Millennium: The Musical

Being a Bob Godfrey fan can be a thankless task. Read more

Pig Heart Boy

At a time when the rural/fantasy axis of children’s drama is ever more dependent on co-productions (enjoyable though they may often be) and the urban/contemporary/realist axis has largely been brought down to a soapified Grange Hill and Byker Grove, with no identifiable beginnings or endings, the arrival of this adaptation of Malorie Blackman’s novel, a runner-up for the 1998 Carnegie Medal, was welcome. Read more

How Do You Want Me?

The second series of Simon Nye’s rural sitcom ended last night with something resembling a bang. Yet this is a series that seems to have gone largely unnoticed. Certainly is not one that has passed into bar-prop parlance. Read more

Modern Times

Like its predecessor 40 Minutes, Modern Times has always found space for a rather charming, old-fashioned view of “Englishness”. Read more

Sports Personality of the Century

The importance of sport in our society is rarely properly scrutinised. It is without question that we believe sporting stories are appropriate subject matter for our news vessels, sitting without incongruity beside matters of life and death. But then again, we often view our sport in Bill Shankly terms. Read more

Have I Got News For You

To the best of my knowledge, no one talks about Have I Got News For You anymore. Read more

Doomwatch

Channel 5 isn’t where you would expect to encounter challenging, quality TV. Doomwatch proved an unsuccessful attempt at subverting that assumption. It’s not that this programme was intrinsically bad, there was the essence of some fine aspirations faintly palpable somewhere within the thing, but ultimately it proved an ugly, uncomfortable spectacle. Let’s go back to the ’70s, again. Read more