BBC2
Toby Jones on the allure of the everyman – and the glamour of coach-driving
Toby Jones shuffles into the café in Clapham where we are meeting. He’s wearing a duffle coat and a hat…
Promising but, compared to the first series, short of laughs: Fleabag reviewed
BBC2’s MotherFatherSon announced its status as a classy thriller in the traditional way: by ensuring that for quite a long…
Danny Dyer’s Right Royal Family might well be the oddest TV show of recent times
Last year on Who Do You Think You Are?, Danny Dyer — EastEnders actor and very possibly Britain’s most cockney…
According to BBC4, what was one of the ‘most important inventions in modern music’?
Here’s a tricky quiz question for you. What word completes this sentence from a BBC4 documentary on Friday: ‘The world…
Refreshingly understated: BBC1’s Mrs Wilson reviewed
Shortly before her husband’s funeral, the undertaker told the eponymous main character in Mrs Wilson (BBC1, Tuesday) that, ‘We’re here…
How does David Attenborough know what the monkeys are thinking?
The opening episode of BBC1’s Dynasties — the new Attenborough-fronted series from the Natural History Unit — introduced us to…
Forget the BBC – only Channel 5 does proper documentaries these days
What a load of utter tripe Bodyguard (BBC1, Sundays) was. Admittedly, I came to it late having missed all the…
I had no idea how fascinating rubbish could be: The Secret Life of Landfill reviewed
Not the most beguiling of titles, I admit, but The Secret Life of Landfill: A Rubbish History (BBC4, Thursday) was…
Did Ed Balls mean to make a documentary on the joys of Trump’s America?
The thing I most regret having failed ever to ask brave, haunted, wise Sean O’Callaghan when I last saw him…
Fury and excitement – how the journalists at the New York Times have coped with Trump
Back when his country was controlled by the USSR, the Czech writer Milan Kundera pointed out that ‘Union of Soviet…
Understated and heartbreaking: BBC2’s King Lear reviewed
I recently came across a theory of the American poet Delmore Schwartz’s that Hamlet only makes sense if you assume…
Law & Order, made – and banned – in 1978, puts most recent crime series in the shade
It’s not every day that a television screenwriter is threatened with a trial for sedition, but G.F. Newman was after…
Jaw-dropping: My Year with the Tribe reviewed
For a while now, the Korowai people of Western Papua have been the go-to primitive tribe for documentary-makers. The Korowai…
Portentous, po-faced but also highly imaginative: The City & The City reviewed
BBC2 has a new drama series for Friday nights. The main character is a world-weary middle-aged police inspector with an…
Sun readers will be disappointed – E.M. Phwoar-ster it is not: Howards End reviewed
Any readers of the Sun who excitedly tuned in to Howards End on Sunday night with their pause button at…
Loose ends
On Sunday night, Holliday Grainger was on two terrestrial channels at the same time playing a possibly smitten sidekick of…
1967 and all that
As you may have spotted, the BBC is marking the 50th anniversary of the decriminalisation of male homosexuality with an…
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…
BBC1’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream seems deliberately designed to flush out purists
Spoiler alerts aren’t normally required for reviews of Shakespeare — but perhaps I’d better issue one before saying that in…
Even the sternest Leavisite critic would find it hard to resist BBC2's Peaky Blinders
The big returning show of the week began with servants laying out the silverware at a large country house in…
Downton Abbey with epidurals: BBC2's Five Star Babies reviewed
Five Star Babies: Inside the Portland Hospital won’t, I suspect, have been a hard sell to BBC2’s commissioning editors. Childbirth…
Line of Duty thinks – rightly – that there’s drama in the subsections of police acts
Which is better, British TV drama or American? A couple of years ago, merely asking the question would have had…
Scandi noir reduces you to an exquisitely suicidal state
Some things I have learned about Iceland after watching six episodes of Trapped (BBC4, Saturdays). 1. They seem to feel…
Twenty things I will ban when I am elected your Dictator For Life in 2016
The two things I hate most about Christmas are a) Advertland showing me how sparkly and joyous my home and…
James Delingpole cringes at London Spy’s gay sex scenes
The main problem with being a TV critic, I’ve noticed over the years, is that you have to watch so…
