James Walton is The Spectator’s TV critic
It’s one of the more mysterious features of human history that people of every era and in almost every place have regularly striven to reduce their intelligence, impair their reflexes and generally ensure that everything about them functions far less well. So what is about getting drunk that we love so much? According to Mark
This week on Channel 4, we watched a cheery 58-year-old American engineer called James going on a first date. He was meeting Harmony, an extravagantly shapely blonde who was obliging enough to be wearing a low-cut crop top and tiny shorts, and who greeted him with a charming smile. After a spot of small talk
Any readers of the Sun who excitedly tuned in to Howards End on Sunday night with their pause button at the ready will, I fear, have been in for a disappointment. Before the programme went out, the paper had assured them that this new BBC1 adaptation would ‘do a Poldark’, with ‘a hot cast’ providing
Anybody who wants to maintain a strong and untroubled stance against mass migration to Europe should probably avoid BBC2’s Exodus: Our Journey Continues. In theory, the case for limiting the numbers may be more or less unanswerable — but this is a joltingly uncomfortable reminder of what it can mean in practice. Any viewers suspicious
In the first scene of this distinctly odd documentary, Grace Jones meets a group of fans, who squeal with delight at the sight of her and nearly pass out with excitement when they hear her speak. And that, I suspect, is the effect which the film confidently expects to have on the rest of us.
Any rival reality-TV makers watching Channel 5 on Thursday will, I suspect, have been both mystified and slightly embarrassed at not having thought up Bad Habits, Holy Orders themselves. After all, the concept is a blindingly obvious one. Take five young women whose primary interests are selfies, booze and clubbing and make them live like
If you think you know what to expect from an Alan Hollinghurst novel, then when it comes to The Sparsholt Affair, you’ll almost certainly be right. Once again, Hollinghurst explores British gay history by plunging us into haute bohemia over several decades of the 20th century. (A few years ago he told an interviewer that
On the face of it, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds aren’t exactly a natural fit with the O2. Cave’s songs range from the thrillingly cacophonous to the quietly lovely. But with their recurring themes of death, violence and religion, and a muse that rarely leads Cave in the direction of the mainstream, very
BBC1’s latest Sunday-night drama The Last Post, about a British military base in Aden in 1965, feels like a programme on a mission: that mission being to avoid getting shouted at by either the Guardian or the Daily Mail. To this (possibly doomed) end, it goes about its business very gingerly, with an almost pathological
On Sunday night, Holliday Grainger was on two terrestrial channels at the same time playing a possibly smitten sidekick of a gruff but kindly detective with a beard. Even so, she needn’t worry too much about getting typecast. In BBC1’s Strike, she continued as the immaculately turned-out, London-dwelling Robin, who uses such traditional sleuthing methods
I had planned to review David Mitchell and Robert Webb’s new Channel 4 sitcom Back without constantly referring to their last one Peep Show. Not only did it seem too obvious a way to go; it also felt a bit unfair to compare a deservedly revered programme that ran for 12 years with a single
Most new Netflix series are greeted not merely with acclaim, but with a level of gratitude that the returning Christ might find a little excessive two minutes before Armageddon. In this respect, then, Atypical is proving rather atypical. The reason for the mixed reception is that its 18-year-old protagonist, Sam, has autism — and, as
As you may have spotted, the BBC is marking the 50th anniversary of the decriminalisation of male homosexuality with an extended gay season. (And if you haven’t, I can only assume you’ve seen and heard no BBC trailers for months.) The centrepiece this week was Against the Law (BBC2, Wednesday), which dramatised the story of
Christopher Wilson’s new novel is much easier to enjoy than to categorise. And ‘enjoy’ is definitely the right word, even though The Zoo tackles subject matter that should, by rights, make for a punishingly bleak read. The narrator is 12-year-old Yuri, whose misfortunes start with the fact that he’s growing up in Moscow in 1953
Channel 4’s Catching a Killer offered the rare TV spectacle these days of a middle-aged white male copper leading a murder inquiry. Then again, it was a documentary rather than a drama. In its resolutely sober way, it also proved a riveting one, if at times piercingly sad. The programme followed the Thames Valley police
It’s not unusual to see a pop concert on TV where teenage girls and a group of middle-aged men are separated by safety barriers, as the glow sticks wave and the band’s name is excitedly chanted. But in Storyville: Tokyo Girls (BBC4, Tuesday), there was one fairly major twist: the teenage girls were the band,
At one uncharacteristically low-key point in Sunday’s Poldark — back for a third series on BBC1 — Ross (Aidan Turner) left off the brooding and cliff-top galloping for a while to review his finances. They were, his genial banker Harris Pascoe told him, in good shape. Hearing that Ross’s marriage was going through one of
This may seem an odd thing to say about a writer who’s been officially declared a National Living Treasure in his native Australia, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times before winning it with Schindler’s Ark — but I sometimes think Thomas Keneally is badly underrated. After all, Schindler’s Ark won that Booker
On the face of it, the two new big drama series of the week don’t have a great deal in common, with one set in a determinedly present-day Britain, the other in a dystopian American future. What they do share, though, is a general air of classiness, some impressively understated central performances and, above all,
I’ve often thought that a good idea for an authentic TV cop show would be to portray the police as neither dazzlingly brilliant (the traditional approach) nor horrifically corrupt (the traditionally subversive one) — but just a bit hopeless at solving crimes. There is, though, one thing that prevents the idea from being as original
