The double act between screenwriter Peter Morgan and his favoured leading man Michael Sheen has given us some of the most teasingly enjoyable dramas of recent years, but how much genuine insight they've given us into Tony Blair or New Labour remains a moot point.
JasperRees Not long now till Tony Blair faces interrogation by A Marr. GraemeAThomson and I tweeting a live review
GraemeAThomson Nice to see they’ve scheduled it straight after Restoration Roadshow. Someone at the Beeb with a GSOH?
GraemeAThomson Marr's gone with the orange tie. Provocative
JasperRees Are you prepared to speculate about the timing of the Hague twin-bed allegations? Who wins? Who loses?
Food writer Stefan Gates seems to have spent his whole life in wilder regions, whether clambering naked up a rain-swept Giant’s Causeway (yes, that‘s the six-year-old Stefan, with his sister Samantha, on the cover of Led Zeppelin’s 1973 album Houses of the Holy), or eating sheep's testicles in Afghanistan, or whatever, in BBC Two's Cooking in the Danger Zone. His latest venture would seem to be his riskiest yet – for Gates immerses himself into the world of the widely feared E-numbered food additives (the E stands for Europe, as in EC-approved, in case, like me, you hadn’t clocked that). It’s a hugely fruitful subject, and hopefully one not with added E120 – the food dye that puts pink into strawberry yoghurt.
People are lured to behave like animals for TV now - Big Brother, Celebrity Jungle, The X Factor - so it merely completes the idiotic equation to have animals insistently transfigured into little humans in wildlife TV. Or big, hairy humans in the case of mountain gorillas and Martin Clunes.
Lucy Punch – what a great name for a comedian (or a female boxer). Unfortunately that is the only thing that’s great about Vexed, a new comedy drama written by Howard Overman, creator of Channel 4’s perky ASBO (RIP) superpower fantasy Misfits. His new show is that relative rarity, a comedy cop show, a genre of which Punch has some experience, having had a supporting role in Hot Fuzz, although it’s not in Vexed’s interests to start making such comparisons.
Keen to boost its credentials as “the home of intelligent and ambitious drama”, BBC Two has announced details of its dramatisation of Michel Faber’s bestselling novel, The Crimson Petal and the White. Adapted into four 60 minute episodes by playwright and screenwriter Lucinda Coxon and directed by Marc Munden (of The Devil’s Whore and The Mark of Cain fame), The Crimson Petal stars Romola Garai, Gillian Anderson, Richard E. Grant, Chris O’Dowd and Mark Gatiss.
What was originally a coincidence of reviewing – two dispatches from the Dark Ages, Treasures of the Anglo-Saxons on BBC Four and Domesday on BBC Two – in fact turned into a remarkably instructive diptych of how and how not to make history programmes for the television.
My surname came to Britain with the Normans, and I must say that my forebears have had a bad press in their adopted homeland. From Hereward the Wake to Robin Hood, Anglo-Saxon legends have depicted us as despotic and cruel, whereas we were great builders of castles and cathedrals, brilliant horsemen and tip-top administrators, as well as being despotic and cruel. Anyway, it was good to have the refreshingly un-youthful and un-strident Professor Robert Bartlett (more Norman names) giving us his authoritative account of the antecedents and legacy of 1066 and all that. It’s about time we Viking-Frenchmen had a spokesperson.