Television: London clay was the
milieu for The Tube: An underground history. It
is 150 years since the world's first underground train pulled into
Farringdon Station, and this terrific programme told the story in
the context of today's network.
Television: NEVER mind what I think - the
British Academy Television Awards (BBC1, Sunday) tells us what the
professionals themselves judge to be the best performances and
productions by their peers over the previous 12 months.
Television: PAPAL encyclicals, statements
from the Archbishops' Council, even my own sermons - all pale into
insignificance as vehicles for reinforcing or challenging
contemporary morals, when compared with the effect of popular TV
sitcoms.
Television: I HAD planned to
review Jerusalem: An archaeological mystery
story. Why wasn't it shown? Digging around unearths a
complex and unedifying story. It appears that anxiety about
potential reaction drove the BBC into pusillanimous retreat.
Television: I FOUND Israel:
Facing the Future (BBC2, Wednesday of last week), in
which John Ware reported the current state of public and private
opinion about what might lie ahead for Jew and Arab, a confusing
programme.
Television: THE title commits a serious
misrepresentation: Keeping Britain Alive: The NHS in a
day, in which 100 camera crews followed every aspect of the
work of the world's largest public-health service throughout 18
October 2012, documents a greater reality than it
advertises.
Television: Easter Week was marked by the
Lord's Prayer's turning up as dramatic utterance of choice in no
fewer than two TV plays.
Television: "A WELL-REGULATED music to the
glory of God" is, no doubt, the aim of your director of music, and
surely informed your keeping of Holy Week and Easter - but probably
was not quite as fully realised as it was in the life's work of the
original formulator of this ambition, the subject of the
superlative documentary Bach: A passionate
life (BBC2, Holy Saturday).
Television: The commentator Huw Edwards
is simply not up to the job. He is enthusiastic, and means well,
but I never get the impression that he knows what he is talking
about.
Gillean Craig enjoys some "unprecedented intimacies and
carefully managed revelations" in ITV's portrait of the Queen
Television: IS IT hell outside your church?
Those of a fundamentalist mindset have usually claimed that
salvation is on offer only for those who remain strictly within the
fold.How to Get to Heaven with the
Hutterites presented an ambivalent version of this
phenomenon.