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Jane Austen: Rise of a Genius began by saying that ‘getting into her mind isn’t easy’ – something you’d never have guessed from the rest of the episode, where both the narrator and the talking heads were able to tell us exactly what Austen was thinking and feeling at any given time. Like many Austen biographies, this one laments her sister Cassandra’s decision to burn most of her letters, but then takes full advantage of how little we consequently know about her to portray (or possibly make up) a woman whose attitudes are spookily close to its own. In a previous era, this might have meant presenting Austen as a

Louis Theroux: The Settlers was never likely to be a programme with much of a narrative arc – and so it proved. In the first 30 seconds, Louis put it to a Jewish householder on the West Bank that his house was ‘quite deep in what are called the Palestinian Territories’. ‘You call it the Palestinian Territories,’ the man replied. ‘I call it the heart of Judea.’ And that, on the whole, was that. Louis travelled from one Jewish settlement to another, doing his best to challenge the inhabitants with his faux-naif questions and impressive range of quizzical expressions. And yet, of course, none of them budged an inch. The

Tribe with Bruce Parry ran for three fondly remembered series in the mid-2000s. Now, upgraded to Tribe with Bruce Parry, it’s back, still championing traditional ways of life – including that of a TV presenter who lives among remote peoples, takes loads of drugs with them and marvels at their closeness to nature. Sunday’s episode featured some other age-old practices, too. Parry, for example, duly travelled up an Amazon tributary to a village where the locals were initially suspicious of ‘the white man’. He then won them over by mucking in with the chores and eating plenty of insects and grubs. His companions this time were the Waimaha, who live

I really had no interest in watching Dope Thief. It’s another of those crime dramas set in a bleak-looking city – possibly there are some pretty parts of Philadelphia but we only get to see the bad bits – where everyone seems to be on welfare or a drug dealer, or both, everything looks washed out, grimy and grey, and where you could die horribly any second. And I get quite enough of all this on my increasingly rare trips to London. But I was desperate. I’ve finished the second season of Severance (very good; definitely worth the effort); White Lotus will only see you through one night a week;

Needless to say, there have been any number of thrillers that rely on what Alfred Hitchcock called a MacGuffin: something, however random, that the goodies have to find before the baddies do. Less common are those where the MacGuffin is the mathematical formula for prime numbers – which is where Apple TV+’s latest show comes in. His first thought on seeing a 204 bus was that 2042 is the sum of three consecutive cubes Prime Target began in ‘Baghdad, Iraq’ – and therefore in a bustling market. Or at least it bustled until a large gas explosion opened up a hole in the ground leading to a spectacular medieval chamber.

There must have been a time when slow-burn psychological thrillers didn’t start with a scene of high drama followed by a caption that reads ‘Three months earlier’ – but if so, it’s getting hard to remember it. The latest programme to deploy the tactic was Playing Nice, which began with James Norton running towards the sea screaming ‘Theo!’ as a child’s body bobbed, face-down, in the waves. He was next seen, post-caption, laughing with his pre-school son in various picturesque Cornish locations while using the word ‘buddy’ a lot. Not to be outdone in the great-parent stakes, his wife also piled on the cuddles for little Theo. Before long, Miles

Reviewing Sky’s The Heist before Christmas last year, I suggested that all feature-length festive television dramas begin with credits announcing a starry cast and end with a redeemed protagonist gazing up at some suddenly falling snow. Reviewing Sky’s Bad Tidings this year, I can rather smugly report that there’s no need to revise my theory. But just in case that isn’t enough television tradition to be going on with, here we also get that other Yuletide stand-by: the characters’ plans for the big day go hideously wrong, yet they still end up having the Best Christmas Ever. Viewed pleasantly drunk, I concede, Bad Tidings might just hit the spot The

On Saturday, Made in Korea: The K-pop Experience began by hailing K-pop as ‘the multi-billion-pound music that’s taken the world by storm’. Unusually, this wasn’t TV hype. Last year, nine of the world’s ten bestselling albums were by Korean acts (the sole westerner being Taylor Swift). Even odder for people over 40, according to such reliable sources as Richard Osman on The Rest is Entertainment podcast and my children, South Korea has replaced America as the cultural centre of the Earth for many British teenagers. Korean youngsters are trained for pop stardom on an industrial scale But this global domination hasn’t come about by chance. Korean youngsters are trained for

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 programme therefore began by explaining that the mosquito is ‘the target of one of medical science’s greatest quests: the battle to save millions of lives and end a scourge that has shaped human history: malaria’. Unusually for an uncompromising science documentary, the finale was a genuine tear-jerker Now in its 51st year, Horizon has spent

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 series began with Mehmet Suleyman (Ethan Kai) leaving his job at the Metropolitan Police to take up fish-out-of-water duties in the city of his birth. Waiting for him at Istanbul airport was what at first seemed like a straightforward comedy foreigner, much given to muttering the words ‘very good, very good’ and driving like

