Culture

The other day James Lovelock, the sprightly 97-year-old inventor of Gaia theory, told a mildly surprised Guardian interviewer that he wasn’t remotely worried about climate change any more. A far more plausible threat, he explained, were all the killer robots that would soon emerge and find no use for us inconvenient humans. Apparently this is a fashionable worry. It has to do with something called the ‘singularity’, which is the theoretical moment when machines become so sophisticated than they can outthink us, then advance at such a pace that we become powerless to stop them.

At my wife’s first 12-week scan, I was expecting — and duly got — that much-documented sense of thrilled wonder at the grey blobby thing on the screen. What came as a genuine shock, though, was realising the scan also had the entirely undisguised aim of calculating the baby’s chances of Down’s syndrome, on the apparent assumption that, if they were high, we’d want to terminate. In the event, this wasn’t a dilemma we faced — which possibly makes it easy to take the moral high ground. Even so, the whole process left me feeling both uneasy and rather naive. How long had this been going on? Did everybody else know about it? And if so, when had they discussed it? A World without Down’s Syndrome?

Stranger Things is the most delightful, gripping, charming, nostalgic, compulsive, edge-of-seat entertainment I’ve had in ages. Like a lot of the best TV these days, it’s on Netflix, which I highly recommend so long as you can cope with the technical complexities of getting it to appear on your screen in the first place. Yeah, I know, all you bastard millennial types sneering at Granddad for his inability to do stuff that’s like so totally easy and obvious.

The closing credits of National Treasure (Channel 4, Tuesday) contain the usual disclaimer that any resemblance between its characters and real people is merely coincidental. Well, coincidental maybe, but also entirely inevitable — because this is a drama based on Operation Yewtree. With its choice of subject matter, a cast including Robbie Coltrane and Julie Walters and a script by Jack Thorne (author of the all-conquering Harry Potter and the Cursed Child), the series is clearly intended as an Important Piece of Television. Yet, partly for that reason, it’s so far proving a rather careful one. Nobody who watched the first episode could accuse it of sensationalism.

Did you know that Queen Victoria might never have married Prince Albert had it not been for an amazing stroke of luck on a woodland walk in Windsor Great Park, involving the queen’s beloved spaniel Dash. Dash, as good fortune would have it, managed to break his leg on a handy knife that someone had left lying around. And the hitherto remote and stuffy German princeling, carelessly ripping yet another of his shirts (the second in about a week) to create a makeshift bandage, splinted Dash’s leg with such tender care that flighty Emma knew at once that cold, disapproving Mr Knightley was the man for her. And that, I’m afraid, is why I’m not going to be watching another minute of this silly, facile, irresponsible series.

With documentary-makers these days, it can be hard to tell the difference between faux-naivety and the real thing. (Personally, I blame Louis Theroux.) Take BBC2’s Absolutely Fashion: Inside British Vogue (Thursday), directed and narrated by Richard Macer, who often seems suspiciously dazzled by whatever he sees: the editor’s office! The editor’s chair! He also has a tendency to proudly offer observations that aren’t necessarily as startling as he thinks: that the magazine appears to be largely run by women, for instance. But where it’s even trickier to decide whether he’s faking or not is when his off-screen voice anxiously wonders whether Alexandra Shulman, the editor in question, wants him there at all — because she so obviously doesn’t.

I think I might be turning into Alf Garnett. When I was growing up I saw him as an obnoxious, cantankerous, ranting old git that my grandparents’ generation seemed to find funny but who left me cold. Now I’m beginning to identify with him as an unfairly maligned and surprisingly youthful fount of wisdom whose tragedy is to be ignored by maddeningly unsympathetic womenfolk and infuriating kids. That was my thought, anyway, watching Till Death Us Do Part (Thursday, BBC Four) — a one-off remake of one of Johnny Speight’s original Sixties scripts, with The Fast Show’s Simon Day as Alf.

