Category Archives: Television & radio

The Great British Bake Off 2021 final review – a Wonderland to behold

Posted on by

It may not have felt as vital or soothing as last year’s series, but this was a corking final, with a Mad Hatter’s tea party Showstopper and disasters for all the finalists

• Warning: this article contains spoilers

Was this a vintage year for The Great British Bake Off (Channel 4)? I’m not sure it will go down as an all-time great, though it was a good, reliable series. It was, however, a strong finale, with strong contestants who were, as we were often reminded, the most evenly matched in Bake Off history. Perfectionist Giuseppe, aesthete Crystelle and self-taught lockdown prodigy Chigs had all shaken the hand of Paul Hollywood twice, and were all crowned star baker twice. It was impossible to tell who was going to win.

Continue reading...

The Wheel of Time actor Madeleine Madden: ‘As an Aboriginal woman, my life is politicised’

Posted on by

The star of the new Amazon Prime fantasy series and granddaughter of Charles Perkins discusses her ‘dream role’, multiracial casting and finding freedom outside Australia

When she walked into the London casting room of The Wheel of Time, Madeleine Madden scanned the faces – a sea of white – and thought, “Yep, standard.”

To announce her presence, she politely inquired, “The Wheel of Time?”

Continue reading...

The Princes and the Press review – more degrading airing of the royal dirty laundry

Posted on by

BBC programme is a compelling analysis of the troubled relationship between media and monarchy

A few days before her wedding, Meghan decided she wanted to wear a particular tiara with emeralds. True, this isn’t the sort of issue that should trouble citizens of a mature democracy but when it comes to royals, Britain is neither mature nor, let’s face it, democratic. Indeed, Amol Rajan, the BBC media editor who presented the Princes and the Press (BBC Two), is a declared republican who once branded the royal family as “absurd” and the media as a “propaganda outlet” for the monarchy. As his measured, compelling analysis of the troubled relationship showed, he may have been right about the former, but the latter? Not so much. The media, we might conclude from his programme, may be driving the monarchy to self-destruct, which would, ironically enough, suit his earlier republican views.

Back to tiaras. There was a problem: the Duchess of Sussex could not be allowed to wear the emerald tiara because it had some unfortunate history to do with Russia, according to the Sun’s former correspondent Dan Wootton. We never learned what that history was nor why it should matter. What we did learn from Wootton’s report is that Harry reportedly shouted at a royal dresser (who is a person, not a thing) that “whatever Meghan wants, Meghan gets.” This in turn prompted the Queen to tell somebody off.

Continue reading...

‘I just can’t believe it exists’: Peter Jackson takes us into the Beatles vault locked up for 52 years

Posted on by

Ahead of his epic series Get Back, the director reveals the secrets of 60 hours of intimate, unseen footage of the Fab Four – and why it turns everything we know about their final days upside down

When the world closed down in March 2020, most of us had to make do with pretending to enjoy video calls with friends or baking bread. Peter Jackson, meanwhile, was busy sifting through a mountain of unseen footage – 60 hours in total – of the Beatles, shot by the director Michael Lindsay-Hogg in 1969.

His four-year project is now finished – “we finally completed it on Friday,” says a relieved-looking Jackson from his home in New Zealand – and the resulting series, The Beatles: Get Back, will be released on Disney+ from 25 November. Originally envisaged as a feature film, Covid uncertainty saw plans revised. It is now three two-hour episodes, using the mass of outtakes from Lindsay-Hogg’s work on what would become Let It Be, the band’s fourth feature film.

Continue reading...

What can we learn from the Janet Jackson Super Bowl documentary?

Posted on by

The New York Times and FX special Malfunction revisits the ‘Nipplegate’ scandal of 2004 but adds little new understanding

In January, the New York Times documentary team released Framing Britney Spears, a succinct and bruising retrospective on the pop star’s career and the shadowy legal arrangement that governed her affairs. The 75-minute documentary, which included virtually no new information but offered a cohesive, damning portrait of her treatment by the press, launched a grenade in pop culture. It triggered widespread calls to end her conservatorship, which Spears, 39, later championed (a judge terminated the 13-year arrangement last week); as well as meditations on punishing cultural commentary, callous treatment of mental health, or the hollow, deceptive empowerment proffered by Spears’s sexy teenage image; and a queasy wave of Britney Spears content (including an NYT follow-up, Controlling Britney Spears, that was part retrospective and part, uncomfortably, true crime.

