James Walton

We’re wrong to mock Do They Know It’s Christmas?

30 November 2024 9:00 am

‘I hope we passed the audition,’ said an alarmingly youthful Bob Geldof at one point in The Making of Do…

Too cautious and wildly over the top at the same time: Paddington in Peru reviewed

9 November 2024 9:00 am

Toy Story or The Godfather? Which way would Paddington in Peru go? Would the third instalment of a much-cherished series…

A bit of a mess: Channel 4’s Generation Z reviewed

2 November 2024 9:00 am

In the second of this week’s two episodes of Generation Z (Sunday and Monday), a teenage girl called Finn wondered…

A hit – but please don’t pretend it’s feminist: Disney+’s Rivals reviewed

19 October 2024 9:00 am

For most of my adult life, clever, well-read, feminist women have told me how much they love Jilly Cooper. It…

Have today’s TV dramatists completely given up on plausibility?

5 October 2024 9:00 am

In advance, Ludwig sounded as if it was aimed squarely at the Inspector Morse market. Set among spires of impeccable…

More Airplane! than Speed: Nightsleeper reviewed

21 September 2024 9:00 am

Earlier this year, ITV brought us Red Eye, a six-part drama set mainly on an overnight plane from London to…

An accidental spy: Gabriel’s Moon, by William Boyd, reviewed

31 August 2024 9:00 am

Having chanced to interview the Congolese politician Patrice Lumumba shortly before his assassination, a travel writer finds himself targeted by British Intelligence

Why are these dead-eyed K-pop groups represented as some kind of ideal?

24 August 2024 9:00 am

On Saturday, Made in Korea: The K-pop Experience began by hailing K-pop as ‘the multi-billion-pound music that’s taken the world…

Ambitious, bold and confusing: BBC4’s Corridors of Power – Should America Police the World? reviewed

10 August 2024 9:00 am

Narrated by Meryl Streep, Corridors of Power: Should America Police the World? announced the scale of its ambition straight away.…

Clear, thorough and gripping: BBC2’s Horizon – The Battle to Beat Malaria

27 July 2024 9:00 am

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

13 July 2024 9:00 am

A partly subtitled show set in Istanbul might sound like a brave departure for a BBC Sunday night crime drama.…

When piracy meets protest

15 June 2024 9:00 am

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

18 May 2024 9:00 am

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

20 April 2024 9:00 am

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

6 April 2024 9:00 am

After conquering the world with Peaky Blinders (and before that by co-creating Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?), Steven Knight…