TV
DVF worship
Girl is back for half-term so I’ve been able to watch nothing but crap on TV this week. Some of…
The Last Kingdom is BBC2’s solemnly cheesy answer to Game of Thrones
The opening caption for The Last Kingdom (BBC2, Thursday) read ‘Kingdom of Northumbria, North of England, 866 AD’. In fact,…
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…
Was BBC1’s Rooney hagiography more scripted reality than documentary?
Close to the Edge (BBC4, Tuesday) feels very much like an idea conceived during a particularly good night in the…
Independents’ day
I really hadn’t meant to write a postscript to last week’s column on my dark Supertramp past. But then along…
Talk of the devil
For years, Ian Fleming was famously self-deprecating about the James Bond books. (‘I have a rule of not looking back,’…
Socialist Cluedo
What a load of manipulative, hysterical tosh is An Inspector Calls. It wasn’t a work with which I was familiar…
Cock and bull
It’s hard to know whether the actor James Norton was being naive or disingenuous when he claimed in publicity interviews…
Lifting the veil
Finally I realise why women are so pissed off. It all goes back to the first codified laws — circa…
Will he was
In 2011, the Daily Mail carried a long story about how the Queen’s cousin Prince William of Gloucester, who died…
Nuclear overreaction
When I was growing up in the 1970s, my three main fears were: being blown up by the IRA; being…
Affairs in squares
On all those comic lists of the world’s shortest books (Great Italian War Heroes, My Hunt for the Real Killers,…
Institutional feminism
Some revelations, it seems, are capable of being endlessly repeated while still remaining revelations. Think of all the books, articles…
Behind the Black Flag curtain
So you’ve just popped out of town for the day on an errand. And when you get back, everyone has…
The bankers’ darling
This week’s Imagine… Jeff Koons: Diary of a Seducer (BBC1, Tuesday) began with Koons telling a slightly puzzled-looking Alan Yentob…
Look back in anger
‘Cringe!’ said Boy, after I’d exposed him to a few seconds of last week’s special nostalgia edition of TFI Friday.…
Bad robots
You’d think scientists might have realised by now that creating a race of super-robots is about as wise as opening…
Pet rescue
I adore Andrew Roberts. We go back a long way. Once, on a boating expedition gone wrong in the south…
Are you being funny?
Monday saw the return of possibly the weirdest TV series in living memory. Imagine a parallel universe in which Are…
Living history
It has been a while since the BBC really pushed the boat out on the epic history documentary front. Perhaps…
Strange ways
BBC One’s 2015 choice of Sunday-night drama series is beginning to resemble the career of the kind of Hollywood actor…
The lying game
My favourite scene in the first episode of the new series of Benefits Street (Mondays, Channel 4) — now relocated…
Messy genius
Orson Welles would have been 100 this month. When he died in 1985, aged 70, the wonder was that he…
Not much cop
With Clocking Off, Shameless and State of Play among his credits, Paul Abbott is undoubtedly one of the most respected…
Aussie rules
Some years ago I paid a visit to the site of the Gallipoli landings because I was mildly obsessed with…
