Television
This year’s top gadgets – according to my inner chimp
I’d hoped to spend this week writing about my new Geberit Japanese-style toilet, but since the grout is not yet…
No one else has the weird levels of self-regard shown by people who appear regularly on TV
One of the more tedious tropes of recent years is for journalists to bemoan the rise of populism while busily…
With these documentaries, the BBC has lost any claim to impartiality
Because the rise of the Nazis is a topic so rarely mentioned these days, least of all in schools, the…
How to be a man
Gstaad I was reading in these here pages Julie Burchill’s review of Candace Bushnell’s Is There Still Sex in…
Why are there so few Polish people on British TV?
Have you ever seen a Pole on British television? Poles are the biggest immigrant group in Britain, numbering between 900,000…
Letters: Stop and search is messy, confrontational and absolutely necessary
Support for stop and search Sir: Mary Wakefield is rightly exasperated by fatuous comments over police use of stop and…
What I’ve learned from 20 years without a TV
In the summer of 1999 I did something radical. Spurred on by my husband’s universal loathing of television I took…
Roman entertainment was far more exploitative than Jeremy Kyle
The Romans were as aware as Jeremy Kyle was of the pleasure that people could get from situations in which…
The problem with TV? There’s too much to watch – and it’s all too good
Friends in Herefordshire said they were both fit and well but confessed to ‘watching far too much television’. I thought…
There’s little difference between Question Time and Britain’s Got Talent
The contestants for the 13th series of Britain’s Got Talent, the variety show which starts on Saturday, certainly showed variety:…
![The Little Drummer Girl [Photo: BBC]](https://www.spectator.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/16729426_low_res_the_little_drummer_girl_1.jpg?w=410&h=275&crop=1)
John le Carré is like Shakespeare – his plots are improbable beyond comprehension
Thank the blessed Lord it’s over. Not Brexit, or Theresa May’s flailing and spastic governance. I’m talking about John le…
Camp, preposterous and weirdly good fun: Killing Eve reviewed
After the all-conquering success of Fleabag — her brilliant dark comedy about a smart but rudderless young woman in London…
Why is a BBC executive calling for the removal of middle-aged white men from television?
Cassian Harrison, the editor of BBC Four, told the Edinburgh International Television Festival last week that no one wants to…
Paranoia and The Woman in White
I sat up with a jerk, after contemplating the wallpaper in the television dramatisation of The Woman in White, when…
Toby Young: I’ve been unmanned by a tennis brute in bright pink
As regular readers will know, Caroline has developed a fanatical interest in tennis and is currently captain of the ladies…
What on earth was The Prisoner all about?
Now, if someone were to spray stun gas through the keyhole of my front door, and I were to collapse…
Lovely to look at but irritatingly pious: The Miniaturist reviewed
BBC1’s The Miniaturist (26/7 December) is a lavish two-part adaptation of Jessie Burton’s bestseller. It’s also further proof that almost…
The idiot box
How to sum up David Frost? The lazy writer’s friend, aka Wikipedia, calls him ‘an English journalist, comedian, writer, media…
The dwarves of death who control your TV
My own fault, I suppose, for turning on the television. Not an action I undertake very regularly these days, because…
Real life
Two months after I cancelled Sky, a strange letter arrived in the post. ‘We are writing to you because we…
Smokers are paying for your pension
Axa will no longer invest in the tobacco industry: the French insurance giant will sell €184 million of shares and…
Michael Dobbs’s diary: Talking House of Cards with President Xi
I’m a lucky man. My novel House of Cards transformed my life, yet I wrote it almost by accident nearly…
Barry Humphries’s diary: My war with ‘Wow!’
I’m counting ‘Wows!’ Suddenly everyone is using this irritating expletive expressing incredulity, amazement and nothing at all. I’ve heard it…
Socrates and Galen on the Great British Bake Off
As the national girth expands by the second, Auntie, never backward about lecturing us on the topic, continues to glory…
Sir Ian Botham is a hero – and a fool
Mark Mason 28 November 2015 9:00 am
In 1981, when I was ten and Ian Botham was 26, I thought he was God. Now, the week after…