TV
Intelligence-insulting schlock: Sky Atlantic's Your Honor reviewed
I’m really not enjoying Your Honor, the latest vehicle for Bryan Cranston to play a good man driven to the…
It's impossible not to feel snooty watching ITV's Agatha and Poirot
Agatha and Poirot was one of those programmes that had the annoying effect of making you feel distinctly snooty. ITV’s…
The Mozarts of ad music
Richard Bratby meets the hidden men and women composing melodies to make you buy
Revelatory and grubby: Framing Britney Spears reviewed
The most headline-grabbing of these three pop docs was Framing Britney Spears, part of the New York Times Presents documentary…
Apple+'s new series damn near cost me my marriage: Calls reviewed
Calls is the very antithesis of televisual soma. In fact it’s so jarring and discomfiting and horrible that I think…
How stupid do the script writers of Sky’s Devils think we are?
Here’s a worried question I want to plant in your head: when is TV drama going to start depicting the…
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…
