike Milligan sad-clown drama writes itself.

“But we didn’t want to do that,” says Newman. “We wanted to ask: how did he come to create these brilliant things?” Their play – a cheerful act of ancestor-worship by by Private Eye’s editor and its eminent cartoonist – is about the first three years (1951-54) of The Goon Show, as its chief writer Milligan battles the BBC to get his vision on air. “It’s: will he survive the fallout from the war?,” says Newman, “and will he crack radio?” And, “spoiler alert!,” chimes in Hislop. “Milligan wins! We just wanted to have a play where he wins.”

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Netflix’s Byron Baes cast appear to flout NSW Covid measures in Instagram videos

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Covid cases in the Byron Bay area have exploded since December

Cast members of the Netflix reality series Byron Baes have posted videos to social media of people dancing to live music at a crowded Byron Bay venue in apparent contravention of New South Wales Covid measures.

Two of the show’s other stars have posted videos in the days after receiving positive Covid tests that appear to show them out in public.

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‘I stayed at the party too long’: Ozark’s Jason Bateman on Arrested Development, smiling villains and his lost decade

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Forty years after his breakthrough role in Little House on the Prairie, the actor is thrilling TV audiences as a drug cartel money launderer. But he almost threw his career away

Jason Bateman appears on a Zoom screen from Los Angeles, bespectacled, calm and in uncluttered, butter-coloured environs. It’s as if Michael Bluth, the character he played in Arrested Development, had dressed up as a therapist for some hilarious purpose. To fans of the show, its entire cast will always have traces clinging to them, as if they have all been, well, arrested in that dysfunctional family. But today we’re here to talk about Ozark, a drama with a reputation that has been climbing each season (it’s now in its fourth and final) and so has, arguably, become even more defining for Bateman.

Tense and lingering, Ozark has the dizzying pace and visual sumptuousness that the modern long-running box set demands. What was haunting about it from the start were the subtle performances of Bateman and his co-star, Laura Linney; just a regular, affluent, middle-aged couple, except he was about to launder $500m for a drug cartel and she’d just watched the murder of the lawyer she was having an affair with. They were on the run, but only sort of. They hated each other, except they didn’t. What passed between them gave such propulsive energy to their characters that from the very beginning you could trust one thing: it might be improbable, but it was never going to be boring. But all that nuance was a double-edged sword. “Marty and Wendy are really intelligent characters,” Bateman says. “Sometimes that narrows your options as a writer, trying to keep things plausible. They can’t do really stupid things. The smart thing to do is to turn yourself in. Then the show’s over.”

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Dutch creator of The Voice accused of victim-blaming over abuse claims on show

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John De Mol said women could learn lessons from scandal that took The Voice of Holland off air

The creator of reality TV shows including The Voice and Big Brother has been accused of victim-blaming by his company’s female employees after accusations of widespread sexual abuse of contestants on the original Dutch version of The Voice.

In a full-page advert in the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad, a group of employees at the production company Talpa Media castigated its founder, John De Mol, for suggesting that women as well as men had lessons to learn from a scandal that has gripped the country this week and prompted the broadcaster RTL to take Friday’s episode of The Voice of Holland off air.

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‘Until now, audiences have only seen the story of the One Ring’: details announced for Lord of The Rings TV show

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The most expensive show of all time reveals the title of a prequel that’s set to feature 20 different rings of power

The mystery shrouding Amazon’s new JRR Tolkien adaptation has lifted slightly, as the show has revealed its title. The multi-series epic will be known as Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, setting viewers up for an on-screen representation of a new Middle-earth story.

“The Rings of Power unites all the major stories of Middle-earth’s Second Age: the forging of the rings, the rise of the Dark Lord Sauron, the epic tale of Númenor and the Last Alliance of Elves and Men,” said showrunners JD Payne and Patrick McKay in a statement accompanying a video which shows the programme’s title being forged in a blacksmith’s foundry.

