Superheroes

Doctor Who fans may remember that after the show’s triumphant return in the early 2000s, we found out that showrunner Russell T. Davies had agreed with BBC mandarins to rid the franchise of some of its more unwieldy elements in order to make it palatable to casual viewers. Gotham City has long been the perfect backdrop for old-fashioned noir, and the city is on fine fettle here Watching the debut episode of The Penguin, HBO’s new crime series (available on Sky Atlantic), based on a popular Batman villain, I suspected a similar game was at play. The series might be visibly set in the Batman universe, but it’s also very

Instead of wasting money, like other museums, on extravagant architectural statements, the Foundling Museum in Brunswick Square has sensibly chosen to welcome visitors with a written statement. In 2014 it commissioned the poet Lemn Sissay, who spent his teenage years in a children’s home, to create a memorial in its entrance hall to the many parentless heroes and heroines in fiction. ‘Heathcliff was a foundling… Harry Potter was fostered… Dorothy Gale was adopted… James Bond was fostered…’ The list goes on, running to more than 100 names. Sissay’s mural will trigger a lightbulb moment for any dimwit like me who has failed to notice this narrative trope – and there

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 reminder of how recently Britain was still a country that made little provision for the disabled – and, even more startlingly, of how controversial the idea of such provision then seemed. The central performances were rivetingly good, and the overall sense was of a heartfelt tribute being paid to a couple who did much to

Mark Millar has a raging hangover but he couldn’t be more chirpy or enthusiastic. ‘People say they get worse as you get older but I get reverse hangovers where I feel amazing. I wake up at four or five and I’m ready to go!’ I’ve caught him on a Sunday morning, on his way to Mass, after an exhausting three weeks in which he has been doing up to 45 interviews a day to promote Jupiter’s Legacy, his blockbuster superhero series for Netflix. He ought to be nervous: this is his first big project off the blocks since (in 2017) the studio bought up his publishing company Millarworld for a

There’s a delicious scene in the new season of Amazon’s superheroes-gone-bad series The Boys. The chief superhero Homelander (Antony Starr) is introduced by a minion to a potential new member of his elite superhero group, the Seven. Homelander watches this bright new talent performing wonders in a gym-style training zone: the young man is agile, eager, skilled with weaponry; but perhaps his most valuable features, the minion suggests, are that he is disabled and belongs to an ethnic minority. This could play really well with the youth demographic, who are into that kind of woke stuff, the aide suggests. The potential recruit approaches Homelander, sweet, modest and starstruck. Even though