Television
Goodwill will not save Claudia Winkleman’s new chat show
Claudia Winkleman has a chat show on the BBC. I’m struggling to understand why this is a story but I…
Charming: The Other Bennet Sister reviewed
The Other Bennet Sister is to Pride and Prejudice what Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is to Hamlet.…
Life could be worse – you could be Jonathan Ross
‘Oh dear, you look like an old person,’ said Girl, greeting me in the interval of the Bach choir’s St…
Bonkers: Young Sherlock reviewed
Judging from the two biggest new streaming dramas around, the taste these days runs towards the kitchen sink – not…
Enjoyably old-fashioned: ITV’s The Lady reviewed
I lasted all of five minutes with Netflix’s tasting menu-length Being Gordon Ramsay. This surprised me, because I’ve long had…
Foot-to-the-floor entertainment: How to Get to Heaven from Belfast, Lisa McGee’s sequel to Derry Girls, reviewed
How do you follow a great sitcom? Judging from How to Get to Heaven from Belfast and Small Prophets, the…
The BBC’s Lord of the Flies is mesmerically brilliant
I don’t much like Lord of the Flies. It’s nasty, weird in an oblique, psychotic way and wrong. William Golding…
Fascinating: The Fabulous Funeral Parlour reviewed
The Fabulous Funeral Parlour ended with possibly the least necessary caption in TV history: ‘Filmed in Liverpool’. Whenever I go…
Gripping: Amazon Prime’s The Tank reviewed
I don’t know how it got past the increasingly powerful ‘All Germans were evil Nazis’ censors but Amazon has released…
The worst Agatha Christie adaptation I can remember
When it comes to Agatha Christie adaptations, there are normally two possible responses to the denouement. One is a deep…
Why has it all gone wrong for The Night Manager?
The Night Manager is finally back after ten years with three major drawbacks: no Elizabeth Debicki for the sex scenes;…
Lucy Worsley’s sleuthing is rather impressive
Lucy Worsley’s Victorian Murder Club opened with its presenter unexpectedly channelling that gravelly voiced bloke who used to do all…
Enough with torture-porn TV
Has anyone got to the end of Malice yet? I’m halfway through – at the time of writing, anyway –…
The cardinals spill the beans on the conclave
Secrets of the Conclave seemed rather optimistically titled, given that everybody at this year’s papal election had made a solemn…
The Beast in Me is surprisingly addictive
The Beast in Me is one of those ‘taut psychological thrillers’ that everyone talks about in the office. This might…
Gothic lives matter: BBC2’s Civilisations reviewed
Anybody growing weary of the debate surrounding the BBC’s unexamined assumptions and biases about modern politics might have expected to…
Pluribus is a mess
Pluribus is another drama set in the dystopian future. But on this occasion the integrity of the entire human race…
Bleak but gripping: Channel 4’s Trespasses reviewed
Yeats famously summarised Ireland in the four words, ‘Great hatred, little room’. But, as Louise Kennedy’s 2022 debut novel Trespasses…
Film and TV are run by satanists
I once came up with a brilliant idea for a children’s Sunday-evening TV series. It would follow the adventures of…
The joy of Mortimer and Whitehouse: Gone Fishing
If you didn’t already know that Down Cemetery Road was based on a novel Mick Herron wrote before the Slough…
A great comedy about a terrible sport
I’m trying to think of things I’m less interested in than American football. The plant-based food section? Taking up my…
Is there anything menopausal women can’t do?
Is there anything menopausal women can’t do (on television)? Last Sunday, as a couple of them were still working on…
Excruciating: Netflix’s House of Guinness reviewed
First the surprising news: not a single one of the four Guinness siblings in 1868 Dublin is black; and only…
The death of cinéma vérité
Oh, how we lived. Or, how we thought we lived. Despite the numerous criticisms levelled at the BBC on a…
Every line in the new Alan Partridge is perfect
By now, viewers of TV thrillers are no strangers to a baffling prologue – but this week brought a particularly…
