James Walton

Warning: if you haven’t seen it yet, the first episode of the much-anticipated Patrick Melrose (Sky Atlantic, Sunday) contains scenes of drug-taking. Further warning: it contains an awful lot of them. The series is adapted from the five justly celebrated autobiographical novels by Edward St Aubyn, which trace the long-term effects on Patrick of an

From time to time, a TV show comes along which is so thrillingly original, so wildly imaginative, that you can’t even begin to think where the makers got the idea. Britain’s Best Home Cook (BBC1, Thursday) isn’t one of them. Nevertheless, it has a serious claim to being the most important new programme of the

For a while now, the Korowai people of Western Papua have been the go-to primitive tribe for documentary-makers. The Korowai were unknown to the outside world until the 1970s — but they’ve certainly made up for it since, with their Stone Age tools, jungle treehouses and penis gourds becoming almost as familiar to TV viewers

BBC2 has a new drama series for Friday nights. The main character is a world-weary middle-aged police inspector with an unshakeable commitment to smoking. His work partner is a feisty female officer in her twenties who combines salt-of-the-earth irreverence with being a damn good cop. Between them, they’re investigating the murder of an attractive young

For as long as I can remember, Sunday nights have been the home of the kind of TV drama cunningly designed to warm the sternest of heart cockles. Think, for example, of Robert Hardy cheerfully bellowing his way through almost every scene of All Creatures Great and Small (‘PASS THE SALT, JAMES!’). Or of Pop

By common consent, including Bafta’s, The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story was one of the best TV dramas of 2016. Produced by Ryan Murphy, it laid out the story in a beautifully clear, largely chronological way that made us appreciate, all over again, just how strange the whole O.J. business was — not

ITV’s Marcella (Monday) represents another triumphant breakthrough in the portrayal of female cops on television. Of course, thanks to more or less every other crime show around, we already know that women in their forties can be senior police officers. But what Marcella makes even clearer than, say, Vera or No Offence is that so

To mark the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage — if a little oddly — Channel 4 on Tuesday brought us a special girls-only edition of The Secret Life of Five-Year-Olds. The cast were a mix of new faces and old hands from previous series: among them Jet who, like a primary-school version of a traditional

These days, when it comes to people who used to be on the telly, the answer to the classic newspaper question ‘Where are they now?’ tends to be a fairly predictable one: they’re still on the telly — if, that is, you look carefully enough. They’re also quite likely to be travelling abroad with a

These days a genuinely controversial TV drama series would surely be one with an all-white, male-led cast that examined the problems of a bunch of middle-class people. (Just imagine the Twitter outrage!) But while we await that — possibly for a while yet — we’ve now got two highly promising new shows of the more

BBC1’s The Miniaturist (26/7 December) is a lavish two-part adaptation of Jessie Burton’s bestseller. It’s also further proof that almost any geographical and historical setting can be conscripted to tell us what’s apparently the only story we’re interested in these days: an alliance of plucky and unfailingly virtuous black people, gay people and women taking

This week on Channel 4, we watched a cheery 58-year-old American engineer called James going on a first date. He was meeting Harmony, an extravagantly shapely blonde who was obliging enough to be wearing a low-cut crop top and tiny shorts, and who greeted him with a charming smile. After a spot of small talk

Any readers of the Sun who excitedly tuned in to Howards End on Sunday night with their pause button at the ready will, I fear, have been in for a disappointment. Before the programme went out, the paper had assured them that this new BBC1 adaptation would ‘do a Poldark’, with ‘a hot cast’ providing

Anybody who wants to maintain a strong and untroubled stance against mass migration to Europe should probably avoid BBC2’s Exodus: Our Journey Continues. In theory, the case for limiting the numbers may be more or less unanswerable — but this is a joltingly uncomfortable reminder of what it can mean in practice. Any viewers suspicious

In the first scene of this distinctly odd documentary, Grace Jones meets a group of fans, who squeal with delight at the sight of her and nearly pass out with excitement when they hear her speak. And that, I suspect, is the effect which the film confidently expects to have on the rest of us.

Any rival reality-TV makers watching Channel 5 on Thursday will, I suspect, have been both mystified and slightly embarrassed at not having thought up Bad Habits, Holy Orders themselves. After all, the concept is a blindingly obvious one. Take five young women whose primary interests are selfies, booze and clubbing and make them live like