TV
Worthy of Riefenstahl
My favourite bit of The Great European Disaster (BBC4, Sunday) was the lingering shot that showed golden heads of corn…
Ukip’s new recruits
Just three months into Ukip’s shock victory as the party of government and already Nigel Farage’s mob are starting to…
Spitting Image
Hold the front page! Spitting Image is back! Well, sort of. A new six-part series, from (some of) the team…
Brief encounter
I lost count long ago of the number of dinner parties and pub conversations where I’ve had to utter the…
Seeing the elephant
There were great numbers of young men who had never been in a war and were consequently far from unwilling…
The long goodbye
In January 1958, the British government began working on the significantly titled Operation Hope Not: its plans for what to…
Shopping and viewing
Some time in the 1960s, a group of people in an advertising agency (among them Llewelyn Thomas, son of Dylan)…
Net effect
Channel 4’s Cyberbully (Thursday), written by Ben Chanan and David Lobatto, turned out to be a brilliantly gripping drama, even…
Winning ways
If ever my near-neighbour William Sitwell is killed in a bizarre shooting accident and I end up taking his place…
Ghost town
BBC1’s authentically spooky three-part ghost story Remember Me hasn’t yet revealed what’s really going on in that gloomy Yorkshire town.…
Death of a screenwriter
Cinema is tough right now for writers. Thomas W. Hodgkinson reports from the front line at the Austin Film Festival
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.…
Un-PC Plod
There can’t have been many people who watched Confessions of a Copper (Channel 4, Wednesday) with a growing sense of…
Rough-Huhne
I love Grayson Perry. You might almost call him the anti-Russell Brand: a genuinely talented artist who also has some…
Hoard games
Detectorists (BBC4) is a sad git’s niche comedy that would never have been commissioned if it hadn’t been written and…
Murder in the mall
So you’ve just popped down to the supermarket for the weekly shop, toddlers in tow, when the grenades start to…
Husband and wives
Needless to say, it’s not uncommon to hear single British women in their thirties and forties saying that all the…
Carry on Mumbai
Viewers who like their TV journalism hard-hitting should probably avoid Hotel India, a new BBC2 series about the Taj Mahal…
Made in Heaven
Where is Jessica Hyde? If those words mean nothing to you then I have some excellent news. If not, then…
One for all
‘Pshaw!’ That was my first reaction to news of the BBC’s new ten-part Sunday night adaptation of The Three Musketeers.…
Law in action
As a new production of Twelve Angry Men opens in the West End, Robert Gore-Langton names his favourite courtroom dramas
