What a sad but ultimately revealing and enlightening film this was. As part of the BBC’s Wonderland series of documentaries, this one followed Emma Bishop and Ben Marshall as they deliberated the pros and cons of getting married.

But what sets Emma and Ben apart from other couples in their twenties who are contemplating the same thing is that they both have Down’s Syndrome, therefore their lives are not truly their own because they must be, in many ways, reliant on others to sanction or veto various aspects of their lives.

Because of the propensity for Down’s sufferers to be subject to what many consider vulnerability and an inability to make life changing decisions, there was to be no rushing into anything for this couple. Despite the fact they’re clearly devoted to each other, and I can think of few young people better suited to making a real go of a marriage than these two based on what we saw last night, there are hurdles for them at every step. Read more & comment »

I don’t think I’ve ever felt so ashamed to be British as I did while watching this documentary by Olly Lambert.

It primarily followed a gentle, kind and intelligent man who was embarking on a career as a traffic warden, and from the abuse he and his colleagues got, you might have assumed they were in fact murderers or something equally as heinous. But no, they were just traffic wardens doing a job.

Durga Pokrehl from Nepal left behind his wife and child to try to build a life for his family here in the UK, and despite having two masters degrees, being multi-lingual and having an inexhaustible knowledge of the works of Shakespeare, the best he could find here was a job as Public Enemy Number One – a traffic warden. Read more & comment »

This is a film that’s going to haunt me for a long time. There’s only ever been one other film that had such a profound effect on me and that was Sophie’s Choice. And like Sophie in that film, the parents of children trying to escape the lives they were born into know that when they say goodbye to their kids, it literally could mean they’ll never see them again, nor ever learn of their fate.

Then there were the many, many children who didn’t have parents, or if they did, were horribly abused by them. But all those young, naïve and innocent kids were trying to get across the border to the US, and filmmaker/director Rebecca Camisa followed just a handful of them on their journey.

And it was one fraught with dangers that most adults wouldn’t make it alive through, never mind waif like, poverty stricken children. Clinging desperately to the tops of freight trains, these children are full of dreams of what cities like Manhattan can offer them, and of course, most often, they don’t even make it across the border.

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Hannah Rothschild made this film which amounted to following Nicky Haslam around for a year. Why? I don’t know. And having watched it, I still don’t know.

If I were in a generous mood, I might presuppose she made it to dig deeper than the very shallow level on which Mr Haslam lives – to reveal a ‘different’ side to him – but frankly, he’s a shallow swimmer in a shallow pool full of shallow sharks.

But they’re rich and famous these swimmers and if they’re not, they’re not in sight. So if you, like me, can’t air-kiss, can’t say “darling” every two seconds and don’t have a propensity to drink only the most expensive champagne – then eat a blini before throwing it up – you and I are not welcome in Haslam’s circles.

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I’m not sure there was really any point to this film, other than having the rather novel experience of sitting in my living room wearing 3D glasses – and being sniggered at by my family – where previously, I’d only worn them in a cinema.

And to be honest, the 3D effect wasn’t that remarkable; I’ve seen better. However, that said, it’s worth bearing in mind that this film footage was shot in the 1950s by Bob Angell and Arthur Wooster – who both recalled their experiences charmingly for this film – so it was actually no mean feat.

In fact, the majority of the film’s charm was in these two lovely gentlemen and the very formal way in which they spoke. All very English and very tea-and-cucumber-sandwiches. I especially liked it when they implored us to put on our “3D viewing spectacles.” Bless. Read more & comment »

I had absolutely no idea that my fuzzy, warm image of one of my favourite childhood authors was totally out of whack. Enid Blyton wasn’t so much warm and fuzzy as cold and barbed it would seem.

I’d heard some rumours about Blyton’s taciturn character but I’d never really taken much notice, and I suspect that’s because, as I mentioned, her work ranks right up there on my Top Ten Childhood Memories, in the Rose Coloured section, so it was rather a disappointment to me to witness her vileness.

But Helena Bonham Carter did a remarkable job of portraying a woman who was no doubt plagued by inner demons but thought nothing of making miserable lives – quite by design – for those who crossed her or didn’t interest her, her own children included. Read more & comment »

Fans of David Tennant will have been drinking him in as the Doctor last night, for his time is nigh. After two Christmas episodes, Matt Smith will become the eleventh incarnation of the famous Doctor, and Tennant shall be a mere memory. Awwww.

But what a way to go; sticking his beak in on Mars in the year 2059 where there a real problem with the water. Not just those air bubbles you get sometimes and wonder if it’s something icky – this water can kill you. And unpleasantly at that.

On Bowie Base One – love that – Captain Adelaide Brooke, excellently played by Lindsay Duncan, is showing that in the future, women are still in charge of anything that’s important. However, Brooke and her team dropped a clanger in that they melted some ice in the ice fields and let loose a nasty virus. Worse than Swine ‘flu even. Or David Cameron. Read more & comment »

The latest Wonderland series offering was no less quirky and odd than its predecessors, and last night, we saw the six-degrees-of-separation like stories of the paths taken by seven Staffordshire Bull Terrier pups, their subsequent owners, as well as their original breeder.

