Netflix
Pure genius
Of all the times and places to have been on the wrong side of history, I can’t imagine many worse…
Sets appeal
The distracting beauty of TV backdrops
Whiplash
Hillbilly Elegy is an adaptation of the best-selling memoir, published in 2016, by J.D. Vance and it’s quite a story.…
The outsiders
Tanya Gold on the journalists who scripted the golden age of Hollywood
Marriage of inconvenience
‘We have to stop it now!’ says Princess Margaret (Helena Bonham Carter), smoking another cigarette, obviously. She’s talking about the…
Nous sommes tous Emily in Paris – why can’t we admit it?
A frothy new drama called Emily in Paris arrived on Netflix last month. Starring Lily Collins — daughter of Phil…
Zinger ping pong
Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 — don’t worry, you haven’t missed six earlier films — is a…
What cinema is for
Cuties is the subject of a moral panic and a hashtag #CancelNetflix. It tells the story of Amy (Fathia Youssouf),…
Bonjour happiness
Soon, very soon now — even sooner than I imagined, if A Suitable Boy turns out to be as lacklustre…
Audio onanism
In Beeb-dominated Britain, the commercial triumph of podcasting — epitomised by Spotify’s recent £100 million deals with Joe Rogan and…
Black lives didn’t matter
Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods is about four African-American vets who return to Vietnam to locate the body of their…
Speak of the devil
Did Jeffrey Epstein kill himself or was he murdered — and frankly who cares? Actually, having watched the four-part Netflix…
Lessons in terror
Sweden is now properly celebrated as the Land that Called Coronavirus Correctly. But in the distant past, those with long…
Beasties and besties
The music of the Beastie Boys was entirely an expression of their personalities, a chance to delightedly splurge out on…
The great escape
When I lived briefly in Stamford Hill I was mesmerised by the huge fur hats (shtreimel) worn by the local…
The fascinating Ms Swift
There had been some question about whether Taylor Swift’s Netflix special would actually appear. Last year it seemed that the…
Race relations
Some years ago I was invited to the British Grand Prix at Silverstone courtesy of a watch manufacturer. As freebies…
Spooky delights
One of my perpetual gnawing terrors is that I’ll recommend a series that looks initially promising but turns out to…
Real Life
One of the many technological things I don’t understand is, how come I’m paying to watch television? I know why…
Why the BBC licence fee makes sense
A consensus seems to be forming that the BBC licence fee is for the chop. In a digital age, the…
Beyond belief
Sky’s latest bingewatch potboiler Cobra can’t quite make up its mind whether it wants to be an arch, knowing House……
The only way to survive Christmas TV is to avoid anything seasonal and watch Giri/Haji
The key to surviving the next couple of weeks of TV is to avoid like the plague anything that smacks…
The Queen, and indeed the British public, deserve better than The Crown’s lies
The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge recently met with survivors of national disasters. They were attending the launch of a…
War of the Worlds is as bad as Doctor Who
Edwardian England deserved everything it got from those killer Martian invaders. Or so I learned from the BBC’s latest adaptation…
No one else has the weird levels of self-regard shown by people who appear regularly on TV
One of the more tedious tropes of recent years is for journalists to bemoan the rise of populism while busily…
