Television

Yesterday

Prue Leith

Am I a fashion icon?

Ever since I met Omi (one half of the fashion design duo Vin + Omi) on a train, I have found myself, every six months, walking in their London Fashion week show. A preposterous idea, you’d think, an 86-year-old strutting down the catwalk. But I’m such a show-off, I can’t resist it. It is enormous fun. There’s a lot of hanging about while all 60 or 70 of us get our make-up and hair done and get fitted (and later dressed) in whatever we are to wear. I like the atmosphere with everyone in one big room and so at ease with each other. Exquisite young models of both sexes are stripping off with no embarrassment, sitting on the floor, everyone relaxed and friendly.

Gareth Roberts

Up next… Yookay Street, a refreshing new soap opera

The idea of TV soap operas was originally, at least in part, to reflect the nation as a whole. This was never really true – out of dramatic necessity, the characters in these shows take an unusual interest in one another’s business and tend to have peculiarly eventful lives. But it was more true than today, when soaps – for all their obsession with ‘issues’ – are squeamish and avoidant, preferring to duck difficult topics. Here is my attempt to restore the balance with a more honest soap opera, where all the problems of modern Britain are concentrated in one place. Everything is absolutely fine on… Yookay Street. SCENE 1 – THE STREET. Afternoon We open on a long, terraced urban street with a corner shop at one end and a pub at the other.

Wednesday

Vanessa Feltz

Piers Morgan, I’m coming for you

I’m keen on a Plan B. My father, Norman the Knicker King, reared us in trembling terror of ending up ‘on Carey Street’ (erstwhile home of the bankruptcy court). So when Channel 5’s sparkling Vanessa succumbed to the noxious pestilence imperilling terrestrial TV, I blithely announced a rapid renaissance. I would simply launch a spanking-new show, At Home with Vanessa, on YouTube – a territory already staked out by telly titans Piers Morgan, Ant and Dec and Holly Willoughby. Speedily, I whisked up the notion of converting my living room into a studio, marshalling the punchiest TV peeps I know into a team, conjuring a format from thin air and plunging in.

Friday

Alexander Larman

Colbert quit the stage with a whimper not a bang

From our US edition

Before the final episode of the Stephen Colbert-hosted Late Show, President Trump was asked what he thought about the demise of a program that was as well-known for the digs that it leveled at him as for its comedic monologues and high-profile special guests. Trump replied, ominously, “I’ll have a message at a later date.” And the verdict duly came in, as Trump wrote on Truth Social that “Colbert is finally finished at CBS. Amazing that he lasted so long! No talent, no ratings, no life. He was like a dead person. You could take any person off of the street and they would be better than this total jerk. Thank goodness he’s finally gone!” It was broad, self-referential, star-studded and played it very safe.

Colbert

Wednesday

James Delingpole

How to win MasterChef

‘Warmer, sharper and funnier than ever,’ claims one reviewer of ‘the BBC’s disgraced cookery show’ MasterChef. But this is nonsense. First, MasterChef was never ‘disgraced’. It was just the victim of some desperate sub-#MeToo media insinuations about the mildly laddish shenanigans of its two ex-presenters John Torode and Gregg Wallace. These insinuations were likely not unconnected with a) the show’s need for some publicity; and b) an excuse for a revamp after 20 years with those presenters now starting to look about as fresh and inviting as the trays of congealing fried eggs and uncrispy bacon you get in a hotel breakfast buffet. MasterChef was never ‘disgraced’.

Tuesday

Simon Kuper

Would W.G. Grace recognise the game of cricket today?

There’s a fascinating thought that the authors of Full Circle pursue for just a couple of pages, then leave hanging: ‘Association football offers an alternative history by which to consider the course cricket might have taken.’ In fact, the book demonstrates that cricket has followed football’s course, albeit about a century late. In cricket, too, professionals ousted amateurs, embraced the market, saw economic power shift east and chose a short format that allowed games to be played in an evening. Like it or loathe it, cricket has effectively become football. Reading this serious and competent work, you wonder at times why the journalists Richard Heller and Peter Oborne bothered to write it. There are already countless cricket histories.

