Culture

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.

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

Apart from the next Game of Thrones, there’s nothing I’ve been looking forward to quite as much as The Grand Tour (Amazon Prime). I like Clarkson, Hammond and May, I like banter, I like political incorrectness, I like exotic scenery, I like cars, I like puerile jokes and I liked Top Gear. Take the same

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

Nairobi. February 1952. Laughing children brandishing sticks are driving an indignant bustle of ostriches up a rudimentary 1950s-Africa semi-bush runway towards the camera, when — WHOOSH! — right over their heads skims the exact BOAC aircraft in which the actual soon-to-be Queen Elizabeth flew to Kenya, as painstakingly rebuilt by the world’s top aircraft restorers

In 2015, the first series of Humans (Sunday) was apparently Channel 4’s most watched home grown drama since The Camomile Lawn: a programme broadcast when Neil Kinnock was still the Labour leader and given a obvious ratings boost by the tabloid outrage about its many nude scenes (and by its many nude scenes). In the

‘Adam Curtis believed that 200,000 Guardian readers watching BBC2 could change the world. But this was a fantasy. In fact, he had created the televisual equivalent of a drunken late-night Wikipedia binge with pretentions to narrative coherence…’ You really must watch Ben Woodhams’s brilliant 2011 Adam Curtis-pastiche mini-documentary The Loving Trap, which you’ll find on

The discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb may well be one of the 20th century’s great stories — but naturally that doesn’t mean a television drama won’t want to jazz it up a bit. Or, in the case of ITV’s lavishly produced but distinctly corny Tutankhamun, quite a lot. The programme gives us a Howard Carter younger

The other day James Lovelock, the sprightly 97-year-old inventor of Gaia theory, told a mildly surprised Guardian interviewer that he wasn’t remotely worried about climate change any more. A far more plausible threat, he explained, were all the killer robots that would soon emerge and find no use for us inconvenient humans. Apparently this is

At my wife’s first 12-week scan, I was expecting — and duly got — that much-documented sense of thrilled wonder at the grey blobby thing on the screen. What came as a genuine shock, though, was realising the scan also had the entirely undisguised aim of calculating the baby’s chances of Down’s syndrome, on the

Stranger Things is the most delightful, gripping, charming, nostalgic, compulsive, edge-of-seat entertainment I’ve had in ages. Like a lot of the best TV these days, it’s on Netflix, which I highly recommend so long as you can cope with the technical complexities of getting it to appear on your screen in the first place. Yeah,

The closing credits of National Treasure (Channel 4, Tuesday) contain the usual disclaimer that any resemblance between its characters and real people is merely coincidental. Well, coincidental maybe, but also entirely inevitable — because this is a drama based on Operation Yewtree. With its choice of subject matter, a cast including Robbie Coltrane and Julie

Did you know that Queen Victoria might never have married Prince Albert had it not been for an amazing stroke of luck on a woodland walk in Windsor Great Park, involving the queen’s beloved spaniel Dash. Dash, as good fortune would have it, managed to break his leg on a handy knife that someone had

With documentary-makers these days, it can be hard to tell the difference between faux-naivety and the real thing. (Personally, I blame Louis Theroux.) Take BBC2’s Absolutely Fashion: Inside British Vogue (Thursday), directed and narrated by Richard Macer, who often seems suspiciously dazzled by whatever he sees: the editor’s office! The editor’s chair! He also has

I think I might be turning into Alf Garnett. When I was growing up I saw him as an obnoxious, cantankerous, ranting old git that my grandparents’ generation seemed to find funny but who left me cold. Now I’m beginning to identify with him as an unfairly maligned and surprisingly youthful fount of wisdom whose

You know when late summer has arrived because conkers are starting to form on the horse chestnuts, your eagerness to get the kids back to school has reached fever pitch, and another season of The Great British Bake Off (BBC1, Wednesdays) has begun. If it feels like there has never, ever been a time when

Stuff I have learnt after two solid weeks watching the Olympics on TV. 1. Tennis and golf shouldn’t be Olympic sports. Yes, I know we won both and Rose’s final chip on to the 18th green was great to watch. But you can see this sort of thing done with a tougher range of competitors

Proof that someone has really made it as a TV historian comes, I would suggest, when they join the likes of David Starkey and Simon Schama by getting their name into the programme’s title. So it is that Dominic Sandbrook’s The 70s, from 2012, has now been followed by The 80s with Dominic Sandbrook (BBC2,

The unacknowledged subtitle of Channel 4’s new reality series Eden (Mondays) is Die, Hippies! Die! Obviously they’re not going to admit this because that wouldn’t be right. But I’m sure Channel 4 is hoping that a terrible Lord of the Flies-type scenario will unfold for the 23 victims who’ve volunteered to get back to nature

In the song ‘All the Young Dudes’, David Bowie gamely tried to reassure the youth of the Seventies that, despite what their Sixties elders were always telling them, they hadn’t been born too late after all. On the contrary: it was the ‘brother back at home with his Beatles and his Stones’ who was missing

Before I set about reviewing Ross Kemp: The Fight Against Isis (Sky 1), I thought I’d have a glance to see whether other critics had been as impressed as I was. Clearly the flip groovester from the Guardian — who opened, inevitably, with a jaunty quip about Grant from EastEnders — had seen a very

On Tuesday night on Channel 4, a stern male figure peered over his glasses (as equipped with one of those cords favoured by themiddle-aged specs-wearer) and offered us his robust views on how government benefits encourage laziness. Which might not sound that unusual — except that the male figure in question was 12. His name,

Pop idol turned top boffin Brian Cox doesn’t shy away from the big issues. With programmes such as Wonders of the Solar System, Wonders of Life and Human Universe, Cox, the heir apparent to His Eminence Sir David Attenborough, has dared to dream on a cosmic scale. Are there any limits to his mighty intellect?

It’s sadly possible to imagine that The Living and the Dead was sold to BBC1’s commissioning editors as ‘Poldark meets The Exorcist’. Yet, while that wouldn’t be a completely inaccurate summary, the overall result is a lot more coherent, clever and ambitious than that. At heart, in fact, Tuesday’s first episode was a nifty twist

The other evening I was driving back in heavy rain from my pilates class when I noticed something rather upsetting in the gated road that goes through our estate. I stopped and got out of the car for a closer look. Yes, as I feared, it was a dead duck. Some bastard had squished her

In his latest documentary for the This World series, the Romanian film-maker Liviu Tipurita could have been forgiven for treading carefully — and not just because it meant him entering the world of organised crime. After all, his previous film in the series, the uncompromisingly titled Gypsy Child Thieves, was ferociously denounced by Roma groups

Sometimes I wonder whether, of all the literary genres, graphic novels aren’t the most stupidly overrated. I can say this because I’m old enough to remember when they were just this obscure thing you had to seek out in specialist stores like Forbidden Planet, understood only by pale, nerdy teens and twenty-somethings who felt superior

Spoiler alerts aren’t normally required for reviews of Shakespeare — but perhaps I’d better issue one before saying that in BBC1’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Monday) Theseus dies near the end. Not only that, but Hippolyta and Titania fly off on butterfly wings to become lovers, and the mechanicals’ play goes down a storm. Personally,

Going Forward (BBC4, Thursdays) is a BBC comedy about the continuing adventures of Kim Wilde, the fat, cynical but lovable nurse character played by former nurse Jo Brand. Now she has quit the NHS and is working in the private sector for a company called Buccaneer 2000 — which is, of course, exactly what a