David walliams

BBC1’s The Miniaturist (26/7 December) is a lavish two-part adaptation of Jessie Burton’s bestseller. It’s also further proof that almost any geographical and historical setting can be conscripted to tell us what’s apparently the only story we’re interested in these days: an alliance of plucky and unfailingly virtuous black people, gay people and women taking on the repressive forces of straight white blokes. The main character, Nella (Anya Taylor-Joy), is ostensibly a young 17th-century Dutchwoman who’s been married off to a rich Amsterdam merchant. On closer inspection, though, she turns out to be a 21st-century feminist who’s somehow been transported back in time to show our benighted forebears the error

Gosh what a breath of fresh air was Andrew Davies’s War & Peace adaptation (BBC1, Sundays) after all the stale rubbish that was on over Christmas. There were times when the yuletide TV tedium got so bad that I considered preparing us all a Jonestown-style punchbowl. That way, we would never have had to endure Walliams and Friend nor the special time-travel edition of what everyone is now rightly calling Shitlock. Sherlock has a terminal case of Doctor Who disease. That is, it has become so knowing, so self-referential, so — ugh! — meta that it no longer feels under any obligation to put in the hard yards needed to

Gosh what a breath of fresh air was Andrew Davies’s War & Peace adaptation (BBC1, Sundays) after all the stale rubbish that was on over Christmas. There were times when the yuletide TV tedium got so bad that I considered preparing us all a Jonestown-style punchbowl. That way, we would never have had to endure Walliams and Friend nor the special time-travel edition of what everyone is now rightly calling Shitlock. Sherlock has a terminal case of Doctor Who disease. That is, it has become so knowing, so self-referential, so — ugh! — meta that it no longer feels under any obligation to put in the hard yards needed to

On the face of it, ITV’s Peter & Wendy sounded like a perfect family offering for Boxing Day: an adaptation of J.M. Barrie’s novel, with a framing story about how much Peter Pan can still mean to children today. In fact, though, the programme suffered from one serious flaw for any Boxing Day entertainment — if you were slightly drunk, slightly hungover or both, it was almost impossible to understand. Then again, I suspect that even the most weirdly sober of viewers might have struggled with a drama that never seemed to know the difference between the intriguingly suggestive and the utterly baffling. The opening sequence played to one of

On all those comic lists of the world’s shortest books (Great Italian War Heroes, My Hunt for the Real Killers, by O.J. Simpson etc.), the best title I ever came across was Bloomsbury: the Untold Story. Now, though, BBC2’s new drama, Life in Squares, is giving us yet another chance to marvel at how many sexual permutations one small group of people can achieve. But before all that began, Monday’s first episode was at some pains to show us the forces of Victorian stuffiness against which the Bloomsbury group rebelled. In the first scene, a suitor tried to woo Vanessa Stephen with the chat-up line, ‘Only two more days, Miss

You know what the world needs most right now? What it needs is five good-looking-ish, talented-ish blokes dressed in a mélange of artfully deconstructed dove-grey suits singing one of the songs out of Les Misérables, like a boy band but one that does numbers from musicals rather than original compositions, oh, and preferably with the kind of crap name that you can imagine being brainstormed by one of the teams on The Apprentice… Well, if that’s what you’ve been thinking these past few weeks, lucky you! You’ll surely have loved the final of Britain’s Got Talent, which gave exactly the result you were pining for: not the slightly rubbish impressionist;

You know you’re getting old when TV starts getting nostalgic about eras during which you were already feeling old and nostalgic. Take Pogs, the subject of one of those ‘Whatever happened to them, eh?’ moments in Badults (BBC3, Tuesday), an amiable sitcom about twentysomething flatmates. Pogs were these collectable discs originally made from fruit-juice bottle caps (passion fruit, orange and guava) that were a massive fad in the mid-Nineties. Tragically, though, the reason I know this is not that I played with them myself but that my stepson Jim the Rat did. How depressing is that? What it means is that even the generation below me, Jim’s, is already beginning

How did our comedies become so sad? BBC1’s new sitcom Big School (Fridays) opened with a scene that would probably tickle the ribs of many, but I, in my usual humourless way, found it depressing. Chemistry teacher Mr Church, played by David Walliams, hoped to excite his morbidly uninterested pupils about the effects of dunking a bottle of cold liquid nitrogen in warm water by using hundreds of table-tennis balls to dramatise the resultant explosion. But the bell rang, and his students filed out of class radiating boredom and contempt, leaving Mr Church gazing forlornly at a thousand ping-ponging shells. A similar sense of vulnerability permeated Boom Town, BBC3’s ‘structured