James Walton

Weekend world

4 February 2016 3:00 pm

When the time comes to make programmes looking back on the 2010s, I wonder which aspects of life today will…

Prime suspect: Steven Avery, whose case is the subject of the Netflix documentary ‘Making a Murderer’

An inconvenient truth

28 January 2016 3:00 pm

On the face of it, the Netflix documentary serial Making a Murderer should only take up ten hours of your…

Compliance order

14 January 2016 3:00 pm

Never a man tortured by self-doubt, Derren Brown introduced his latest special Pushed to the Edge (Channel 4, Tuesday) as…

Losing the plot

31 December 2015 3:00 pm

On the face of it, ITV’s Peter & Wendy sounded like a perfect family offering for Boxing Day: an adaptation…

Beyond a joke

3 December 2015 3:00 pm

Let’s start this week with a joke: ‘You know Mrs Kelly? Do you know Mrs Kelly? Her husband’s that little…

Why most four-year-olds deserve to be sectioned

5 November 2015 3:00 pm

The first episode of Let Us Entertain You (BBC2, Wednesday) definitely couldn’t be accused of lacking a central thesis. Presenter…

The Last Kingdom is BBC2’s solemnly cheesy answer to Game of Thrones

22 October 2015 2:00 pm

The opening caption for The Last Kingdom (BBC2, Thursday) read ‘Kingdom of Northumbria, North of England, 866 AD’. In fact,…

Was BBC1’s Rooney hagiography more scripted reality than documentary?

8 October 2015 2:00 pm

Close to the Edge (BBC4, Tuesday) feels very much like an idea conceived during a particularly good night in the…

Middle-England Gothic: Anna Maxwell-Martin as Merrily Watkins in Midwinter of the Spirit

Talk of the devil

24 September 2015 1:00 pm

For years, Ian Fleming was famously self-deprecating about the James Bond books. (‘I have a rule of not looking back,’…

Novel romance: Richard Madden as Mellors and Holliday Grainger as Constance Chatterley

Cock and bull

10 September 2015 1:00 pm

It’s hard to know whether the actor James Norton was being naive or disingenuous when he claimed in publicity interviews…

Will he was

27 August 2015 1:00 pm

In 2011, the Daily Mail carried a long story about how the Queen’s cousin Prince William of Gloucester, who died…

Sick and tired

13 August 2015 1:00 pm

When the link between tobacco and lung cancer was first established in the early 1950s, one obvious question arose: should…

Affairs in squares

30 July 2015 1:00 pm

On all those comic lists of the world’s shortest books (Great Italian War Heroes, My Hunt for the Real Killers,…

Institutional feminism

23 July 2015 1:00 pm

Some revelations, it seems, are capable of being endlessly repeated while still remaining revelations. Think of all the books, articles…

Serial thriller

16 July 2015 1:00 pm

For keen students of China, this week’s television provided yet more proof that Deng Xiaoping’s decision to open the country…

The bankers’ darling

2 July 2015 1:00 pm

This week’s Imagine… Jeff Koons: Diary of a Seducer (BBC1, Tuesday) began with Koons telling a slightly puzzled-looking Alan Yentob…

Bad robots

18 June 2015 1:00 pm

You’d think scientists might have realised by now that creating a race of super-robots is about as wise as opening…

Are you being funny?

4 June 2015 1:00 pm

Monday saw the return of possibly the weirdest TV series in living memory. Imagine a parallel universe in which Are…

Strange ways

21 May 2015 1:00 pm

BBC One’s 2015 choice of Sunday-night drama series is beginning to resemble the career of the kind of Hollywood actor…

Not much cop

7 May 2015 1:00 pm

With Clocking Off, Shameless and State of Play among his credits, Paul Abbott is undoubtedly one of the most respected…

Still crazy after all these years

28 August 2014 1:00 pm

It says something about Kate Bush’s standing in the music world that, perhaps uniquely in the history of long-awaited live…

Still crazy after all these years

28 August 2014 1:00 pm

It says something about Kate Bush’s standing in the music world that, perhaps uniquely in the history of long-awaited live…

Bookends: The Saint Zita Society, by Ruth Rendell

18 August 2012 4:00 pm

Sometimes it seems as if Ruth Rendell’s heart just isn’t in all that killing any more. Certainly, her latest book,…