You can’t move for the World Wars on the BBC. Gallipoli (100 years ago) and VE Day (70) are this month’s on-trend anniversaries, and they’ll soon budge up for VJ Day and the Somme. And let’s not forget older victories: there’s Waterloo (200 years ago), and isn’t it time to go once more unto the breach, Agincourt being 700 this year? And for extra lashings of commemoration let us now turn to Britain’s Greatest Generation.This new four-parter is revisiting events which have been covered ad infinitum already. The difference is that Britain’s Greatest Generation comes at them exclusively through Read more ...

Rum old business, espionage – at least in the way we Brits are still pursuing it. For all the reality that the existential threat has long moved locations, in its television incarnations we remain addicted to the Cold War, the attraction to those gloomy postwar years seemingly a fatal one. The BBC’s new spy drama The Game was back in prime le Carré territory and the early Seventies, with industrial unrest and power cuts further turning down the visual wattage. The props department duly delivered curtains that risked depriving viewers of the will to live, while the fact that Birmingham’s old Read more ...

You haven’t had to actually watch the brutal executions staged by Islamic State (IS, or ISIS or ISIL, as it’s also known) to register them: just a single image registered has been more than enough to horrify. Managing to penetrate the world’s consciousness to such an extent has surely been one of the terror group’s most singular achievements. As one contributor to This World’s latest bulletin from the frontlines of Islamism, World’s Richest Terror Army, put it, the organization combines an ideology drawing on seventh-century principles with a 21st-century grasp of social media technology. In Read more ...

I’ve got no idea what the opposite of dumbing down might be. Swatting up? Whatever it is, it’s surely going to set the tone for the next couple of Friday nights on BBC Two, where Sex and the Church is as erudite a piece of television as we’re going to get in a long time. The fact that it’s on Two, which was home to presenter Diarmaid MacCulloch’s previous series A History of Christianity and How God Made the English, further encourages: this new one would certainly have fitted in on BBC Four, so it must have been past ratings that have kept MacCulloch on the senior channel.I confess I’d never Read more ...

Louis Theroux just wants to make good television. This may seem an obvious thing to say of a programme-maker, but many programme-makers concerned with the kind of human interest story that Theroux has made his own, often want to do more than this. They want to understand subject and motive, to get under the skin of a thing, or perhaps somehow resolve an issue. They believe, and sometimes perhaps they may even be right, that this in itself will produce good television, or at least go most of the way there. Theroux’s ambitions are clearly much simpler. He wants to tease out stories – Read more ...

If the mark of a good documentary is that it teaches you something new, then the awkwardly titled Hillary Clinton: The Power of Women was a very good documentary indeed. For instance, before watching it I had no idea that the famous “women’s rights are human rights” speech given by the possible 2016 presidential candidate was “the beginning of the cry for women’s rights across the globe”; and it was certainly a surprise to discover that the 2002 invasion of Afghanistan was not merely in service of a “war against terror” but rather “a war against the barbaric treatment of women”.The format Read more ...

Another tough night in with Jimmy McGovern. Banished may have taken ship to 18th-century New South Wales, whither the first British convicts have been expelled to a penal colony guarded by red-coated soldiers. But peer past the uniforms, the rifles and the tricorn hats and we have been lured yet again to McGovern’s favourite hangout, stuck somewhere between a rock and a hard place.And this Australia is a very hard place. The sun may shine on a glinting azure sea, but there isn’t enough grub to go round, seeding routine theft of rations and mistrust among the convicts. Meanwhile the women, who Read more ...

Judging by its early-evening slot and diddly-dee theme tune, Matt Lucas's latest project is aimed at family audiences – far removed from the wonderful ribaldry of Little Britain with his comedy partner David Walliams - something to stick the kids in front of while the adults snooze off their Sunday roast.Lucas (who directs and writes with four other credited writers) is Pompidou, an eccentric aristocrat, and Alex MacQueen (The Thick of It) is his faithful butler Hove. Pompidou has fallen on hard times and now no longer lives in the grand house at the top of the drive but in a dilapidated Read more ...

Wolf Hall divided viewers from the off. It mesmerised many and left a vocal minority cold, for whom apparently - mystifyingly - it has all been a bit dull. The dialogue was too elliptical, the politics tricksy and convoluted (who is this Holy Roman Emperor anyway?), there was a surfeit of men called Thomas and women stitching in bay windows and big dresses. And to cap it all director Peter Kosminsky, fetishising Mark Rylance’s inscrutable face, seemed to want every take to carry on into next week.In the end, the rewards for loyalty were rich, and never more than in the adaptation's final Read more ...

For weeks and weeks, the BBC has been borrowing Anne Boleyn’s tactic of seduction. Henry VIII was vouchsafed occasional access to his future bride’s breasts, but no more until she was queen. It’s felt rather like that being fed Wolf Hall trailers for the past few weeks: teasing snippets of promised treasure, but there has been no way of knowing precisely what goodies lay in wait under the skirts. Has it been worth the anticipation?In a word, yes. And for one overpowering reason: Mark Rylance, the complete actor. This is his first return to television in more than a decade. For all his Read more ...

Part of a series of programmes marking the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, The Eichmann Show was a 90-minute account of how the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the SS's most enthusiastic engineers of the Holocaust, became "the world's first ever global documentary series". The key men in making this happen were TV producer Milton Fruchtman and renowned documentary director Leo Hurwitz, the latter a victim of McCarthy-era blacklisting in the USA.It was a potentially interesting idea, but the notion of presenting the trial of one of the most heinous Nazi war criminals – Read more ...

Some depressing statistics for your reading pleasure. (Depressing if you’re British and not a billionaire.) Since 2008, UK government austerity measures have been equal to the sum of money paid out in bankers’ bonuses: £80 billion. Not depressed yet? Try this. In 2013 the UK’s thousand richest people saw their wealth increase by a sum equivalent to the combined earnings of the country’s fulltime workforce: £70 billion. You probably are now, but if not... We play host to more billionaires than any other country in the world: 104. Oh, and the UK is the only leading economy which has become more Read more ...