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James WaltonThe Spectator |
‘I hope we passed the audition,’ said an alarmingly youthful Bob Geldof at one point in The Making of Do They Know It’s Christmas? He was, of...
Toy Story or The Godfather? Which way would Paddington in Peru go? Would the third instalment of a much-cherished series prove even better than the...
In the second of this week’s two episodes of Generation Z (Sunday and Monday), a teenage girl called Finn wondered why her friend Kelly was so...
For most of my adult life, clever, well-read, feminist women have told me how much they love Jilly Cooper. It therefore came as a bit of shock when I...
In advance, Ludwig sounded as if it was aimed squarely at the Inspector Morse market. Set among spires of impeccable dreaminess (in a cunning twist,...
Earlier this year, ITV brought us Red Eye, a six-part drama set mainly on an overnight plane from London to Beijing. Displaying a heroic indifference...
When was the last time you described – or indeed thought of – someone’s face as ‘even-featured’, ‘angular’ or ‘refined’? If the...
On Saturday, Made in Korea: The K-pop Experience began by hailing K-pop as ‘the multi-billion-pound music that’s taken the world by storm’....
Narrated by Meryl Streep, Corridors of Power: Should America Police the World? announced the scale of its ambition straight away. Before the opening...
If you transcribed the narrator’s script in almost any episode of Horizon, you’d notice something striking: an awful lot of the phrases would end...
A partly subtitled show set in Istanbul might sound like a brave departure for a BBC Sunday night crime drama. But in fact, if you strip away The...
Like many sitcoms, W1A featured a middle-aged man convinced that he’s the only sane person left in the world. Usually, of course, this merely goes...
Sometimes there are advantages to being ill-informed. Knowing embarrassingly little about why 30 Greenpeace activists were jailed in Russia in 2013,...
Let’s say, for the purposes of this joke, that I was recently staying in a hotel and kept hearing through the wall a voice shouting, ‘Yes! Yes!...
One challenge facing any novel, drama or film about the Holocaust is to restore its sheer unimaginability. In Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark...
Who do you think said the following on TV this week: ‘I love being around gay men – seeing a group of men expressing themselves the way they do is...
After conquering the world with Peaky Blinders (and before that by co-creating Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?), Steven Knight was last seen on British...
‘People throw the word “genius” around a lot,’ said a talking head on BBC2 this week, ‘but she was a genius, truly.’ If it wasn’t for...
If there’s such a thing as a workmanlike romp, then Mary & George might be one. This drama about political and sexual shenanigans during the reign...
‘The British don’t revolt, they grumble,’ said someone in the first episode of The Way. But what if we ever reversed this policy? That was the...
As Curb Your Enthusiasm begins its 12th and apparently final series, one key question remains: how does Larry David get away with it? While many...
With its tales of close relatives reuniting after years of separation, ITV’s Long Lost Family has been reliably jerking tears since 2011. Now, from...
The big finish to Streets of Gold: Mumbai, an excited look at the city’s ‘wealthiest one-percenters’, was an extravagant party hosted by ‘two...
When it comes to one-off family dramas for Christmas, two things are pretty much guaranteed. They’ll begin with credits announcing a starry cast,...