The strangest figure in pop
On 3 February 2003, the emergency services in Los Angeles received a call. ‘I’m Phil Spector’s driver,’ a voice told…
Sentimental value
What’s wrong with sentimentality? The answer, I’d suggest, could either be: a) its almost bullying insistence on us having emotions…
The glee of hatred
For those who consider themselves traditional liberals (full disclosure: such as me) Sunday’s first episode of Simon Schama’s History of…
Doggy style
Have you ever seen film of the England 1966 football team holding the World Cup at the Royal Garden Hotel,…
Gluttons for punishment
Nick Hornby yokes the two in an enjoyable jeu d’esprit – but, apart from troubled childhoods and prodigious energy, the thing they really share is Hornby’s admiration
Man up
Sunday’s SAS Rogue Heroes – about the founding of perhaps Britain’s most famous regiment – began with a revealing variation…
Motivated by love
At the start of Somewhere Boy, an 18-year-old boy is rescued from an isolated house by his aunt Sue following…
Paxman on Parkinson’s
On first impression, you might have thought that Unbreakablewas just a fairly desperate reality show cobbled together from I’m a…
Bang goes nothing
Crossfire was a three-part drama in more ways than one. Running every night from Tuesday to Thursday, it brought together…
In all seriousness
Amazon’s much-heralded Tolkien prequel The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power began by answering a question that has…
Rough justice
At 4.38 a.m., one morning in October 2013, the radio presenter Paul Gambaccini was understandably asleep when the doorbell rang.…
Softly, softly
Grizzled police officers of the old school should probably avoid Channel 4’s Night Coppers for reasons of blood pressure. Like…
Not one for the naive
The Undeclared War has many of the traditional signifiers of a classy thriller: the assiduous letter-by-letter captioning of every location;…
Central line
James Graham has made his considerable name writing political-based dramas of a highly unusual type: non-polemical ones. And this certainly…
Special delivery
A youngish couple leave London and drive off excitedly to make a fresh start in more rural surroundings. They demonstrate…
Rooney tunes
It’s official: television has a new genre. Its features include leisurely half-hour episodes, plenty of literary chat, several scenes set…
No more Mr Nasty Guy
In theory, it should be a perfect match. John Morton – the man behind the brilliantly assured sitcom W1A which…
Don’t frighten the horses
Chivalry – written by and starring Sarah Solemani and Steve Coogan – is a comedy drama about post-#MeToo Hollywood life.…
A true maverick
Art That Made Us is an ambitious new series, firmly in the ‘history of something in a load of different…
Bring up the bodies
BBC2’s one-off drama Then Barbara Met Alan(Monday) told the true story of how two disabled performers on the cabaret circuit…
An Englishwoman in Paris
A couple of years ago, I happened to read Graham Norton’s third novel Home Stretch. Rather patronisingly, perhaps, I was…
Lobster and dead pig
ITV’s new version of The Ipcress File began with a close-up of a pair of black-rimmed glasses just like those…
The Theroux Paradox
In the latest episode of Louis Theroux’s Forbidden America, Louis asked a rapper called Broke Baby if ‘it’s important to…
(no title)
According to the makers, This is Going to Hurt is intended as ‘a love letter to the national health service’.…
Good cop, bad cop
Older readers may remember a time when people signalled their cultural superiority with the weird boast that they didn’t watch…
