Television
The New York deli sandwich that changed history
There’s nothing new about bringing maverick businesspeople into government to give the bureaucratic blob what an unnamed ‘Trump adviser’ was…
When will the BBC ever learn?
They say that death and taxes are the only certain things in this life. I would add BBC bias into…
In defence of benzos
In the latest series of The White Lotus – a moral fable about the narcissism and toxicity of the privileged…
Keir Starmer must look beyond adolescent politics
An industry poll by the British Film Institute in 2000 to find Britain’s best television programme put Fawlty Towers first…
Well done to the Channel 4 halfwits
The number of people arriving here in small boats has increased since Sir Keir Starmer was elected Prime Minister on…
The hard truth about Britain’s soft power
How hard is your soft power? According to David Lammy, Britain’s soft power is so strong and underrated that he…
How to catch a traitor
A quarter of a century after the first series of Big Brother, there is still some life in reality TV.…
The Traitors finale was a cruel spectacle
Blame Covid. That’s the origin of the BBC’s hit game-show, The Traitors. Workplaces are still deserted as people sit in…
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…
The BBC vs Gregg Wallace
The last time I took my wife to watch Millwall play a home game, a gentleman a few rows in…
The best podcasts to fall asleep to
‘Yous!’ a train cleaner in rubber gloves says as we arrive at Liverpool Lime Street. ‘What are yous doing here?’…
More Airplane! than Speed: Nightsleeper reviewed
Earlier this year, ITV brought us Red Eye, a six-part drama set mainly on an overnight plane from London to…
Are the Rees-Moggs ready for their new reality?
I felt slightly anxious for Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg when I read he’d agreed to have a reality show made about…
When piracy meets protest
Sometimes there are advantages to being ill-informed. Knowing embarrassingly little about why 30 Greenpeace activists were jailed in Russia in…
Biddy Baxter and the perils of remembering the past
I’ve been reading the cracking, crackling new biography Biddy Baxter: The Woman Who Made Blue Peter by Richard Marson (he’s a friend,…
Much of the mysteriousness is inadvertent: ITV’s The Reunion reviewed
The Reunion opened in 1997 with some young people being carefree: a fact they obligingly signalled by zipping around the…
Will we even notice if AI replaces screenwriters?
Will we even notice if AI replaces screenwriters?
The BBC’s biggest problem
As I write this, the director-general of the BBC is being quizzed on the corporation’s future by people who were…
The strange obsession with Phillip Schofield
As I have noted before, there is always another circle. I thought that last week’s scandal (originally entitled ‘Suellagate’ or…
TV dramas like Welcome to Wrexham are spoiling sport
The blurred lines between sport and entertainment
What Zelensky has taken from his former TV career
Volodymyr Zelensky is one of the few leaders of modern times whose charisma, determination and sheer cojones can be said,…
Boris, Sherwood and the politics of the past
It feels like the end, but we’ve been here before. The past months of Boris Johnson’s teetering administration have felt…
A masterclass in evenhandedness: James Graham’s Sherwood reviewed
James Graham has made his considerable name writing political-based dramas of a highly unusual type: non-polemical ones. And this certainly…
