Reality TV
Surprisingly good: Amazon Prime’s Last One Laughing reviewed
‘What will it take to make Richard Ayoade laugh?’ If you find this question about as enticing as ‘Whose turn…
I’m warming to Meghan Markle – only joking
You know that urge when you’ve got friends coming for the weekend and you just have to spend the previous…
I hope nobody watches Meet the Rees-Moggs
Towards the end of last year, the production company Optomen TV contacted Jacob about the possibility of filming a documentary series…
Why did C.J. Sansom ok this moronic Disney+ Shardlake adaptation?
What would C.J. Sansom have made of the Disney+ version of his novel series about 16th-century crookback lawyer Matthew Shardlake?…
Beyond the cringe
Big Brother is Nineteen Eighty-Four rewritten by Aldous Huxley. The detail that George Orwell got wrong is that far from…
Rewriting history
If you don’t subscribe to every last detail of the LGBTQ+ agenda, then basically you are a Nazi. This was…
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…
Playing chicken with your conscience
Jade Goody appeared on Big Brother in 2002. She was a short, loud, blonde-haired woman who broadcast her every thought…
Wicked smaht
When I was ten years old I had a babysitter who was a beautiful graduate student at an Ivy League…
Open book
365 Stories I Want To Tell You Before We Both Die is a podcast that experimental filmmaker Caveh Zahedi started…
Resistance reality TV has jumped the shark
Comey. Cohen. Strzok. Page. Blasey Ford. Kavanaugh. Mueller. Taylor and Kent. Are you fed up yet? It sometimes feels as…
The left-wing bias on Celebrity Gogglebox was excruciating
This week I want to put the boot in to Gogglebox (Channel 4, Fridays). Not the mostly likeable, everyday version,…
When in Rome…
I know I keep saying that in Decline of the West terms we’re all currently living in Rome, circa 400…
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…
Would I break my neck for a bit of TV fame?
Not long ago I was asked if I wanted to participate in a Channel 4 reality show called The Jump.…
Will you survive the Delingpole Era? See below…
Things I am going to ban when, by popular acclaim, I am elected your Dictator For Life in 2016.…
I’m a Celebrity is like The Simpsons: good if you’re thick; even better if you’re not
The best bit in I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! (ITV) will be when the prisoners finally revolt…
Jonathan Coe’s raucous social satire smoulders with anger behind the fun
When Rachel, one of the unreliable narrators of Number 11, wants to ‘go back to the very beginning’, she starts…
Hunted blows a fresh breeze through the stale world of reality TV
Television used to employ entertainers to entertain the public. Back then you could count the channels on the fingers of…
Reality check
Why I had to say no to Celebrity Big Brother
The lying game
My favourite scene in the first episode of the new series of Benefits Street (Mondays, Channel 4) — now relocated…
Law of the jungle
One of the great benefits of having teenage children is that they force you out of your fuddy-duddy comfort zone.…
I’m a celebrity, get me in there
I had thought that my days of being approached by reality show producers hoping to put together a cast of…