Malfunction: The Dressing Down of Janet Jackson, the latest New York Times documentary for FX on Hulu, aims for the same type of cathartic reframing through an infamous episode of early 2000s pop culture: the baring of Janet Jackson’s breast for nine-sixteenths of a second at the 2004 Super Bowl, and the subsequent cultural firestorm. The 70-minute film follows a similar format to its predecessors – archival footage (including plenty of gag-worthy early 2000s fashion) synthesized with first-person interviews and commentary from cultural critics.

Continue reading...

Too much bosom: why The Wheel of Time is far from ‘great for women’

Posted on by

Rosamund Pike, who stars in Amazon Prime’s forthcoming take on Robert Jordan’s fantasy series, says his female characters are role models. Really?

What is going on with Amazon Prime’s characterisation of The Wheel of Time? I ask this as a fantasy fan, someone who not only adores the classy stuff (NK Jemisin, Guy Gavriel Kay etc) but has also devotedly ploughed her way through The Belgariad, most of Terry Goodkind (until it got too crazy even for me) and Simon R Green. And how many people involved with the forthcoming adaptation have actually marathoned their way through all of the books?

My eyebrows were first raised back when the deal to adapt Robert Jordan’s extremely long series was announced in 2018, when head of Amazon Studios Jennifer Salke praised its “timely narrative featuring powerful women at the core”. Now, I read these books in my late teens, but my resounding memory of them was not of “powerful women”. In fact, I remember thinking Jordan’s depiction of women was pretty dismal – he might have packed in far more female characters than Tolkien ever did, but they’re constantly objectified, forever hoisting their bosoms around, adjusting their skirts – even getting spanked as punishment.

Continue reading...

Gaga, Gucci and prison ferrets: how true crime conquered the world

Posted on by

Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci stars Lady Gaga in a tale of fashion and murder. But is true crime – once the soul of cinema, from thrillers and horrors to westerns – now outgrowing the big screen?

What took you so long, House of Gucci? This story was destined to become a movie from the moment the bullet left fashion heir Maurizio Gucci dead outside his Milan office in March 1995 – shot, a witness said, by a hitman with a “beautiful, clean hand”. The film by Ridley Scott now finally arrives dripping with star power, and Lady Gaga as Gucci’s ex-wife Patrizia Reggiani. But the story alone was enough: a glittering tickbox of money, revenge and a villainess kept company in jail by an illicit pet ferret called Bambi.

True crime gold. So why, now that the film is actually here, does the Gucci case feel a strange fit for a movie after all? Put it down to timing. The film’s development began in entertainment prehistory: 2006. Back then, a lavish movie was still the grand prize for any news story, and true crime – that trashbag genre – would simply be glad of the association. Now though, film and true crime have the air of an estranged couple. Had Maurizio Gucci been gunned down on Via Palestro last week, Netflix would already have the rights and the podcast would be on Spotify.

Continue reading...

Succession recap: series three, episode five – catastrophe strikes as Logan loses his grip

Posted on by

As the patriarch succumbs to a meltdown brought on by health woes, Shiv tries to save the day at the shareholder meeting. What a hilariously excruciating hour

Spoiler alert: this recap is for people watching Succession season three, which airs on HBO in the US and Sky Atlantic in the UK. Do not read on unless you have watched episode five.

The long-awaited shareholder meeting played out like a blend of anxiety dream and boardroom farce. But who would emerge victorious? Here are the minutes from episode five, titled Retired Janitors of Idaho …

Continue reading...

‘Meeting Barry White took the sex out of his music for me’: Jane Krakowski’s honest playlist

Posted on by

The Ally McBeal and 30 Rock star on her love of Ed Sheeran, singing Lady Marmalade and knowing all the words from Grease

Lady Marmalade. “Back in the day”, quote unquote, I would just sing it as it was done by Labelle. Now I quite enjoy doing all three parts of the Moulin Rouge version, and the tricky bits, and adding in the rap by Lil’ Kim.

Continue reading...

Rob Delaney on love, loss and married life: ‘No, my wife is not having an affair with her karate teacher’

Posted on by

The star of Catastrophe and Home Sweet Home Alone answers your questions on everything from family tragedy to the value of comedy

Rob Delaney – comedian, actor, writer, tweeter, activist – co-wrote and co-starred in the Channel 4 sitcom Catastrophe with Sharon Horgan. Now he has a starring role in the film Home Sweet Home Alone. He has also written and spoken movingly about the death of his two-year-old son, Henry. Here, he answers questions from readers about all of this, as well as being an American in London – and how he keeps his hair looking so great.

