newcritics

To summarise: wartime Britain kept its spirits up by listening to entertaining and uplifting radio from the BBC. After the war the morale raising Home Service was joined by the Light Programme. Together they pioneered a brand of light-hearted and often highly innovative radio entertainment. Shows like Round the Horne, Hancock’s Half Hour and The [...]

You know this already: Doctor Who is a triumph. It’s a really grown-up collision of ideas and drama in a primetime TV slot. In the three series since the Doctor’s return to TV in 2005, classical science fiction devices have mixed it up with classy pop TV plotting in a way you very rarely see. [...]

What’s a thirty-five-year-old countercultural love-fest doing ruling the pop cultural roost seven years into the twenty-first century? How did a crowd of feckless hippies wind up practically owning the British media for a week every Summer (rain or shine)? These and other questions are, interestingly, absent from the papers and the broadcast media these days. [...]

I know it’s been a few days and I don’t mean to sound… What? Bitter? Negative? Jaded? I don’t know. Anyway, The Queen. Let’s talk about The Queen. Here in Britain – its country of origin you’ll remember (like you could forget) – The Queen was moderately well-received. Well-received like, for instance, an interesting TV [...]

Something remarkable happened at the conclusion of this year’s Celebrity Big Brother (the one with the exciting race and class theme that I’ve been going on about). Shilpa won. Britain voted, and Britain voted — by a substantial margin — for an Indian actress never heard of outside the subcontinent. In fact, to count off [...]

So Britain did the right thing. Celebrity Big Brother viewers voted by an 82% majority to evict racist bully Jade Goody. Endorsement contracts have been cancelled, Jade’s successful perfume line has been pulled from department store shelves, the tabloids have universally dumped their favourite reality TV celebrity and her lucrative TV career is over.
Opportunist politicians [...]

Britain’s having a nasty allergic reaction… to a reality TV show called Celebrity Big Brother. Here’s what’s happened (this is a big international story so you’ll know the basics). Once or twice a year commercial terrestrial TV station Channel 4 stuffs a bunch of B-list (C-list I guess) celebrities into a big house lined with [...]

In our house (here in London’s outer suburbs) we have an annual post-Xmas tradition. In the weeks after the dust has settled and a small truckload of packaging and wrapping has been disposed of, I review the stuff that the kids actually seem to like (and sometimes the obvious rubbish that’ll never see daylight again [...]