Tv

I was at a party the other day when who should accost me but Jeremy Clarkson. There were lots more famous and interesting people in the room, including the surviving half of Wham!. But Clarkson was itching to talk to me about, of all things, a review I’d written of a BBC reality series called This Is My House. He was genuinely mystified as to why I’d given such tosh a favourable critique. Having just watched his new series, Clarkson’s Farm, I now understand his puzzlement. Since late 2019, Clarkson has been playing at being a farmer on his 1,000-acre Oxfordshire estate. And when you’re a farmer — even a

Tragically it wasn’t my turn to review when Channel 5’s groundbreaking Anne Boleyn came out so you’ll never find out what my totally unpredictable critique might have said. As you know, I have previously been mad for all things Israeli and one of my plans had been to go there with my brother Dick and make a fun documentary where we train with the IDF, practise in one of those urban-warfare shooting ranges, learn krav maga, eat lots of Ottolenghi-type food, wallow in the Dead Sea, etc. But I’m afraid I’ve rather gone off Netanyahu’s vax tyranny and just can’t root for Israel in the way I once did. Still,

I’ve been looking at the reviews so far of Sky’s new Romans series Domina and none seems to have noticed the most salient point: it’s crap. This is almost more depressing than the fact that the series got made in the first place, for what it suggests is this: our culture is now so debased that even our arbiters of taste can no longer tell the difference between quality and mediocrity. Domina follows the story of Julius Caesar’s great-nephew Octavian, from when he was a member of the triumvirate to his apotheosis as Caesar Augustus. You’d think you couldn’t possibly go wrong with such fascinating historical material, rich with gore,

There was certainly no lack of variety among new TV dramas this week, with a standard British thriller up against more glamorous American competition in the shape of some extravagant Victorian sci-fi and an adaption by an Oscar-winning director of a Pulitzer-winning novel. (All three, mind you, did naturally feature a one-dimensional white bloke as the embodiment of sexist and/or racist villainy.) The surprising thing at this stage is that it’s the plucky British show that looks most promising. The Pact began, like many a thriller before it, with a frightened woman running through some dark woods. So far we still don’t know why — unless it was just force

I had been expecting the BBC to make a dreadful hash of The Pursuit of Love, especially when I read that they’d spiced it up with hints of lesbianism and punk rock. But actually, I think what writer/director Emily Mortimer has done here is play a very clever trick — the equivalent of releasing a cloud of aluminium chaff from your fighter aircraft to distract the enemy’s missiles. So while everyone is cooing about how refreshing it is that lesbianism has finally got a look-in (see also: every other drama and comedy series on TV from Killing Eve to Call My Agent), Mortimer can get on with the deeply subversive

Mark Millar has a raging hangover but he couldn’t be more chirpy or enthusiastic. ‘People say they get worse as you get older but I get reverse hangovers where I feel amazing. I wake up at four or five and I’m ready to go!’ I’ve caught him on a Sunday morning, on his way to Mass, after an exhausting three weeks in which he has been doing up to 45 interviews a day to promote Jupiter’s Legacy, his blockbuster superhero series for Netflix. He ought to be nervous: this is his first big project off the blocks since (in 2017) the studio bought up his publishing company Millarworld for a

Here’s a thought that will make you feel old. Or worried. Or both. The poke-fun-at-celebrity-houses series Through the Keyhole — originally presented by Loyd Grossman — was first broadcast as a segment on TV-am in February 1983. That means that we are now as far away in time from Through the Keyhole’s first episode as its debut was from the end of the second world war. It has endured almost till the present (I actually preferred the Keith Lemon version to the stilted and slightly turgid original) because it’s such an addictive format. Most of us fancy ourselves as amateur psychologist sleuths, picking up on those telling details missed by

I’m really not enjoying Your Honor, the latest vehicle for Bryan Cranston to play a good man driven to the dark side by extraordinary and compelling circumstances designed to make the viewer go: ‘There but for the grace of God go I…’ The problem with the compelling circumstances in this case is that they feel so desperately contrived. Cranston plays a priggishly upright New Orleans judge who radiates implausible goodness and rectitude. We first glimpse this during the case of a trial of a black woman accused by police of concealing drugs in an intimate part of her anatomy. A white cop, sweating integrity, swears on the witness stand that

Agatha and Poirot was one of those programmes that had the annoying effect of making you feel distinctly snooty. ITV’s decision to dedicate 85 minutes of primetime Easter Monday television to a books-related documentary was never likely to result in a steely Leavisite engagement with literature. Nor, of course, should it. Even so, it was hard to avoid a dowager-like shudder when, for example, one contributor declared that Agatha Christie ‘will never be surpassed as the world’s greatest novelist’ — especially when the contributor was that well-known literary critic Lesley Joseph. Or when Danny John-Jules suggested that a murder is ‘the last thing you’d expect’ in a book set on

Calls is the very antithesis of televisual soma. In fact it’s so jarring and discomfiting and horrible that I think this week’s column damn near cost me my marriage. ‘Why are we having to watch this hideous drivel?’ grumbled the Fawn, who felt cheated of a soothing night glued to our new addiction, the French series Call My Agent! (Netflix). ‘Because it’s my job and this is a new thing and Call My Agent! isn’t,’ I said. So I had to watch on my own. I do understand the Fawn’s objections. Really, it’s more like radio than TV and might work better enlivening a long car journey. There are no

Here’s a worried question I want to plant in your head: when is TV drama going to start depicting the world we actually live in, where almost everyone wears masks, even outdoors? The current state of affairs — watching people on screen in familiar locations interacting closely, as we used to, and not wearing face-coverings — is a bit jarring. But it’s greatly preferable to the alternative: mumbled lines even more unintelligible than they are usually, smiles and teeth and noses and lips hidden behind a rag — and concealed with them not just beauty or character but half the means our faces use to convey emotion. I wonder, though,

On 5 July 2009, an unemployed 54-year-old metal detectorist called Terry Herbert was walking through a Staffordshire field when his detector started to beep and didn’t stop. Herbert guessed almost immediately that he’d found gold. What he didn’t realise was that he had made Britain’s greatest archaeological discovery since the second world war. Three hundred sword-hilt fittings, many of them spectacular examples of Anglo-Saxon metalwork; a mysterious gold-and-garnet headdress, apparently for a priest; miniature sculptures of horses, fish, snakes, eagles and boars. The Staffordshire Hoard, as it became known, led to a sold-out exhibition, an Early Day Motion in parliament saluting ‘the UK’s largest haul of gold Anglo-Saxon treasure’, and,