Counter Culture

Welcome to Culture Vulture, your guide to the week’s entertainment from an alternative standpoint. The first full Culture Vulture of 2026 is preoccupied with legacy — not as nostalgia, but as consequence. This is a week shaped by artists and institutions reckoning with what they leave behind, whether knowingly or not. Three standouts define the terrain. 🌟 Bowie: The Final Act captures a mind still experimenting in the face of death. 🌟 Culloden remains one of the most politically radical works ever broadcast on British television. 🌟 Rod Stewart Night reframes a pop career as craft rather than legend.

This is a week that trusts its audience — to sit with discomfort, to revisit classics without irony, and to recognise that culture does not move forward by forgetting. Selections and reviews are by Pat Harrington.

Saturday, 3rd of January 2026

Carmen Jones BBC Two, 10:20am

Otto Preminger’s Carmen Jones remains startling not for its premise but for its seriousness. Relocating Bizet’s opera to wartime America, it refuses novelty framing and instead commits fully to tragedy.

Dorothy Dandridge’s Carmen is charismatic, dangerous, and unsoftened — a woman whose agency is never apologised for. The film allows desire to exist without moral reassurance.

What endures is its refusal to comfort. This is a musical that understands consequences.

The Eagle Has Landed BBC Two, 3:20pm

Often misremembered, this is a thriller obsessed with professionalism and failure. What begins as a high‑concept mission — German paratroopers attempting to kidnap Churchill — is treated not as pulp but as procedure. Michael Caine’s German officer is defined not by ideology but by doomed competence, a man who understands the mechanics of his job even as he recognises the futility built into it. His calm becomes a kind of tragedy.

Donald Sutherland adds unease rather than colour. His Irish operative moves through the film like someone who has already accepted the consequences of his choices. There’s no flamboyance, no villainy — just a man who knows the ground is shifting beneath him. The ensemble follows suit, playing with a restraint that lets the tension accumulate quietly, almost politely, until it can’t be ignored.

What drives the film is inevitability. Every plan is meticulously constructed, every contingency considered, yet the story keeps circling back to the same truth: no operation survives contact with reality. A small mistake, a chance encounter, a moment of decency — these are the forces that undo the mission. The suspense comes not from surprise but from watching competence collide with circumstance.

The village setting becomes a pressure chamber. Ordinary people, drawn into extraordinary events, react with a mixture of confusion, courage, and fear. The film refuses to turn them into symbols or pawns; they are simply people caught in the slipstream of history. Their presence grounds the thriller, giving weight to every decision and every misstep.

What lingers is the film’s refusal to moralise. It isn’t interested in heroism or villainy, only in the mechanics of action and the cost of failure. The Eagle Has Landed is a war film stripped of triumph, a study in how plans unravel and how professionalism becomes its own quiet form of fatalism.

The Searchers BBC Two, 3:55pm

Fred Zinnemann’s post-war drama treats displacement as its subject, not its setting. Shot amid Europe’s ruins, it resists sentimentality at every turn.

Montgomery Clift underplays beautifully, allowing the emotional burden to rest with the children.

The film’s moral clarity lies in patience rather than judgement.

From Roger Moore with Love BBC Four, 9:00pm

This tribute understands Moore’s Bond as a tonal achievement. He offered charm as masculinity, humour as authority.

The programme is strongest when it situates him in a Britain learning to value irony.

It lets Moore remain what he was — and that confidence pays off.

Bowie: The Final Act 🌟Channel 4, 10:00pm

Rather than mythologising decline, this documentary focuses on process. Bowie is shown planning, assembling, thinking.

Blackstar emerges as an experiment, not a farewell note.

It is moving precisely because it refuses closure.

Moonage Daydream Channel 4, 12:00am

Brett Morgen’s film abandons biography in favour of immersion. Bowie is treated as an idea-system.

It assumes familiarity and rewards curiosity.

Seen alongside The Final Act, it feels like the inside of the same mind.

Sunday, 4th of January 2026

Chariots of Fire BBC Two, 1:55pm

Too often reduced to its score, this is a film about belief systems colliding. Faith, class, and ambition coexist without hierarchy; each character moves according to a private logic the film refuses to simplify. Its restraint is its strength — emotion held in check until it becomes unavoidable. The running matters less than what interrupts it, the pauses where conviction is tested and identity quietly redefined. It’s a story about what drives people forward, and what makes them stop.

Rio Bravo 5Action, 3:30pm

Howard Hawks’ masterpiece is about people doing their jobs well. The plot is deceptively simple: a sheriff arrests the wrong man — the brother of a powerful rancher — and suddenly the town becomes a pressure cooker. The jailhouse turns into a siege before the siege even begins. Hawks treats procedure as drama, letting the mechanics of holding a prisoner become the film’s true engine.

