As the semifinal of the eighth series of Britain’s Got Talent airs, we asked Karen Kidman, who entered the contest with her daughter, to tell us about their experience. Part two will appear next week.
Category Archives: Television
The Complete and Utter History of Britain
Michael Palin and Terry Jones’s 1969 sketch show is (incompletely) released today on DVD. Emma Street takes a look at the forgotten forerunner of Monty Python.
Murder, Rinse, Repeat
MarvMarsh returns once more to the scene of the crime, to ponder the conundrum that is Criminal Minds.
The Solitary Psychopath
The BBC’s Sherlock ended its long-awaited, if brief, run last week. Yasmeen Khan argues that despite accusations of self-conscious fan service, it remains compelling viewing.
MostlyFilm’s Review of 2013 – Television
Welcome to MostlyFilm’s review of 2013, which we like to think of as pleasingly eccentric, rather than randomly boshed together. We’re here all week (try the brisket). We kick off with a review of the year in TV, with musings from Ricky Young on zombies, The Tramp on Elementary, Sarah Slade on the reality TV successes of the year, Viv Wilby on a reality near-miss, Ron Swanson on US comedy and drama, and Indy Datta on web TV.
The Sad Eyes of Ken Mok
A string of terrible production decisions has left America’s Next Top Model swinging in the wind, while its overseas clones seem – thus far – immune. Ricky Young risks The Wrath Of Tyra and investigates the sudden dearth of smizing.
Never Knowingly Soft-sold
With John Lewis making actual headlines with its Christmas adverts, Mr Moth takes a look that is both wry and sideways at this season’s big television commercials.
Berlin Alexanderplatz
Your next box set? Philip Concannon spends a weekend with Fassbinder’s epic television masterpiece.
We’re all going to be together in the dark
by Mr Moth
I know you like it, Americans, but you do Hallowe’en all wrong. For a start, there’s the costumes. They’re supposed to be scary, you can’t just wear any old fancy dress. Going to a Hallowe’en party as Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz is just not on, unless you’re basically admitting a deep-seated fear of gay icons. Trick or Treat? Well, that’s debatable and I don’t know who’s right or wrong but I can tell you now that ACTUALLY GOING THROUGH WITH THE TRICK IS BAD. Don’t do that. Changing your Twitter avatar to a spooky skull on the first of October? TOO SOON. The most egregious affront to Hallowe’en, however, has occurred only recently and in an unlikely spot – cable television.
You see, American Horror Story: Murder House was first broadcast on FX in the United States on the fifth of October. The second series, Asylum, premiered on the 17th of October. And Coven, the third series, began on the ninth of October. Is it too much to ask that a series so steeped in American (and, for that matter, European) horror tradition premieres on the 31st of October? Or at least as near as possible?
Aw Hell Gnaw!
By Ricky Young.
Things have changed. A bit.
When we last talked about AMC’s The Walking Dead on MostlyFilm, we spent most of the article agog at how a programme so filled with desperate and throbbing flaws could continue to be such a mega-hit.
Make no mistake – and broadsheet media-section column inches be damned – this is by far AMC’s biggest show. Yes, they have Mad Men, of course, watched by Mark Lawson, Mark Lawson’s cat, Mark Lawson’s commissioning editor and absolutely nobody else. They had Breaking Bad, which managed a degree of cultural significance by repackaging the good bits of The Shield half-a-decade later, and whose ludicrously hype-drenched finale was watched by a supposedly epic 10.3 million viewers.
Want to know something? Thirteen out of The Walking Dead’s sixteen third-season episodes beat the ass off that. More people regularly tuned in to watch Egg out of This Life get chased by golems again than could be bothered finding out what ended up happening to Walter White. (Spoiler: He returned to his own planet.)
People sure do love the heck out of zombies, it seems. But, like a creeping, tenacious infection, spreading from a single starting point and extending its influence into multiple parts of the whole, this year The Walking Dead showed signs of an extremely worrying and unexpected new symptom.
Competence.
MostlyFilm 