11 h. ago ROLAND WHITE reviews Civilisations: Rise And Fall: BBC turns the history of Rome into a lecture on immigration and equality

BBC series Civilisations Rise And Fall seems to believe its core audience struggles with detail and has the attention span of a hyperactive squirrel.

Events

34 h. ago ROLAND WHITE reviews Prisoner 951 on BBC1: Nazanin's Iran hell made me yearn for the days of gunboat diplomacy

The people at Panorama who doctored President Trump's speech have done more damage to the BBC than they can possibly imagine.

Events

5 d. ago ROLAND WHITE reviews Turner: The Secret Sketchbooks: Do the paintings really look like omelettes? Ronnie Wood disagrees

He drew our attention to the movement and thickness of the paint, and highlighted the way the artist expressed turbulence and unrest.

Events

5 d. ago Turner: The Secret Sketchbooks review – the sheer number of pornographic drawings is a big shock

JMW Turner left behind some 37,000 sketches when he died, many of which have rarely been seen. Do they – including a huge collection of explicit sketches – reveal truths about the elusive man?The hook for Turner: the Secret Sketchbooks is meant to be that many of the 37,000 sketches left behind by the great British painter JMW Turner have rarely been seen and never been filmed; therein may be hints at the nuances of his elusive character that his main oeuvre kept hidden. Equally remarkable, though, is the documentary’s bold choice of contributors. As well as the art historians and present-day British artists who would dominate a standard art film, there are famous laymen, from the obviously somewhat qualified – Timothy Spall played the artist in Mike Leigh’s biographical film Mr Turner; Chris Packham is well placed to comment on Turner’s reverence for the natural world – to the more surprising hire of Ronnie Wood from the Rolling Stones.Neither the sketchbooks nor the celebs turn th...

Events

6 d. ago ROLAND WHITE reviews Cooper & Fry: Headless corpses? Evil spirits? All in a day's work for a Peak District cop

When people start new jobs in real life, they wait a few days to settle in. They're on their best behaviour, and they don't moan that it was much better at their old place.

Events

7 d. ago ROLAND WHITE reviews Celebrity MasterChef: Grace Dent's recipe for success? Make the cooks the stars

Celebrity MasterChef is further proof that you can make successful television from pretty much anything. The cooks' first task was to reveal a piece of food, and prepare something with that ingredient in question.

Society

2 w. ago Documentary explores whether JMW Turner may have been neurodivergent

Programme uses artist’s sketches, drawings and watercolours to build unprecedented psychological portraitHe is widely regarded as England’s greatest painter, but despite his extraordinary output, elements of JMW Turner’s personality have remained a mystery.Now, a groundbreaking BBC documentary delves into Turner’s 37,000 sketches, drawings and watercolours to build an unprecedented psychological portrait, one that raises the possibility that Turner’s singular vision was shaped by childhood trauma and neurodivergence. Continue reading...

Politics