Review: My Brother, the Islamist
My Brother, the Islamist is a documentary in which a film-maker I had never heard of, named Robb Leach (his home page, incidentally, has no biography or reference to any other work by him),...
Category: Reviews
Care Home Kid: letting them off lightly?
I watched the first part of Neil Morrissey’s Care Home Kid series yesterday (on iPlayer, where viewers in the UK can see it until next Monday) with much interest. Although I never was in...
Review: 23 Week Babies – the Price of Life
BBC2 – 23 Week Babies: The Price of Life This was on last Wednesday on BBC2, and is available on iPlayer until next Wednesday. It examines whether it is worthwhile to resuscitate babies born...
Dispatches: “Lessons in Hate and Violence”
Last night, Channel 4 broadcast another Dispatches programme titled “Lessons in Hate and Violence” (not available currently to watch online, possibly because arrests have been made in connection to some of the footage, but...
Review: “Beauty and the Beast”, first episode
Beauty and the Beast (subtitled “The Ugly Face of Prejudice”) is a series on Channel 4 about our attitudes towards those with facial disfigurements, and seems to be based on getting people with beauty...
Review of “Mental” from BBC Four
One of my contacts on Dreamwidth requested that someone in the UK review this history of British mental health care since the 1950s, which originally went out in May 2010 and was repeated last...
Review of “Jeff Brazier: Me and My Brother”
BBC Three – Jeff Brazier: Me and My Brother (available until Saturday, UK only) I just finished watching this programme on iPlayer; it features a BBC presenter named Jeff Brazier trying to bully his...
BBC Radio 4 – Young, Muslim and Black
BBC – BBC Radio 4 Programmes – Young, Muslim and Black I heard this advertised on Radio 4 last week, and feared the worst when I heard the presenter, Dotun Adebayo, enunciate the word...
Faith schools are no menace
Last week, Richard Dawkins delivered a polemic on the British digital TV channel, More 4, against the principle of government support for faith schools. (It is available for viewing at 4 On Demand, although...
Review: Lost Voices
Lost Voices is published by Invest in ME, a British charity which concentrates on promoting research into the causes of, and a possible cure for, the debilitating neurological disease, myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME); they have...
Impressions of BBC4’s Women series
BBC4 recently broadcast a three-part series entitled Women, which was meant to give some kind of history of feminism from the radicals and “libbers” of the late 1960s and early 1970s through to the...
Muslim women driving, and contrasts on niqab
I didn’t watch the Muslim Driving School programme, which was on BBC2 last Tuesday (at the right time to clash with Defamation, which I reviewed in my last entry), but I finally got round...
Defamation: perception and reality of anti-Semitism
Defamation, a documentary researched and presented by the Israeli journalist Yoav Shamir, was part of More4’s True Stories slot and was on Tuesday night. The idea that anti-Semitism was somewhat overhyped and used to...
Review of “Does God Hate Women?”
Does God Hate Women? is a 178-page tirade by Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom, editors of the atheist website Butterflies and Wheels, co-authors of A Dictionary of Fashionable Nonsense and both senior editors on...
Review of Channel 4’s “Revelations: Islamic school”
Revelations: Islamic school (Channel 4, 5th July 2009) was an 50-minute documentary following two Muslim girls in Nottingham through a year at a fee-paying Islamic school (a mixed primary with an all-girls secondary). The...
Waterloo Road stretches the bounds of credibility
OK, so hands up who’s watched Waterloo Road? It’s a BBC drama series set in a northern English urban school. It’s run for a number of series, but this one has gone all out...
Review: Bad Science by Ben Goldacre
Technorati Tags: ben goldacre, bad science Ben Goldacre is a doctor who writes a column called Bad Science in the Guardian every Saturday, and has also got a blog by the same title as...
Unity but not much peace at ExCeL
I managed to get to Global Peace and Unity 2008 this year, for the first time since 2006 (and that, like this time, was because I managed to blag a free ticket off another...
True Stories: Forbidden Lie$ and Sabine
More4, the "grown-up channel" run by Channel 4 in the UK, is broadcasting Forbidden Lie$, about Honor Lost/Forbidden Love, the "novel" about honour killing in Jordan published as a book of fact, this coming...
LugRadio Live 2008 reviewed
LugRadio Live 2008 pictures Last Saturday I went to what was billed as the last ever LugRadio performance. LugRadio is (or rather was) a podcast produced by the Wolverhampton Linux Users’ Group, and since...