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For years, Ian Fleming was famously self-deprecating about the James Bond books. (‘I have a rule of not looking back,’ he once said. ‘Otherwise I’d wonder, “How could I write such piffle?”’) Towards the end of his life, though, he finally produced an essay in their defence — proudly pointing out, among other things, that however fantastical the plots may become, they’re always carefully rooted in a world recognisable as our own. Of course, this is not something that can necessarily be said of all the Bond films — but it certainly applies to ITV’s new three-part thriller Midwinter of the Spirit (Wednesday), based on the novel by Phil Rickman.

What a load of manipulative, hysterical tosh is An Inspector Calls. It wasn’t a work with which I was familiar till I saw the latest TV adaptation. Now, of course, I see exactly why the luvvies — see, for example, Stephen Daldry’s highly acclaimed early 1990s National Theatre revival — adore it so. It confirms everything they think they know about the world: rich people bad, heartless, oppressive; poor people the long-suffering and saintly salt of the earth. In case you’ve not had the pleasure, J.B. Priestley’s play is like a socialist game of Cluedo: a lovely innocent young working-class woman has died and the toffs all dunnit. Self-made millionaire

It’s hard to know whether the actor James Norton was being naive or disingenuous when he claimed in publicity interviews for BBC1’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover that ‘We are no longer shocked that people have sex.’ Either way, the tabloids soon proved him wrong. Days before the programme went out, the Sun had duly worked itself up into a state of delighted outrage about a TV drama that was apparently ‘so steamy it borders on porn’. In the event, this proved an exaggeration wild enough to suggest that none of the journalists involved had seen the programme —or, less likely, any porn. Sunday’s adaptation, written and directed by Jed Mercurio, was

Finally I realise why women are so pissed off. It all goes back to the first codified laws — circa 2,400 bc — when rules like this were invented by men: ‘If a woman speaks out of turn then her teeth will be smashed by a brick.’ Before that, apparently, women lived on a pretty equal footing with their future male oppressors. Indeed, in arguably the first civilisation — a hive-like collection of houses in central Anatolia called Çatalhöyük dating back to 7,500 bc, when mankind was just beginning to emerge from the Stone Age and living with semi-domesticated animals — not a single man was expected to put out

In 2011, the Daily Mail carried a long story about how the Queen’s cousin Prince William of Gloucester, who died in a plane crash aged 30, had been Prince Charles’s boyhood idol. (Our own Prince William, it claimed, was named after him.) In passing, it tactfully informed us that William’s ex-girlfriend Zsuzsi Starkloff ‘no longer wishes to be reminded of her lost love’. Well, the good news is that Zsuzsi has certainly changed her mind since. The following year she gave the Mail an interview describing their relationship in some detail. And on Thursday, she appeared in The Other Prince William: Secret History to tell all over again what Channel

When I was growing up in the 1970s, my three main fears were: being blown up by the IRA; being eaten by a Jaws-like great white shark; being vaporised by a nuclear bomb. I expect it was the same for most kids of my generation. The first two, obviously, were a function of the Birmingham bombings (et al.) and the Peter Benchley/Steven Spielberg axis of shark terror. And the third was the product of the relentless propagandising of CND as rehearsed faithfully on pretty much every BBC programme going from John Craven’s Newsround to The Archers, Animal Magic and Roobarb and Custard. I don’t actually remember the notorious episode where

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

Some revelations, it seems, are capable of being endlessly repeated while still remaining revelations. Think of all the books, articles and TV programmes over the years which have ‘revealed’ that the Victorians weren’t, after all, mad sexual repressives who had a fit of the vapours at the sight of an uncovered table-leg; or that the 1950s were a lot more fun than the drab conformist decade of popular imagination. Or that Rudyard Kipling was by no means a straightforward imperialist. (Feel free to add examples of your own.) And yet, no matter how many times these things are pointed out, it’s always with a proud flourish — as if what’s

So you’ve just popped out of town for the day on an errand. And when you get back, everyone has gone. Your wife, your kids, your nephews and nieces, your friends, your customers: they’ve all been kidnapped and dragged off to a place so barbarically horrible that really they’d be better off dead. Your daughter, for example. If she’s nine or over then she’s considered fair game. She’ll be sold as a slave in the market to the highest bidder — as ever, there’s a premium for blonde hair or blue eyes— after which her new owner can use her as she wishes. The very least she can expect is