You know when late summer has arrived because conkers are starting to form on the horse chestnuts, your eagerness to get the kids back to school has reached fever pitch, and another season of The Great British Bake Off (BBC1, Wednesdays) has begun. If it feels like there has never, ever been a time when GBBO wasn’t on, this is because there hasn’t. Here are some key facts about our favourite telly comfort blanket you won’t find on Wikipedia. 1. Mary Berry has barely aged at all since the show’s first edition was broadcast in 1946 immediately after Muffin the Mule.

Stuff I have learnt after two solid weeks watching the Olympics on TV. 1. Tennis and golf shouldn’t be Olympic sports. Yes, I know we won both and Rose’s final chip on to the 18th green was great to watch. But you can see this sort of thing done with a tougher range of competitors at any number of majors all the time. Olympic medals should be there to reward the Corinthian spirit not just an opportunity for millionaires to add something a bit different to their mantelpiece. 2. I still don’t understand the judging system for the diving but had arse quality been included in the women’s events — as I believe it should — the Italian girl would have done much better. 3.

Proof that someone has really made it as a TV historian comes, I would suggest, when they join the likes of David Starkey and Simon Schama by getting their name into the programme’s title. So it is that Dominic Sandbrook’s The 70s, from 2012, has now been followed by The 80s with Dominic Sandbrook (BBC2, Thursday), a series that confirms his ability to put across moderately big ideas in a light easy style — and in a parka. Sometimes when watching television, you might be in the mood for a serious history documentary, and sometimes for a show that’ll just wash over you pleasantly. With Sandbrook — and I’m pretty sure I mean this as a compliment — you can have both.

The unacknowledged subtitle of Channel 4’s new reality series Eden (Mondays) is Die, Hippies! Die! Obviously they’re not going to admit this because that wouldn’t be right. But I’m sure Channel 4 is hoping that a terrible Lord of the Flies-type scenario will unfold for the 23 victims who’ve volunteered to get back to nature on a remote Scottish peninsula for 12 months, in which they hunt one another down with sharpened sticks, with hideously watchable consequences. In episode one, my money would have been on Anton as chap-best-placed-to-survive.

In the song ‘All the Young Dudes’, David Bowie gamely tried to reassure the youth of the Seventies that, despite what their Sixties elders were always telling them, they hadn’t been born too late after all. On the contrary: it was the ‘brother back at home with his Beatles and his Stones’ who was missing out. Sadly, for those of us growing up at the time, even Bowie at his most thrilling wasn’t quite as persuasive as we’d have liked. OK, so it was definitely annoying to be surrounded by people banging on about how great the Sixties were. But once we’d heard the music, there was an uncomfortable sense that they might also be right.

Before I set about reviewing Ross Kemp: The Fight Against Isis (Sky 1), I thought I’d have a glance to see whether other critics had been as impressed as I was. Clearly the flip groovester from the Guardian — who opened, inevitably, with a jaunty quip about Grant from EastEnders — had seen a very different documentary from the one I saw. Otherwise, he could not have failed to be moved by Kemp’s heartbreaking interview with the Yazidi woman from Sinjar who’d recently escaped from Isis. Her 10-year-old daughter squatted beside her — only survivor of the five children she had had when Isis captured her town.

On Tuesday night on Channel 4, a stern male figure peered over his glasses (as equipped with one of those cords favoured by themiddle-aged specs-wearer) and offered us his robust views on how government benefits encourage laziness. Which might not sound that unusual — except that the male figure in question was 12. His name, no less improbably, was Mog and he was a contestant in the new series of Child Genius, now hosted by Richard Osman — these days almost as ubiquitous on television as Susan Calman is onRadio 4. As ever, the first few minutes were spent assuring us how fiendish the quiz would be; but, as ever too, this was no mere hype.

Pop idol turned top boffin Brian Cox doesn’t shy away from the big issues. With programmes such as Wonders of the Solar System, Wonders of Life and Human Universe, Cox, the heir apparent to His Eminence Sir David Attenborough, has dared to dream on a cosmic scale. Are there any limits to his mighty intellect? In his latest adventure, Forces of Nature (BBC1, Monday), the ambitious prof boldly seeks to illustrate the workings of ‘the underlying laws of nature’. As wistful electronic music tinkled Eno ishly in the background, he assured us, in a metaphysical tone, that ‘the whole universe, the whole of physics, is contained in a snowflake’.