Authority is earned, not asserted. John Wayne’s Sheriff Chance isn’t a swaggering lawman; he’s a man who understands the limits of his own competence. He refuses help from amateurs not out of pride but out of responsibility. The film’s moral code is built on the idea that doing the job properly matters more than winning. Every decision is weighed, every risk measured. Hawks makes professionalism feel like a worldview.

Dean Martin’s fragility gives the film its emotional depth. As Dude, the alcoholic deputy clawing his way back to dignity, he becomes the film’s quiet centre. His withdrawal, shame, and slow reclamation of purpose are treated with an almost documentary patience. His struggle isn’t a subplot — it’s the film’s conscience. Hawks suggests that competence is never static; it’s something you fight to maintain.

Around them, the town becomes a study in enforced intimacy. Chance, Dude, Stumpy, and Colorado form a makeshift family defined by circumstance rather than sentiment. Time spent together becomes the film’s true action: long stretches of waiting, listening, anticipating. Hawks uses silence as tension, letting the threat of violence hang heavier than violence itself. The film trusts the audience to feel the weight of hours, not just the flash of gunfire.

What endures is its belief that solidarity, not spectacle, holds the line. Rio Bravo is a western where the shootouts matter less than the conversations that precede them, where loyalty is built through shared labour rather than grand gestures. It’s a film about competence under pressure, about the dignity of showing up, and about the quiet heroism of people who keep going because someone has to. Hawks turns restraint into revelation.

The Million Pound Shamen Scam BBC Two, 9:00pm

What becomes clear very quickly is that this first episode isn’t interested in the usual true‑crime theatrics. Instead, it reconstructs the scam with a kind of forensic patience, showing how a self‑styled “shamanic healer” managed to build a lucrative empire out of charisma, pseudo‑spiritual language, and the vulnerabilities of people looking for meaning, comfort, or recovery. The programme takes its time establishing the world he operated in — a blend of wellness culture, alternative therapy, and online self‑help communities where boundaries blur and authority is self‑appointed.

The central figure, the so‑called “shaman,” is presented not as a cartoon villain but as someone who understood exactly how to perform authenticity. He cultivates intimacy, speaks in the soft cadences of spiritual guidance, and positions himself as a conduit to healing. The documentary shows how he built a following through retreats, one‑to‑one sessions, and a carefully curated online presence that promised transformation. What begins as guidance quickly becomes dependency, and dependency becomes financial exploitation. The sums involved — collectively reaching into the millions — are staggering, but the emotional cost is even more so.

The victims are the heart of the episode. They are not portrayed as naïve or foolish; the programme is careful to show the circumstances that made them susceptible: grief, illness, loneliness, or simply the desire for a better life. Each testimony is given space to breathe. One woman describes how the shaman’s language made her feel “seen” for the first time in years. Another explains how the sessions gradually shifted from spiritual support to pressure for increasingly expensive “advanced healing work.” A man recounts how he was encouraged to cut ties with sceptical family members, a classic tactic of coercive control. These are not isolated stories but a pattern — a system of manipulation disguised as enlightenment.

The supporting characters — former associates, wellness practitioners, and investigators — help map the wider ecosystem that allowed the scam to flourish. Some speak with regret about not recognising the warning signs sooner; others describe the difficulty of challenging someone who cloaks themselves in spiritual authority. The documentary also highlights the structural gaps that make this kind of fraud so hard to regulate. When a practice sits between therapy, religion, and lifestyle coaching, who is responsible for oversight? The programme doesn’t offer easy answers, but it makes the question unavoidable.

By the time the episode lays out the full scale of the deception, the anger it provokes feels entirely justified. Not the cheap outrage of a tabloid sting, but a deeper, more grounded fury — the kind that comes from seeing how easily trust can be weaponised, how quickly vulnerability becomes a business model, and how slowly accountability arrives. The restraint of the filmmaking makes the emotional impact sharper. It’s a quietly devastating hour of television, and a reminder that exploitation doesn’t always look like violence; sometimes it looks like someone offering to heal you.

Back to Black  🌟BBC Two, 10:00pm

The Amy Winehouse biopic succeeds when it slows down. In its quieter stretches the film finally trusts the audience, letting gesture and breath do the work that exposition can’t. Performance replaces caricature; the actor isn’t asked to imitate Winehouse so much as inhabit the contradictions that made her impossible to summarise. It’s in these moments — the pauses before a note, the hesitation before a decision — that the film finds its pulse.

Music is treated as labour, not montage. Sessions are shown as work: repetitive, exhausting, occasionally transcendent. The film understands that Winehouse’s brilliance wasn’t accidental or chaotic but crafted, shaped, fought for. It resists the temptation to turn creativity into shorthand for personality, and instead shows the grind behind the glamour — the hours, the discipline, the cost.

