Leavisites should stay away: Sky’s Bad Tidings reviewed
Reviewing Sky’s The Heist before Christmas last year, I suggested that all feature-length festive television dramas begin with credits announcing…
We’re wrong to mock Do They Know It’s Christmas?
‘I hope we passed the audition,’ said an alarmingly youthful Bob Geldof at one point in The Making of Do…
Too cautious and wildly over the top at the same time: Paddington in Peru reviewed
Toy Story or The Godfather? Which way would Paddington in Peru go? Would the third instalment of a much-cherished series…
A bit of a mess: Channel 4’s Generation Z reviewed
In the second of this week’s two episodes of Generation Z (Sunday and Monday), a teenage girl called Finn wondered…
A hit – but please don’t pretend it’s feminist: Disney+’s Rivals reviewed
For most of my adult life, clever, well-read, feminist women have told me how much they love Jilly Cooper. It…
Have today’s TV dramatists completely given up on plausibility?
In advance, Ludwig sounded as if it was aimed squarely at the Inspector Morse market. Set among spires of impeccable…
More Airplane! than Speed: Nightsleeper reviewed
Earlier this year, ITV brought us Red Eye, a six-part drama set mainly on an overnight plane from London to…
An accidental spy: Gabriel’s Moon, by William Boyd, reviewed
Having chanced to interview the Congolese politician Patrice Lumumba shortly before his assassination, a travel writer finds himself targeted by British Intelligence
Why are these dead-eyed K-pop groups represented as some kind of ideal?
On Saturday, Made in Korea: The K-pop Experience began by hailing K-pop as ‘the multi-billion-pound music that’s taken the world…
Ambitious, bold and confusing: BBC4’s Corridors of Power – Should America Police the World? reviewed
Narrated by Meryl Streep, Corridors of Power: Should America Police the World? announced the scale of its ambition straight away.…
Clear, thorough and gripping: BBC2’s Horizon – The Battle to Beat Malaria
If you transcribed the narrator’s script in almost any episode of Horizon, you’d notice something striking: an awful lot of…
Utterly bog-standard: BBC2’s The Turkish Detective reviewed
A partly subtitled show set in Istanbul might sound like a brave departure for a BBC Sunday night crime drama.…
When piracy meets protest
Sometimes there are advantages to being ill-informed. Knowing embarrassingly little about why 30 Greenpeace activists were jailed in Russia in…
Nowhere near as miserable as I remember it: The Beatles – Let It Be reviewed
Beatles lore has long held that the film Let It Be was a depressing portrait of the band falling apart.…
Danny Dyer’s new C4 programme is deeply odd
Who do you think said the following on TV this week: ‘I love being around gay men – seeing a…
Dramatic, urgent and intriguing: BBC1’s This Town reviewed
After conquering the world with Peaky Blinders (and before that by co-creating Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?), Steven Knight…
