Channel 4
Modern soap operas have lost the plot
Modern soap operas have lost the plot
Is Jed Mercurio bored with Line of Duty?
When a drama begins with news of a ‘Chis handler’ receiving ‘intel graded A1 on the matrix’ that causes a…
John DeLorean: man of mystery – and full-blown psychopath
DeLorean: Back from the Future was one of those documentaries — for me at least — that takes a story…
Who's laughing now? Cancel culture is killing comedy
The BBC and Channel 4 are self-censoring their comedy output because they are so terrified of offending people. So says…
Funny, tender and properly horrible: Channel 4’s Adult Material reviewed
A woman is eating a pie in her car as it gets an automatic wash. Careful to keep the pie…
Sick, puerile, inappropriate and delicious: Amazon Prime's The Boys reviewed
There’s a delicious scene in the new season of Amazon’s superheroes-gone-bad series The Boys. The chief superhero Homelander (Antony Starr)…
A fine, even rather noble drama: BBC1's The Salisbury Poisonings reviewed
This week, BBC1 brought us a three-part dramatisation of an ‘unprecedented crisis’ in recent British life. Among other things, it…
Another drama about how women are great and men are rubbish: C4's Philharmonia reviewed
On the face of it, a French-language drama about a Parisian symphony orchestra mightn’t sound like the most action-packed of…
SAS: Who Dares Wins is harsh, gruelling and transgressively countercultural
SAS: Who Dares Wins (Channel 4, Sundays) is literally the only programme left on terrestrial TV that I can bear…
Should we be playing the surveillance state for laughs? Celebrity Hunted reviewed
One of the many great things about The Capture was that we could never be sure whether the British authorities’…
The Octopus in My House left you with an overwhelming sense that octopuses are astonishing
Professor David Scheel, the presenter of a BBC2 documentary on Thursday, instantly brought to mind that American scientist in The…
Makes you wonder if you’ve got drunk without noticing: Wild Bill reviewed
Usually, the return of Killing Eve would be pretty much guaranteed to provide the most unconventional, rule-busting TV programme of…
Did the makers of When I Grow Up have no qualms turning a small boy into a hate figure?
Channel 4’s When I Grow Up had an important lesson for middle-class white males everywhere: you’re never too young to…
Why has Frankie Boyle gone so soft?
‘I spend a lot of time helping teenagers who’ve been sexually abused…’ — beat — ‘…find their way out of…
Why did no one think the premise of Mums Make Porn was questionable?
What can parents do about the avalanche of pornography available to their children on tablet, phone and laptop? This question…
It’s shocking how many Michael Jackson fans are still determined to take his side
Halfway through the first part of Channel 4’s extraordinary documentary Leaving Neverland (Thursdays), I flicked through the comments on social…
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…
Enjoyably contrived: BBC1’s Baptiste reviewed
What’s the best way to start a six-part thriller? The answer, it seems, is to have a bloke of a…
Les Misérables is another depressing example of the BBC’s woke quota targets
As the Allies advanced towards Germany in September 1944, their supplies were brought all the way from western Normandy in…
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…
‘Brexit unleased something monstrous’: James Graham interviewed
‘I try to interpret the most generous version of somebody’s actions,’ says the dramatist James Graham. This rare ability to…
Full of bog-standard, if annoyingly effective, emotional manipulation: The Foreign Doctors Are Coming reviewed
Surprising I know, but judging from The Foreign Doctors Are Coming (Channel 4, Tuesday), Britain mightn’t be such a bad…
Channel 4 doesn’t do ‘news’ in any meaningful sense of the word – it’s pure propaganda
When President Trump refused to take a question from a CNN reporter at the Chequers press conference last week, I…
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…
Exhilaratingly original, C4’s Flowers is much more than just a ‘dark comedy’
On Wednesday, BBC Four made an unexpectedly strong case that the human body is a bit rubbish. Our ill-designed spines,…
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