My resolution this summer was to see how far into the Olympics I could get without watching an event. It’s harder than you think. Especially when you’ve got kids calling constantly from the sitting room: ‘Dad, Dad, it’s Romania vs Burkina Faso in the finals of the women’s beach volleyball and there’s been a tremendous
Narrated by Meryl Streep, Corridors of Power: Should America Police the World? announced the scale of its ambition straight away. Before the opening titles, we’d already heard from Hillary Clinton, Colin Powell, Madeleine Albright and the late Henry Kissinger. We’d also seen the lines drawn up as to how its bold subtitle might be answered.
Unless you did English A-level and shoehorned a mention of it into your Chaucer paper to try to get extra marks, you probably haven’t even heard of Boccaccio’s The Decameron, let alone read it. Which no doubt partly explains Netflix’s decision to give it the Bridgerton treatment: no one, anywhere, is liable to complain about
If you transcribed the narrator’s script in almost any episode of Horizon, you’d notice something striking: an awful lot of the phrases would end with a colon, and for one obvious reason: to play a neat trick on the viewers: that of making them keen to hear what comes next. (You get the idea.) Monday’s
Most of my favourite TV shows seem to involve gangsters in one way or another: The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Top Boy, The Offer (that brilliant series on Paramount+ about the making of The Godfather), series two of The White Lotus, Suburra, Gomorrah; even, you could argue, Game of Thrones (cod-medieval fantasy gangsters with dragons) and
A partly subtitled show set in Istanbul might sound like a brave departure for a BBC Sunday night crime drama. But in fact, if you strip away The Turkish Detective’s minarets and bazaars (not hard given that they supply somewhat perfunctory local colour), what remains is, according to taste, either reassuringly familiar or utterly bog-standard.
The Bear has been called ‘the most stressful thing on TV’ and I think that’s probably a fair description. It’s set in a Chicago restaurant and – as has become de rigueur in all films and TV series about restaurants – the kitchen scenes are invariably fraught, jerkily shot, uptight, pent-up, explosive, inflammable, past boiling
Like many sitcoms, W1A featured a middle-aged man convinced that he’s the only sane person left in the world. Usually, of course, this merely goes to show how delusional the bloke is – but the subversive twist here was that Ian Fletcher, the BBC’s head of values, seemed to be right. Playing Ian, Hugh Bonneville
Jason Dessen, the hero (and, as you’ll discover shortly, anti-hero) of Apple TV’s latest sci-fi caper Dark Matter, is a physics professor at a second-rate university in Chicago. You can tell he’s not that good at his job because he introduces the concept of Schrödinger’s cat (surely the only interesting bit in the entirety of
Sometimes there are advantages to being ill-informed. Knowing embarrassingly little about why 30 Greenpeace activists were jailed in Russia in 2013, or the wilder assertions made by the broadcaster Alex Jones (emphatically not the woman from The One Show) meant that two documentaries this week unfolded for me like the twistiest – if not necessarily
Because you don’t – I hope – use TikTok you will never have heard of the Wilking sisters. But back in the day (2020) they were huge, their homemade videos of dance routines performed at their suburban Michigan home attracting 127 million views. A year later, it all turned sour. Dancing for the Devil: The
Let’s say, for the purposes of this joke, that I was recently staying in a hotel and kept hearing through the wall a voice shouting, ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ At first I assumed it was someone having sex – but I later found out that the next-door room was occupied by Romesh Ranganathan’s agent. This year’s
Imagine a new series of Morse in which the real-ale-quaffing, jag-driving opera buff is turned into a speed-snorting mod on a pimped up Lambretta. Or – this one I’d actually like to see – jeune Poirot, featuring a clean-shaven habitué of fin-de-siècle Brussels absinthe dives. This may give you an inkling as to how upset
Beatles lore has long held that the film Let It Be was a depressing portrait of the band falling apart. According to the same lore, that’s why Peter Jackson’s Get Back was such a revelation. Revisiting Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s footage of the group at work in January 1969, Jackson discovered there was far more joy around
What would C.J. Sansom have made of the Disney+ version of his novel series about 16th-century crookback lawyer Matthew Shardlake? Sadly, because he died just a few days before its release, we’ll probably never hear the full story. But this comment from the show’s producer offers a hefty clue: ‘Chris [Sansom] has been enormously generous
One challenge facing any novel, drama or film about the Holocaust is to restore its sheer unimaginability. In Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark – filmed, of course, as Schindler’s List – when news reaches Krakow of what’s happening in Auschwitz, Keneally pauses for some editorialising. ‘To write these things now,’ he says, ‘is to state the
Here’s an offensive joke: ‘Jimmy Carr gets paid to do a Netflix special.’ All right, it’s not original – I nicked it from an online chat forum. And it’s not especially funny. But unlike any of the sordid, ugly, threadbare material in Carr’s excruciating set, it does at least contain a measure of critical insight.
Who do you think said the following on TV this week: ‘I love being around gay men – seeing a group of men expressing themselves the way they do is beautiful’? The answer, perhaps unexpectedly, is Danny Dyer, whose admittedly convincing schtick as the world’s most Cockney bloke was applied to the question of contemporary
If you’ve spent any time gawping at Netflix over the past half-decade or so, you’ll already know that human culture has reached its final, perfect form. We made a good effort with cave paintings, epic poetry, theatre, literature and the rest of them, but the apex of culture is the bingeable, episodic rabbit-hole Netflix documentary
After conquering the world with Peaky Blinders (and before that by co-creating Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?), Steven Knight was last seen on British television giving us his frankly deranged adaptation of Great Expectations. Happily, he’s now returned to form with a show that, while not a retread exactly, is definitely Peaky-adjacent. In This
