For a man who lives in an agreeable region of France, Jonathan Meades grew strangely passionate in the course of this fascinating excursion around Essex. The thuggish-looking narrator travelled by small, functional Toyota rather than Magical Mystery Tour-style charabanc, though the latter would have been perfectly apt for tales of Cockneys seeking escape in the county described by one sneering commentator as "the dustbin of London".The word "Essex" arrives dragging heaps of clanking debris attached to its rear bumper, and Meades began his odyssey with an extended demolition of Essex- Read more ...

As a parable on the dissolution of the American Dream, the story of self-made billionaire David Siegel is almost too good to be true. Much like another recent documentary – Bart Layton’s spellbinding The Imposter – Lauren Greenfield’s The Queen of Versailles, broadcast last night in BBC Four's Storyville strand, lays out the kind of story that could only be told by a documentarian, because coming from a screenwriter it would sound both too neat and too far-fetched.Admittedly on one level, the Siegels’ story is as familiar as they come: Florida real-estate mogul David got rich fast in the Read more ...

The television channels have been making documentaries about our boys, and indeed girls, in Afghanistan for the best part of a decade. We’re used by now to the imagery, which mainly consists of dust, joshing, weaponry and boredom. Prince Harry: Frontline Afghanistan was an occasion to stir an extra ingredient into the brew: dust, joshing, weaponry and boredom, plus a chap who when he loses at strip poker makes the front page of every newspaper in the western world.For reasons which won’t need much unpacking, the channel which normally brings you things called Sun, Sex and Suspicious Parents Read more ...

My only real complaint about the ever-excellent Good Wife is that they cram so much into every episode that it's notoriously difficult to keep track of all the plots, subplots, new names and cunningly tangled relationships. It's a bit like a televisual zip file, where you have to unpack it before you can extract all the contents.Anyhow, after some diligent pausing and rewinding, I can confidently declare that this first episode of series four was a sizzler, picking up where series three left off with no pause for breath. Screenwriters Robert King and Michelle King had reprised one of their Read more ...

As political campaigns go, Bob Servant's bid to win a by-election in Broughty Ferry (a real-life seaside suburb of Dundee) looks more like a drunken practical joke, or the result of an ill-judged bet. A fluent and shameless liar whose only credentials are a lifetime of dodginess, Servant's motives are venal and his ambitions entirely self-centred. He knows nothing about politics or, apparently, anything else, expect perhaps selling hamburgers, which he has done for many decades.Adapted from Neil Forsyth's books, Bob Servant Independent is low-key and low budget, but looks capable of building Read more ...

We love the snow but hate the cold, and for almost 300 years Northern European winters were bitterly, catastrophically cold. Crops failed, there were famine riots and people died of hypothermia during the Little Ice Age. From the 16th to the 19th centuries, no population suffered at the hands of Old Man Winter quite as much as those in the Low Countries. Winters were long, life was harsh, but in Brussels Pieter Bruegel the Elder was singlehandedly inventing the winter landscape of our imaginations.Bruegel painted Hunters in the Snow in 1565, during the coldest winter for a century. At first Read more ...

It was surely a no-brainer for ITV to produce a series about grand houses presented by Julian Fellowes with stories about those who lived and worked in them. But while it may sound wholly derivative to many, at least Fellowes - unlike a raft of celebrities presenting television programmes these days - has the wherewithal. He's an acknowledged expert in the field - although (wittily, I think) the titles were a neat rip-off of Downton Abbey's and he shamelessly plugged his upstairs-downstairs drama in the opening scenes.In the first of a two-parter he explained he was “trying to find the real Read more ...

I somehow avoided the period medical drama phenomenon that Call the Midwife became in its first series until the Christmas special. As befits the holiday season its storyline was trite, focusing on a teenage mother who miraculously managed to single-handedly give birth in a cupboard with no mess and little fuss.Such is a woman’s work: thankless, bloody and not suitable to be shown uncut while the nation’s families are gathered around the television after Sunday dinner (although, if you believe the adverts from nearly every major supermarket chain over the festive period, that too is mum’s Read more ...

Although there was no shortage of interview clips with Glen Campbell [who has died at the age of 81] in this fine overview of his career, the tragedy was that archives were so heavily drawn on. Tragic because pop-country stylist Campbell has Alzheimer’s and is limited in what he can contribute. Less tragic, but equally noteworthy, was that British TV has taken so long to get around to seriously appraising the singer of classics like “By the Time I Get to Phoenix”, “Wichita Lineman”, “Galveston” and “Rhinestone Cowboy”.Campbell was a British chart and television fixture from the late Sixties Read more ...

Even though this much-anticipated encounter was shown on the Discovery channel in the middle of the night, it was still generously packed with ad breaks, which may be some testament to the global selling power of Oprah Winfrey. But in fact the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN), which made the programme, has been struggling for ratings in its two-year existence while managing to burn a $300m hole in Oprah's pocket.Could disgraced super-cyclist Lance Armstrong, seven-times Tour de France winner but now expunged from the record books following revelations about the epic extent of his use of banned Read more ...

Read theartsdesk's review of the final episode of UtopiaNew from Kudos, makers of the likes of Spooks and Hunted, comes this sinister six-parter. Steeped in surveillance paranoia, conspiracy theory and online anomie, it concerns a mysterious graphic novel called The Utopia Experiment, created by a brilliant but schizophrenic scientist who killed himself after writing it. Supposedly there was a part two, which was destroyed... or maybe it wasn't.If you weren't seized with dread in the opening moments of this first episode, you must have been overdoing the cognac and sleeping tablets. After a Read more ...

Last November, for the 25,000th time on the stage, the actor playing Sergeant Trotter in The Mousetrap stepped forward during the curtain call and asked members of the audience not to reveal the play's surprise ending to others. To do so would, by implication, spoil the whodunnit for future audiences. Over the years the odd clever-clogs stand-up has disobeyed the injunction. And whoever wrote the play’s Wikipedia entry also gives the game away. The play being an old warhorse that even Agatha Christie thought no more than workmanlike, the revelation is all The Mousetrap has, and it has been Read more ...