Clear, thorough and gripping: BBC2’s Horizon – The Battle to Beat Malaria
If you transcribed the narrator’s script in almost any episode of Horizon, you’d notice something striking: an awful lot of…
Utterly bog-standard: BBC2’s The Turkish Detective reviewed
A partly subtitled show set in Istanbul might sound like a brave departure for a BBC Sunday night crime drama.…
When piracy meets protest
Sometimes there are advantages to being ill-informed. Knowing embarrassingly little about why 30 Greenpeace activists were jailed in Russia in…
Nowhere near as miserable as I remember it: The Beatles – Let It Be reviewed
Beatles lore has long held that the film Let It Be was a depressing portrait of the band falling apart.…
Danny Dyer’s new C4 programme is deeply odd
Who do you think said the following on TV this week: ‘I love being around gay men – seeing a…
Dramatic, urgent and intriguing: BBC1’s This Town reviewed
After conquering the world with Peaky Blinders (and before that by co-creating Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?), Steven Knight…
Riveting and heart-wrenching: BBC1’s Time reviewed
‘Only with women’ is a phrase used by more cynical TV types for a show that takes something that’s been…
Only goodwill will get you through this reboot: Paramount+’s Frasier reviewed
Remember the groans of dismay, possibly including your own, which greeted John Cleese’s announcement in February that he was reviving…
Shocking: Channel 4’s Partygate reviewed
If there were special awards for Most Subtlety in a Television Drama, Tuesday’s Partygate would be unlikely to win one.…
A Picasso doc that – amazingly – focuses on how great he was
Earlier this year, the Guardian took a break from arguing that ‘cancel culture’ is a right-wing myth to ask the…
Subtle, psychologically twisty drama: BBC3’s Bad Behaviour reviewed
Bad Behaviour is a decidedly solemn new Australian drama series with plenty to be solemn about. It was billed in…
Much of the mysteriousness is inadvertent: ITV’s The Reunion reviewed
The Reunion opened in 1997 with some young people being carefree: a fact they obligingly signalled by zipping around the…
Too in thrall to today’s dogmas: ITV1’s A Spy Among Friends reviewed
In 2014, Ben Macintyre presented a BBC2 documentary based on his book A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the…
