Film and television are sometimes criticised as requiring less imagination than reading. If we can already see exactly what the characters look like, if the actors and designers and directors have already captured so much detail on screen, what’s left for us to imagine? On the other hand, there are people who see this as […]
BBC2 tonight, 9pm: Trouble in Amish ParadiseAn extraordinary insight into the secretive world of the Old Order Amish of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. When two radical Amish men, Ephraim and Jesse Stoltzfus, start to question some of the most fundamental aspects of their Amish culture, they face excommunication from their church and total rejection by their […]
Last weekend, I watched Einstein and Eddington, the BBC2 drama starring Andy Serkis and David Tennant as the two scientists, whose lives become intertwined through Einstein’s new and unproven theory of relativity . I don’t know enough about the two figures to judge how historically accurate it was. I’d be somewhat surprised if the two […]
There’s an interesting article on Yahoo News about People Who Live Without TV (shock! horror!). I’m not too fussed about having a television. As long as I’m able to watch Doctor Who round with friends or online via the BBC iPlayer, there’s not much television I’d really miss. My techno-addiction is the Internet rather than […]
As the Human Fertilization and Embryology Bill went through Parliament, Channel 4 aired a documentary about “the rising influence of Christian fundamentalism in the UK”, which I watched with very mixed feelings. The documentary was very selective and frustratingly one-sided. It failed to properly define fundamentalism: the way it portrayed it seemed to be Young […]
You wait for one alien invasion to come along, and two come along at once. Although nine months have passed for us since the pilot of The Sarah Jane Adventures back in the New Year, which saw the Doctor’s former companion defeat the Bane, adopt a son and begin to gather a rag-tag crew of […]
Amid a lot of hype, drama series Heroes has arrived on BBC2 on Wednesday evenings. Watching the X-Men films, I always thought that a multi-character superhero story was better suited for an ongoing television series than for cinema, since many characters only get a couple of significant moments on-screen. Having heard good things about the […]
Torchwood hit our television screens earlier this week, with the new Doctor Who spin-off garnered BBC3’s biggest ever audience, with 2.5 million people tuning in on Sunday night. It sees the mysterious organisation ‘Torchwood’ seeking to track down alien technology to defend humanity against whatever nasties slip through the Rift in time and space that […]
Yesterday evening, I caught the end of this edition of Horizon – sadly it was laughably dumbed-down. I’m sure there’s an interesting and intelligent programme to be made on the subject of the similarities and differences between humans and apes, and how we should treat them, but this wasn’t it. A comedian spending some time […]
The new series of Doctor Who is only two weeks away, and the publicity machine is beginning to kick in! Check out the website Outpost Gallifrey for a round-up of all the news. I’m really excited about the series. It’s been a lurking fear ever since the announcement in September 2003 that they’ll do a […]