The porn was a bit disappointing, was it not? Dear old Ted, no longer romantically active, admitted to being a user. The Superintendent Hastings fanclub sighed for sorrow to witness him toss away his status as an essentially decent heartthrob for the Saga generation. Sorry for your loss, ladies. It was also disappointing because the high-risk act of wiping his laptop turned out to have such a bathetic explanation. The 50k lying around in a brown envelope he clearly deemed to have less pressing potential for embarrassment.At least now we know that Hastings is not H because - guess what? - no Read more ...

Jacob has just managed to shoot up. No easy matter because his veins are, he says, non-usable, and are like those of an 80-year-old man. He’s in his twenties and has been on heroin for six years. Unusually, he works full time, has a car and a flat – blood-spattered ones. When the heroin kicks in he doesn’t feel stoned but as if he could “work on some graphic design or art work”. Not quite Edward St Aubyn or William Burroughs territory, though he also says that it “removes any sort of sickness in your mind”.Sadly, watching people talking about their drug habits tends to be boring, especially Read more ...

Are brothers Harry and Jack Williams mounting a takeover bid for British TV? They’ve written (among other dramas) The Missing, Liar and Baptiste, and they produced Fleabag. However, judging by their co-writing efforts on The Widow (ITV) they’re spreading themselves thin.The final two episodes saw the tension mount as the mysteries unravelled, but it wasn’t enough to compensate for the basic flaws which had made it creak and wobble from the start. It was as if the Williamses had patched it together from a random assortment of press clippings about African corruption, rapacious capitalism and Read more ...

TV cooking shows are mostly a pain in the butt. Masterchef, featuring the thuggish Gregg Wallace and John Torode along with India Fisher’s excruciatingly arch voiceover, is enough to provoke a massed hunger strike. The BBC’s Great British Bake Off may have featured national treasure Mary Berry, but her Miss Marple-ish charm was undermined by the ostentatiously pointless Mel and Sue. Prue Leith should be running a Victorian workhouse rather than a cookery show.And so to Channel 4’s version of Bake Off, which is at least eccentric and, in finest pastry-making style, lighter than air. The trick Read more ...

It’s been a memorable few days for audiences – big-screen and small – who happily invest years of their lives in epic storytelling. With the dust still settling on Avengers: Endgame, the final season of Game of Thrones has reached its mid-point with one of the most extraordinary episodes in its impressive history.  The eagerly anticipated Battle of Winterfell, in an episode formally and aptly titled The Long Night, was terrifying, emotionally gruelling and at times exhilarating. Taking up most of the 78-minute episode, it’s said to be the longest battle ever Read more ...

With the knife crime epidemic seemingly raging out of control, and the government at its clueless worst as it stumbles around hoping for a quick fix, here was a look at a possible solution. Via her Track Academy charity, former triple-jumper and sports journalist Connie Henry aims to use sport as a force for education, personal development and social cohesion.“One of the things that sport does is it gives you a family” said Daley Thompson, a double Olympic gold medallist and one of the celebrity supporters who have pitched in to help boost Henry’s efforts. Daley’s comment struck a nerve, Read more ...

This final episode of BBC Four's Looking for Rembrandt, exploring the life and work of the Netherlands’ greatest painter, was a mini-masterpiece in itself. We rejoined the story in the mid-1650s, when Rembrandt found that his days of popular acclaim and patronage by heads of state and the nobility were behind him. Instead, he had discovered to his horror that “my pupils are more popular than me and I’m fodder for the gossips.”It was an inspired move to hire Toby Jones as the voice of the artist. Resisting any urge towards thespian grandstanding, Jones conveyed the varied facets of the painter Read more ...

Peer down the glassy dark and you’ll see them. White bubbles trapped in the frozen lake which appear to be rising to the surface. Look through the permafrost this way and you’re seeing into the past: as the ice melts, gas which was captured and stored tens of thousands of years ago when woolly mammoths and sabre-toothed cats stalked Alaska is released into the atmosphere. Each slick of melt water is another decade returning to the rivers. A scientist pokes a flare towards a hissing vent and the lake burps fire. It is methane, a gas with 21 times the smothering effect of carbon dioxide which Read more ...

Chimerica is a stage-to-screen adaptation that has certainly kept up with the times. When it opened at the Almeida back in 2013 – a West End transfer followed, along with an Olivier award for Best New Play – Lucy Kirkwood’s drama was (very loosely) about the geopolitical symbiosis between the world’s two largest economies, China and America (hence, the title). It was seen through the prism of a story that began back in 1989 on Tiananmen Square and continued through to the present day.Channel 4’s new four-part drama, adroitly directed by Michael Keillor, retains the original’s sense of Read more ...

Great, a new drama not by the Williams brothers. Instead it’s Dan Sefton’s second iteration of his medical thriller Trust Me, last seen in 2017 starring Jody Whittaker. Since she’s off being Doctor Who, the new series has a new cast, with John Hannah as Dr Archie Watson and Ashley Jensen as physio Debbie Dorrell.Front and centre, though, is Corporal Jamie McCain (Alfred Enoch), who’s been brought to the neurological unit of South Lothian hospital after suffering a spinal injury during a shoot-out in Syria. He’s currently in the “spinal shock” phase (in medic-speak), which has left him with Read more ...

Pre-publicity for Back to Life has been all about its stablemate. This new six-part comedy comes from the same producers who brought you Fleabag, and the hope is that the Midas touch is catching. It seems unlikely, on the face of it, to follow the same path from the experimental comedy factory that is BBC Three all the way to global domination. That would not be for a lack of originality or ambition, however.Back to Life tells of an emotionally damaged single woman in her thirties on a quest for redemption. So far, so Fleabag. In fact her back story has as much in common with other dramas Read more ...

If you were a fan of “Rock Island Line” when it became a pop hit, you’d have to be at least in your mid-70s now. In 1956, Paul McCartney heard Lonnie Donegan perform it live in Liverpool, and Paul’s rising 77. How many below that age know it is moot, though that doesn’t necessarily disqualify it from the hour-long documentary treatment. For blues lovers, it’s a benchmark. “Rock Island Line” dates from the late 1920s and was first recorded in 1934.Billy Bragg dependably and articulately fronted up this BBC Four history of the song, a protest paean to, or (as it might once have been called) a Read more ...