It’s hard to imagine in the wake of GoodFellas, The Sopranos and Gomorrah but there was a time, not so long ago, when the very existence of the Mafia was widely dismissed as an urban myth. What changed was Mario Puzo’s 1969 bestselling novel The Godfather, which sold nine million copies in two years. You
When TV makes shows about TV, it rarely has a good word to say for itself. In the likes of W1A, The Day Today and, savagest of all, Victoria Wood: As Seen on TV, the industry has looked in the mirror and ripped itself to shreds. What all these comedies say, in their own way,
Many years ago a man on the end of my cigarette stole my soul. Mr Migarette (for such was his name) wore a tall hat like the one in the Arnolfini Marriage portrait, he smoked a pipe and no matter how often I tried to flick away the glowing fag ash, his evil grinning features
Grizzled police officers of the old school should probably avoid Channel 4’s Night Coppers for reasons of blood pressure. Like most documentary series with close access to the police, this one paints them in a light so favourable as to be almost comically sycophantic. The trouble for those grizzled types is that – the times
‘The Terminal List is… a dated and drably made eight-part military thriller that offers little intrigue or excitement,’ says the Guardian’s ‘east coast arts editor’ in a corrosive one-star review. Eh? Can we have been watching the same series? Let me give you an example of this ‘little intrigue or excitement’ and allow you to
The Undeclared War has many of the traditional signifiers of a classy thriller: the assiduous letter-by-letter captioning of every location; the weirdly precise time-checks (‘Sunday 09.47’); above all, the frankly baffling opening scene. In it, a young woman walked around a deserted fairground, broke into a beach hut that turned into a gym and spotted
I don’t think it’s my imagination: it really is getting harder and harder to find anything worth watching on TV. But then, why should it be otherwise? Entropy has afflicted every aspect of our culture from holiday flights to the supply chain to the efficacy and integrity of our political and legal system to the
James Graham has made his considerable name writing political-based dramas of a highly unusual type: non-polemical ones. And this certainly applies to his television work as well as his stage plays. Coalition (about the 2010 Conservative-Lib Dem alliance) and Brexit: The Uncivil War (which gave Dominic Cummings the signal honour of being played by Benedict
Just how edgy and dangerous is Ricky Gervais? There is no one more edgy and dangerous, we learn from no less an authority than one R. Gervais. He keeps reminding you of this at intervals in his latest stand-up special, for which he was reputedly paid $20 million (to go with the other $20 million
A youngish couple leave London and drive off excitedly to make a fresh start in more rural surroundings. They demonstrate their happiness by laughing all the way to their new town, where a cheery sign on the outskirts reads: ‘Welcome to Midwich’. So what could possibly go wrong? In fact, even for viewers unfamiliar with
Having now watched it to the end, I would say that Slow Horses (Apple TV+) is by far the best TV drama I’ve seen in at least the last year: superbly acted and directed, ingeniously plotted, refreshingly free of annoyance. Oh, and I’d like to apologise to Mick Herron, author of the original novel series,
It’s official: television has a new genre. Its features include leisurely half-hour episodes, plenty of literary chat, several scenes set in libraries, not much humour and lots of close-ups of the thoughtful faces of clever young Irish women. It would also have presented a serious dilemma for teenage boys growing up before the internet, in
How thriller writers must miss the Cold War! Early John le Carré and Len Deighton had it easy when trying to create a convincingly menacing enemy: the Soviets, obviously. But their successors are forced to go through all manner of desperate contortions to generate their bad guy McGuffin. They can’t do Muslims because that’s Islamophobic;
In theory, it should be a perfect match. John Morton – the man behind the brilliantly assured sitcom W1A which so gleefully skewered the BBC – gets to give us the English version of Call My Agent!: the brilliantly assured French lockdown hit which so gleefully skewered the Parisian showbusiness world. In practice, at least
Netflix’s share price has collapsed and a major factor, people are saying, is its relentless pushing of agendas. I think I have the solution. Perhaps it should follow the BritBox model and instead of making dramas it feels that audiences ought to like – e.g. the very creepy-sounding He’s Expecting, a Japanese series about a
Chivalry – written by and starring Sarah Solemani and Steve Coogan – is a comedy drama about post-#MeToo Hollywood life. It’s perhaps not surprising, then, that the show’s chief characteristic so far has been nervousness. Somewhere inside it, you feel, lurks an impulse to really let rip. But if so, Thursday’s first two episodes successfully
The only impersonation I can do is my Jimmy Savile impersonation. This is not uncommon among people of my generation: if you were a child or a teenager in the 1970s and 1980s, Savile was quite possibly the most famous person in your entire world. His show Jim’ll Fix It was the most popular on
Art That Made Us is an ambitious new series, firmly in the ‘history of something in a load of different objects’ category. That the something in question is Britain duly means that we get the BBC’s usual, and perhaps even very British, mix of deep patriotism on the one hand and deep suspicion of patriotism
The iron law of TV these days is that if you want to avoid series that are suffocatingly right-on the only way to go is foreign. Any TV emanating from the Anglosphere is guaranteed to be chock-full of intrusive anachronisms. Bridgerton,which reinvents Regency England as a melting pot of diversity, is an extreme example of
BBC2’s one-off drama Then Barbara Met Alan (Monday) told the true story of how two disabled performers on the cabaret circuit of the 1990s fell in love and campaigned together successfully for disability rights. Most of the cast and a lot of the crew were people with disabilities themselves, and the programme provided a startling
