Netflix

Apart from hunting, one of the very few consolations of the end of summer is that telly stops being quite so dire. But that moment hasn’t quite arrived yet – as you can tell from the fact that I’m reviewing Hostage. There’s so much that is annoying about Hostage that I don’t know quite where to begin. But let’s start with its cloth-eared use of the word ‘abducted’. Suppose you were the prime minister (Suranne Jones) and your implausible Médicins Sans Frontières husband Alex (Ashley Thomas) had been kidnapped by a masked terror group in French Guiana and you had to brief your teenage daughter on what had happened, which

The punters are saying My Oxford Year is a disaster. ‘Predictable, uninspiring and laughable,’ complains some meanie on Rotten Tomatoes. But they’re missing the point. My Oxford Year may be a work of accidental genius, but it’s a work of genius nonetheless. You will squirm, you will laugh derisively, you will cringe. By the end, though, you will be forced to admit that you secretly enjoyed every moment, for this is the very examplar of a so-bad-it’s-good masterpiece. You know it’s going to be awful from the very first frame: a still representing the bookshelf of our handsome, clever and poor heroine Anna De La Vega (Sofia Carson) who has

If you enjoyed Apocalypto – that long but exciting Mel Gibson movie about natives being chased through the jungle with (supposedly) ancient Mayan dialogue – then you’ll probably like Chief of War, which is much the same, only in Hawaiian. Like Apocalypto, it even has sailing ships appearing mysteriously from Europe with crews that serve the role of dei ex machina, rescuing endangered native protagonists at key moments. This time our based-on-a-true-story hero is Ka’iana, the 18th-century Maui chieftain who succeeded in uniting the four warring island kingdoms (Oahu, Maui, Molokai and Lanai) and turned them into the kingdom of Hawaii. He is played by Jason Momoa – to you,

Can you imagine how dull a TV detective series set in a realistic Scottish police station would be? Inspector Salma Rasheed would have her work cut out that’s for sure: the wicked gamekeeper on the grisly toff’s estate who murdered a hen harrier and then blamed its decapitation on an innocent wind turbine; the haggis butcher who misgendered his vegetarian assistant; the Englishman who made a joke on Twitter about a Scotsman going to the chippy and ordering a deep-fried can of Coke… It would get lots of awards, obviously, but I doubt it would do that well in the ratings. As with Slow Horses, this is about enjoying the

You had a narrow escape this week. I was about to urge you to watch Sirens, the latest iteration of that fashionable genre Ultra-Rich Lifestyle Porn, currently trending on Netflix. But luckily for you I watched it right to the end and got to witness the whole edifice collapsing like a speeded up version of Miss Havisham’s wedding cake. Normally, this doesn’t happen. Like most critics I have neither the time nor the work ethic to view a TV series in its entirety before putting in my tuppenny-ha’penny’s worth. I just assume that if something starts well or badly it’s going to continue that way. Not Sirens, though. It’s as

The Four Seasons is one of those shows you notice in the ‘Top TV Programmes on Netflix’ section, see it’s some kind of glossy romantic comedy starring American actors you’ve vaguely heard of, and skip past quickly in search of something with zombies or subtitles. This would be a mistake though because, at least if you are of a certain age, you’re really going to enjoy it. I think the litmus test is whether you’re old enough to remember the 1981 Alan Alda film on which it is based, which I do, just about, vaguely. It’s that kind of movie where a bunch of old friends who have been holidaying

‘Next time you do a review, you’ve got to find something you like. You’ve been far too negative,’ said the Fawn. ‘Well, it’s hardly my fault if everything on TV is crap at the moment. I can’t just call up good stuff to order,’ I said. ‘Try,’ said the Fawn. Luckily – and unwontedly – Netflix has come to my rescue with a dystopian sci-fi series called The Eternaut. Though I’m not totally convinced by the name – a conflation of ‘eternity’ and ‘astronaut’ – it’s a very enjoyable watch, which confirms, yet again, Delingpole’s Iron Law of Television: always go for the shows with subtitles. This one is from

Antonin Carême was known as the ‘chef of kings and the king of chefs’. His patrons and employers included Talleyrand, Napoleon, the Prince Regent, Tsar Alexander and the then richest man in France, James Rothschild. He popularised the tall ‘toque’ hat worn by chefs; he either invented or perfected culinary classics including the vol-au-vent, the profiterole and the mille-feuille, as well as sauces including velouté and béchamel. All this he managed to achieve despite having come from a desperately poor background, raised in a shack in revolutionary France and sent off as a young lad to help make ends meet as a kitchen boy and later as apprentice to Paris’s

Bradley Walsh: Egypt’s Cosmic Code may sound like a pitch by Alan Partridge – but, impressively, the programme itself manages to be even odder than its title. Naturally, Tuesday’s opening episode began with Bradley emphasising that his interest in Ancient Egypt long predates his signing of the contract for the show. Indeed, it was back when he was an apprentice at Rolls-Royce that he first realised ‘whoever built the pyramids, it certainly wasn’t the Ancient Egyptians 4,500 years ago’. Sharing his scorn for this discredited idea was Tony McMahon, an ‘investigative historian’ who showed up now and again to say bonkers things in an authoritative and sonorous manner. Given that

You know that urge when you’ve got friends coming for the weekend and you just have to spend the previous week putting together all the essentials for a successful stay: personalised bags of truffle-flavoured popcorn and pretzel nibbles for their bedside; hand-blended, sensually curated bath salts; layer cake flavoured with honey from your private hives; etc? Well, if you’ve never had that urge, I’ve got some disappointing news: With Love, Meghan may not be the programme for you. Wait, no, actually, it might yet. But not for pleasurable reasons. Only for car crash-TV reasons. It’s like the lifestyle-TV equivalent of one of those rare public appearances by Mark Zuckerberg where

Netflix is the television equivalent of pasta and ready-made pesto: a slightly desperate but acceptable enough stand-by when you’ve got home late, you haven’t time to prepare anything more nutritious and at least it fills the gap without too much pain or fuss. It is an adamantine rule of television that foreign-language dramas are always superior La Palma is classic Netflix. You wouldn’t necessarily rave about it to your friends. But if, as I do, you have one of those wives who gets really pissed off if there’s not a programme ready and waiting to be viewed while supper’s still hot and, in a panic, you click on La Palma,