Weekend world
When the time comes to make programmes looking back on the 2010s, I wonder which aspects of life today will…
An inconvenient truth
On the face of it, the Netflix documentary serial Making a Murderer should only take up ten hours of your…
Compliance order
Never a man tortured by self-doubt, Derren Brown introduced his latest special Pushed to the Edge (Channel 4, Tuesday) as…
Losing the plot
On the face of it, ITV’s Peter & Wendy sounded like a perfect family offering for Boxing Day: an adaptation…
Beyond a joke
Let’s start this week with a joke: ‘You know Mrs Kelly? Do you know Mrs Kelly? Her husband’s that little…
Why most four-year-olds deserve to be sectioned
The first episode of Let Us Entertain You (BBC2, Wednesday) definitely couldn’t be accused of lacking a central thesis. Presenter…
The Last Kingdom is BBC2’s solemnly cheesy answer to Game of Thrones
The opening caption for The Last Kingdom (BBC2, Thursday) read ‘Kingdom of Northumbria, North of England, 866 AD’. In fact,…
Was BBC1’s Rooney hagiography more scripted reality than documentary?
Close to the Edge (BBC4, Tuesday) feels very much like an idea conceived during a particularly good night in the…
Talk of the devil
For years, Ian Fleming was famously self-deprecating about the James Bond books. (‘I have a rule of not looking back,’…
Cock and bull
It’s hard to know whether the actor James Norton was being naive or disingenuous when he claimed in publicity interviews…
Will he was
In 2011, the Daily Mail carried a long story about how the Queen’s cousin Prince William of Gloucester, who died…
Sick and tired
When the link between tobacco and lung cancer was first established in the early 1950s, one obvious question arose: should…
Affairs in squares
On all those comic lists of the world’s shortest books (Great Italian War Heroes, My Hunt for the Real Killers,…
Institutional feminism
Some revelations, it seems, are capable of being endlessly repeated while still remaining revelations. Think of all the books, articles…
Serial thriller
For keen students of China, this week’s television provided yet more proof that Deng Xiaoping’s decision to open the country…
The bankers’ darling
This week’s Imagine… Jeff Koons: Diary of a Seducer (BBC1, Tuesday) began with Koons telling a slightly puzzled-looking Alan Yentob…
Bad robots
You’d think scientists might have realised by now that creating a race of super-robots is about as wise as opening…
Are you being funny?
Monday saw the return of possibly the weirdest TV series in living memory. Imagine a parallel universe in which Are…
Strange ways
BBC One’s 2015 choice of Sunday-night drama series is beginning to resemble the career of the kind of Hollywood actor…
Not much cop
With Clocking Off, Shameless and State of Play among his credits, Paul Abbott is undoubtedly one of the most respected…
Still crazy after all these years
It says something about Kate Bush’s standing in the music world that, perhaps uniquely in the history of long-awaited live…
Still crazy after all these years
It says something about Kate Bush’s standing in the music world that, perhaps uniquely in the history of long-awaited live…
Bookends: The Saint Zita Society, by Ruth Rendell
Sometimes it seems as if Ruth Rendell’s heart just isn’t in all that killing any more. Certainly, her latest book,…
