Television
Filthy lucre
If you’re after an exciting, twisty programme about police corruption that doesn’t also feel a bit like sitting an exam…
Ill-judged sanctimony
I’m really not enjoying Your Honor, the latest vehicle for Bryan Cranston to play a good man driven to the…
Cooking the books
Agatha and Poirot was one of those programmes that had the annoying effect of making you feel distinctly snooty. ITV’s…
So damned French
For the past few weeks I have been binge-watching the Netflix series Call My Agent! (or Dix pour cent, as…
Mercurio rising
When a drama begins with news of a ‘Chis handler’ receiving ‘intel graded A1 on the matrix’ that causes a…
Nothing to see here
Calls is the very antithesis of televisual soma. In fact it’s so jarring and discomfiting and horrible that I think…
Double act
Well, this a bit awkward. A fortnight ago, in my last TV column, I confidently asserted that, despite the involvement…
Dumb and dumber
Here’s a worried question I want to plant in your head: when is TV drama going to start depicting the…
Thoughtful thriller
To begin on a cheerful note, it’s certainly been a good week for fans of slow-burn British crime dramas with…
Three plots for the price of one
ZeroZeroZero is the impossibly exciting new drugs series from Roberto Saviano — the author who gave us perhaps my all-time…
Joining the dots
‘History,’ wrote Edward Gibbon, ‘is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.’ In…
You’ll wish you were gay
To promote his new drama series about Aids in the early 1980s, Russell T. Davies insisted in an interview that…
Life in the fast lane
DeLorean: Back from the Future was one of those documentaries — for me at least — that takes a story…
Perfectly pointless
‘What the world needs now is a black and white pastiche of classic 1950s and 1960s sitcoms reviving two Marvel…
The weirdness of Britain present and past
The new series of Mark Kermode’s Secrets of Cinema began with an episode on British comedy films. As ever, Kermode…
Superb but depraved
The Serpent is the best BBC drama series in ages — god knows how it slipped through the net —…
A romcom with very little com
In Black Narcissus, based on the novel by Rumer Godden, five nuns set off for a remote Himalayan palace in…
Pure genius
Of all the times and places to have been on the wrong side of history, I can’t imagine many worse…
The great awakening
Congratulations, everyone! It turns out we’re much better than those bigoted old Brits of the 1950s. After all, they were…
Drama gold or bullion dross?
Unlike with every other BBC period drama series these days, I didn’t have to sit through Small Axe: Mangrove grumbling…
Great Scott
Ronnie’s: Ronnie Scott and His World-Famous Jazz Club was like the TV equivalent of an authorised biography: impressively thorough, often…
Marriage of inconvenience
‘We have to stop it now!’ says Princess Margaret (Helena Bonham Carter), smoking another cigarette, obviously. She’s talking about the…
Twin peaks
There must be some people somewhere who vaguely know their own spouses — but if so, they don’t tend to…
Spit and no polish
Thank you, Spitting Image, for the nostalgia trip! Your new series on BritBox has rekindled with almost Proustian fidelity those…
Hare-brained
Like many a political thriller before it, BBC1’s Roadkill began with a politician emerging into the daylight to face a…
