I sincerely hope you’re not watching television. With the glorious summer sun we’re having, you should be having picnics and swims, not sitting in front of a screen. So this is my recommended viewing for the week: nothing. Get out. Still, if you must look for something, why not look for shows about looking? There
Last week I was on holiday with my family on the Algarve. The good news was that, thanks to the BBC’s widespread availability in Portugal, we didn’t miss out on Murray at Wimbledon. The bad news was that, for the same reason, we couldn’t escape The Apprentice. But this isn’t an anti-Apprentice column. It’s an
Luther is back, in Luther, and so is Donny Osmond, of Donny & Marie fame. Could there be two more differing cultural symbols of manhood? My feeling is no. Luther (Tuesdays, BBC1) fills our screens with sick foreboding. We are as victims pinned to the sofa, eyeballing the characters’ every action with terror as they
This week I witnessed the bloody, brutal death of mainstream television. It will, I think, go down in media history as one of those ‘Where were you when JFK was shot?’ moments. The victims were the presenters of a US breakfast television show called Morning Joe; the executioner was Russell Brand. Russell Brand? No, it’s
Channel 4 is deep into its summer of love. It’s having a Mating Season and — unusually for the network — it’s not all about sex. Instead, it’s about those fluttery butterflies that occur before the birds and the bees come in, when two people meet for the first time and get to know each
With the possible exception of Game of Thrones, The Returned (Channel 4, Sunday) is the best series you will see on TV all year. I caught some early previews about a month ago when I was on The Review Show (BBC4). Normally the reviewers don’t agree on much but on this we were unanimous: we
The Tudors have invaded television. Everywhere you look, it’s Henry VIII this, Henry VII that, Anne Boleyn this, Anne of Cleves that. On BBC2 is the continuing drama series The Tudors, whose Henry VIII looks like the lead singer in a boy band who’s stumbled on to the wrong film set. At any moment, you
The kids are back for half-term so we’re having to watch absolute crap again on TV. Monday night, I wanted to watch The Fall (BBC1). But I couldn’t, obviously, because Britain’s Got Talent (ITV1) was on. ‘Dad! Dad! You’ve got to see this!’ So I come in to see what I’ve got to see and
I like bankers. They’re an honest lot. All of us like money, but only they are upfront about it. I once witnessed a conversation between three financiers that started with them comparing their cars, then their houses, then their helicopters. None of the shilly-shallying you find at a society cocktail party, where people slyly suss
The serial killer on The Fall (BBC1, Monday) is no ordinary serial killer. He has a unique and terrifying modus operandi — or ‘signature’, as we serial-killer experts call it. What this serial killer does is to predate ruthlessly and single-mindedly on those young, attractive women unfortunate enough to be in the precise target-audience demographic
Forget The Apprentice. A ‘reality TV’ show where you have no say, and where you can only watch as Sir Alan Sugar does all the hiring and firing? That is so last decade. Forget, too, quaint programmes such as The X Factor, where you pick the contestants you like and the ones you don’t —
The controversial counterintuitive piece I was going to write concerned Ben Elton’s new sitcom The Wright Way (BBC1, Tuesday). You may have noticed it has been panned by all the critics, but the main focus has been on Elton’s shift from darling of the Eighties alternative comedy left to bourgeois sell-out. So what I was
There are two American Dreams — the one that happens in real life and is experienced by people such as Barack Obama, and the one that happens on screens, both silver and small, shared by millions across the world. BBC2’s The United States of Television: America in Primetime (Saturday) traces the history of the latter,
In Margaret: Death of a Revolutionary (Channel 4, Saturday) — Martin Durkin’s superb tribute to our greatest prime minister — there was some footage of Harold Macmillan giving his ‘selling the family silver’ speech that made me quite sick. What nauseated me first was the sycophantic laughter from his black-tie Tory Reform Group audience oozing
Sometimes a television programme raises far bigger questions than it actually gives a platform for, which is the case with Panorama’s The Secrets of Britain’s Sharia Courts (BBC1, Monday). Wedged in this half-hour slot are explosive issues such as the sovereignty of British law, the role of religion in arbitrating on marital disputes, and the
Not many actors have made a name for themselves with quite the same force as Lara Pulver. In January last year more than eight million people tuned in to BBC1 and watched her star as Irene Adler in ‘A Scandal in Belgravia’, the opening episode in the second series of Sherlock. I’m not saying that
Everyone’s loving BBC1’s new, Sunday-night period mega-drama The Village (32 episodes long if writer Peter Moffat has his way). It’s taut, spare, grown-up, accomplished, dark, strange and poetic, according to the critics, which I think are all euphemisms for ‘not like Downton Abbey’. And it definitely isn’t like Downton Abbey. There’s a lot more brooding,
It used to be that when an arch-villain wanted to decimate a community, he’d put something in the water. Now, it’s something in the wi-fi. In the new Dr Who, the Time Lord battles a baddie who runs a group called the Spoonheads, whose mission is to upload and download stuff from the wireless internet.
I like bankers. They’re an honest lot. All of us like money, but only they are upfront about it. I once witnessed a conversation between three financiers that started with them comparing their cars, then their houses, then their helicopters. None of the shilly-shallying you find at a society cocktail party, where people slyly suss
On 28 January 1986 the Challenger space shuttle exploded shortly after launch, killing all seven crew. What made it worse was that one of the victims, Christa McAuliffe, was a teacher, so of course all the children in her class were watching it live on TV. I remember it well. For the first few seconds