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Girls creator Lena Dunham has received criticism from all sides. Detractors on the right see her as an exhibitionist provocateur. Those on the left see her as a privileged narcissist, who can’t help but see feminism through a white middle-class prism — and who unforgivably rooted for Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders. The HBO show that made Dunham’s name, which she has written and starred in since her early twenties, is on its final season. It has portrayed the young lives and friendships of four millennial women trying to succeed, or just subsist, in New York, and how their dreams either lose grandeur when they come true or don’t come

Down the Mighty River with Steve Backshall (BBC2) was perfect Sunday-night TV — one of the most enjoyable adventure travelogues I’ve watched in ages. So I was quite surprised to see it reviewed lukewarmly by another critic. One of the critic’s objections was that the scene where Backshall spots a bird of paradise through his binoculars by the Baliem river in Papua New Guinea was a bit crap. Why couldn’t we have seen it in loving close-up detail, as you would on a David Attenborough? But this is precisely what I loved about the documentary. It had a roughness, an unpredictability, a spontaneity that you rarely find on TV any

Buffy the Vampire Slayer turned 20 yesterday, which will make millennials feel as old as the actors who supposedly passed for teenagers back then. When Buffy came out I was eight. At first I was hooked by the horror aesthetic. Later I began to appreciate how it dealt with adolescent crises through supernatural allegory. But only now do I realise how lucky I was to have grown up with an empowered feminist to look up to (and have my first crush on). For those who didn’t watch Joss Whedon’s show between 1997 and 2003, Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar) is a popular cheerleader type who falls in social status after she finds out she

Rival law-enforcement agencies arguing about which of them should investigate a murder has, of course, been a staple of crime dramas for decades. Rather less common, though, is for the agencies in question to be the Metropolitan Police, the Gestapo and the SS. SS-GB (BBC1, Sunday), based on Len Deighton’s novel, poses the undeniably interesting question of what this country would have been like in 1941 if Germany had won the Battle of Britain. Its primary answer is that — in every way — it would have been very murky indeed. Again, plenty of crime dramas over the years have created a suitably noirish atmosphere, while cunningly saving on the

Recently on holiday I did a very bad thing. I nearly left the Fawn to die on a precipitous mountain path in the Canary Islands because she was having a terrible attack of vertigo that was threatening to spoil my fun. No, worse: it actually did spoil my fun. Now that I’m old and boring I desperately need little jabs of adrenaline to remind me I’m still alive, and this particular route was doing the job quite nicely. Although it’s actually so undangerous that even my eightysomething dad can do it, it’s reasonably steep, it’s gobsmackingly picturesque, and it does now and then give you at least the illusion of

Before he died aged 44 (probably of a pulmonary embolism, poor chap), Frederick, Prince of Wales, compiled a list of precepts for his son, the future George III. ‘Employ all your hands, all your power, to live with economy,’ was one. ‘If you can be without war, let not your ambition draw you into it,’ was another. The result of such sensible parentage is that today, about the only things we know about our third-longest-reigning monarch are that his nickname was ‘Farmer George’, that he lost America, and that he went bonkers, providing a lucrative franchise for the significantly more famous playwright Alan Bennett. This — as Robert Hardman’s charming,

Revolting (Tuesdays) is the BBC2 comedy series that spawned the now-infamous sketch ‘Real Housewives of Isis’. It has been watched on the BBC’s Facebook page nearly 30 million times and rightly so because it is fearless, funny and near the knuckle. A pastiche of reality TV shows set in places like Beverly Hills, the sketch depicts three young British jihadi brides brightly discussing their domestic lives in some Raqqa-like hellhole. ‘Ali bought me a new chain,’ boasts one, ‘which is eight feet long. So I can almost get outside, which is great.’ Cue shot of black-hijabed housewife lurching towards the doorway of her bombed-out home, dragging the cooker to which

‘Blimey! How on earth did they think of that?’ is unlikely to be anyone’s response to Our Dancing Town (BBC2, Tuesday). A few years ago, The Great British Bake Off was adapted into The Great British Sewing Bee by the simple process of fitting another domestic activity to the same formula. Now — after what I imagine was a brain-storming session lasting approximately 30 seconds — the BBC has taken the idea, structure and tone of Gareth Malone’s singing programmes and applied them to a series about dance. Enthusiastic evangelist for the life-changing potential of his chosen art form? Lots of initial sceptics dolefully shaking their heads and insisting that

One of the few intelligent responses from the liberal-left to our radically altered political landscape was an essay published last year in the impeccably right-on Vox. It began: ‘There is a smug style in American liberalism …It is a way of conducting politics, predicated on the belief that American life is not divided by moral difference or policy divergence — not really — but by the failure of half the country to know what’s good for them.’ You could apply very much the same argument to Britain and, as evidence, you could cite the first episode in the new series of Sherlock. (Shitlock as I prefer to call it, in

As you’ve probably noticed, TV critics spend a lot of their time trying to identify which other programmes the one they’re reviewing most resembles. Sadly, in the case of BBC2’s The Entire Universe, this noble quest proved futile. Written and emceed by Eric Idle, the show did contain plenty of familiar television elements: songs, dance troupes, Warwick Davis making jokes about how small he is, a lecture by Professor Brian Cox on the nature of the cosmos. Yet the way it mixed them together was so unprecedentedly odd that it may well have made the average Boxing Day viewer feel they must be drunker than they thought. The basic gag

When I was a child in the 1970s, the two big excitements of the run-up to Christmas were first the chocolate Advent calendar which, somehow, I managed to smuggle past the prison-guard inspection at my Colditz-like prep school; and second, browsing the Radio Times to see what televisual delights the Christmas hols had in store. Now I hardly bother with chocolate —unless it’s Artisan du Chocolat, in which case, yes please. And I find Christmas TV, all Christmas TV, even if it’s a Nick Park animation that has never been on before, so intrinsically depressing that I just want to string myself up from one of the giant black hooks

BBC1’s The Missing has been one of the undoubted TV highlights of 2016. Yet, even thrillers as overwhelmingly thrilling as this one have been known to blow it in the concluding episode, when the biggest revelation of the lot turns out to be that the writers couldn’t really answer all the questions that previous episodes had so intriguingly raised. And of course, The Missing had raised more than most, with its fiendish plotting ranging across three timeframes — until last week, that is, when it added a fourth. So could Wednesday’s finale possibly avoid giving us that sense of outraged disappointment that comes from realising we’ve spent weeks looking forward

St James’s Palace. 1953. A dynamic Duke of Edinburgh is relishing a ding-dong with the antediluvian fossils of the Coronation Committee. He wants to embrace modernity by allowing the BBC to televise the ceremony. The ‘grey old men’ want to continue doing things in exactly the same way that they have been done since 1066. Modernity prevails and the coronation is the biggest television spectacular there has been. This episode, splendidly recreated with a little artistic licence in The Crown, Netflix’s epic about the Queen, was a tipping point in terms of the public’s acceptance of the medium of television. Many viewers acquired their first sets for the sole purpose

If I tell you that on Monday there was an hour-long documentary about the history of stamp-collecting, then you probably don’t need this column’s usual bit in brackets saying which channel it was on. Indeed, at times Timeshift: Penny Blacks and Twopenny Blues seemed determined to be the most BBC4-like programme in the history of BBC4: cheerfully niche, heroically indifferent to all notions of cool and so old-school in its production style that any mention of France was introduced with a blast of accordion music. Above all — and unlike so many other documentaries elsewhere — it was wholly confident that its viewers would be interested in interesting things without