Television
Brief encounter
I lost count long ago of the number of dinner parties and pub conversations where I’ve had to utter the…
Seeing the elephant
There were great numbers of young men who had never been in a war and were consequently far from unwilling…
The long goodbye
In January 1958, the British government began working on the significantly titled Operation Hope Not: its plans for what to…
Losing the plot
Probably the two greatest advances in western culture in my lifetime have been the Sopranos-style epic serial drama and the…
Net effect
Channel 4’s Cyberbully (Thursday), written by Ben Chanan and David Lobatto, turned out to be a brilliantly gripping drama, even…
Right and wrong
God, it must be awful to have been at school with James Corden. As he sat fatly at the back…
Tale of the expected
As a New Year’s Day treat for all the family, Esio Trot (BBC1) seemed to be taking no chances. It…
Winning ways
If ever my near-neighbour William Sitwell is killed in a bizarre shooting accident and I end up taking his place…
Ghost town
BBC1’s authentically spooky three-part ghost story Remember Me hasn’t yet revealed what’s really going on in that gloomy Yorkshire town.…
Law of the jungle
One of the great benefits of having teenage children is that they force you out of your fuddy-duddy comfort zone.…
Un-PC Plod
There can’t have been many people who watched Confessions of a Copper (Channel 4, Wednesday) with a growing sense of…
On war and remembrance
There’s a plausible theory — recently rehearsed in the BBC’s excellent two-part documentary The Lion’s Last Roar? — that our…
Country folk
Twenty minutes into BBC4’s The Heart of Country (Friday), there was a clip of Chet Atkins, country music’s star producer…
Rough-Huhne
I love Grayson Perry. You might almost call him the anti-Russell Brand: a genuinely talented artist who also has some…
Home again
One of the more welcome and surprising things about television at the moment is that Homeland (Channel 4, Sunday) is…
Hoard games
Detectorists (BBC4) is a sad git’s niche comedy that would never have been commissioned if it hadn’t been written and…
Great leaps forward
Anybody feeling a bit depressed about the shortcomings of humanity could do worse than watch Brian Cox’s new series Human…
Murder in the mall
So you’ve just popped down to the supermarket for the weekly shop, toddlers in tow, when the grenades start to…
Husband and wives
Needless to say, it’s not uncommon to hear single British women in their thirties and forties saying that all the…
Fashion victim
At a birthday dinner over the weekend I was introduced to this delightful party girl of a certain age whose…
Linked in
For some of us, the biggest TV question of recent weeks hasn’t been how Newsnight is doing without Jeremy Paxman,…
Journey’s end
Is it just me or are almost all TV documentaries completely unwatchable these days? I remember when I first started…
Carry on Mumbai
Viewers who like their TV journalism hard-hitting should probably avoid Hotel India, a new BBC2 series about the Taj Mahal…
Made in Heaven
Where is Jessica Hyde? If those words mean nothing to you then I have some excellent news. If not, then…
In bed with the jihadis
War can reshape the medium of television. The First Gulf War was a landmark moment in broadcasting: CNN had reporters…
