Skip to main content

Fall back: how the networks ensured there would be TV this autumn

Virtual audiences, isolation pods – your favourite shows might look different this year, but there’s plenty of TV left in the tank

Autumn is traditionally when TV unveils its lushest treats of the year. In 2020, though, you might think this can’t possibly be the case. Life has been on hold, to some extent, since March, when almost every TV show in production closed down. Surely, then, the cupboard is bare? But thanks to stockpiling of pre-lockdown footage and some clever tweaks to how shows are made, the major broadcasters and streamers have autumn slates that very nearly constitute business as usual.

When Taskmaster completes its big-money transfer from Dave to Channel 4, for example, Greg Davies will have an excuse to shout at the competing comedians even more than he did before. Everyone will be sitting further away from each other, and they’ll be compensating for the lack of noise from a now-absent studio audience. But the tasks themselves were filmed before the virus arrived.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2G5uMGp

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

One giant leap: meet the new generation of male ballet stars

Beauty, strength and bags of energy: BBC Four’s Men at the Barre documentary gets up close and personal with the Royal Ballet dancers on the rise ‘It’s a golden era of male ballet dancers.” So says Emma Cahusac, the commissioning editor behind a new documentary, Men at the Barre, part of BBC Four’s dance season. It’s not just hyperbole. The young men rising up at the Royal Ballet are some of the most exciting in dance right now: principals Matthew Ball and Marcelino Sambé, first soloists Cesar Corrales and William Bracewell, and first artist Joseph Sissens all feature in Men at the Barre. With the majority of them British or UK-trained, it’s a giant leap from the grumblings of a decade ago about the lack of local dancers making it to the top. I spoke to Ball, Corrales and Sambé by phone, all staying resolutely positive during this enforced break from their intensive dancing lives, but all desperate to get back to work with colleagues they’re certain are something special. “I see so m...

Dita Von Teese: ‘Even when I was a bondage model, I had big-time boundaries’

As the star dives into a giant glass of fizz for her first online extravaganza, she talks about this new golden age for burlesque, why the French Strictly gives her costume problems – and how #MeToo has changed her Dita Von Teese is looking divine. Her lips are that signature red, she’s wearing 1950s cat eye glasses, and her black hair falls in a thick wave across a Snow White skin – and all this on the unglamorous stage of a glitchy Zoom call. Only knowing Von Teese from her femme fatale image, her teasingly aloof burlesque performances, and her time in the tabloids as former wife of goth rocker Marilyn Manson , you might expect an icy demeanour, an impermeable mystique. So it’s surprising to discover quite how normal she is: chatty, self-deprecating, not very vampish. It’s easy to see traces of Heather Sweet, the “super shy” girl from small-town Michigan who transformed into Von Teese. The reason for our conversation is a new film, Night of the Teese, made with director Quinn Wils...