Television
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…
Mossad’s Lara Croft
If you love Fauda — and of course you do — you’re in for a long wait for season four,…
Porn again
A woman is eating a pie in her car as it gets an automatic wash. Careful to keep the pie…
The boys are back in town
There’s a delicious scene in the new season of Amazon’s superheroes-gone-bad series The Boys. The chief superhero Homelander (Antony Starr)…
The odd couple
Collectors of TV titles that sound as if they were thought of by Alan Partridge will presumably have spotted Danny…
Who dares wins
‘Art is dead,’ declared Mark Steyn recently. He was referring to the new rules — copied from the Baftas —…
Me time
‘You may think our modern world was born yesterday,’ said Simon Schama at the beginning of The Romantics and Us.…
Bearing all
Few things better capture the crazed cognitive dissonance of our age than this: that while we cower behind masks for…
There’s no business like show business
Fifteen minutes into the first episode of I Hate Suzie, main character Suzie Pickles was doing a photoshoot in her…
Television Keep it in the family James Delingpole
‘By the way, my name is Max. I take care of them, which ain’t easy, because their hobby is murder.’…
Stitches and bad-ass bitches
If it’s a test of a good documentary series that it takes us deep into an unknown, even unimaginable world,…
Bonjour happiness
Soon, very soon now — even sooner than I imagined, if A Suitable Boy turns out to be as lacklustre…
Opulence and chaos
Nobody could argue that Andrew Davies isn’t up for a challenge. He’d also surely be a shoo-in for Monty Python’s…
Why I love the French
There’s a scene in the French espionage series The Bureau — about the DGSE, France’s equivalent of the CIA or…
