Television
Playing it safe
BBC1’s latest Sunday-night drama The Last Post, about a British military base in Aden in 1965, feels like a programme…
Loose ends
On Sunday night, Holliday Grainger was on two terrestrial channels at the same time playing a possibly smitten sidekick of…
Rockies horror show
Tin Star, the latest Sky Atlantic drama, has a comfortingly familiar premise: Jim Worth (Tim Roth), an ex-detective from London…
Second thoughts
I had planned to review David Mitchell and Robert Webb’s new Channel 4 sitcom Back without constantly referring to their…
Straight to hell
No, The State (Channel 4) wasn’t a recruiting manual for the Islamic State, though I did feel uneasy about it…
For goodness’ sake
Most new Netflix series are greeted not merely with acclaim, but with a level of gratitude that the returning Christ…
Norway’s noir
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
All this week I have been trying, with considerable success, to avoid being bludgeoned by TV programmes telling me in…
1967 and all that
As you may have spotted, the BBC is marking the 50th anniversary of the decriminalisation of male homosexuality with an…
Dethroned by feminism
I’m a bit worried about Game of Thrones (Sky Atlantic). Not seriously worried: there’s too much money invested, too much…
Candid camera?
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
Melvyn Bragg on TV: The Box That Changed The World (BBC2, Saturday) was just what you would have expected of…
Mad about the girls
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
‘Riviera is the new Night Manager,’ I read somewhere. No, it’s not. Riviera (Sky Atlantic, Thursday) is the new Eldorado…
Never knowingly understated
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
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
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
Birds have been giving me a lot of grief of late. There’s Tappy — the blue tit who has built…
Police force
I’ve often thought that a good idea for an authentic TV cop show would be to portray the police as…
Serial offenders
Since completing season two of the brilliant Narcos, I’ve been unsuccessfully looking for a replacement serial drama that is more…
Arms race
Like most documentaries, Britain’s Nuclear Bomb: The Inside Story (BBC4, Wednesday) began by boasting about all the exclusives it would…
The real deal
The other day I had a very dispiriting conversation with a TV industry insider. It turns out that everything you…
Psycho thriller
Psychological thrillers — or ‘thrillers’ as they used to be known — have become almost as ubiquitous on television as…
Look back in anger
‘What we really need is a faux-historical drama series about police brutality and black activism set in 1970s London,’ said…
Age as allegory
Sky Atlantic — available only to Sky customers — has the cunning/infuriating policy of broadcasting the kind of programmes most…
