Gareth Roberts

The cult of Paddington has gone too far

5 November 2024 4:00 pm

‘Kindness is like marmalade – a little goes a long way,’ Paddington Bear tweeted recently. But it isn’t only imaginary…

Halloween indulges a very human obsession

29 October 2024 7:41 pm

Halloween is approaching. The Americans, who go very big on it normally, are distracted this year by the election, so…

Paddington shouldn’t have been given a passport

23 October 2024 1:17 am

Paddington has an official passport. The makers of the new Paddington film Paddington in Peru revealed this in passing to the Radio Times today.…

The TV industry should be worried about AI

22 October 2024 6:34 pm

ITV are searching for an ‘AI expert’ to ‘create TV shows, films and digital content’, and to use this possibly…

The unspectacular joy of quiz shows

19 October 2024 4:00 pm

Quiz shows on TV – the kind you can join in with at home by shouting the answer at the…

Thank God for Elon Musk

15 October 2024 4:00 pm

Like many people this weekend, I couldn’t tear myself away from videos of the booster rocket of Elon Musk’s Starship…

Why is Gary Lineker worth all the bother?

7 October 2024 8:33 pm

There’s been another development in the wearying saga of Gary Lineker, the over-salaried presenter of football on the BBC and…

Doctors and the trouble with the BBC

4 October 2024 3:30 pm

The BBC’s daytime soap Doctors will soon vanish from our screens after 24 years. But while the final episodes make…

How doom scrolling changed TV for ever

1 October 2024 3:00 pm

Are you one of the growing number of ‘second screen’ television viewers? For all too many of us, it seems…

Will things really get better under Labour?

24 September 2024 3:15 pm

Labour’s honeymoon didn’t last long. Keir Starmer won power less than three months ago with a vow to ‘change Britain’.…

When will EU flag wavers get the message?

17 September 2024 3:55 pm

Arguing about the last night of the Proms is as much of an annual tradition as the music itself. Usually…

We’re being ruled by a 1980s left-wing student elite

10 September 2024 7:06 pm

We are now governed by people who were left-wing students in the 1980s and early 90s. This is one of…

There’s no shame in being ‘weird’

4 September 2024 9:58 pm

Are Conservative politicians ‘weird’? A series of focus groups carried out by More in Common suggests that voters – particularly…

What Carol Vorderman gets wrong about the TV industry

27 August 2024 7:30 pm

Carol Vorderman has given a speech to the Edinburgh Television Festival, in which she complains that the TV industry is too middle class. This…

Why the ‘sensibles’ aren’t happy now the Tories are gone 

20 August 2024 10:26 pm

I have to confess that, like many other commentators, I thought that the coming of the Labour government would mean…

The tyranny of twee

13 August 2024 4:00 pm

The horrific murders in Southport earlier this month were followed by horrific riots and horrific counter-riots. But fear not. Because…

Should civil servants be allowed to wear inappropriate clothes to work?

6 August 2024 3:30 pm

Does His Majesty’s Government have a policy on civil servants wearing fetish clothing in the workplace? It’s not the sort…

Just Stop Oil and the secret power of the middle class

31 July 2024 3:15 pm

Just Stop Oil isn’t what it was. When a handful of protestors from the environmental group tried to block a…

Has the opening ceremony finished yet?

27 July 2024 6:33 pm

The 2012 British opening ceremony has sadly become a shorthand for nostalgic Remainy twee. But la grande débâcle in Paris last night brought…

Keir Starmer and the illusion of ‘seriousness’

9 July 2024 5:42 pm

The first few days of a totally new government are disorientating. Nobody knows quite how to react. The electoral dust…

The Tories: a requiem

4 July 2024 4:00 pm

And now the end is near. Barring a polling error of galactic proportions, we are hours away from the final…

Meet the Labour ministers who are going to ruin the country

25 June 2024 4:23 pm

We’re going to be lumbered with them for at least five years, so I think it’s time to have a…

The boring truth about Keir Starmer

22 June 2024 4:00 pm

How would you define ‘working people’? You’d think that ‘people who work’ would be a pretty safe bet. But Keir…

We’ll never find the heir to Blair

18 June 2024 3:00 pm

The ghost of 1997 haunts the 2024 election. The defining image of this year’s contest, barring any major upsets over…

The staggering dullness of Sunak and Starmer

13 June 2024 6:46 pm

We’re now about halfway through the election campaign. I don’t know how we’re going to keep our excitement from bubbling…