Bye bye Holby City
Last week the BBC announced that the long-running hospital drama Holby City is going to be terminated next March. The reason given was that the BBC was looking to produce dramas that “better reflect,...
Category: TV
Review: Skipping School (Dispatches, Channel 4)
Last night, at the rather late hour of 10:15pm, Channel 4 broadcast an hour-long Dispatches programme, presented by the children’s commissioner Anne Longfield, about concerns that home-schooling is being used as a cover for...
Holby City: the Gaskill saga’s denouement
I’ve been a fan of the BBC dramas Casualty and Holby City since the 1980s, although I only started watching them on a regular basis again more recently (Casualty was a fixture when I...
Review: Silent Witness, “One Day”
Silent Witness is a series based on the work of police pathologists: the “witness” refers to the body of a murder victim. It’s been running since 1996 and the stories are always in two...
Review: House of Saud, episode 1
So, last night the first episode of a three-part series on BBC2, House of Saud: A Family at War was broadcast. I commented on the trailer last night as the language had been troubling...
Anti-Catholic prejudice? Really?
400 years on from Guy Fawkes, Britain’s Catholics still face prejudice | Catherine Pepinster, the Guardian Currently on the BBC there’s a serial about the Gunpowder Plot, in which a group of Catholics in...
Review: ITV’s “Don’t Hate Us”
ITV Player: Tonight — Don’t Hate Us Last Thursday ITV broadcast a documentary on the rise in hate crimes against people with disabilities which has occurred since the coalition government came to power and...
Carole Malone: a new low in victim-blaming
This was on “This Morning”, a chat show that goes out on weekday mornings on ITV1, earlier today (Wednesday): Carol Malone, a tabloid newspaper columnist, gave her judgement on the family of which six...
Who is really Undateable?
Channel 4 has been advertising a forthcoming TV show titled “The Undateables”, in which they try to hook up various people with disabilities and disfigurements which might have been getting in the way of...
RIP trolling isn’t the worst kind
On Tuesday night, the BBC broadcast two programmes about online bullying, one of them specifically dedicated to the phenomenon of “RIP trolling”, meaning the phenomenon of mindless idiots posting insulting messages, videos and doctored...
Social-worker bashers’ wilful blindness
On Monday night, BBC2 broadcast a documentary titled Protecting Our Children, the first of a series of three programmes which follows a social worker in Bristol as they deal with one of their child...
“One Born Every Minute”: learning disabilities, babies and marriage
One Born Every Minute is a series on Channel 4 (UK) which features women giving birth, and the nurses and midwives who attend to them. They feature two women (or couples, if the man...
Holby City’s ridiculous bone marrow transplant story
Last night BBC1’s Holby City aired a quite ridiculous storyline in which a 16-year-old girl with the skin condition Epidermolysis Bullosa (EB) received a bone-marrow transplant from her sister, which is supposed to cure...
Is there money to burn in Basildon?
BBC iPlayer: The Big Gypsy Eviction This programme was on BBC1 last night (you can watch it until next Thursday, if you are in the UK) and is the result of six years of...
Emmerdale, assisted suicide and the drama imperative
I don’t plan to watch the Terry Pratchett assisted suicide show that is on tonight, but I did watch the sequence of episodes in Emmerdale in which Jackson Walsh, who sustained a spinal-cord injury...
Minorities may die in Midsomer Massacres
The BBC doesn’t have a monopoly on ridiculous plotlines in its drama, despite the recent trends of Casualty, Holby City and EastEnders (not to mention the sappy ridiculousness of the school drama series, Waterloo...