Born of Uggs, whose owner Jackie wanted to make money from selling her pups, the seven puppies were destined for very different lives, but more or less to a man, or pup, their futures weren’t looking especially bright.

That said, one of them did fare very well; Jackie’s sister-in-law Maria bought one of the pups to help her children to get over the grief of losing their dad, and of all the puppies, this one seemed the most suited to getting along with fragile children. Read more & comment »

Oh my… 14 kids and 8 of them delivered all at once. Nadya Suleman might’ve been better in a box under the stairs than in hospital, but I think even more weird than her being the – much vilified – mother to 14 kids, and nary a dad in sight, is that she’s turning her kids’ lives into a real life Truman Show.

And I’m not sure how to feel about that; on the one hand, at least she’s found a way to support her children, but on the other, it didn’t turn out to be the best thing in the world for Truman to be the subject of a lifetime TV series. And it must be a developmental psychologist’s wet dream of a programme.

Unlike Truman though, Nadya’s older children are fully aware that their lives are being played out in front of a TV audience, and some of them really don’t like it. One child, Elijah, even decided to lob a screwdriver at his mother in his frustration as he screamed “stop filming!” Read more & comment »

I’ve always liked Calum Best. He’s always struck me as a young man who fully realises that were it not for his celebrity dad, he’d be – most likely – just an ordinary bod. But I’ve always alternately felt sorry for him because of that fact and because it was almost an inevitability that we’d all be waiting with baited breath for him to follow in dad’s footsteps and fall off many a barstool.

And if he hadn’t, he would probably have faded into obscurity, but with the media waiting, cameras poised for those like-father-like-son moments, it’s often felt as if he had no choice but to become a serious boozer.

In making this film however, Calum demonstrated that he’s not about to turn into a raging alcoholic just to slake our thirst for a George Best clone and enable us to use clichés about apples not falling far from trees. Read more & comment »

I’ve previously stated in my reviews that there are just too many travelogue shows. We seem to have been subjected to loads of them of late, and when I saw that the affable, rubber faced but disarmingly charming John Sergeant was hosting yet another, I could barely stifle my yawn.

However, although John packed his bags and headed off, it was more of a weekend jaunt around this green and pleasant land of ours rather than a long-haul flight to examine all some far flung corner of the earth can offer.

And another thing that made this programme rather unique was that John met with, and cross examined – the journalist in him is still alive under that sequinned bolero jacket – visitors to Britain about some of their preconceptions of us. And the results were both amusing and bizarre at times. Read more & comment »

When I first read the ‘blurb’ for this show, I thought ‘how can someone as financially privileged as Rosa Monkton pretend she understands the plight of someone who isn’t uber-rich?’

But, I had to take back that somewhat shallow thought when I watched this documentary. Money doesn’t take away heartbreak, and for Rosa, just as for the many other parents we saw in this film, little does.

All the parents featured in this film had disabled children, and from the get go, it was clear that Rosa’s empathy extends to far more than lip service.

However, what Rosa’s money can do is buy her physical help with her disabled child, but for those parents who aren’t wealthy, and they were in the majority in this film, that was what they needed most. Read more & comment »

What a bizarre film this was, and one that left me with a rather unpleasant taste in my mouth, metaphorically speaking.

First, I was uncomfortable watching anything that Gadd – aka Gary Glitter – might profit from, even if that profit was only some kind of vicarious pride in the fact that his repugnant story was being given attention.

Secondly, I am an advocate of the death penalty, and though this isn’t the right forum in which to go into an in-depth discussion of that point, it was of course the point of this film. But in making the point, I suspect the portrayal of a blood thirsty Britain was OTT. Read more & comment »

Co-written by Anthony Horowitz and Michael A Walker, this fast-paced but intricately woven drama on ITV last night proved the validity of that old idiom about not trying to reinvent the wheel; the simple ideas will always work well.

And the drama’s focal point is something that intrigues us all – the what ifs and the whys when an accident happens. That thought that maybe fate really does have a guiding hand in our lives because that other well used phrase, ‘if only’ is rarely more apropos.

By providing a back-story to everyone who was in the genuinely spectacular collision of the does-what-it-says-on-the-tin title, Horowitz and Walker posed lots of questions, but one thing that I did have to take some issue with was, would so many of the people in the crash be involved in something ‘shady’? Read more & comment »

What an astonishing film this was; not only did it serve as testimony to the capabilities of ordinary people in extraordinary times, those people were young people, some barely old enough to qualify for puberty.

The story told was a true one, but it could just as easily have been a gripping kids’ adventure story, and that was perhaps what made it quite magical. It was Enid Blyton meets The Hun.

We heard how some of the British ex-pat children at the British Memorial School in Ypres, Belgium, banded together – along with some of the adults involved with the school of course – to create a small but forcible Resistance movement. And again, I can’t stress enough how the recollections shared in this film made it feel as though one were hearing a fictitious account. Read more & comment »