Net effect
Channel 4’s Cyberbully (Thursday), written by Ben Chanan and David Lobatto, turned out to be a brilliantly gripping drama, even…
Tale of the expected
As a New Year’s Day treat for all the family, Esio Trot (BBC1) seemed to be taking no chances. It…
Ghost town
BBC1’s authentically spooky three-part ghost story Remember Me hasn’t yet revealed what’s really going on in that gloomy Yorkshire town.…
The daily grind of the hunter-gather
In the early days of Victorian railways, train journeys were (rightly) considered so dangerous that ticket offices sold life insurance…
Un-PC Plod
There can’t have been many people who watched Confessions of a Copper (Channel 4, Wednesday) with a growing sense of…
Country folk
Twenty minutes into BBC4’s The Heart of Country (Friday), there was a clip of Chet Atkins, country music’s star producer…
Home again
One of the more welcome and surprising things about television at the moment is that Homeland (Channel 4, Sunday) is…
A glimpse of the limelight
On 5 August 2010, 33 men entered the remote San José mine in Chile’s Atacama desert to begin their 12-hour…
Great leaps forward
Anybody feeling a bit depressed about the shortcomings of humanity could do worse than watch Brian Cox’s new series Human…
Finding a new way to live
In Colm Tóibín’s much-loved 2009 novel Brooklyn, Eilis Lacy, somewhat to her own surprise, leaves 1950s Enniscorthy (Tóibín’s own home…
Husband and wives
Needless to say, it’s not uncommon to hear single British women in their thirties and forties saying that all the…
He’s not joking
At first sight, J — which has beenshortlisted for the Man Booker Prize — represents a significant departure for Howard…
Linked in
For some of us, the biggest TV question of recent weeks hasn’t been how Newsnight is doing without Jeremy Paxman,…
Still crazy after all these years
It says something about Kate Bush’s standing in the music world that, perhaps uniquely in the history of long-awaited live…
Carry on Mumbai
Viewers who like their TV journalism hard-hitting should probably avoid Hotel India, a new BBC2 series about the Taj Mahal…
Remembering what it’s like to forget
In October 2002, 28-year-old David Stuart MacLean woke up at Hyderabad railway station. He was standing at the time, and…
A life derailed
When Haruki Murakami — Japan’s most successful novelist at home and abroad — was interviewed by the Paris Review in…
Trigger happy
Channel 4’s Kids and Guns (Thursday) began with an American TV advert in which a young boy’s eyes shone with…
Unforgettable riffs
A few weeks ago, my eight-year-old son, who’s taken up the guitar, announced that he’d learned something new. He then…
The king is dead – get over it
With Elvis has Left the Building, the longstanding editor of GQ has inexplicably written a book that could serve as…
Secrets and lies
BBC2’s The Honourable Woman (Thursday) began with a rather portentous voice-over bringing us the unsurprising news that ‘We all have…
Dolphin watch
BBC4’s The Girl Who Talked to Dolphins (Tuesday) began with the overstated-sounding claim that it would be tackling ‘perhaps the…
Those were the days
If you wanted a brief epigraph for Linda Grant’s recent fiction, then five words from Dorothy Parker might well do…
Dark tales
The work of John Banville — Booker-winning novelist and impeccably high-minded literary critic — might seem an unlikely source for…
Alcohol overload
According to its executive producer Griff Rhys Jones, A Poet in New York (BBC2, Sunday) sought to rescue Dylan Thomas…