The surrounding world is less generous. Managers, partners, and institutions drift in and out, each with their own demands, each convinced they know what she should be. The film refuses to make Winehouse responsible for her exploitation; it recognises the machinery that built her up and stripped her down. There’s no moralising, no tidy lesson — just the steady accumulation of pressures that narrow her choices until they barely exist.

Where the film falters is where it hurries. When it compresses years into minutes, it loses the specificity that makes Winehouse compelling. But when it lingers — on a rehearsal, a cigarette, a moment of stillness — it becomes something sharper: a portrait of an artist whose life was constantly interpreted but rarely understood.

What remains is a sense of proximity rather than revelation. The film doesn’t claim to solve Winehouse, and that restraint becomes its integrity. It offers not closure but clarity: a reminder that talent is work, vulnerability is not a flaw, and the systems that consume artists rarely acknowledge their own appetite.

Hitchcock at the National Film Theatre BBC Four, 9:50pm

Hitchcock in conversation reveals more than his films ever could. Wry, evasive, precise. Cinema still believed in itself here.

Monday, 5th of January 2026

Gold Wars Down Under Sky History, 9:00pm

Gold is the hook, but the series makes it clear from the outset that the real story lies in the people chasing it. What begins as a familiar prospecting format gradually reveals itself as a study in obsession — the slow, creeping kind that reshapes priorities and narrows a person’s world until the next dig becomes the only thing that matters. The crews aren’t framed as rugged adventurers; they’re ordinary people who have convinced themselves that one more seam, one more promising patch of ground, will finally change everything. Risk sits at the centre of their lives, corroding as much as it rewards. Machinery breaks, tempers fray, finances wobble, and the weather seems to take a personal interest in undermining them. Even the victories feel precarious, the joy already shadowed by the knowledge that the next setback is never far away. What makes the programme compelling is its refusal to romanticise any of this. There is no heroic gloss, no frontier mythmaking. Instead, the camera stays close to the faces, catching the flickers of doubt, the stubbornness, the private calculations that keep people digging long after common sense would have sent them home. It becomes a portrait of modern extraction culture at its most intimate — not the corporate mega‑mines, but the small operators who believe they can still outwit geology, circumstance, and sometimes themselves. The show understands that the real drama isn’t in the gold, but in the human need to believe that something glittering is just beneath the surface, waiting to be claimed.

Tuesday, 6th of January 2026

Culloden  🌟BBC Four, 10:00pm

Peter Watkins’ Culloden remains one of the most quietly radical films ever broadcast on British television. Shot in the style of a modern news documentary, it collapses the distance between past and present, forcing the viewer to confront the 1746 battle not as a misty national myth but as a brutal, chaotic event experienced by real people. The choice to film it as if a BBC crew were embedded on the field is still startling; it strips away the romance that has long clung to Jacobite history and replaces it with immediacy, confusion, and fear.

What Watkins exposes most clearly is the class violence at the heart of the conflict. The Highland clans are shown not as a unified romantic force but as impoverished tenants coerced or cajoled into fighting for aristocratic ambitions that were never their own. Opposite them stands a British state machine that treats the battlefield as an opportunity to crush a population already living on the edge of survival. The film makes no attempt to soften this dynamic. It shows power operating with cold efficiency, and the people caught beneath it with no illusions left to cling to.

The aftermath is where the film’s accusation becomes unmistakable. Watkins documents the reprisals with the same unblinking eye: the executions, the burnings, the systematic dismantling of a culture deemed inconvenient. There is no triumph here, no sense of a necessary historical turning point. Instead, the film insists on the human cost — the families displaced, the communities shattered, the deliberate use of terror as policy. It is a portrait of state violence that feels disturbingly contemporary, precisely because Watkins refuses to let the audience retreat into the safety of historical distance.

What makes Culloden so enduring is its refusal to age. The techniques may be from the 1960s, but the politics are painfully current. It is a film that accuses — not just the commanders and politicians of 1746, but the systems that continue to justify violence in the name of order. Watching it now, the shock is not in its style but in its clarity. Watkins shows how easily a nation can mythologise its own brutality, and how necessary it is to look again, without the romance, at what was done and who paid the price.

.The Making of Culloden BBC Four, 11:10pm

This companion piece makes Watkins’ intent explicit. Form becomes ideology. Television as weapon.

Wednesday, 7th of January 2026

Eddie the Eagle BBC One, 12:10am

This is a sports film about refusal — refusal to be realistic, to know one’s place, to disappear politely.

Taron Egerton plays Eddie as awkward persistence incarnate. Hugh Jackman’s mentor figure tempers cliché with regret.

