1967 and all that
As you may have spotted, the BBC is marking the 50th anniversary of the decriminalisation of male homosexuality with an…
Playing Stalin for laughs
Christopher Wilson’s new novel is much easier to enjoy than to categorise. And ‘enjoy’ is definitely the right word, even…
Candid camera?
Channel 4’s Catching a Killer offered the rare TV spectacle these days of a middle-aged white male copper leading a…
Mad about the girls
It’s not unusual to see a pop concert on TV where teenage girls and a group of middle-aged men are…
Never knowingly understated
At one uncharacteristically low-key point in Sunday’s Poldark — back for a third series on BBC1 — Ross (Aidan Turner)…
The sting of betrayal
This may seem an odd thing to say about a writer who’s been officially declared a National Living Treasure in…
Heaven knows they’re miserable now
On the face of it, the two new big drama series of the week don’t have a great deal in…
Police force
I’ve often thought that a good idea for an authentic TV cop show would be to portray the police as…
Arms race
Like most documentaries, Britain’s Nuclear Bomb: The Inside Story (BBC4, Wednesday) began by boasting about all the exclusives it would…
Cover stories
These days, Aubrey Powell is a genial 70-year-old who can be found most mornings having breakfast at his local Knightsbridge…
A cuckold’s revenge
Perhaps the least necessary piece of advice ever given to a Hanif Kureishi protagonist comes in 2014’s The Last Word.…
Psycho thriller
Psychological thrillers — or ‘thrillers’ as they used to be known — have become almost as ubiquitous on television as…
Age as allegory
Sky Atlantic — available only to Sky customers — has the cunning/infuriating policy of broadcasting the kind of programmes most…
The man who’s read everything
According to Martin Amis in The Information, the last person to have read every book ever published was Coleridge. Faced…
Beyond belief
As we know from all those newspaper articles and actress interviews, there’s a scandalous lack of high-profile British TV dramas…
On the money
Fans of tough investigative journalism should probably avoid Channel 4’s How’d You Get So Rich? Presenter Katherine Ryan’s main tactic…
On the money
Fans of tough investigative journalism should probably avoid Channel 4’s How’d You Get So Rich? Presenter Katherine Ryan’s main tactic…
Occupational hazard
Rival law-enforcement agencies arguing about which of them should investigate a murder has, of course, been a staple of crime…
Occupational hazard
Rival law-enforcement agencies arguing about which of them should investigate a murder has, of course, been a staple of crime…
Occupational hazard
Rival law-enforcement agencies arguing about which of them should investigate a murder has, of course, been a staple of crime…
Tricks of the trades
Oddly enough, one of the most historically influential pieces of British writing has turned out to be an essay that…
Tricks of the trades
Oddly enough, one of the most historically influential pieces of British writing has turned out to be an essay that…
Impaired vision
With the Shannon Matthews story, it’s not easy to accentuate the positive — but BBC1’s The Moorside (Tuesday) is having…
Impaired vision
With the Shannon Matthews story, it’s not easy to accentuate the positive — but BBC1’s The Moorside (Tuesday) is having…
Hull’s a poppin’
In early January, lastminute.com recommended its top 15 destinations for 2017. In 12th spot, just above Montreal, Croatia and Japan,…