Tuesday

Kristina Murkett

Harry Potter is for infantilized millennials

Nostalgia is often seen as a positive emotion, but the word actually derives from the Greek nostos, meaning "homecoming," and algos, meaning "pain." Nostalgia is really a type of homesickness, an ache for something lost. As audiences watch the new trailer for the HBO Harry Potter television series, the algos may hit pretty hard: those tantalizing two minutes are the reminder we need that you can’t catch lightning in a bottle twice.  The first thing you notice is simply how bad everything looks. Shows seem to have an obsession nowadays with making everything as dark as possible, so that you are constantly trying to adjust the light settings of your screen to see what’s actually happening.

harry potter

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Meghan is a woman much misunderstood

Lying in bed with a swollen face, I decided that the best thing to do was nothing, so I ended up watching the Duchess of Sussex make smoothies. I don’t know why everyone is so mean about her Netflix show because it hit the spot for me. As I took to my bed after surgery to take out the old screws and plates in my long-ago broken jaw, everything put me on edge apart from watching Meghan and her lovely way of smiling and smiling as she expressed wonderment at a bunch of grapes, or the way a liquidiser whirred.

Wednesday

Toby Young

Louis Theroux needs to make a positive case for masculinity

I’ve always had a soft spot for Louis Theroux. I wouldn’t call him a friend, exactly, but I’ve known him for about 40 years. We started our journalistic careers at the same time and would frequently bump into each other at parties. He’s intelligent and funny and, in person, doesn’t answer every question with a question or pretend to be puzzled when he’s evidently long made up his mind. The passive--aggressive ‘just asking questions’ routine is, thankfully, confined to his TV appearances. By this I mean he has no hesitation in telling me I’m being ‘unbelievably stupid’ – which, because we disagree about politics, is quite often. But he’s a QPR fan so I can forgive these outbursts.

Wednesday

James Heale

In bed together: The writers of HBO’s Industry on bankers and politicians

No TV show better encapsulates the nexus between money and power than Industry. The HBO drama sees investment bankers screwing, snorting and slogging their way to the top of English society. Now, in its fourth series, political intrigue is taking centre stage. Think House of Cards – but with more sex and better-remunerated hotties. Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, the co-writers of the show, explain when we chat that they wanted to ‘expand the canvas’ as Industry progressed. It initially focused on the ‘hermetically sealed’ world of the trading floor but has now expanded beyond. ‘Finance is linked to other spheres of influence,’ says Down. ‘Obviously finance and media have a transactional relationship. Finance and politics also have a transactional relationship.

Friday

Clare McHugh

Love Story’s counterfeit Kennedys

From our US edition

Last June, Jack Schlossberg, the Kennedy nepo baby currently running for the open seat in New York’s 12th Congressional District, called out the television mini-series, Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr & Carolyn Bessette. Executive producer Ryan Murphy was, Schlossberg declared, exploiting this couple’s courtship, marriage and death, and “profiting off of it in a grotesque way.” On a key point, Jack can rest easy. Love Story, now airing on FX/Hulu, treats his uncle John F. Kennedy Jr. reverently. Elizabeth Beller, Bessette’s biographer, praises the show for “honoring the legacy of everyone involved.” If JFK Jr.

Monday

Zak Asgard

The streaming model is broken

‘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 of sorts. And as such, I was ready for some mind-numbing television. ‘We can watch something,’ I said. ‘What do you fancy?

Wednesday

Prue Leith

The real reason I’m leaving Bake Off

I have been dithering for years about when to stop judging The Great British Bake Off. When I joined nine years ago, I thought, since I was in my mid-seventies, that I’d be lucky to manage two years. At that age, my mother was deaf as a post and away with the fairies, believing her son was her father and that her cat was the one she’d had 40 years before. But my marbles stayed more or less in place and there seemed no good reason to give up a job I loved. Finally, though, the desire to work less and play more got to me. Bake Off and its offshoots such as The Great American Baking Show and even the Christmas specials are all filmed in the summer, which has meant I could never have a summer holiday. So, I finally jumped.

Saturday

James Delingpole

Why has it all gone wrong for The Night Manager?

