Television
Sheer delight
Graham Hancock’s Ancient Apocalypse has been described by the Guardian as ‘the most dangerous show on Netflix’. What? More dangerous…
The glee of hatred
For those who consider themselves traditional liberals (full disclosure: such as me) Sunday’s first episode of Simon Schama’s History of…
The good, the bad and the ugly
TV currently abounds with ‘I thought they were dead’ revival projects: series in which your favourite 1980s movie stars are…
Doggy style
Have you ever seen film of the England 1966 football team holding the World Cup at the Royal Garden Hotel,…
Gross profit
Gratingly edgy soundtrack, stomach-churning gore, torture, witchcraft, sadism and an indigestible title. The Bastard Son & The Devil Himself sounds…
Man up
Sunday’s SAS Rogue Heroes – about the founding of perhaps Britain’s most famous regiment – began with a revealing variation…
Dog days of the USSR
Russia 1985-1999: TraumaZone – even the title makes you want to scream – is Adam Curtis’s Metal Machine Music: the…
Motivated by love
At the start of Somewhere Boy, an 18-year-old boy is rescued from an isolated house by his aunt Sue following…
Senior moment
We men all think we’ve still got it, even when we’re well past 50 and young women look straight through…
Paxman on Parkinson’s
On first impression, you might have thought that Unbreakablewas just a fairly desperate reality show cobbled together from I’m a…
Why I love a cliché
You’d have to pay me an awful lot more than I get for this column to review Monster: The Jeffrey…
Bang goes nothing
Crossfire was a three-part drama in more ways than one. Running every night from Tuesday to Thursday, it brought together…
So much better than talking
In all the tributes to Her late Majesty’s constancy, dignity, wisdom and devotion to duty, not enough has been said…
In all seriousness
Amazon’s much-heralded Tolkien prequel The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power began by answering a question that has…
There will be blood
House of the Dragon got off to a pretty uninspirational start, I thought: no major characters brought to a shocking…
Rough justice
At 4.38 a.m., one morning in October 2013, the radio presenter Paul Gambaccini was understandably asleep when the doorbell rang.…
Finger-wagging and flawed
‘Diversity is woven into the very soul of the story.’ If those words of praise from a rave review in…
Howard’s way
About ten minutes in to Thirteen Lives, Boy came in and asked me whether it was any good. I said:…
Mob mentality
It’s hard to imagine in the wake of GoodFellas, The Sopranos and Gomorrah but there was a time, not so…
Old news, but good news
When TV makes shows about TV, it rarely has a good word to say for itself. In the likes of…
Acid test
Many years ago a man on the end of my cigarette stole my soul. Mr Migarette (for such was his…
Softly, softly
Grizzled police officers of the old school should probably avoid Channel 4’s Night Coppers for reasons of blood pressure. Like…
The thrilling game
‘The Terminal List is… a dated and drably made eight-part military thriller that offers little intrigue or excitement,’ says the…
Not one for the naive
The Undeclared War has many of the traditional signifiers of a classy thriller: the assiduous letter-by-letter captioning of every location;…
This will end badly
I don’t think it’s my imagination: it really is getting harder and harder to find anything worth watching on TV.…