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 Comic Relief featured a W1A sketch where one of the gags was about how Ranganathan now presents everything on television. But the truth is, apart from that sketch, his only TV gigs so far this year have been presenting The Weakest Link, presenting the Baftas, co-presenting Rob & Romesh Vs…, co-writing and starring in the

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 masculinity in a new programme for Channel 4. The result was a deeply odd mix of the touching, the illuminating, the silly, the thought-provoking, the cheerfully comic, the pensive and the completely confusing. At first, it looked as if the cheerfully comic would predominate. Danny Dyer: How to Be a Man opened with Danny showing

‘People throw the word “genius” around a lot,’ said a talking head on BBC2 this week, ‘but she was a genius, truly.’ If it wasn’t for the heading on this column, I suspect it might have taken you a while to guess the unquestionable genius being referred to here. But then again, for Carrie Fisher: A Life in Ten Pictures, considered analysis and fear of hyperbole would only have got in the way. Not that this prevented the programme from being inadvertently revealing. Granted, if you wanted to know the full story of Fisher’s life – including the fact that she married Paul Simon – you’d have been better off

In advance, The Gallows Pole: This Valley Will Rise was touted as a radical departure for director Shane Meadows. After all, he made his name with the film This Is England and its three rightly acclaimed TV sequels, about a group of working-class folks struggling to survive against the heartless backdrop of that reliable old enemy: Thatcher’s Britain. Now, he’s giving us a costume drama set in 18th-century Yorkshire. In fact, though, it didn’t take long to realise that Meadows’s departure mightn’t be as radical as advertised – because the programme could easily have been entitled This Was England. Wednesday’s opening episode even began with a series of captions making

When TV makes shows about TV, it rarely has a good word to say for itself. In the likes of W1A, The Day Today and, savagest of all, Victoria Wood: As Seen on TV, the industry has looked in the mirror and ripped itself to shreds. What all these comedies say, in their own way, is that most TV is bombastic, brain-dead, two-star crap put together in a blind panic and a moral vacuum by idiots and monsters. Second only to politics, it’s the satirists’ biggest sitting duck, the gift that can’t stop giving. The Newsreader, a new newsroom drama, turns out to be cut from different cloth. It’s set

BBC2’s one-off drama Then Barbara Met Alan (Monday) told the true story of how two disabled performers on the cabaret circuit of the 1990s fell in love and campaigned together successfully for disability rights. Most of the cast and a lot of the crew were people with disabilities themselves, and the programme provided a startling reminder of how recently Britain was still a country that made little provision for the disabled – and, even more startlingly, of how controversial the idea of such provision then seemed. The central performances were rivetingly good, and the overall sense was of a heartfelt tribute being paid to a couple who did much to

ITV’s new version of The Ipcress File began with a close-up of a pair of black-rimmed glasses just like those worn by Michael Caine in the 1965 film. They were then put on by their owner (Joe Cole), thus transforming him into Harry Palmer – but also neatly establishing the kind of show we were in for. Sunday’s first episode did a fine job of setting up an impeccably twisty (i.e. confusing) Cold War plot. It spared no effort in its quest to show us that the Britain of 1963 was on the Brink of Social Change. And yet, neither of these things really got in the way of its

In the latest episode of Louis Theroux’s Forbidden America, Louis asked a rapper called Broke Baby if ‘it’s important to keep it real’. ‘You have to play your role,’ replied Broke by way of apparent agreement. Given how stoned he was, this neat paradox — that you keep it real by pretending to — mightn’t have been wholly intended. Either way, however, it was hard not to apply it to Louis himself. More than 20 years into his TV career, does anybody know for sure whether his familiar schtick is genuine or faked? Certainly not, I’d suggest, Louis — whose elaborate stage-English courtesy, wide-eyed bemusement and spectacular naivety are now

Thanks to Covid, the days are gone — or at least suspended — when a TV travel programme meant a thespian in a Panama hat wandering around souks and bravely trying some funny foreign food. Instead, we now have shows in which the presenters, often operating in pairs, drive around picturesque parts of Britain cranking up the bantz, with plenty of aerial shots of their car bowling along an abnormally empty road. Take Miriam and Alan: Lost in Scotland — by my reckoning approximately Exhibit P. The premise here is that Alan Cumming and Miriam Margolyes are seeking to reconnect with their proud Caledonian roots, which is why the first

At one point in an early Simpsons, Homer comes across an old issue of TV Guide, and finds the listing for the sitcom Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. ‘Gomer upsets Sergeant Carter,’ he reads — adding with a fond chuckle, ‘I’ll never forget that episode.’ Even for British viewers unfamiliar with the show, the joke is clear: that’s what happens in every episode. Sad to say, this popped into my head while watching the first in the new series of Succession. The acting, script and direction are as brilliant as ever. Nonetheless, once Logan Roy began yet again to dangle the possibility of becoming the next CEO of his media empire before