It’s sadly possible to imagine that The Living and the Dead was sold to BBC1’s commissioning editors as ‘Poldark meets The Exorcist’. Yet, while that wouldn’t be a completely inaccurate summary, the overall result is a lot more coherent, clever and ambitious than that. At heart, in fact, Tuesday’s first episode was a nifty twist on another genre: the one where a retired detective/gunslinger/master criminal comes out of retirement for one last job. The programme began in Somerset in 1894, where we met Harriet Denning, an unusually bright 16-year-old, whose intellectual curiosity alarmed her mother but who was encouraged in her reading of Ibsen, Zola and Darwin by her proud father.

The other evening I was driving back in heavy rain from my pilates class when I noticed something rather upsetting in the gated road that goes through our estate. I stopped and got out of the car for a closer look. Yes, as I feared, it was a dead duck. Some bastard had squished her flat. What made me more upset still was that I could see her mate — a mallard drake — swimming forlornly in the ditch next to the road. I loved those ducks like Tony Soprano used to love his ducks. Especially the stupid way they waddled blithely across your path, forcing you to slow down and always making you smile whatever mood you were in. But clearly the tosser who did this was in too much of a hurry: either a van driver or someone in a 4 x 4, I guessed.

In his latest documentary for the This World series, the Romanian film-maker Liviu Tipurita could have been forgiven for treading carefully — and not just because it meant him entering the world of organised crime. After all, his previous film in the series, the uncompromisingly titled Gypsy Child Thieves, was ferociously denounced by Roma groups for showing how some Roma parents send their children into European cities with strict instructions to beg and steal — the charge being not that this was necessarily untrue, but that it might confirm ugly prejudices. So how would Tipurita tackle the equally awkward facts behind The New Gypsy Kings (BBC2, Thursday)?

Sometimes I wonder whether, of all the literary genres, graphic novels aren’t the most stupidly overrated. I can say this because I’m old enough to remember when they were just this obscure thing you had to seek out in specialist stores like Forbidden Planet, understood only by pale, nerdy teens and twenty-somethings who felt superior to, but unappreciated by, the real world outside. Then Watchmen came along and spoiled the party in much the same way Britpop ruined indie. Suddenly, graphic novels became everyone’s domain. See how the Guy Fawkes mask from V for Vendetta (Alan Moore was the author; David Lloyd the illustrator) has become almost as recognisable a global symbol as the McDonald’s golden arches.

Spoiler alerts aren’t normally required for reviews of Shakespeare — but perhaps I’d better issue one before saying that in BBC1’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Monday) Theseus dies near the end. Not only that, but Hippolyta and Titania fly off on butterfly wings to become lovers, and the mechanicals’ play goes down a storm. Personally, I’ve never been sure about the existence of that mysterious tribe known as ‘Shakespeare purists’. If they do exist, though, Russell T. Davies’s heavily cut and cheerfully tweaked adaptation seems almost deliberately designed to flush them out.

Going Forward (BBC4, Thursdays) is a BBC comedy about the continuing adventures of Kim Wilde, the fat, cynical but lovable nurse character played by former nurse Jo Brand. Now she has quit the NHS and is working in the private sector for a company called Buccaneer 2000 — which is, of course, exactly what a healthcare company would call itself in order to allay potential criticisms that it was backward-looking, heartless and rapacious. This is one of the series’ big problems. It wants to be naturalistic, almost fly-on-the-wall, observational comedy, with the dog wandering casually in and out, and parents and kids saying just the kind of things we all do in real life.

Let me start this week with an admittedly hard quiz question: in 1954, how did the sudden illness of Jack Lester, head of London Zoo’s reptile house, transform British television? The answer is that his reluctant stand-in as the presenter of BBC’s Zoo Quest was the show’s director, David Attenborough. Offhand, it’s not easy to think of many people whose 90th birthday could overshadow the Queen’s, but this month Attenborough’s is coming pretty close. The latest tribute was David Attenborough’s Zoo Quest in Colour (BBC4, Tuesday), which dedicated an appropriate 90 minutes to his first TV hit. As the title indicates, the big coup here was that the archive clips were no longer in grainy black-and-white.

