Television

‘Do you want to stream something?’ my girlfriend asked me. It was 5 p.m. on a Saturday and I’d had a horrendous week. I’d caught one of those mutant viruses that you learn about in nursery rhymes or at the London Dungeon. The cough was the worst part. It was the sort of cough that evacuates a Tube carriage. It was the sort of cough you hear in a western before the protagonist says: ‘Old Billy Boy got consumption. There ain’t a darn thing we can do ’bout it. Doc says he got weeks. Poor bastard. He ain’t never gon’ make it to Montana.’ In short, I was feeling out

Nobody Wants This, the Netflix romcom that brought us the ‘hot rabbi’, recently returned for its second season. For the uninitiated, the first series introduced us to sex and relationships podcaster Joanne, played by Kristen Bell, who meets Noah, played by Adam Brody (of The O.C. millennial crush fame), a reform rabbi who has just broken up with his long-term girlfriend. The premise felt fresh and original: a romcom that dared talk about religion and even made it the key part of the plot. It’s undoubtedly a hit, with season two racking up more than eight million views in its first four days of streaming, taking it to the number one spot

The Duchess of Sussex has achieved something quite remarkable. After the brickbats hurled at the first season of her Netflix show With Love, Meghan – the furious pro-monarchy outrage, the eye-rolling from critics, the memes that lampooned her syrupy anecdotes – many TV personalities would have flinched. They would have called consultants, tweaked the format, apologised by going in a ‘new direction’. Meghan Markle (or should I say Sussex) has done the opposite. Season two arrived last month: unchanged, unrepentant and every bit as twee as the first.  Like her homemade ‘jam’, that’s not to say it’s gone down well. ‘Painfully contrived’, ‘irrelevant meets intolerable’ and ‘tone-deaf’ were just some of the

A thought hit me when bingeing the first series of The Paper on Sky’s Now streaming service this week: how on earth did it take this long for someone to make a sequel to The Office? Don’t get me wrong, this wasn’t a glowing verdict on the comic merit of The Paper – an Office-style mockumentary set in a struggling regional newspaper in Toledo, Ohio. Rather it was a reflection on the usually mercenary economics of big television. During the pandemic, the American version of The Office racked up an astonishing 57 billion streaming minutes, despite its final episode having aired in 2013. The show premiered in 2005, inspired by the

‘The view was stunning.’ ‘The hotel room was well appointed.’ ‘It’s a city of contrasts.’ Such numbing clichés in travel commentary are considered, by anyone remotely au fait with Eric Newby or Patrick Leigh Fermor, to be unacceptable. But if you watch Match of the Day, you’ll know the footballing equivalents of these kinds of asinine blandishments have long been deemed worthy of the kind of critical scrutiny usually reserved for Jonathan Franzen novels. After following the game for 40 years, I’ve finally reached breaking point with the abysmal drivel that comes out of the mouths of players, pundits and managers alike. Of course, they aren’t being paid to be

We’ve been through a lot as a nation over the past few years. Watching politicians debate scotch eggs, finding out (without wanting to) how Prince Harry lost his virginity, Just Stop Oil’s tomato soup tantrums… so sometimes an event arises that makes you ask yourself: has this all taken a larger toll than we realised on our collective psyche? Are we, in fact, having some kind of national nervous breakdown?  The answer would appear to be a big, fat, pig-shaped yes, given the ‘breaking news’ announcement on ITV’s Good Morning Britain this week that Peppa Pig matriarch Mummy Pig had given birth to her third piglet, Evie. She's here! 🐷 Mummy Pig has given birth

With reluctance – but enticed by its surprisingly starry cast and the fact that it had landed, ironically enough, on Netflix – I recently tuned in to The Hour, the BBC’s 2011 political drama series. It’s about a BBC TV news programme being launched in 1956, against the backdrop of the Suez Crisis. And, goodness me, isn’t it good? Better than good, in fact – it’s a high-carat television diamond, and not some lab-grown job either, but the real, romantic, sparkling deal hewn out of the earth and hawked via Antwerp before ending up in the Imperial State Crown. From the get-go – those classy, Hitchcockesque credits – you know

The modern world of dating is ripe for disappointment, and recent dating app convert Sophie is certainly not immune. ‘I went on a date with an actor – not doing too bad – we go to Zuma. I ordered everything; Henry VIII in there, got it all. Then the bill came and he says, how should we do this? Ugh! Ejector seat. Meep! Bye bye. No, I couldn’t. I paid the whole bill and left. Auf wiedersehen.’ Luckily, pal Olivia has a solution, and advises her to ditch the apps and instead sign up to a millionaires’ dating agency run by her friend. Good advice for all of us, perhaps,