It was the best of times, it was the worst of times: it was the time of breasts.
By now, you will surely have seen the video of actress Sydney Sweeney at the end of her Saturday Night Live hosting …
Britain needs to deploy Warhammer
If the BBC is the cultural expression of the British state, then the omens are surely unfavourable. Its funding contested and overstretched, bogged down in interminable culture war disputes, the BBC does not know what it is for. Every few …
The Sopranos is a Freudian comedy
Thinking back on The Sopranos over the years, I’ve granted a sort of holy status to the scene in “Second Opinion” (Season 3, Episode 7) where Carmela is bluntly lectured by an elderly psychiatrist. She’s expecting some gentle double-talk from …
Will Hollywood strike back?
In the Fifties, television destroyed radio, many of whose stars were themselves survivors of the death of vaudeville, and persisted through radio and into film: The Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields. And many of the first movie stars had come first …
The conservative case for Strictly
In 1976, Angela Rippon was already well-known to Britain’s TV watchers — from the waist up — as Britain’s first female national newsreader. Then aged 38, she appeared on a Morecambe & Wise Christmas special, sitting behind her desk, only …
Rupert Murdoch was my fiercest competitor
“I’m calling to celebrate the demise of Maxwell,” said Rupert Murdoch down the phone to me on the morning Robert Maxwell’s private effects were being auctioned in a bankruptcy sale. I acknowledged that Maxwell had been a frightful scoundrel, but …
Why you want to be a millionaire
For better or worse, the TV quiz show is the perfect cultural expression of our age. Like the knowledge they require of contestants, they are too easily dismissed as trivial, but you only have to scratch the surface to discover …
The gladiatorial art of the quiz show
For better or worse, the TV quiz show is the perfect cultural expression of our age. Like the knowledge they require of contestants, they are too easily dismissed as trivial, but you only have to scratch the surface to discover …
The Noughties enabled Russell Brand
Back in the Noughties, pop culture was hard and nasty. The internet was corroding the mystique of fame, and the public wanted to read — in the words of Jessica Callan, one of The Mirror’s original 3AM Girl gossip columnists …
Peep Show is a national humiliation
The history of British comedy is a history of ever-increasing male humiliation. Let’s start in the Seventies, the decade of declinism and brown suits. Forced to bear witness to both is Basil Fawlty, the supreme specimen of self-righteous control-freakery who, …
What’s the point of a gay dating show?
Unless you took the sensible precaution of disconnecting your television in anticipation, you might have noticed that Love Island returned to ITV2 last week. The show is — and I should declare a little bit of guesswork on my part …
Why Gen Z loves Seinfeld
Long ago, in another age, young people gathered in sitting rooms to watch television. And these moments of fixed attention, and the TV shows that create them, define generations. A quarter of century ago last weekend — slacking on the …
Great Expectations has violated Dickens
If you were choosing a Dickens novel to adapt for the screen, you’d need a really good reason to opt again for Great Expectations. David Lean’s 1946 film, with its spectacular cinematography, is already exquisite, and in 2011, Gillian Anderson …
This England can’t be neutral
“Can you think of a novel that ever was written about the strictly contemporary scene?” George Orwell asked his friend Tosco Fyvel in April 1949. “It is very unlikely that any novel, i.e. worth reading, would ever be set back …
Richard Osman’s common people
In 1984, Clive James tabled the Barry Manilow Law: no-one you know likes Barry Manilow, while the rest of the world worships the ground on which he walks. This adage can now be updated. Until very recently, I didn’t know …