Comedy

Punk rock, packaged, parcelled, and boxed up as a treat for nostalgic wrinklies. That’s the deal with Punk Off!, a touring show that recently completed a lap of the country at the Dominion Theatre. Most of the audience were there to recall their rebellious heyday. ‘It’s about to get really, really loud,’ announced the compère, Kevin Kennedy, as the four-piece band hammered out ‘Sheena Is A Punk Rocker’ ‘and ‘If the Kids Are United’. Both hits sounded eerily unfamiliar. Why? Those raucous, pulsing rhythms can’t be turned into elevator jingles or a background drone at a shopping mall – so we rarely hear them. Just as well. Kennedy rattled through

The White Lotus, now back for a third series, could perhaps be best described as Death in Paradise for posh people. Most obviously, this is because its plots revolve around murders in an idyllic location – only with a far bigger budget, a much starrier cast and several episodes per story. But there’s also the fact that it follows the same pattern every time. So it was that season three began this week, rather like its predecessors, with some lovely scenery, a dead body and a caption reading ‘One week earlier’. After that, we duly watched a bunch of rich, good-looking Americans arriving at a luxury White Lotus resort where

It is a truth universally acknowledged that lazy journalists begin every piece about Jane Austen with the words ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged’, so I’ll fight the temptation. In any case, the Miss Austen at the centre of BBC1’s new Sunday-night drama isn’t Jane, but her beloved sister Cassandra, best known for destroying most of Jane’s letters. Given that this has rendered our knowledge of the woman’s biography tantalisingly sketchy, Cassandra has attracted her fair share of resentment from Janeites. But rather cunningly, Miss Austen both exonerates her and takes full advantage of the sketchiness: high-mindedly questioning our entitlement to snoop into Jane’s private life, while feeling free to

At last, a film about the G7. There have been more movies than you can shake a stick at set in the Oval Office and No. 10 and other citadels. But not once has cinema gathered democracy’s prime septet in the same frame, the way the annual Group of Seven summit does. Until Rumours. ‘Did you cast me because you couldn’t get anyone else to do it?’ Blanchett asks To play the leaders of the free world at this geopolitically sensitive moment, Rumours has attracted stars of magnitude. Cate Blanchett is the German chancellor, Charles Dance the American president. Roy Dupuis plays Canada’s pin-up prime minister and Alicia Vikander gives

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, those of Cambridge), it has a main character who solves crimes and cryptic crosswords with equal efficiency. Once the series began, though, it was clear that its sights were set a little lower than that. Instead, the show seems content to take its place as the latest proof that plausibility is out of fashion in TV drama these days. (In my last column I reviewed Nightsleeper, which had no time for it at all.) One reason this detective feels like the traditional fish out of

Kaos is a new Netflix gods-and-monsters black-comedy blockbuster that will scorch your screen and fry your brain like a thunderbolt from Zeus. It’s sick, cynical, brutal and very, very dark but it’s so well acted, ingeniously plotted, moving, inventive, funny and addictive that I fear resistance may be futile. Playboy Poseidon hangs out on his superyacht servicing his mistress – and sister, and brother’s wife Written by Charlie Covell, it’s like Succession relocated to a parallel modern world in which the ancient Greek gods still rule over us, ruthlessly pursuing their peculiar ends with a characteristically Olympian disregard for the pain and misery their shenanigans inflict on us worthless mortals.

The Turbine Theatre is a newish venue beneath the railway arches of Grosvenor Bridge in Battersea. The comfy auditorium is furnished with 94 cinema seats and the only snag is the scent of mildew clinging to the plasterwork. Overhead, the rumbling commuter trains create the perfect soundscape for Cockfosters, a zany rom-com set on the Tube. Two travellers meet by accident on a Piccadilly line service departing from Heathrow Terminal 3. James is a nerdy public-school reject who spots a fellow traveller, Victoria, struggling to shift three monster suitcases onto the train. Obeying Tube etiquette, he makes no attempt to help her and they sit in adjoining seats without acknowledging

Dr Phil Hammond is a hilarious and wildly successful comedian whose career is built on the ruins of the NHS. His act has spawned a host of imitators on the stand up-circuit and they share Dr Phil’s confused adoration for the NHS. All of them love the idea of universal healthcare but they dislike the messy practical details. And they’re convinced that extra cash will save the system. The evidence suggests otherwise; handing more money to the NHS is like giving a gambling addict the keys to a bullion van. The gallows humour is delightful if you’re not stuck in an NHS queue Dr Phil claims that he would gladly

Grade: B+ Games can be exciting, puzzling, scary, competitive and – occasionally – moving. Can they be funny? Not often. But this lovingly crafted indie cartoon adventure has a creditable bash at it. The protagonist is an oval-headed yellow homunculus in a shirt and tie, as if Family Guy’s Stewie Griffin, Dilbert and a minor Simpsons character had been squished in a particle collider. He is dispatched to the fictional Yorkshire town of Barnsworth by his boss to do… something. But the mayor won’t meet him so he finds himself wandering around the town. ‘Thank goodness you’re here!’ say various townspeople in ee-bah-gum accents, before inviting you to help them

Therapy seems to be the defining theme of this year’s Edinburgh festival. Many performers are saddled with personal demons or anxieties which they want to alleviate by yelling about them in front of a paying audience. Professor Tanya Byron puts it like this in the Pleasance brochure: ‘Therapy is where art and story-telling combine.’ This show crashes and burns like the stock market on a bad day. A cheerier ending might help. At the Pleasance, Joe Sellman-Leava is seeking catharsis through his show It’s The Economy, Stupid! (Jack Dome, until 26 August). He begins by delivering a friendly lecture about credit, interest rates, retail banks, Adam Smith and so on.

Do men and women need different podcasts? The notion goes against the unisex, every-sex, what-is-sex-anyway culture we have come to inhabit. Yet this week we find, on the BBC no less, a podcast dedicated to men’s problems and one satirising women’s problems. Some would say the pushback has begun. Geoff Norcott’s Working Men’s Club is a recorded stand-up comedy act performed to a studio audience in Leeds. Norcott describes it as a place ‘to discuss proper bloke stuff’, by which he means beer, sport and masturbation (cue laughter), but much more than that, men’s physical, mental and emotional health (initial silence). He jibes at the male habit of squashing feelings

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 Turkish Detective’s minarets and bazaars (not hard given that they supply somewhat perfunctory local colour), what remains is, according to taste, either reassuringly familiar or utterly bog-standard. The series began with Mehmet Suleyman (Ethan Kai) leaving his job at the Metropolitan Police to take up fish-out-of-water duties in the city of his birth. Waiting for him at Istanbul airport was what at first seemed like a straightforward comedy foreigner, much given to muttering the words ‘very good, very good’ and driving like

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 to show how delusional the bloke is – but the subversive twist here was that Ian Fletcher, the BBC’s head of values, seemed to be right. Playing Ian, Hugh Bonneville therefore spent much of his screentime radiating a bemused dismay at the madness around him. The only question is whether the show will hold its nerve or whether Douglas will prove toxic after all Now, as the main character in the comedy drama Douglas Is Cancelled, Bonneville is at it again. When we first met