BCG Daily Sunday 9th February 2014

How Brian Paddick helped Danny Boyle put the Met on TV

As C4's controversial police drama airs tonight, a former senior officer at the Met talks about his role as adviser.

Robert Newman interview

The comedian on freestyle skating, West End lies and evolution.

Preview: Babylon, C4, Sunday

Sunday night TV is usually a pretty tedious affair, but not this time. A series should follow - as soon as possible please.

Radio Times review

Shambles, swearing and spin: if you've missed The Thick of It, you're in luck. Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong have applied the high-farce formula to the Metropolitan Police for this scabrous comedy drama directed by Danny Boyle.

Their Met, led by James Nesbitt as Commissioner, is obsessed with public image: top brass fret so much about media coverage that any actual policing comes a distant second. This gets ugly (and funny) in tonight's pilot, when a series of shootings breaks out across London on the day a new American PR chief (Brit Marling) arrives in the job. The script is sharp and cruel, though occasionally the delivery feels a little too delivered: throwaway realism is what's needed here. Roll on a full series.

Emily Mortimer and Dolly Wells interview

The two actors - who have been friends since childhood - have written a comedy drama about a star who hires her best friend as her assistant.

Babylon: a hilarious, unsettling drama

Like Four Lions, there are many tones and registers packed in.

Sarah Millican - review

Britain's favourite funny woman is a deft comic, but her frankness about vibrators, pubic grooming and anal bleaching trades on shock that quickly wears off.

Babylon - TV review

For the 90 minutes that Danny Boyle's comedy-drama pilot was on I laughed - and despaired too.

Babylon was bewildering but often brilliant

They didn't hit all the targets and there were times when you wondered exactly where Babylon was headed but it did manage to pack in some very funny moments.

TV review: Danny Boyle tackles topic of the moment

Babylon's best scene was its opening one, in which several tooled-up, testosterone-addled members of the show's deftly cast ensemble were caught on camera phone bursting into a man's home and tasering his testicles.

Babylon, episode 1, Channel 4, review

While it had many strengths, Babylon was not quite as great as the sum of its parts and the problem lay in Danny Boyle's direction. He may be Britain's most-lauded director but his filter of coolness was at odds with the very British, rather dyspeptic dialogue of Sam Bain and Jessie Armstrong.

Danny Boyle's striking direction saves imbalanced drama

I still can't really make my mind up whether I enjoyed it or not.

Review: Nish Kumar is a Comedian

The clue's in the title, really. Nish Kumar is, indeed, a comedian - and a damn fine one at that.