Television

They were loud, vivacious and gloriously un-PC.  Sometimes they seemed to be learning how to cook as they went, barely one step ahead of the viewer. It didn’t matter. If anything, it only made the BBC’s Two Fat Ladies more watchable. And 25 years on – the last of the two dozen episodes pairing Jennifer Paterson and Clarissa Dickson Wright aired on 28 September 1999 – I miss terribly their jaunty style of cooking, glass in hand. I don’t think I’m alone. Spectacularly and unexpectedly successful in their lifetimes – 70 million worldwide watched their programme over its four-year run, including many in the US – the internet has allowed

More than 200,000 people have schlepped down the ley lines for another year of ‘Glasto’. It’s tempting to deride these people: they’ll stink, they’re anchorless hedonists, they’re blue-haired hippies. However, they’ve got tickets to Glastonbury and I haven’t, so they win.  Actually going to the festival, however, is a minority experience. More of us will be watching it on TV. And whether you dig the Glastonbury vibe or not, there’s plenty of good music for all across this weekend.  The most important thing to remember, though, is to watch as little of the coverage as possible. It’s fluff. For three whole days, everything is ‘fantastic’, everyone will ‘bring it’ and

The award-winning Succession is many things. Now in its fourth series, it has been compared with a Renaissance painting, a Greek tragedy, a Jane Austen novel, and a psychoanalytical allegory of trauma responses (Kendall – fight; Connor – flight; Shiv – fawn; Roman – freeze). Ultimately, however, it is a Shakespearean series. The writers may have swapped the battlefield for the boardroom and armies for anxious shareholders, but the show’s character studies and themes – power, family, politics, betrayal, revenge – are Shakespearean in their complexity and circularity. Only instead of soliloquies, we have a lot more raised eyebrows, death-stares and ‘uh-huhs’. There’s even a playwright called Willa. Like Shakespeare

How Walford in EastEnders got its name, why Isaac Newton visited bars in disguise and what happened when the IRA parked on a double yellow line. Our tour of London’s postcode areas has reached its penultimate stop – who fancies an E?

As I’ve got on in years I’ve been fairly successful in eliminating vices – most of the debauchery of my teens and twenties is a distant, hazy memory. But as I reached my fifties I found I had fallen into the grip of a compulsion that was as powerful and unshakeable as any drug. My name is John and I am addicted to Great Canal Journeys with Prunella Scales and Timothy West.  During my condition’s worst ravages I found myself staying up half the night binge-watching this endearing elderly couple navigating their way around the historic waterways of Britain at 2mph. The pottering about, the occasional prang while entering and exiting locks,

You’ll know where you are with Ted Lasso – the third season of which has just started on Apple TV – as soon as you hear the Marcus Mumford co-written theme song. It peddles a sort of sub-Coldplay uplift, with a lot of big, meaningless anthemic ‘yeah’s in the chorus. Bright, accessible, catchy and instantly forgettable, you still enjoy hearing it every time you watch a new episode. And that’s the show in microcosm: cheery, amusing and utterly inconsequential. Yet somehow the Jason Sudeikis vehicle has become not only Apple TV’s biggest hit to date, but the most Emmy-nominated comedy in recent years. It has won for everyone from Sudeikis (who has

In our risk-averse, deeply fearful age, the idea of one of the most popular shows on any streaming service being a black comedy about a serial killer who has an unfortunate penchant for murdering the women he falls in love with might be something of a tough sell. But the bloody exploits of Joe Goldberg, a bookstore worker-turned-university-professor, who has so far terrorised the denizens of New York, California and London, have run to four immensely popular seasons on Netflix, with a likely fifth and final instalment in the next year or two. Not bad for a series that – intentionally or otherwise – treads a fine line between hilarity

Farces, satires and straight slapstick comedies about extremely wealthy people have made popular entertainment for centuries. In film, the most notable example is Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (1939), in which a group of upper-middle-class French people gather at swanky events, culminating in an affair that ends in a mistaken identity shotgun death, one that will be reported to the police as ‘nothing more than an unfortunate accident’. HBO’s Succession, which returns to Sky Atlantic with a fourth season on Monday, has followed an even wealthier group of people, even more self-absorbed, distorted and cut off from the outside world than Renoir’s overzealous swingers and servants whistling past the future graveyards