Storyville: Fashion Victim

Those expecting the ususal fawning, “it’s a tragedy he’s dead” style tribute to fashion designer Gianni Versace, would have been in for a surprise had they watched this excellent film from James Kent. This was no documentary about the merits of Versace’s work or of how sorely he will be missed by fashion’s glitterati, and it was far from the kind of clichéd offering that ITV or Channel 5 may have given us on the subject. Read more

The 100 Greatest Kids’ TV Shows

Whilst the I Love … series rattles on on BBC2, pushing its remit to the limit, Channel 4 offer up what’s becoming regular and welcome bank holiday fare with another from the Top 100 canon. Read more

I Love 1991

I have always wondered what nostalgia was. Sure, I can look it up in the dictionary any time I want, but what does it actually mean to me? Read more

I Love 1990

With the clip show format arguably starting to go off the boil, if we need anything at the moment we need a sense of strangeness, otherness, distance, among programmes of this genre. I Love the Nineties therefore seems rather unnecessary and pointless, and to have come too soon. Read more

The National Lottery: Winning Lines

For an evening that was supposed to mark the beginning of a revolution in television programming and strategy this Saturday night on BBC and ITV felt stubbornly conventional. Aside from the obvious, and frankly bizarre, novelty of having a huge 75 minutes of hastily-edited football highlights shoved out at peak audience and advertiser grazing time, here were a selection of shows reeking of yesteryear. Read more

The Premiership

Sitting on a train, some time after seven o’clock on Saturday evening, I heard for the first time a plea that will echo round the nation’s cellular networks at that time for months to come. “Hi Dad. Can you tape The Premiership?” OK, not quite for the first time. I’d said it myself 10 minutes earlier. Read more

EastEnders: It’s Your Party

Not harsh, merely, but punitive. The treatment meted out by the BBC towards its once great flagship programme continues to beggar belief. EastEnders‘ slide into total irrelevance and self-parody, hastened with the arrival of a fourth weekly episode, almost inevitably had to be marked with an equally unwanted and misguided “tribute” such as this. Read more