Anna torv

Rupert Murdoch’s warped vision of family

When Rupert Murdoch divorced his fourth wife, Jerry Hall, in August 2022 he made her sign an agreement that she would not give any story ideas to the writers of Succession. Frankly he need not have bothered, because it’s all here in this utterly gripping book. The award-winning journalist Gabriel Sherman has been reporting on the Murdochs since 2008 and has interviewed them all at one time or another, so he really knows his stuff. He briskly covers Rupert’s entire career but concentrates on the man’s relationships with his children and the war of succession. Rupert was always an absentee father who put business before family. He divorced his first

Alienatingly sweet and warm: BBC2's The Newsreader reviewed

When TV makes shows about TV, it rarely has a good word to say for itself. In the likes of W1A, The Day Today and, savagest of all, Victoria Wood: As Seen on TV, the industry has looked in the mirror and ripped itself to shreds. What all these comedies say, in their own way, is that most TV is bombastic, brain-dead, two-star crap put together in a blind panic and a moral vacuum by idiots and monsters. Second only to politics, it’s the satirists’ biggest sitting duck, the gift that can’t stop giving. The Newsreader, a new newsroom drama, turns out to be cut from different cloth. It’s set