There’s no way of saying this without shredding the last vestiges of my critical credibility, but this new Ben Elton comedy series, Upstart Crow (BBC2, Mondays), about William Shakespeare: I’m loving it and think it’s really, really funny. Yes, all right, it’s very like season two of Blackadder — which Elton co-wrote with Richard Curtis.

The big returning show of the week began with servants laying out the silverware at a large country house in 1924. But rather than a shock comeback for Downton Abbey, this was — perhaps even more unexpectedly — Tommy Shelby’s new home in Peaky Blinders (BBC2, Thursday). Which explains why so many of the guests were carrying guns, and why the family matriarch was using the word ‘fuck’ a lot more than Lady Grantham ever did. When we last saw gang-leader Tommy (Cillian Murphy), he was still based in the Birmingham backstreets. He was also having a fairly tough time — what with juggling two women, trying not to get murdered and being required by the government to start the Irish Civil War. Two years on, however, things are clearly looking up.

So: Game of Thrones. Finally — season six — the TV series has overtaken the books on which it is based and the big worry for all us fans is: will it live up to the warped, convoluted, sinister genius of George R.R. Martin’s original material? As regulars will know, the great thing about Martin is that you never know which of your favourite characters he’s going to kill off next. Really — and I can’t think of any other series of which this is true — they could die any moment, which is one of the things that makes it such gripping, unsettling, memorable TV. (The ritual immolation of that little girl last season, for example. Will it ever be surpassed?

Five Star Babies: Inside the Portland Hospital won’t, I suspect, have been a hard sell to BBC2’s commissioning editors. Childbirth and rich people are both reliably popular subjects for TV documentaries. So why not combine them into one handy package by showing us life at the UK’s only private maternity hospital? And yet, however artificial the programme’s conception, any sociologists studying contemporary Britain’s peculiar attitudes to the very wealthy could have done a lot worse than to tune in to Wednesday’s episode. ‘Parenthood: the great leveller,’ began the narrator — somehow managing not to add a hollow laugh. This sense of irony, though, was short-lived.

‘Our findings will shock many people,’ promised Trevor Phillips at the beginning of What British Muslims Really Think (Channel 4, Wednesday). But the depressing thing is that I doubt they will, actually. I think the general British public have known for some time what Phillips’s documentary professed to find surprising: that large numbers of Muslims don’t want to integrate, that their views aren’t remotely enlightened, and that more than a few of them sympathise with terrorism. It’s only the establishment elite that has ever pretended otherwise. As former head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Phillips was very much part of that elite. He commissioned the 1997 Runnymede report that popularised the word ‘Islamophobia’.

In recent years there’s been a fashion for arts documentaries presented by celebs rather than boring old experts — presumably on the grounds that knowledge and insight are no match for vague enthusiasm and a touch of showbiz glamour. (In a particularly gruesome episode of ITV’s Perspectives, Pop Idol winner Will Young established his credentials for discussing the life and works of René Magritte with the words, ‘I’ve been collecting bowler hats for 12 years now.’) Even so, one channel you might have expected to hold out against such frivolity is BBC4, the natural home of resolutely untelegenic academics telling us stuff they really know about. But then on Sunday came Bob Geldof on W.B.

Now the kids are back for the school holidays, I have a licence to watch complete trash again. No more brooding Scandi dramas (though Follow the Money is shaping up very nicely — plus, as an added bonus, its anti-windfarm theme is really winding up Guardian readers) — just pure televisual soma, such as the masses use to anaesthetise themselves after another thankless day in their veal-fattening pens. First Dates (C4, Fridays), for example. You wouldn’t want to pig out on more than one episode at a time but it’s about as perfectly formed a TV experience as you’ll get: you laugh, you cry, you gawp, you cringe; you feel uplifted by the stories with happy endings and reassured by the ones without as you realise — hurrah!