When you were offered the role in Home Sweet Home Alone, did you hesitate and think that maybe another remake of a successful movie would be pointless? Bernard Hautecler, Brussels, Belgium

Continue reading...

Weight loss, deadlifts and divorce: what we learned from Adele’s One Night Only special

Posted on by

In her TV concert special, the singer got personal in an interview with Oprah Winfrey about her dreams of a nuclear family, fixation with her weight loss and how much she can deadlift

Adele opened up about the pain of her divorce, losing the dream of a nuclear family, commentary over her weight and her strained relationship with her late father in a candid, ranging interview with Oprah Winfrey.

During the sit-down in Winfrey’s rose garden, recorded prior to her first concert in more than four years for the CBS special Adele One Night Only, the singer revealed she felt “embarrassed” that she couldn’t make her marriage to Simon Konecki “work”.

Continue reading...

Will Smith: now Hollywood royalty, the star’s rise has been far from painless

Posted on by

From Fresh Prince to King Richard, personal upsets have so far failed to derail his childhood goal to be the world’s biggest film star

There’s a seemingly offhand quality which is central to the appeal of Will Smith: an innate magnetism and loose-limbed, casual coolness. But the career path from teenage rap artist to TV actor to superstar status was anything but effortless; it was the result of a self-described “psychotic” work ethic and meticulous, perhaps even obsessive, planning.

For a while, at least, he was one of the most bankable film actors on the planet – a planet that he saved on a regular basis in summer blockbusters. But while that kind of success rate is hard to sustain, Smith has shown himself to be extremely adaptable compared to his contemporaries. From film actor/musician, he has evolved into a multimedia phenomenon. He has adopted a very marketable openness and accessibility, and embraced personal failures as teachable moments.

Continue reading...

Irvine Welsh: ‘We’re heading for an anarchist paradise where we play football and make love’

Posted on by

The notorious author is breaking new ground with his TV debut. He talks about messed up cops, exorcising Sick Boy … and writing the tunes for Trainspotting: The Musical

‘I like the way you call me Irvine,” says Irvine Welsh to a young woman who’s just offered him a cup of tea, and pronounced his first name to rhyme with wine. “I’ve been living in Miami and it makes me feel like I’m back there.” The so-called Magic City is his happy place, “the polar opposite of Edinburgh. All people do in Scotland is fucking talk, they rabbit in each other’s faces. Miami is nothing like that. At the start, I found it so vacuous, but you can get all your stuff from Edinburgh and London, then take it away to Miami and write in peace.” The world is one long, warm bath to this man, it seems. He is “happy everywhere. All the shit comes out in the writing. In normal life, I focus on the good things: the beauty in life, romance, friendship.”

The undisputed king of the 1990s, of swear words, of Scottishness, is here to talk about Crime, in which he breaks new ground with his first script for television. It’s a riveting and quite surprising move from him – it starts off looking like a classic cop show, although I’ve only been allowed to watch the first three episodes. “I know this sounds like what everybody would say, but episode four is when it really kicks off, and five and six go absolutely fucking mental.” It really doesn’t sound like what everybody would say. It’s hard to figure out what is more charming about Welsh – how much of a one-off he is, or his conviction that he’s exactly like everyone else.

Continue reading...

Inside the world of foley artists: ‘Watermelons are brilliant for the sound of brains hitting the floor’

Posted on by

They are film and television’s unsung heroes: the people who create sounds, for everything from crunchy snow, kissing and horses’ hooves. Just don’t mention coconuts

Monday morning in the small Essex town of Coggeshall, and in an unassuming building that used to be a laundry, a man named Barnaby is trying to sound like a horse. Trying and succeeding, uncannily. Not neighing or whinnying, just making the sound of the hooves on the ground.

In a big screen on the wall of a windowless room is an armoured knight astride a white warhorse. It’s Richard III, as it happens, accompanied by a gaggle of guards, also armoured and mounted. It’s a scene from The Lost King, Stephen Frears’s upcoming film about the woman who, after 30 years of looking, discovered Richard’s remains under a Leicester car park.

Continue reading...

