Culture

I don’t much like Lord of the Flies. It’s nasty, weird in an oblique, psychotic way and wrong. William Golding – a war-damaged, depressive alcoholic – wrote it as an antidote to the uplifting escapism of The Coral Island, a Victorian yarn by R.M. Ballantyne about plucky young British castaways surviving and thriving in the

The Fabulous Funeral Parlour ended with possibly the least necessary caption in TV history: ‘Filmed in Liverpool’. Whenever I go back there (quite often these days for family reasons), I’m struck all over again by how the whole city seems engaged in the production, distribution and promotion of Scouseness. Yet, even by normal Liverpudlian standards,

I don’t know how it got past the increasingly powerful ‘All Germans were evil Nazis’ censors but Amazon has released a sympathetic portrait of a Tiger crew on the Eastern Front, translated, clunkily, as The Tank. It has been criticised in some quarters for its weird twist at the end, which the genre-literate will see

When it comes to Agatha Christie adaptations, there are normally two possible responses to the denouement. One is a deep satisfaction that the unlikeliest suspects were the inevitable culprits after all. The other’s the same as that – except approximately a quarter of an hour later you suddenly find yourself thinking: ‘Hold on a minute…’

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

Lucy Worsley’s Victorian Murder Club opened with its presenter unexpectedly channelling that gravelly voiced bloke who used to do all those film trailers beginning ‘In a world…’. ‘The London Thames,’ she intoned as gruffly and menacingly as she could, ‘winding silently through the capital. But in Victorian times…’ dramatic pause ‘…it had a sinister side.’

Has anyone got to the end of Malice yet? I’m halfway through – at the time of writing, anyway – and am dearly hoping that I might bump into someone at a party who will blurt out all the plot details and spare me the misery of having to sit it out to the bitter

Secrets of the Conclave seemed rather optimistically titled, given that everybody at this year’s papal election had made a solemn vow before God not to divulge any. But, while we duly heard nothing about backstage politicking – apart from regular assurances that none took place – this respectful and quietly charming documentary did succeed in

The Beast in Me is one of those ‘taut psychological thrillers’ that everyone talks about in the office. This might sound disparaging – as it is, obviously – but I have to admit that, having succumbed in desperation (because, as usual, there is so little else on), I did find the show pretty addictive and

Anybody growing weary of the debate surrounding the BBC’s unexamined assumptions and biases about modern politics might have expected to find some relief in a scholarly documentary about the sack of Rome in AD 410. Sad to say, though, the first episode of Civilisations: Rise and Fall offered very little of it. Of course, it’s

Pluribus is another drama set in the dystopian future. But on this occasion the integrity of the entire human race depends not on someone ordinary and likeable who could almost be you, but on a bolshie, misanthropic middle-aged lesbian called Carol. Carol (Rhea Seehorn from Better Call Saul) is so grumpy that when in flashback

Yeats famously summarised Ireland in the four words, ‘Great hatred, little room’. But, as Louise Kennedy’s 2022 debut novel Trespasses showed, in 1970s Northern Ireland the hatred had grown even greater and the room even littler. Channel 4’s faithful adaptation began – as it would continue over its four parts this week – with the

I once came up with a brilliant idea for a children’s Sunday-evening TV series. It would follow the adventures of young Jesus in Britain, circa AD 16, and his rich, tin-trading great uncle Joseph of Arimathea. There’d be dragons and giants and lots demonic figures, all trying to kill the boy Messiah before He achieved

If you didn’t already know that Down Cemetery Road was based on a novel Mick Herron wrote before the Slough House series – later adapted into TV’s Slow Horses – it mightn’t be too difficult to guess. After all, main character Zoë Boehm (Emma Thompson, no less) is a cynical sixty-something with a dodgy hygiene

I’m trying to think of things I’m less interested in than American football. The plant-based food section? Taking up my GP’s offer of a free Covid booster? Ed Miliband’s nostril depilation regime? No, apart from maybe baseball, I can’t think of anything so soul-crushingly tedious as a rigged game where men in shoulder pads and

Is there anything menopausal women can’t do (on television)? Last Sunday, as a couple of them were still working on the daring theft of a Salvador Dali painting in ITV1’s Frauds, BBC1 launched Riot Women in which five others form a punk band. Meanwhile, two regular features of British TV remain actresses lamenting the lack

First the surprising news: not a single one of the four Guinness siblings in 1868 Dublin is black; and only 25 per cent of them – surely a record for Netflix – is gay. Now the bad: despite these oversights, House of Guinness remains very recognisably the work of Steven Knight, the Peaky Blinders screenwriter

By now, viewers of TV thrillers are no strangers to a baffling prologue – but this week brought a particularly extreme example. Nine Bodies in a Mexican Morgue opened with shots of a desert, a cactus, an animal skull nailed to a cross and a moustachioed man driving a battered pick-up truck with a Virgin

As we know, when terrestrial television has a big new hit these days, its response – once it’s got over the surprise – is to serve up a variation on the same formula. In the case of The Hack, the hit that inspired it is clearly Mr Bates vs the Post Office, as another real-life

The drama series Doc began with the most literal of bangs. While the screen remained black, the sound-effects team knocked themselves out by creating a spectacular crashing noise. When the lights came on, we saw a smashed-up car containing ‘a female, unresponsive’. By the time she did respond – one major brain operation and seven

Apart from hunting, one of the very few consolations of the end of summer is that telly stops being quite so dire. But that moment hasn’t quite arrived yet – as you can tell from the fact that I’m reviewing Hostage. There’s so much that is annoying about Hostage that I don’t know quite where

Another week, another show striving desperately to become the new Traitors. So it is that The Inheritance brings a group of disparate people together in a very big house, gives them tasks that win them money and invites them to pretend to cooperate while secretly behaving treacherously. In fact, about the only surprising thing about

During lockdown, a friend and I moved into a flat that had a difficult relationship with the TV aerial. Ineptitude and laziness combined to ensure that the only channels we were able to watch were BBC ones via the iPlayer app. So most nights – if there was no live sport – we found that

I once spent a delightful weekend in Madrid with the co-producer of Alien. His name was David Giler (now dead, sadly, I’ve just discovered) and he’d hit upon the bizarre idea of trying to get my anti-eco-lunacy book Watermelons made into a Hollywood movie. The film project never came off but I did learn an

The punters are saying My Oxford Year is a disaster. ‘Predictable, uninspiring and laughable,’ complains some meanie on Rotten Tomatoes. But they’re missing the point. My Oxford Year may be a work of accidental genius, but it’s a work of genius nonetheless. You will squirm, you will laugh derisively, you will cringe. By the end,

If you enjoyed Apocalypto – that long but exciting Mel Gibson movie about natives being chased through the jungle with (supposedly) ancient Mayan dialogue – then you’ll probably like Chief of War, which is much the same, only in Hawaiian. Like Apocalypto, it even has sailing ships appearing mysteriously from Europe with crews that serve

President Trump has a very small willy. His boyfriend is Satan. He’s a con man who will sue you for billions on the flimsiest of pretexts but will probably settle for a few hundred million. If this is your idea of cutting-edge satire then you are going to love the new season of South Park,