Television
BBC1’s Esio Trot: like Fawlty Towers played at quarter speed
As a New Year’s Day treat for all the family, Esio Trot (BBC1) seemed to be taking no chances. It…
How to win MasterChef - and why salmon is the fish of the devil
If ever my near-neighbour William Sitwell is killed in a bizarre shooting accident and I end up taking his place…
BBC1’s Remember Me: the curious case of the killer Yorkshire taps
BBC1’s authentically spooky three-part ghost story Remember Me hasn’t yet revealed what’s really going on in that gloomy Yorkshire town.…
Don’t sneer at I’m a Celebrity. The show is teaching us to become model citizens
One of the great benefits of having teenage children is that they force you out of your fuddy-duddy comfort zone.…
Jaw-dropping confessions of a very un-PC Plod
There can’t have been many people who watched Confessions of a Copper (Channel 4, Wednesday) with a growing sense of…
We know that war is hell. But it doesn’t ever make us stop doing it
There’s a plausible theory — recently rehearsed in the BBC’s excellent two-part documentary The Lion’s Last Roar? — that our…
James Walton uncovers the sound of Nashville - money
Twenty minutes into BBC4’s The Heart of Country (Friday), there was a clip of Chet Atkins, country music’s star producer…
James Delingpole falls in love with Grayson Perry - and almost comes round to Chris Huhne
I love Grayson Perry. You might almost call him the anti-Russell Brand: a genuinely talented artist who also has some…
Hooray for Homeland - Carrie’s back blasting America’s enemies to pieces with drones
One of the more welcome and surprising things about television at the moment is that Homeland (Channel 4, Sunday) is…
Fellow saddoes rejoice: BBC4 has made a comedy-drama about metal detecting
Detectorists (BBC4) is a sad git’s niche comedy that would never have been commissioned if it hadn’t been written and…
We're great and baboons are losers: this week's lesson from Brian Cox
Anybody feeling a bit depressed about the shortcomings of humanity could do worse than watch Brian Cox’s new series Human…
Could the Kenyan mall atrocities happen here?
So you’ve just popped down to the supermarket for the weekly shop, toddlers in tow, when the grenades start to…
Marriage and foreplay Sharia-style
Needless to say, it’s not uncommon to hear single British women in their thirties and forties saying that all the…
I love that people assume I’m gay
At a birthday dinner over the weekend I was introduced to this delightful party girl of a certain age whose…
Now for the really tricky question: can Only Connect survive BBC2?
For some of us, the biggest TV question of recent weeks hasn’t been how Newsnight is doing without Jeremy Paxman,…
We need more opinionated English eccentrics making documentaries like, ahem, me...
Is it just me or are almost all TV documentaries completely unwatchable these days? I remember when I first started…
BBC2’s Hotel India: slums? What slums?
Viewers who like their TV journalism hard-hitting should probably avoid Hotel India, a new BBC2 series about the Taj Mahal…
Eye-gouging within the first half-hour: the edgy new rules of TV drama
Where is Jessica Hyde? If those words mean nothing to you then I have some excellent news. If not, then…
Scoops, snark and jihad – this is Vice News's war
War can reshape the medium of television. The First Gulf War was a landmark moment in broadcasting: CNN had reporters…
Gomorrah is gangsters without glamour – but it's still not as scary as Dance Moms
Gomorrah (Sky Atlantic, Monday), the new, must-see Mafioso series, started promisingly. We met two hoods — one young, shaven-headed, good-looking;…
Barbie dolls? This girl aims for the head
Channel 4’s Kids and Guns (Thursday) began with an American TV advert in which a young boy’s eyes shone with…
In which James Delingpole gets down with the kids, finds they’re sex-obsessed…
If there’s one thing everyone knows about BBC comedy it’s that it’s going downhill. According to Danny Cohen, now Director…
The quest for the perfect guitar riff is a noble one – if not quite the key to unlocking the mysteries of the universe
A few weeks ago, my eight-year-old son, who’s taken up the guitar, announced that he’d learned something new. He then…
Your starter for ten: why do we Brits so love University Challenge?
‘Fingers on buzzers!’ says Jeremy Paxman on University Challenge. But technically this is inaccurate. Only one of the teams actually…
The Honourable Woman could have done with some help from an overpaid executive in a suit
BBC2’s The Honourable Woman (Thursday) began with a rather portentous voice-over bringing us the unsurprising news that ‘We all have…
