Losing the plot
The Reunion opened in 1997 with some young people being carefree: a fact they obligingly signalled by zipping around the…
Too posh for the cosh
In 2014, Ben Macintyre presented a BBC2 documentary based on his book A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the…
Time to start popping the pills
No one does agonising quite like Mobeen Azhar. In several BBC documentaries now, he’s set his face to pensive, gone…
Split decision
In the opening minutes of Best Interests (Monday and Tuesday), an estranged middle-aged couple made their separate ways to court,…
This was England
In advance, The Gallows Pole: This Valley Will Rise was touted as a radical departure for director Shane Meadows. After…
Death on the Nile
The most controversial aspect of Netflix’s new drama-documentary Queen Cleopatra – not least in Egypt – was the casting of…
Rabbit redux
With the current taste for remakes of erotic-thriller movies of the 1980s and ’90s, these are certainly good times for…
Sex offenders
It is, of course, traditional for film and TV reviewers to demonstrate their steely high-mindedness by claiming that anything describing…
Losing the plot
By now a genuinely radical way to turn a Victorian novel into a TV drama would be to take that…
On the sick list
Sunday-night dramas on the two main terrestrial channels definitely aren’t what they used to be. Not so long ago, you…
Same old story
Back in 1990, Grandpa from The Simpsons wrote a letter of protest to TV-makers. ‘I am disgusted with the way…
Calling time
There’s a distinct and rather cunning whiff of cakeism about the new documentary series Parole. On the one hand, it…
Man and boy
For my money – and lots of other people’s – Florian Zeller’s 2020 film The Father was pretty much a…
Joking aside
Nick Hornby’s 2014 novel Funny Girl was both a heartfelt defence and a convincing example of what popular entertainment can…
The seeds of the kingdom
Salman Rushdie returns to India with a full-throated mix of history, magic realism and dazzling storytelling, says James Walton
Procession of eccentrics
For around a decade now, Grayson Perry has been making reliably thoughtful and entertaining documentary series about such things as…
The strangest figure in pop
On 3 February 2003, the emergency services in Los Angeles received a call. ‘I’m Phil Spector’s driver,’ a voice told…
Sentimental value
What’s wrong with sentimentality? The answer, I’d suggest, could either be: a) its almost bullying insistence on us having emotions…
The glee of hatred
For those who consider themselves traditional liberals (full disclosure: such as me) Sunday’s first episode of Simon Schama’s History of…
Doggy style
Have you ever seen film of the England 1966 football team holding the World Cup at the Royal Garden Hotel,…
Gluttons for punishment
Nick Hornby yokes the two in an enjoyable jeu d’esprit – but, apart from troubled childhoods and prodigious energy, the thing they really share is Hornby’s admiration
Man up
Sunday’s SAS Rogue Heroes – about the founding of perhaps Britain’s most famous regiment – began with a revealing variation…
Motivated by love
At the start of Somewhere Boy, an 18-year-old boy is rescued from an isolated house by his aunt Sue following…
Paxman on Parkinson’s
On first impression, you might have thought that Unbreakablewas just a fairly desperate reality show cobbled together from I’m a…
Bang goes nothing
Crossfire was a three-part drama in more ways than one. Running every night from Tuesday to Thursday, it brought together…
