TV
Our love affair with the Anglo-Saxons
Dan Hitchens on our love affair with the Anglo-Saxons
Impossibly exciting: Sky Atlantic's ZeroZeroZero reviewed
ZeroZeroZero is the impossibly exciting new drugs series from Roberto Saviano — the author who gave us perhaps my all-time…
Makes me nostalgic for an era when music was more than a click away: Teenage Superstars reviewed
In Teenage Superstars, a long and slightly exhausting documentary about the Scottish indie scene of the 1980s and ’90s, there…
Incoherent and conspiracy-fuelled: Adam Curtis’s Can’t Get You Out of My Head reviewed
‘History,’ wrote Edward Gibbon, ‘is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.’ In…
You'll wish you were gay: Channel 4's It's a Sin reviewed
To promote his new drama series about Aids in the early 1980s, Russell T. Davies insisted in an interview that…
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…
Like trying to understand some obscure but fashionable meme: WandaVision reviewed
‘What the world needs now is a black and white pastiche of classic 1950s and 1960s sitcoms reviving two Marvel…
Watch Mark Kermode find 1950s political attitudes in 1950s films
The new series of Mark Kermode’s Secrets of Cinema began with an episode on British comedy films. As ever, Kermode…
Most artistic careers end in failure. Why does no one talk about this?
Rosie Millard dispels the myth that persistence is always rewarded
A romcom with very little com: BBC1’s Black Narcissus reviewed
In Black Narcissus, based on the novel by Rumer Godden, five nuns set off for a remote Himalayan palace in…
Netflix's Barbarians taught me those Romans had it coming
Of all the times and places to have been on the wrong side of history, I can’t imagine many worse…
What's an art form that feels unpopular and pointless, but isn't? Video art
How did the universe begin? Did the great god Bumba vomit us up, as the Kuba believe? Or did we…
Watch Andrew Marr stare at places where stuff happened: New Elizabethans reviewed
Congratulations, everyone! It turns out we’re much better than those bigoted old Brits of the 1950s. After all, they were…
The grotesque unevenness of Mozart’s Requiem
It is amazing what fine performances you can get beamed to your computer these days. Slightly less amazing is the…
I could have directed it better: Steve McQueen's Small Axe reviewed
Unlike with every other BBC period drama series these days, I didn’t have to sit through Small Axe: Mangrove grumbling…
Like much jazz, it might have benefited from being less solemn: BBC4's Ronnie's reviewed
Ronnie’s: Ronnie Scott and His World-Famous Jazz Club was like the TV equivalent of an authorised biography: impressively thorough, often…
Did any of this actually happen? The Crown, season four, reviewed
‘We have to stop it now!’ says Princess Margaret (Helena Bonham Carter), smoking another cigarette, obviously. She’s talking about the…
Is The Undoing properly great or just a run-of-mill thriller with a brilliant casting director?
There must be some people somewhere who vaguely know their own spouses — but if so, they don’t tend to…
Has Spitting Image ever been funny?
Thank you, Spitting Image, for the nostalgia trip! Your new series on BritBox has rekindled with almost Proustian fidelity those…
Enough plotlines to power several seasons of The West Wing: BBC1's Roadkill reviewed
Like many a political thriller before it, BBC1’s Roadkill began with a politician emerging into the daylight to face a…
Is AppleTV's Tehran the new Fauda?
If you love Fauda — and of course you do — you’re in for a long wait for season four,…
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)…
How on earth did Harold Pinter and Danny Dyer become such good friends?
Collectors of TV titles that sound as if they were thought of by Alan Partridge will presumably have spotted Danny…
The TV we feared they’d never dare make any more: The Singapore Grip reviewed
‘Art is dead,’ declared Mark Steyn recently. He was referring to the new rules — copied from the Baftas —…