‘Cringe!’ said Boy, after I’d exposed him to a few seconds of last week’s special nostalgia edition of TFI Friday. And he did have a point. From its once almost-daring name to its zany title graphics to its whatever-happened-to guest list (Shaun Ryder, Blur, Ewan McGregor), Chris Evans’s irredeemably Nineties game show now looks so dated and impossibly remote you might as well be looking at an early episode of Face to Face with John Freeman, or The Black and White Minstrel Show or Muffin the Mule. Gosh, time is cruel. But it was great at the time, right? No, it wasn’t, actually. I watched this one-off revival mainly to

Look, could everyone please stop denigrating the Entourage movie for spurious reasons like ‘it feels like an extended episode of the TV series’? Since the US release a few weeks ago, critics across the Atlantic have booed and shamed writer and director Doug Ellin’s long-awaited reunion of Vinnie Chase and co for just that. As if, instead of being a cheery summer feel-good flick for nostalgic fans, the show ought to have morphed into some erudite reflection for Entourage neophytes on how childish 20-something boys grow up into upstanding young gentlemen. Yawn. What a boring film that would have been. What did detractors expect? A brand new cast, novel character

I adore Andrew Roberts. We go back a long way. Once, on a boating expedition gone wrong in the south of France, we had a bonding moment almost Brokeback Mountain-esque in its bromantic intensity. Roberts had hired an expensive speedboat for the day (as Andrew Roberts would) and we’d left very little time to get it back to harbour and avoid being stung for a massive surcharge. Problem was, the seas had got very rough and our anchor was stuck fast. We manoeuvred the boat this way and that to no avail. There was nothing for it. Someone would have to dive down to free it. It wasn’t easy. The

With 60 million international subscribers and a programme-making budget of about $3bn, Netflix is steamrolling most of the received wisdom about how we make and watch television. Already riding high on the success of prestigious hits like House of Cards and Daredevil, Netflix is expecting to bust new barriers with Sense8, whose 12 episodes became available to view today. The big news is that Sense8 marks the TV debut of Andy and Lana Wachowski, the enigmatic creators of the blockbusting Matrix movies, though riding a little less high of late following equivocal reactions to Cloud Atlas and Jupiter Ascending. The multiple storylines and global reach of Sense8 inevitably bring to mind

Monday saw the return of possibly the weirdest TV series in living memory. Imagine a parallel universe in which Are You Being Served? had starred Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud and Janet Suzman, and you might get some idea of what ITV’s Vicious is like. Alternatively, I suppose, you could just watch the thing and realise that no, you’re not drunk — you really are seeing Derek Jacobi, Ian McKellen and Frances de la Tour acting their socks off in a sitcom that would have been considered rather creaky in 1975. Jacobi and McKellen play Stuart and Freddie: a pair of gay actors who’ve been living together for decades despite the

It has been a while since the BBC really pushed the boat out on the epic history documentary front. Perhaps to make amends it is treating us to possibly the most historian-studded, blue-screen-special-effects-enhanced, rare-documentastic, no-hyperbole-knowingly-under-employed series ever shown on television. Armada: 12 Days to Save England (Sundays, BBC2). Having clearly spent a lot of money here, the BBC is taking no chances with its demographic spread. For the laydeez, in the Ross Poldark role it has Dan Snow, captured somewhat gratuitously piloting his handsome yacht into the choppy waters of the English Channel. (Just like in 1588! Sort of.) For the dirty old men it has no fewer than three

If you’ve never watched Game of Thrones, it is a twee fantasy show in which men and women discuss politics at length, dance in Austen-like balls, and drink small amounts of wine by streams. Characters communicate as much by the angle at which they hold their fans or opera glasses as by the subtext of their artfully crafted bon mots. It has attracted a massive following for the cultured and intellectually stimulating qualities of the series, but there has been some outrage after the last episode featured what appeared to be a rape scene. After four full seasons, viewers are expressing horror over an incident that has shocked regular fans of a series universally famous for treating beloved characters with cherished