I Love 1994
Saturday, September 15, 2001 by David Agnew · Comments Off
Saturday night, Saturday night… and I’m sitting in front of the television, recalling a conversation with a colleague at work. “Everything came back in the ’90′s, so the decade never really had a style of its own,” I was informed. So I Love the Nineties was always destined to be problematic. Read more
The Last Night of the Proms
Saturday, September 15, 2001 by Ian Jones · Comments Off
First came the pictures. Arresting images terrifyingly simple to understand. Frames that will resonate through history, tragic marriages of blurred video camera with cruelly focused real life. And as those pictures continued to emerge, filmed from ever more galling angles, so the words began. A torrent of them, raw, unqualified, sorrowful and vitriolic, homespun and world-weary. Attempts to both rationalize and elaborate on a jumble of facts, emotions, and consequences. Read more
‘Orrible
Monday, September 10, 2001 by Jack Kibble-White · Comments Off
Our preconceptions of BBC2′s ‘Orrible are formed chiefly around its star and co-scriptwriter – Johnny Vaughan. His previous experience in this field is Snow White and the Seven Cons (the pantomime he wrote when serving a four year prison sentence), yet the £5 million that the BBC spent to secure his services, ensures that expectations are high. Read more
Bob and Rose
Monday, September 10, 2001 by Graham Kibble-White · Comments Off
Russell T Davies, the writer of ITV’s new six-part drama Bob and Rose, has baggage. In the pre-autumn schedule skirmishes his name has been deployed as an exocet to punch a hole through the BBC’s “cynically populist” drama output. He is, like McGovern, Bleasdale and Bennett, a writer whose name can be bandied about in the marketing of a programme. Read more
I Love 1993
Saturday, September 8, 2001 by Jack Kibble-White · Comments Off
I love 25 August 2001. I remember it clearly because I was stuck on a bus. Read more
Absolutely Fabulous
Friday, September 7, 2001 by Ian Jones · Comments Off
If in doubt, fall over: the credo of Absolutely Fabulous since its debut in 1992. A step down from a chair, a simple walk across a room… the tiniest movement from Edina (Jennifer Saunders) or Patsy (Joanna Lumley) always came accompanied with assorted jerks and twitches, better still an all-out collapse at the knees. Read more
I Love 1992
Saturday, September 1, 2001 by Bruce MacDonald · Comments Off
1992: the year of Europe, the Single European Act, the Treaty of Maastricht, Black Wednesday and the Barcelona Olympics. In short, one of the most momentous years in recent European history. But, wait a moment, this isn’t 1992 – it’s I Love 1992. Read more
Storyville: Fashion Victim
Thursday, August 30, 2001 by Paula Wilkins · Comments Off
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
Monday, August 27, 2001 by Graham Kibble-White · Comments Off
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
Saturday, August 25, 2001 by David McNay · Comments Off
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
Saturday, August 18, 2001 by Robin Carmody · Comments Off
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
Saturday, August 18, 2001 by Ian Jones · Comments Off
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
Saturday, August 18, 2001 by Chris Hughes · Comments Off
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
Friday, August 10, 2001 by Ian Jones · Comments Off
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
Big Brother
Friday, July 27, 2001 by Ian Jones · Comments Off
What will be the lasting memory of Big Brother 2? No overwhelming moment of high drama, no intense, carthatic confrontation or resolution – the only fireworks were those let off outside the house, which the contestants gawped at before dutifully scurrying back inside on their masters orders. Read more
Survivor: The £1m Final
Thursday, July 26, 2001 by Andrew Collins · Comments Off
It’s been lonely out here by the water cooler this summer. Everyone else has been chattering away about Big Brother (Helen this, Paul that), the return of Sharon Watts, Coronation Street‘s internet stalker, Ricky Gervais (genius or c***?), there was even a conversation or two about the General Election. Read more
Space
Sunday, July 22, 2001 by Cameron Borland · Comments Off
With a boom of celestial proportions, the much-vaunted Space, fronted by the redoubtable Sam Neill, began on Sunday evening. Read more
Big Brother
Saturday, July 21, 2001 by Steve Williams · Comments Off
One of the best things about Big Brother is that the series is constantly developing throughout the run. The programme at the moment is perhaps unrecognisable to the programme at the end of May; the days of Penny and Stuart now seem so long ago, at times it’s as if they were in the last series. Read more
Big Brother’s Little Brother
Sunday, July 15, 2001 by Cameron Borland · Comments Off
The enduring pleasure of Big Brother’s Little Brother is the belligerently unsubtle way in which each evictee has been thrust onto our screens for five days, Sunday through to Thursday, thus reducing the compelling urge that most of them appear to suffer from – that a high profile media career awaits. Read more
Big Brother
Friday, July 13, 2001 by Chris Diamond · Comments Off
In its final stages now Big Brother is reaching the point where, for me, it became most interesting last time round. Less people means more time for the remaining participants. More evictions mean a higher awareness amongst the housemates of both the impending end of the show and of their own mortality within it. Read more