The Crown’s Josh O’Connor: ‘My advice to my 21-year-old self? Find a therapist’

Posted on by

Before his turn as a conflicted survivor of the first world war in Mothering Sunday, the star of God’s Own Country, The Durrells and The Crown answers your questions

If you weren’t an actor and you had to work in the film industry, what would you like to do? avishagfink

I would like to be a ceramicist. I still want to be a ceramicist while also being an actor. A functional ceramicist. My grandmother was a sculptural ceramicist and she was very brilliant, but I’d like to make plates and pots and mugs. I’m a big fan of Ian Godfrey and I’m very fortunate to have a couple of his pieces. Lucie Rie and Hans Coper I really like; Richard Batterham, very much.

Continue reading...

Dean Stockwell, Quantum Leap and Blue Velvet actor, dies aged 85

Posted on by

Versatile actor had worked in Hollywood since childhood, and was Oscar nominated for his role in 1988 comedy Married to the Mob

A life in pictures: Dean Stockwell

Dean Stockwell, the former child star who became a key figure in the Hollywood counter-culture and enjoyed late success in popular TV shows, has died aged 85. According to Deadline, his family said he died at home “of natural causes”.

Born in Los Angeles in 1936, Stockwell had become a major name while still in high school, starring in the anti-racism parable The Boy With Green Hair in 1948 and alongside Errol Flynn in the 1950 adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim. However, Stockwell found the transition to adulthood difficult and after dropping out of university he re-established his film career with a lead role in Compulsion, the 1959 crime film based on the Leopold and Loeb murder case, for which he won a best actor award at the Cannes film festival alongside co-stars Orson Welles and Bradford Dillman.

Continue reading...

Jemima Khan cuts links with The Crown over treatment of Diana’s final years

Posted on by

Princess’s close friend says story was not handled ‘as respectfully and compassionately’ as she had hoped

Jemima Khan, a close friend of Princess Diana, pulled out of helping to script Netflix’s The Crown because the story was not being handled “as respectfully or compassionately” as she had hoped, she has said.

Khan said she was brought in to help the show’s creator, Peter Morgan, write the script of the fifth series, which includes the years leading up to Diana's death in a Paris car crash in 1997.

Continue reading...

‘I had to watch it with my therapist’: when real-life horrors get turned into TV

Posted on by

From The Shrink Next Door to Dr Death, true-crime podcasts are being snapped up for TV. But how does it really feel when your worst nightmare becomes a bingewatch?

The dark new drama The Shrink Next Door tells an almost unbelievable story. Almost, of course, because it actually happened. In 1980s New York, wealthy businessman Martin “Marty” Markowitz fell under the spell of his psychiatrist Isaac “Ike” Herschkopf, who manipulated Marty into giving him his house, handing over his business and cutting off his family for almost 30 years. In an adaptation penned by one of Succession’s writers, Georgia Pritchett, Will Ferrell plays the patient whom many assumed was the handyman in his own home, while Paul Rudd is the smarmy shrink turned cuckoo in the nest.

If the story sounds familiar, that’s because the show is based on the hit podcast of the same name. The Shrink Next Door is the latest in the podcast to TV trend, which includes Julia Roberts’s Homecoming, Dirty John, with Connie Britton as the gaslit victim of “Dirty” John Meehan (Eric Bana), and Dr Death – based on the terrifying tale of sociopathic surgeon Christopher Duntsch – starring Joshua Jackson, Christian Slater and Alec Baldwin.

Continue reading...

Minari’s Youn Yuh-jung: ‘I’m very strange-looking, in a good way’

Posted on by

As the London Korean film festival kicks off, Youn Yuh-jung, talks about how her portrayals of racy grannies and scheming maids scandalised the nation

In her Oscar-winning turn in last year’s Minari, Youn Yuh-jung played the mischievous granny you wished you’d had: the one who ignores your fun-sucking parents, takes you on wild adventures and teaches you to do your own thing. “You’re not a real grandma,” her Americanised grandson tells her. “They bake cookies! They don’t swear! They don’t wear men’s underwear!” In real life, Youn is pretty similar: lively, funny, unpretentious, and, she admits, not all that good at cooking. The 74-year-old actor has had an unconventional life and career, and most of us in the west know only a tiny fraction of it.

“My problem is, I don’t plan anything!” Youn laughs over Zoom from Los Angeles. Unlike her character in Minari, she speaks fluent English, although she apologises for it not being good enough.

Continue reading...