Television

The other day I had a very dispiriting conversation with a TV industry insider. It turns out that everything you see on reality TV is fake. It’s the ‘everything’ part that really bothered me. Obviously, we all sort of know that most TV is faked: that close-ups on wildlife documentaries are sometimes filmed in zoos

Psychological thrillers — or ‘thrillers’ as they used to be known — have become almost as ubiquitous on television as they are in the average bookshop. On the whole, this is now a genre where contented domesticity exists solely to be undermined, and where the chief function of the past is to come back and

‘What we really need is a faux-historical drama series about police brutality and black activism set in 1970s London,’ said no TV viewer, ever. But TV commissioning editors have more important priorities, these days, than mere plausibility, entertainment or value-for-subscription fee. So naturally, when the chance arose to make Guerrilla (Sky Atlantic, Thursday) — a

Sky Atlantic — available only to Sky customers — has the cunning/infuriating policy of broadcasting the kind of programmes most likely to appeal to people who pride themselves on not being Sky customers. (Basically, the liberal, metropolitan you-know-what.) Now, to a list that includes Veep, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Girls and Last Week Tonight with John

Jack Whitehall could have been perfectly awful as Paul Pennyfeather in Decline and Fall (BBC1, Fridays). He has spent most of his career comically playing up to a common person’s idea of what a posh person looks like: the stand-up who went to the same public school (Marlborough) as Kate Middleton; JP, the Jack-Wills-wearing yah

As we know from all those newspaper articles and actress interviews, there’s a scandalous lack of high-profile British TV dramas starring women over 40. Indeed, if it wasn’t for No Offence, Unforgotten, Silent Witness, Last Tango in Halifax, The Fall, NW, Agatha Raisin, Broadchurch, Happy Valley and Apple Tree Yard, there’d really only be Vera,

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

Fans of tough investigative journalism should probably avoid Channel 4’s How’d You Get So Rich? Presenter Katherine Ryan’s main tactic is to ask wealthy people how much they paid for something and, when they tell her, to repeat their answer in a tone of wondering admiration. Yet, despite her best efforts to keep it shallow,

Here’s the bad news. One day you or someone like you will be shopping in a mall or enjoying a concert or about to catch a train when the first sudden, sharp crack will rend the air and your world will change forever. Around you, people will start to crumple and as the panic and

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

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

With the Shannon Matthews story, it’s not easy to accentuate the positive — but BBC1’s The Moorside (Tuesday) is having a go nonetheless. Although touching at times, the result ultimately proves a rather awkward watch. Shannon was nine when she went missing from the Moorside estate, Dewsbury, in February 2008. Her mother Karen made a

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,’

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

‘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

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

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

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.