Bognor Regis was once renowned for its restorative climate and was much favoured by George V (he awarded the town the “Regis” tag), but times have changed if Toby Jones’s new series is anything to go by. The Bognor we see in BBC Two's Don't Forget the Driver is a crumbling ghost town, all run-down bungalows, pensioners and, it seems, an underclass of exploited immigrants. It looks like the London-luvvie invasion which has trendified other coastal towns like Hove and Broadstairs has passed dear old Bognor by. Jones, who also co-wrote the series with Tim Crouch, plays Peter Green with a Read more ...

The problem with Fleabag (BBC Three/BBC One) is that it makes almost all television look pedestrian. It’s like the difference between Fleabag’s scummily inadequate boyfriends and the unattainable perfection embodied by the cool sweary priest. Earth vs heaven. Water/wine. And now it is gone.Having delivered a raging aria about the cruelty of love, the sinning father fled back to the triumphant embrace of the Almighty, pursued by a cunning fox. Having declared her own simple truth about love Fleabag, clutching a re-stolen effigy of her mother’s fecund body, set off in the other direction, her Read more ...

The Williams brothers (The Missing, Liar, Rellik, Baptiste) are back. In The Widow, the writer-producer team of Jack and Harry move on to Wales, Rotterdam and corruption in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but the recipe is wearyingly familiar: a bag full of evil money, a missing person, foreign languages that some characters can’t speak, and people who say ponderous things like, “They say hope is to see the light in spite of all the darkness” and “We can never hide who we are." There’s a fine cast, it’s stylish and colour-saturated, but in the first two episodes at least, there’s Read more ...

Piers Morgan hated This Time with Alan Partridge (BBC One) and predicted it would be pulled before the end of the series. This may be taken as a kitemark of quality. And yet the prime target for Steve Coogan’s satire was no voice in the wilderness. A lot of viewers professed themselves underwhelmed by the return of Partridge to mainstream broadcasting and voted with their remotes: the show managed to shed a third of his audience between the first and second episode.One of the disappointments for Partridge fans is that for five episodes he has been on if not best, then better behaviour, Read more ...

Congratulations to Stephen Graham, guest-starring in this fifth season of BBC One’s Line of Duty, for still being alive at the end of episode one, a favour not routinely granted to headline names in Jed Mercurio’s diabolical labyrinth of deception. Then again, death needn’t necessarily be the end, as we were reminded when the late and exceptionally unlamented ACC Derek Hilton, the sleazy string-puller from series four, repeated on us here like a bad oyster.Mercurio isn’t just telling a story, he’s spinning a kind of Game of Villains epic that stretches out to unknowable horizons. Just as the Read more ...

Halfway through filming For Folk’s Sake, a documentary for BBC Four about Morris dancing, I received a package in the post that would dramatically change the course of the programme. It was from my mother. Inside were a number of yellowing newspaper articles from the 1920s and 1930s and some dog-eared black and white photos. The newspaper clippings showed photographs of capacious lawns outside stately homes and on the hot summer grass were vast hordes of people folk dancing.All the women had bobbed hair and wore long white skirts and the men were, to all intents and purposes, in cricket Read more ...

Documentaries about the 20th century’s most fabled quartet keep coming. There’s no special call for The Beatles: Made on Merseyside (BBC Four), which looked at the group’s Liverpool beginnings, though at a stretch it could be argued that in the 50th anniversary year of their horrible break-up we need reminding of pop’s Biggest Bang in 1963. This was almost the film to do it. Yet for such an explosive moment in cultural history it was curiously downbeat.That might be because, as we were reminded throughout, the group’s genesis was scruffy and full of false starts. Liverpool in the 1950s seemed Read more ...

The joke in Dead Pixels, a new sitcom on E4, is that there is a better life to be pursued in the fantasy world of videogames. In this alt. environment, outcomes can be controlled by consoles and keyboards, squeamishness about violence can be parked and you are free to be your best or worst self. Probably the show’s target audience is gamers under 30, but I’m very far from either and I found it a hoot.The other joke is that real life has a habit of butting in. Thus we first met squat blonde Meg (Alexa Davies) on the badminton court where she was plotting to end a long period of celibacy. Then Read more ...

Let me be clear. The agonising process of the UK’s departure, or not, from the EU will be an infinite field of academic study over the decades to come. Road to Brexit (BBC Two) will not be a valuable source of research material, because it was a farrago of misinformation and fantasy, but it least it delivered a reasonable percentage of cheap belly laughs.It was a vehicle for Matt Toast of London Berry, appearing here as the imaginary historian Michael Squeamish. Slobbish, bearded and long-haired, Squeamish exuded a bellicose air of entirely unjustified certainty as he rode roughshod over 60- Read more ...

 ITV has an enviable knack for creating populist historical costume dramas which never seem to wear out, despite a million rotations on ITV3. Once everybody had got over the shock of a young and glamorous Queen Victoria, who had previously existed in the popular imagination as a scowling dowager in a coal sack, Victoria proceeded to take its place in the ITV pantheon with an air of unswerving confidence.The third series dawned with a whiff of gunpowder in the air. It’s 1848, and revolutionary zeal is sweeping across Europe. No royal family is safe, and France’s King Louis Philippe – Read more ...

NYC, 1987. AIDS is ravaging the city, Reagan’s in power, Trump is in his tower. The American dream is available - to some. And for some of those to whom it’s not, there’s the world of balls, vogueing and competing for trophies. If your family has kicked you out for being gay or trans, the balls are a place where you can strike a pose, find acceptance and make your legendary mark. Even if you're homeless and haven’t eaten in days.Pose, partly based on Jennie Livingston’s 1990 documentary Paris is Burning, (she acted as consultant on the series) is ground-breaking because trans people play Read more ...

In the 1970s, the Mancunian stand-up Colin Crompton had a famous routine about Morecambe. He characterised Morecambe as “a sort of cemetery with lights” where “they don't bury their dead, they stand them up in bus shelters with a bingo ticket in their hand”.You can tell it’s Morecambe that stars in The Bay (ITV) because there was a fleeting glimpse of its most famous son, who named himself after the place and is memorialised in a dancing statue on the front. In other respects it seems to have changed its spots. There are barely any retirees, and it’s all gone lively. In the opening scenes Read more ...