Gareth Roberts is a TV scriptwriter and novelist who has worked on Doctor Who and Coronation Street
It’s bad manners to complain about a gift of any kind, and very bad manners to complain about a Christmas present that comes with epic historical significance. But the Trafalgar Square tree, supplied from the good people of Norway every year since 1947 as a thank you to Britain for looking out for them in
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This week: are we drowning in a sea of twee? Gareth Roberts writes the cover article this week, arguing against what he sees as the hideous triviality of our times. ‘The British have lost their aversion to glutinous sentimentality,’ he declares. How did we get here, and who are the worst offenders? Gareth argues that
I remember the moment I first understood that we, the British, had a national character. It was in the mid-1970s and my family and I were watching a clip from an American TV show which was being shown to us by ITV for a giggle. It was a celebration of the love between mothers and
The current series of I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! has been a big contrast to the previous two. The 2022 and 2023 camps contained politicians, and they were two particularly hot – in the potato sense – politicians. Matt Hancock and Nigel Farage carried baggage with them into the camp. In Hancock’s
Keir Starmer’s critics might have you believe that the Labour government is fighting a class war. They point to Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson’s crackdown on private schools and Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s attack on farmers. These initiatives certainly don’t appear to be just about money: whacking VAT on school fees and hitting dead farmers with inheritance
There’s no need to be afraid, but 40 years since the advent of ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’ by Band Aid there is a dispute raging about the commemorations. There is to be an ‘ultimate’ version of this haunting ditty – haunting in the Borley Rectory sense – in which vocals from across each of
Hate crimes, hate speech, hate groups… It is quite possible that we have less of these things today than ever before – they originated before our age, as anybody who’s read Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale can vouch – but we have never obsessed about them quite so much. What is hate in its 21st century, British sense? And
Gary Lineker is to leave Match of the Day at the end of the current football season, and to exit the BBC entirely after the 2026 World Cup. It was 1999 when he took over Match from Des Lynam, though in a strange discord with the usual swift passage of time, it feels much longer. Because despite his close
There is something slightly uncanny about the musical Marsh family of Faversham in Kent, who recently gathered millions of YouTube views with ‘Gimme Hope Kamala’, their rewrite of Eddy Grant’s ‘Gimme Hope Jo’Anna’. They are a combination of two big fads of the 70s, The Partridge Family and Jonestown. Mad Ma Marsh in particular has the shining
‘Kindness is like marmalade – a little goes a long way,’ Paddington Bear tweeted recently. But it isn’t only imaginary talking bears who take this approach on social media. The News Agents’ Emily Maitlis was inspired by the rather sickly – and given the seriousness of current events, rather inappropriate – chummy love-in between Rishi
Halloween is approaching. The Americans, who go very big on it normally, are distracted this year by the election, so it feels like we have it more to ourselves than usual. And nobody in Britain will be having a happier Halloween than Danny Robins, a former comedy writer and journalist who has cracked the big
Paddington has an official passport. The makers of the new Paddington film Paddington in Peru revealed this in passing to the Radio Times today. They needed the passport for scenes in the new movie, presumably showing Paddington clearing customs on his journey back to darkest Peru. So they approached the Home Office for a facsimile, which is odd in
ITV are searching for an ‘AI expert’ to ‘create TV shows, films and digital content’, and to use this possibly baleful new algorithmic technology for ‘character development’ and ‘ideation’. The successful applicant will be ideating away for a tidy salary of up to £95,000 per annum. AI could be a game-changer for TV and film,
Quiz shows on TV – the kind you can join in with at home by shouting the answer at the screen, rather than panel games or tests of skill – seem to be surging with renewed popularity. At its peak last year, Pointless drew in over 7 million viewers, while The Chase averages 3 million
Like many people this weekend, I couldn’t tear myself away from videos of the booster rocket of Elon Musk’s Starship shrieking back to earth, to be clutched in the giant ‘chopstick’ arms of a towering metallic cradle. I must have watched it now about 50 times from varying angles. The most impressive are the videos recorded at
There’s been another development in the wearying saga of Gary Lineker, the over-salaried presenter of football on the BBC and banal takes on Twitter/ X. An email leak suggests that a draft BBC statement preparing to announce his departure from Match Of The Day is in the works, but he has laughed this off on screen and told
The BBC’s daytime soap Doctors will soon vanish from our screens after 24 years. But while the final episodes make for excruciatingly bad television, they are worth watching for a simple reason: they encapsulate everything that is wrong with modern television. The BBC’s obsession with ramming progressive storylines down viewers’ throats is plain to see
Are you one of the growing number of ‘second screen’ television viewers? For all too many of us, it seems that watching one screen just isn’t enough; modern technology and, in particular, our obsession with looking at our phones has so addled our brains that plenty of us fiddle with our mobiles while ostensibly ‘watching’
Labour’s honeymoon didn’t last long. Keir Starmer won power less than three months ago with a vow to ‘change Britain’. But the Labour government’s missteps over the last few weeks – not least the ongoing row about freebies – makes it hard to distinguish life under Labour to what came before. ‘Vanity snappers’, free posh
Why do we decide something is not for us? This is a question I’ve been pondering as I’ve got older, and started to take a liking to various cultural products that I’d previously marked down – in some cases, for decades – as absolutely unpalatable. Is this a sign of a maturing, more tolerant palate?
