BBC1
David Hare is the kind of second-rate artist who flourished under Stalin
Shortly after my rave review of McMafia eight weeks ago, I got a long message from an old friend chastising…
Sun readers will be disappointed – E.M. Phwoar-ster it is not: Howards End reviewed
Any readers of the Sun who excitedly tuned in to Howards End on Sunday night with their pause button at…
Playing it safe
BBC1’s latest Sunday-night drama The Last Post, about a British military base in Aden in 1965, feels like a programme…
Loose ends
On Sunday night, Holliday Grainger was on two terrestrial channels at the same time playing a possibly smitten sidekick of…
BBC1’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream seems deliberately designed to flush out purists
Spoiler alerts aren’t normally required for reviews of Shakespeare — but perhaps I’d better issue one before saying that in…
David Attenborough used to steal the animals he found in the jungle and take them home
Let me start this week with an admittedly hard quiz question: in 1954, how did the sudden illness of Jack…
Line of Duty thinks – rightly – that there’s drama in the subsections of police acts
Which is better, British TV drama or American? A couple of years ago, merely asking the question would have had…
Scandi noir reduces you to an exquisitely suicidal state
Some things I have learned about Iceland after watching six episodes of Trapped (BBC4, Saturdays). 1. They seem to feel…
BBC1’s The Night Manager verges on parody
The Night Manager (BBC1, Sunday) announced its intentions immediately, when the opening credits lovingly combined weapons and luxury items. ‘Blimey,’…
Murder, rape, sheep abuse: you won't feel short-changed by BBC1's Happy Valley
Judging from its website, Hebden Bridge’s tourist office considers the fact that BBC1’s Happy Valley is filmed in the town…
War & Peace is actually just an upmarket Downton Abbey
Gosh what a breath of fresh air was Andrew Davies’s War & Peace adaptation (BBC1, Sundays) after all the stale…
Dreams don’t have to make sense - but TV dramas do: Peter & Wendy reviewed
On the face of it, ITV’s Peter & Wendy sounded like a perfect family offering for Boxing Day: an adaptation…
James Delingpole cringes at London Spy’s gay sex scenes
The main problem with being a TV critic, I’ve noticed over the years, is that you have to watch so…
Was BBC1’s Rooney show 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…
Guns, tools and toffee apples - but no nudity: BBC1’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover reviewed
It’s hard to know whether the actor James Norton was being naive or disingenuous when he claimed in publicity interviews…
Bohemian conformity can be just as suffocating as any other type: BBC1’s Life in Squares reviewed
On all those comic lists of the world’s shortest books (Great Italian War Heroes, My Hunt for the Real Killers,…
As blatant rip-offs go, this one is shaping up nicely: Odyssey, BBC2, reviewed
This week’s Imagine… Jeff Koons: Diary of a Seducer (BBC1, Tuesday) began with Koons telling a slightly puzzled-looking Alan Yentob…
James Delingpole remembers why he never watched TFI Friday - because it's dreadful
‘Cringe!’ said Boy, after I’d exposed him to a few seconds of last week’s special nostalgia edition of TFI Friday.…
Channel 4’s No Offence reviewed: ‘hugely entertaining and wildly unconvincing’
With Clocking Off, Shameless and State of Play among his credits, Paul Abbott is undoubtedly one of the most respected…
Poldark review: drama by committee
By my calculations, the remake of Poldark (BBC1, Sunday) is the first time BBC drama has returned to Cornwall since…
Channel 4’s Cyberbully: an unashamedly old-fashioned drama in being both well made and moral
Channel 4’s Cyberbully (Thursday), written by Ben Chanan and David Lobatto, turned out to be a brilliantly gripping drama, even…
It's because Corden is such a dick that The Wrong Mans was so blindingly brilliant
God, it must be awful to have been at school with James Corden. As he sat fatly at the back…
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…
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.…
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…
