Games Britannia, BBC Four

A three-part history of board games begins on the brainiac channel

A bit like the British constitution, it’s never been written down. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist: the edict, issued from a leather-bound desk somewhere within the innermost enclave of the citadel that is Television Centre, that an audience’s intelligence must never in any circumstances ever be taken as a given. No horses were frightened in the making of this programme.

Margot, BBC Four

TV film hints maybe it was Fonteyn and Arias all the time

If Margot Fonteyn and Rudy Nureyev were the most massively important people who ever existed in ballet, then the most massively important question that ever existed in ballet was, did they sleep together? Last night Margot got this over pleasingly quickly. There was the quivery BBC anno at the start that there would be scenes “of a sexual nature”, and hop-skip-jump the couple were at it like rabbits straight after their first performance together.

Interview: Anne-Marie Duff plays Margot Fonteyn

The turbulent life and loves of the prima ballerina

Anne-Marie Duff doesn't really resemble Margot Fonteyn. Blonde, fresh-faced and blue-eyed, she has nothing of the exotic, olive, Latin complexion that Fonteyn inherited from her Brazilian grandfather. And she never learned ballet, even if, with her long, lean frame and elegant swan neck, she looks more like a dancer than the rather more compact Peggy Hookham of Reigate (as Fonteyn started out in life).

Hi Society: The Wonderful World of Nicky Haslam, BBC Four

Half a century of celebrity hobnobbing with dahling Nicky

This odyssey of party-goer and interior designer Nicky Haslam frequently resembled a Private Eye diary by Craig Brown, who’s always at his best when lacerating narcissistic name-dropping diarists from earlier generations. We watched Haslam swapping anecdotes about Picasso with the painter’s biographer John Richardson, reminiscing about how Mae West used to sleep with two monkeys on her bed, and pointing out where Marilyn Monroe and Tallulah Bankhead used to live in New York.

Enid, BBC Four

Beloved children's author Enid Blyton is portrayed as a ruthless ice maiden with a father fixation

Has somebody got it in for poor Matthew Macfadyen? In the recent series of Criminal Justice he didn’t even make it to the end of episode one before he was fatally stabbed by Maxine Peake. Now here he was as Enid Blyton’s adoring and supportive first husband Hugh Pollock, books editor at the George Newnes publishing house, only to find himself on the wrong end of Ms Blyton’s brutally self-centred drive for success at any price. For heaven’s sake, was this any way to treat a man who’d given you your big break in publishing and even bought you a new typewriter?

Singles and Downloads

Thomas H Green rummages through the hottest new singles and downloads

Slagsmalsklubben, Sponsored By Destiny (Zarcorp)

When white 7" singles drop though my letter box with commercially suicidal band names, they're usually from artists just starting their career, boutique vinyl being cannily collectable in our MP3 age. Slagsmalsklubben, however, which means The Fight Club in their native tongue, are a six-piece from Norrkoping in Sweden who have three albums under their belt.

Synth Britannia, BBC Four

Alienated synthesists trigger pop revolution

Would-be axe murderers of the BBC often propose to lop off (among other things) TV channels Three and Four, but Four’s music coverage is vastly better value for viewers’ money than the executive pension fund. Synth Britannia stuck firmly to Four’s “Britannia” formula, being a bunch of talking heads and clumps of archive footage interwoven with synth-pop classics from the late Seventies and early Eighties. But that’s OK as long as the raw material is strong, and this saga of post-punk, pre-New Romantic gadget-pop was often fascinating and sometimes even thought-provoking.

Micro Men, BBC Four

When British computing ruled the earth!

You won’t read this in Steve Jobs’ autobiography, but in the early Eighties Britain led the world in personal computing. Acorn made the BBC Micro, which sold 1.5 million units. Sinclair Research shifted shed-loads of its ZX81, despite its rickety construction and coal-fired levels of performance. A generation of apprentice nerds produced their first bloops and squiggles on these devices. Today, no doubt they’re all writing apps for that iPhone you're reading this on.
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