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I Love 1994

Saturday, September 15, 2001 by · 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 · 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 · 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 · 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 · 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 · 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 · 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 · 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 · 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 · 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 · 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 · 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 · 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 · 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 · 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 · 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 · 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 · 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 · 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 · 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

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