Television

Autistic endeavour: Keir Gilchrist as Sam in Atypical

For goodness’ sake

26 August 2017 9:00 am

Most new Netflix series are greeted not merely with acclaim, but with a level of gratitude that the returning Christ…

Norway’s noir

17 August 2017 1:00 pm

Valkyrien (C4, Sunday) is the hot new Scandi-noir series, which is being billed as Norway’s answer to Breaking Bad. In…

In praise of Netflix

5 August 2017 9:00 am

All this week I have been trying, with considerable success, to avoid being bludgeoned by TV programmes telling me in…

1967 and all that

29 July 2017 9:00 am

As you may have spotted, the BBC is marking the 50th anniversary of the decriminalisation of male homosexuality with an…

Dethroned by feminism

22 July 2017 9:00 am

I’m a bit worried about Game of Thrones (Sky Atlantic). Not seriously worried: there’s too much money invested, too much…

Candid camera?

15 July 2017 9:00 am

Channel 4’s Catching a Killer offered the rare TV spectacle these days of a middle-aged white male copper leading a…

In praise of braindead filth

8 July 2017 9:00 am

Melvyn Bragg on TV: The Box That Changed The World (BBC2, Saturday) was just what you would have expected of…

Mad about the girls

1 July 2017 9:00 am

It’s not unusual to see a pop concert on TV where teenage girls and a group of middle-aged men are…

Trouble in paradise

24 June 2017 9:00 am

‘Riviera is the new Night Manager,’ I read somewhere. No, it’s not. Riviera (Sky Atlantic, Thursday) is the new Eldorado…

Never knowingly understated

17 June 2017 9:00 am

At one uncharacteristically low-key point in Sunday’s Poldark — back for a third series on BBC1 — Ross (Aidan Turner)…

How the west coast was won

10 June 2017 9:00 am

There’s an incredibly addictive old iPhone game called Doodle God where you effectively invent civilisation from scratch by combining basic…

Heaven knows they’re miserable now

3 June 2017 9:00 am

On the face of it, the two new big drama series of the week don’t have a great deal in…

The great rock’n’roll swindles

27 May 2017 9:00 am

Birds have been giving me a lot of grief of late. There’s Tappy — the blue tit who has built…

Police force

20 May 2017 9:00 am

I’ve often thought that a good idea for an authentic TV cop show would be to portray the police as…

The bemused protagonist with a stupid name: Ricky Whittle as Shadow Moon in American Gods

Serial offenders

13 May 2017 9:00 am

Since completing season two of the brilliant Narcos, I’ve been unsuccessfully looking for a replacement serial drama that is more…

1932. Right, John Cockcroft adjusts a pump at the Cavendish Laboratory's atom splitter. Left, Ernest Walton sits working in the detector of a Cockcroft-Walton generator.

Arms race

6 May 2017 9:00 am

Like most documentaries, Britain’s Nuclear Bomb: The Inside Story (BBC4, Wednesday) began by boasting about all the exclusives it would…

The real deal

29 April 2017 9:00 am

The other day I had a very dispiriting conversation with a TV industry insider. It turns out that everything you…

Psycho thriller

22 April 2017 9:00 am

Psychological thrillers — or ‘thrillers’ as they used to be known — have become almost as ubiquitous on television as…

Look back in anger

14 April 2017 11:00 pm

‘What we really need is a faux-historical drama series about police brutality and black activism set in 1970s London,’ said…

Age as allegory

8 April 2017 9:00 am

Sky Atlantic — available only to Sky customers — has the cunning/infuriating policy of broadcasting the kind of programmes most…

Vincent Franklin (Mr Prendergast), Jack Whitehall (Paul Pennyfeather) and Douglas Hodge (Captain Grimes) in ‘Decline and Fall’

Oh! What a lovely Waugh

1 April 2017 9:00 am

Jack Whitehall could have been perfectly awful as Paul Pennyfeather in Decline and Fall (BBC1, Fridays). He has spent most…

Adam Driver as Adam Sackler, the most unsparingly but sensitively drawn modern male to grace the small screen this decade

Let’s hear it for the boys

25 March 2017 9:00 am

Girls creator Lena Dunham has received criticism from all sides. Detractors on the right see her as an exhibitionist provocateur.…

Brenda Blethyn as DCI Vera Stanhope 'wearing the kind of hat not seen since the glory days of All Creatures Great and Small'

Beyond belief

25 March 2017 9:00 am

As we know from all those newspaper articles and actress interviews, there’s a scandalous lack of high-profile British TV dramas…

To die for

18 March 2017 9:00 am

Down the Mighty River with Steve Backshall (BBC2) was perfect Sunday-night TV — one of the most enjoyable adventure travelogues…

On the money

11 March 2017 9:00 am

Fans of tough investigative journalism should probably avoid Channel 4’s How’d You Get So Rich? Presenter Katherine Ryan’s main tactic…