Television
Good cop, bad cop
It has been quite some time since I’ve been able to bear watching UK crime drama. All right, I do…
Death by a thousand cuts
I wish I could say that Bamber Gascoigne would be turning in his grave at what has happened to University…
Rewriting history
If you don’t subscribe to every last detail of the LGBTQ+ agenda, then basically you are a Nazi. This was…
Too posh for the cosh
In 2014, Ben Macintyre presented a BBC2 documentary based on his book A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the…
Plane speaking
Idris Elba would have made a perfect James Bond. Not the James Bond that we knew and loved when he…
Time to start popping the pills
No one does agonising quite like Mobeen Azhar. In several BBC documentaries now, he’s set his face to pensive, gone…
Downhill fast
I’m ideologically opposed to bicycles for all the obvious reasons: they don’t have lovely big nostrils which you can blow…
Split decision
In the opening minutes of Best Interests (Monday and Tuesday), an estranged middle-aged couple made their separate ways to court,…
Let’s twist again
Imagine if you had the power always to tell whether or not someone was lying. You’d have it made, wouldn’t…
This was England
In advance, The Gallows Pole: This Valley Will Rise was touted as a radical departure for director Shane Meadows. After…
Inside story
Back once more to our favourite unhappy place: the dystopian future. And yet again it seems that the authorities have…
Death on the Nile
The most controversial aspect of Netflix’s new drama-documentary Queen Cleopatra – not least in Egypt – was the casting of…
Rabbit redux
With the current taste for remakes of erotic-thriller movies of the 1980s and ’90s, these are certainly good times for…
Vaudeville villainy
Tetris is a righteously entertaining movie about the stampede to secure the rights from within the Soviet Union to what…
Sex offenders
It is, of course, traditional for film and TV reviewers to demonstrate their steely high-mindedness by claiming that anything describing…
Scandi crush
War Sailor (Krigsseileren), a three-part drama on Netflix about the Norwegian merchant navy in the second world war, is one…
Losing the plot
By now a genuinely radical way to turn a Victorian novel into a TV drama would be to take that…
If I were a rich man
I have a theory that many great artists’ strength is a product of their weakness. The flaw of the relentlessly…
On the sick list
Sunday-night dramas on the two main terrestrial channels definitely aren’t what they used to be. Not so long ago, you…
A Rock and a hard place
Chris Rock was paid $20 million for his 70-minute Netflix special, so by my reckoning his riff on whether or…
Same old story
Back in 1990, Grandpa from The Simpsons wrote a letter of protest to TV-makers. ‘I am disgusted with the way…
Sporting greats
My new favourite tennis player, just ahead of Novak Djokovic, is Nick Kyrgios. Up until recently I’d barely heard of…
Calling time
There’s a distinct and rather cunning whiff of cakeism about the new documentary series Parole. On the one hand, it…
So damned German
I was almost tempted not to watch Kleo because it sounded like so many things I’d seen before: beautiful ex-Stasi…
Joking aside
Nick Hornby’s 2014 novel Funny Girl was both a heartfelt defence and a convincing example of what popular entertainment can…