From our US edition

The Night Manager is finally back after ten years with three major drawbacks: no Elizabeth Debicki for the sex scenes; no Tom Hollander for the comedy scenes; and no Hugh Laurie for the evil-kingpin-in-his-toothsome-mountaintop-lair scenes, I nearly claimed. But only because at the very beginning of the new season the Laurie character’s grizzled body is identified by Olivia Colman (in her most irritating performance ever, as a dowdy but capable MI6 officer with a gratingly suburban accent). And I didn’t want to spoil the coming plot twist in case any of you were foolish enough to have fallen for this blatant case of Chekhov’s misidentified corpse.

night manager

Friday

Mickey Down

New York, I love you, but I need to get home

I reached New York for the premiere of the fourth series of Industry in a mild state of delirium. I was traveling from Lamu, and it had taken four flights and 20 hours in the air to reach the US. Lamu is so beautiful that it briefly makes you consider whether to bother with western civilization at all. On the rickety flight to the island from mainland Kenya, I had sat next to a German count I vaguely knew. ‘You looking to get a little fucked up?’ he asked. I mumbled something about ‘family time’. He nodded and wished me luck. On New Year’s Day I ran into him again, by which point he had abandoned all pretense of dignity. It felt fitting, then, that I should follow this holiday with a work trip to New York to party with abandon.

Wednesday

Alexander Larman

George ‘R&R’ Martin takes it easy

From our US edition

Now that the Stranger Things disappointment has died down – slightly – George R.R. Martin and his merry band of Game of Thrones cohorts have recaptured attention in what we must call the Thrones universe. After the warily positive but underwhelming reception that the major spin-off House of the Dragon received, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms’s six-episode offering is in a lower key than either of its forbears. No dragons, no enormous battles, no big stars, just a small-scale relationship drama focusing on the hapless “hedge knight” Ser Duncan the Tall, aka “Dunk” and his child squire, Egg, whose origins are rather less lowly.

george r.r. martin knight seven kingdoms
Rod Liddle

The true villains of our TV crime dramas? The creators

Idly watching the first episode of a TV crime drama series recently, I found myself in a slightly troubled frame of mind. We were already 35 minutes in and no probable villain had shown their face. We had seen black people, Chinese people, lesbians, the disabled, the impoverished and powerless, Muslims, the young and idealistic… yikes, I thought to myself, it simply can’t be any of them, can it? Surely not. And then, as if the scriptwriter had heard my private worries, for lo, a very rich, marble-mouthed white woman emerged and was shown being beastly to some young and idealistic people and I thought: bingo! We have our villain. There is no need to watch the remaining five episodes. She did it, the rich cow. The only slight surprise is that it was a woman rather than a bloke.

Friday

Alexander Larman

Good riddance, Kathleen Kennedy

From our US edition

The news that the producer Kathleen Kennedy is stepping down with immediate effect as president of Lucasfilm, to be replaced by Dave Filoni and Lynwen Brennan, may not sound especially consequential; film executives come and go all the time, and their arrival and departure is normally only of interest to those in the movie business. Yet Kennedy, who has run Lucasfilm – home of Star Wars, Indiana Jones and a great deal more – since 2012, and been in sole charge after the departure of the company’s founder George Lucas the same year, is the most consequential Hollywood studio head of the past couple of decades. And, her millions of detractors would argue, the most destructive, too.

kathleen kennedy

Wednesday

Mickey Down

New York, I love you, but I need to get home

I reached New York for the premiere of the fourth series of Industry in a mild state of delirium. I was travelling from Lamu, and it had taken four flights and 20 hours in the air to reach the US. Lamu is so beautiful that it briefly makes you consider whether to bother with western civilisation at all. On the rickety flight to the island from mainland Kenya, I had sat next to a German count I vaguely knew. ‘You looking to get a little fucked up?’ he asked. I mumbled something about ‘family time’. He nodded and wished me luck. On New Year’s Day I ran into him again, by which point he had abandoned all pretence of dignity. It felt fitting, then, that I should follow this holiday with a work trip to New York to party with abandon.

Monday

Alexander Larman

The steady-as-she-goes Golden Globes

From our US edition

So, One Battle After Another is going to sweep the Oscars. That was fairly certain before last night’s Golden Globe awards, but it is now essentially guaranteed. Paul Thomas Anderson’s loose Thomas Pynchon adaptation won best film in the musical/comedy category, as well as Best Director, Best Screenplay – over the hotly tipped Sinners, which had been expected to win the award as a consolation prize – and Best Supporting Actress for the scene-stealing Teyana Taylor as the superbly named Perfidia Beverly Hills. Those of us who would have liked to see Amy Madigan take that award for her indelibly creepy performance in Weapons will have been disappointed, but in truth the Globes threw up a modest number of surprises.

golden globes