Rosie Jones: Am I a Ret*rd, reviewed
This documentary by the comedian Rosie Jones, about the online abuse and trolling she received a lot of on account of her disability, has been the subject of a lot of debate in the...
Category: Reviews
Review: Farha
Farha is a 90-minute film set somewhere in Palestine in 1948, just as the state of Israel is being set up and the British mandate forces are withdrawing (we see them briefly, as children...
Review: The Fall
The Fall is a drama about a serial killer currently streaming on iPlayer in the UK as well as Netflix; it consists of three series, five episodes in the first series and six each...
Garmin’s four-day outage reflects incompetence
Last Thursday when I started work, driving a truck for a flooring company, I attempted to connect my new Garmin sat-nav to get software updates. It told me it couldn’t connect to the update...
Reflection on “Happy Valley”, series 1
Last week, while looking for something to watch while doing a large stack of ironing during the lockdown, I stumbled upon the first series of the six-part BBC crime drama, Happy Valley. This drama,...
Review: Britain’s Killer Motorways
This week’s BBC Panorama (available until January 2021) was about a recent report into the smart motorway system, which has been revealed to be what many of us who have to use them regularly...
Review: The Left Behind
The Left Behind is an hour-long BBC Three drama in which a young man who is facing homelessness as a result of his family’s eviction and gets very rapidly groomed into racist violence, leading...
And he wasn’t even Muslim
Last month a film-making group called “Error in Terror”, founded by a group of “highly-skilled film-makers” after the Westminster and Borough Market terrorist attacks in London to “create content which aims to tackle all...
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...
About that Gillette ad …
So, yesterday the razor manufacturer Gillette published an advertisement contrasting examples of harmful expressions of masculinity, such as fighting and sexual harassment, accompanied by fatalistic or enabling attitudes such as “boys will be boys”...
Review: Garmin Dezl 580
Last year I bought, and then returned, Garmin’s latest ‘flagship’ truck sat-nav, the Dezl 780. The reason I returned it was that a major feature which I used on a daily basis, the ability...
Stacey Dooley and the environmental impact of fashion
I haven’t watched any Stacey Dooley for about five years, since I watched her programme on drug smuggling through Ukraine in 2013 and gave it this scathing review. In tonight’s BBC Three documentary (shown...
First impressions: Garmin Dezl 780
The new 7” Garmin truck navigation unit, the Dezl 780, is being released some time this month according to Garmin’s website; you can buy it through Amazon now. I got mine last Sunday after...
Review: The Silent Child
The Silent Child is a 20-minute film which won an Oscar at the recent Academy Awards (for the best Live Action Short Film) which focuses on a four-year-old deaf girl named Libby who comes...
Review: Dispatches, “Inside the Priory”
This documentary on Channel 4 last night (19th Feb) exposed abusive practices, short staff, over-reliance on temporary staff (including the undercover reporter for this programme) and poor safety at a hospital unit, The Dene...
Review: Panorama, “White Fright”
Last night a 30-minute Panorama programme was shown on BBC1 that looked at Blackburn, a town of about 140,000 in Lancashire (north-western England) where the white British majority live largely separate lives from the...
Review: Unrest
Unrest is a film about ME, made by Jennifer Brea (right) and which tells the story of her life with the condition since it forced her to cut short her degree. It also tells...
Review: TomTom Go Professional 6250
If you’re a truck driver nowadays, you’ll need a HGV-aware sat-nav (GPS unit). There are many stories about truck drivers getting their vehicles stuck down back alleys, teetering on the edges of cliffs or...
Review: The State
The State is Peter Kosminsky’s four-part drama series on a group of young people from western Europe (the two central characters are British) who travel to Syria to join ISIS. It was shown on...
The Handmaid’s Tale: speculation so white
The Hulu TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel set in a New England taken over by a fundamentalist Christian theocratic police state that styles itself the Republic of Gilead, concluded...