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If it’s a test of a good documentary series that it takes us deep into an unknown, even unimaginable world, then Inside Missguided: Made in Manchester passes with flying colours — especially for the more middle-aged viewer. Missguided, it turns out, is a fast-fashion company, which means that it spots what celebrities are wearing online and then designs, makes and sells much cheaper versions within days — all while indignantly denying the outrageous charge that ‘we just rip off other people’s designs’. The target market apparently consists of young women obsessed with Instagram and Love Island. And so, on the whole, does the staff, who have names like Treasure, Zee

Soon, very soon now — even sooner than I imagined, if A Suitable Boy turns out to be as lacklustre as some critics are saying — the only things left worth watching on the BBC will be old repeats and foreign buy-ins like The Last Wave. A bit like The Returned (Les Revenants), The Last Wave concerns the effect of a supernatural event on a small community, not in the Alps this time but in a seaside resort on the Atlantic coast famed for its surf. During a competition, ten surfers are enveloped by a mysterious sausage-shaped cloud and disappear in the sea for five hours. They re-emerge, apparently unharmed

For more than four decades I have been around Rupert Murdoch. In that time he employed me in both London and New York, invested in my business ideas and ultimately fired me. It was always rock ’n’ roll around Rupert and that’s the way I liked it. So you would have thought that when the BBC made its current three-part documentary on him, it might have come to me for my views. Oh no. I presume it didn’t want to take the risk I might say something warm and supportive. It did, however, film Trevor Kavanagh, the Sun’s political columnist, for hours on end. He was warm and supportive. But

It might seem a bit of a stretch to see deep similarities between Michaela Coel (young, female, black and currently very fashionable indeed) and the late Philip Roth (increasingly discredited as an embodiment of all those phallocentric white guys who once ruled American fiction merely because they were great writers). Nonetheless, this week’s television made it hard not to. On Tuesday night, as an adaptation of Roth’s The Plot Against America began on Sky Atlantic, Coel’s I May Destroy You was serving up a dazzling final episode that confirmed how Rothian the series has been. For one thing, the main character Arabella, played by Coel herself, was — like many

This week, BBC1 brought us a three-part dramatisation of an ‘unprecedented crisis’ in recent British life. Among other things, it featured a lockdown, an extensive tracking and tracing programme, much heroism from people on the front line, and much confusion among scientists as to how to provide the facts when they didn’t really know them. The Salisbury Poisonings (Sunday–Tuesday) was presumably made well before you-know-what. Yet watching the programme in the current circumstances, it wasn’t easy to decide whether the timing was good or bad luck for the makers. The obvious parallels did lend a haunting, drone-note resonance to proceedings. On the other hand, they sometimes threatened to overshadow what

What are the new rules on race and performance? In the world of TV, everyone is busy apologising, self-censoring and denouncing their previous work. Ant and Dec have deleted routines in which they imitated Japanese girls and people of colour. The comedian Leigh Francis has expressed contrition for satirising Craig David in Bo’ Selecta! (which was nominated for a Best Comedy Bafta in 2004). Matt Lucas and David Walliams have withdrawn sketches featuring dark-skinned characters. A new order is being created. A new hierarchy of privileges and prohibitions based on ethnicity is taking root. We are strengthening the vice we sought to eliminate. The new rule appears to forbid actors from

Did Jeffrey Epstein kill himself or was he murdered — and frankly who cares? Actually, having watched the four-part Netflix series — Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich — about his secretive, sordid life, I care very much. Sure, his squalid death in jail, apparently from suicide while awaiting trial for numerous sex crimes, was thoroughly deserved. But justice would have been far better served if this noisome creep had spent the rest of his days rotting in prison, deprived for ever of all sexual activity save the involuntary variety provided in the showers whenever he dropped the soap. I hadn’t expected to respond quite this viscerally to the Epstein tale. Indeed,

On the face of it, a French-language drama about a Parisian symphony orchestra mightn’t sound like the most action-packed of TV watches. In fact, though, Philharmonia (Sundays) is pretty much Dallas with violins. The first episode began with the eponymous orchestra blasting out a spot of what Shazam assured me was Dvorak, before its elderly conductor dropped his baton and collapsed to the floor, never to rise again. Cue a pair of Gallically elegant female lower legs making their way through the airport as one Hélène Barizet arrived from New York to take over the role. David was left in a tartan bag in Belfast; Helen was discovered in a

The world’s greatest playwright ought to be dynamite at the movies. But it’s notoriously hard to turn a profit from a Shakespearean adaptation because film-goers want to be entertained, not anointed with the chrism of high art. Macbeth is one of the texts that frequently attracts directors. Justin Kurzel’s 2015 version (Amazon Prime) didn’t triumph at the box office despite two fetching performances from Bamburgh Castle in Northumberland and the snow-wreathed mountains of Skye. The trailer is a marvel. Two exhilarating minutes of virile swordplay, ravishing scenery and dramatic cathedral interiors. The film itself is a cold, muddy slog. Michael Fassbender plays the thane as a gruff Celtic robo-hunk married

C4’s Friday Night Dinner was the nation’s stop off point for feeling a bit better about ourselves. It featured the Goodman family. Every week the Goodman’s two sons returned to their parents’ home for Shabbat dinner. Every week, things didn’t go to plan. Of course, the chaotic Goodmans stand in for all our chaotic families in these times. It is good to know that it isn’t only our own family that is a shambles. The guiding force, the everyday matriarch of that family, is Jackie Goodman – long-suffering mum, played by Tamsin Greig. ‘It is charming because it is all about coming home. I think that’s why people love it. The

Sweden is now properly celebrated as the Land that Called Coronavirus Correctly. But in the distant past, those with long memories may recall, it had a less flattering reputation as the Land Absolutely Ruddy Swarming With Jihadists. Caliphate — an eight part Swedish-made drama on Netflix — takes you back there in vivid and compelling detail. Partly, it’s an edge-of-seat thriller about a major terrorist attack on Swedish soil —from its conception in Isis-held Raqqa to its execution (or its foiling by the security services: I haven’t got there yet so I don’t know) by a mix of radicalised locals and hardened Isis killers flown in from Syria. Partly, it’s

This week I’d like to point you in the direction of the British Film Institute and its free online archive collections, which are properly free. There is no signing up for one of those ‘free trials’ which means that, somewhere down the line, you’ll discover you’ve been paying £4.99 a month for something you didn’t want. And it’s certainly excellent value for the money you don’t pay, as there are 65 of these collections, grouped under various headings — ‘Football on Film’, ‘Black Britain on Film’ — although I plumped for ‘Eating In’, because it’s all any of us do now, and ‘Cats v Dogs’, as if that were even