Television
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…
Bleak and brutal
Gomorrah (Sky Atlantic, Monday), the new, must-see Mafioso series, started promisingly. We met two hoods — one young, shaven-headed, good-looking;…
Trigger happy
Channel 4’s Kids and Guns (Thursday) began with an American TV advert in which a young boy’s eyes shone with…
Laugh a minute
If there’s one thing everyone knows about BBC comedy it’s that it’s going downhill. According to Danny Cohen, now Director…
Unforgettable riffs
A few weeks ago, my eight-year-old son, who’s taken up the guitar, announced that he’d learned something new. He then…
Question time
‘Fingers on buzzers!’ says Jeremy Paxman on University Challenge. But technically this is inaccurate. Only one of the teams actually…
Secrets and lies
BBC2’s The Honourable Woman (Thursday) began with a rather portentous voice-over bringing us the unsurprising news that ‘We all have…
Serpents’ tale
Did you know that the 8th-century Kingdom of Northumbria was the epicentre of an international exotic reptile trade? I only…
Dolphin watch
BBC4’s The Girl Who Talked to Dolphins (Tuesday) began with the overstated-sounding claim that it would be tackling ‘perhaps the…
Spectator sport
You know what the world needs most right now? What it needs is five good-looking-ish, talented-ish blokes dressed in a…
Dark tales
The work of John Banville — Booker-winning novelist and impeccably high-minded literary critic — might seem an unlikely source for…
Dipping should be outlawed
Admit it. Say it! ‘My name is Blah and I am a boxaholic.’ Life on hold, marriage in bits, job…
Comic genius
On Harry and Paul’s Story of the Twos (BBC 2, Sunday), there was a particularly cruel sketch in which Paul…
Alcohol overload
According to its executive producer Griff Rhys Jones, A Poet in New York (BBC2, Sunday) sought to rescue Dylan Thomas…
