Television
I hope nobody watches Meet the Rees-Moggs
Towards the end of last year, the production company Optomen TV contacted Jacob about the possibility of filming a documentary series…
The BBC vs Gregg Wallace
The last time I took my wife to watch Millwall play a home game, a gentleman a few rows in…
The best podcasts to fall asleep to
‘Yous!’ a train cleaner in rubber gloves says as we arrive at Liverpool Lime Street. ‘What are yous doing here?’…
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…
Are the Rees-Moggs ready for their new reality?
I felt slightly anxious for Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg when I read he’d agreed to have a reality show made about…
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…
Biddy Baxter and the perils of remembering the past
I’ve been reading the cracking, crackling new biography Biddy Baxter: The Woman Who Made Blue Peter by Richard Marson (he’s a friend,…
Much of the mysteriousness is inadvertent: ITV’s The Reunion reviewed
The Reunion opened in 1997 with some young people being carefree: a fact they obligingly signalled by zipping around the…
Will we even notice if AI replaces screenwriters?
Will we even notice if AI replaces screenwriters?
The BBC’s biggest problem
As I write this, the director-general of the BBC is being quizzed on the corporation’s future by people who were…
The strange obsession with Phillip Schofield
As I have noted before, there is always another circle. I thought that last week’s scandal (originally entitled ‘Suellagate’ or…
TV dramas like Welcome to Wrexham are spoiling sport
The blurred lines between sport and entertainment
What Zelensky has taken from his former TV career
Volodymyr Zelensky is one of the few leaders of modern times whose charisma, determination and sheer cojones can be said,…
Boris, Sherwood and the politics of the past
It feels like the end, but we’ve been here before. The past months of Boris Johnson’s teetering administration have felt…
A masterclass in evenhandedness: James Graham’s Sherwood reviewed
James Graham has made his considerable name writing political-based dramas of a highly unusual type: non-polemical ones. And this certainly…
I’m a tourist in my own town
‘Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in,’ groans a weary Al Pacino in The Godfather…
Changing channels: the new war for political broadcasting
The television will be revolutionised
The BBC’s obsession with youth
At long last the state of Oregon has got around to installing tampon machines in the male lavatories of its…
Is this Premier Inn all I’ll be remembered for?
It’s fairly commonplace for people to wonder what, if anything, they’ll be remembered for. I’m going to be 59 later…
How to watch YouTube on your TV – and why you should
According to Pliny the Elder, Scipio Aemilianus was the first man to shave daily. The origin of the name Boeing…
The most disadvantaged group in Britain? White working-class men
I’m not sure what to think about the BBC’s announcement that it wants a quarter of its staff to be…
The day I nearly brought RT down
It is interesting to watch Ofcom finally remove the broadcasting licence from the Russian propaganda channel Russia Today (RT). I…
The unseen Victoria Wood
For a few years now I have been living with Victoria Wood. That sounds all wrong, obviously, and yet no…