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Cheer coach Monica Aldama: ‘The allegations were shocking and devastating for all of us’

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The head coach and breakout star of the Netflix hit, Cheer, talks about her high expectations for her cheerleading team, and how she has been affected by claims of child abuse against one of the show’s stars

Two years ago, hardly anyone outside the world of competitive cheerleading would have been familiar with Navarro College, based in the small Texan town of Corsicana, its junior college cheer squad, or its head coach, Monica Aldama. But the global success of Cheer, Netflix’s Emmy-winning docuseries following Aldama and her team’s journey to the national championships in Daytona, changed all of that.

Audiences were immediately captivated by the technical skill, athleticism and personal dramas of competitive cheerleading. Cast members became stars, garnering huge social media followings and appearing on the likes of The Ellen DeGeneres Show and Oprah’s live tour. Aldama’s signature blond highlights and no-nonsense “mat talk” were satirised on SNL. Reese Witherspoon even said she inspired her to the point of tears.

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Dun, Dun Duuun! Where did pop culture’s most dramatic sound come from?

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Did the iconic three-note sequence come from Stravinsky, the Muppets or somewhere else? Our writer set out to – dun, dun duuuun! – reveal the mystery

There’s surely only one thing that unites Russian composer Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, the 1974 comedy horror Young Frankenstein and The Muppets’ most recent special on Disney+. Regrettably, it is not Kermit the Frog. The thing that appears in all of these works has no easily recognisable familiar name, although it is perhaps one of the most recognisable three-beat musical phrases in history. It starts with a dun; it continues with a dun; it ends with a duuun!

On screen, a dramatic “dun, dun duuun” has appeared in everything from Disney’s Fantasia to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air to The IT Crowd. In 2007, a YouTuber scored a video of a melodramatic prairie dog with the three beats, earning over 43m views and a solid place in internet history. Yet though many of us are familiar with the sound, no one seems to know exactly where it came from. Try to Google it and … dun, dun, duuun! Its origins are a mystery.

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‘I’m one of the nicer showrunners’: Joss Whedon denies misconduct allegations

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Whedon denies allegations of threats and cruelty detailed by Buffy and Justice League actors, saying he has been made to seem like an ‘abusive monster’

Joss Whedon, Buffy creator and director of films including The Avengers and Justice League, has responded to multiple allegations of misconduct, denying claims from actors including Gal Gadot and Ray Fisher that he threatened and belittled them on set.

In a lengthy interview with New York magazine, Whedon responded to the stream of allegations made against him, which began to gain momentum in 2020 when Fisher detailed his experiences on the set of Justice League. Whedon stepped in to direct the film after the departure of Zack Snyder.

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Juliette Lewis, Christina Ricci and teen cannibals: why Yellowjackets is the most fun TV show in forever

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A brilliant cast lead this outrageously fun gorefest, which navigates a 90s-to-present-day timeline with laughs, panache – and exploding planes

What’s not to love about Yellowjackets (Sky Atlantic), a series largely driven by the central mystery of which teenage girl has been eaten, and who ordered the eating? The US horror/thriller/drama, which is also truly a comedy (is it so wrong to laugh at an exploding plane?), has acquired a big following over the course of its first season. It tells the story of a girls’ high-school football team, whose plane crashes while they’re travelling to a national tournament, leaving survivors stranded in the wilderness, having to fight for their lives. Think of it as a hybrid of The Craft and The Island with Bear Grylls, or Lost – with intentional jokes – plus a hint of Big Little Lies, if that had more of an interest in cannibalism than property porn.

I can’t remember the last time a TV series offered such unadulterated and outrageous fun. It even manages to navigate one of contemporary television’s most irritating trends, the split timeline, with style and panache. Half of the action takes place in 1996, starting out as a retro teen drama in the run-up to the crash, morphing into a folk-horror gorefest once the girls (and the odd boy or two) are right there in the thick of it. The other half takes place 25 years later, in the present day, as some of the women who made it out alive have to work out who knows what about the terrible things they did while they were stranded, and who is trying to blackmail them about it.

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