The film’s quiet subversion lies in redefining success as dignity rather than victory.

Thursday, 8th of January 2026

Live Well with the Drug-Free Doctor Channel 4, 8:00pm

What makes this programme interesting is its refusal to present lifestyle medicine as a new gospel. Fronted by Dr Rangan Chatterjee, a figure already familiar to viewers for his calm, demystifying approach to health, the series keeps circling back to uncertainty — what we know, what we think we know, and what remains stubbornly unproven. The “drug‑free” framing could easily have tipped into evangelism, but Chatterjee avoids that trap by asking questions rather than delivering pronouncements. Health is treated not as a battlefield between pharmaceuticals and alternatives, but as a space where evidence, habit, and personal circumstance collide.

Chatterjee himself is presented not as a guru but as a guide. He talks through diet, movement, sleep, and stress with cautious optimism, acknowledging the limits of lifestyle interventions while still recognising their value. The tone is exploratory rather than doctrinaire. You see him working with patients who are tired of quick fixes and equally tired of being lectured. The conversations are grounded in lived experience rather than theory, which gives the programme a welcome humility.

What stands out is the shift from obedience to engagement. Instead of telling people what to do, Chatterjee asks what they can realistically change, what they’re willing to try, and what barriers stand in the way. It’s a subtle but important difference. The programme recognises that health advice only works when it fits the messy realities of people’s lives. There’s no shaming, no moralising — just a steady attempt to build trust and agency.

The result is a series that feels more like a dialogue than a directive. It doesn’t promise transformation, and it doesn’t pretend that lifestyle alone can solve every problem. But by questioning certainty and foregrounding patient experience, it opens up a space for viewers to think about health in a more nuanced, less adversarial way. It’s a gentle hour of television, but a quietly thoughtful one.

Friday, 9th of January 2026

Rod Stewart Night 🌟BBC Four, from 10:05pm

Stewart’s career is framed as evolution, not legend. Craft and phrasing take precedence over charts. Charisma is shown as work.

The Last Days of Anne Boleyn PBS America, 6:15pm

What this documentary does, with a quiet confidence, is remove the varnish that centuries of retelling have layered onto Anne Boleyn’s downfall. There is no melodrama, no breathless court intrigue played for shock value. Instead, the programme reconstructs her final days with a historian’s discipline, showing how political calculation, factional rivalry, and the machinery of Tudor power converged on one woman with devastating speed. The familiar story is still here, but the tone is different: cooler, sharper, more attuned to the structures that made her fate possible.

Anne herself emerges not as a doomed romantic heroine but as a political actor — ambitious, intelligent, and fully aware of the stakes of the world she moved in. The documentary gives space to the scholars who argue that her downfall was not simply the result of Henry VIII’s wandering affections, but of a broader shift in court alliances and the threat she posed to entrenched interests. Her influence, her reformist leanings, and her refusal to play the role of silent consort all made her vulnerable once the tide turned. The programme treats her not as a symbol, but as a strategist whose calculations suddenly stopped working.

The supporting voices — historians, biographers, and legal experts — help map the speed and brutality of the process that followed. The charges levelled against her are shown for what they were: a legal fiction designed to give political necessity the appearance of justice. The documentary is careful not to sensationalise the trial or execution; instead, it focuses on the mechanisms of power that allowed such a collapse to happen with barely a pause for breath. It is a portrait of a system that required a scapegoat and found one in a woman who had once been indispensable.

By the end, history is returned to consequence. The programme reminds viewers that Anne’s death was not an isolated tragedy but a turning point with profound political and religious repercussions. It shows how the personal and the structural intertwine, how a single execution can reshape a dynasty, and how easily a life can be rewritten by those who survive it. The documentary’s restraint is its strength: by refusing melodrama, it restores the gravity of what happened and the cost paid by the woman at its centre.

Streaming Choices

Alpha Males Netflix — Season 4 available from Friday 9th of January

Four seasons in, Alpha Males remains as sharp as ever, and just as unwilling to let its characters off the hook. The series continues its forensic dissection of modern masculinity, following a group of men who are forever trying — and failing — to adapt to a world that no longer centres them. What keeps it compelling is the show’s refusal to soften their edges. The humour is still barbed, the self‑delusion still painfully recognisable, and the writers still trust the audience to sit with the awkwardness rather than escape it.

Season 4 pushes the characters further into the contradictions they’ve spent years avoiding. Their attempts at self‑improvement are earnest but misguided, and the show mines that tension with a precision that feels both comic and bleak. Each man is caught between the roles they were raised to inhabit and the expectations of a culture that has moved on without them. The result is a kind of emotional slapstick — funny because it’s true, uncomfortable because it’s close to home.

What stands out is the show’s continued commitment to discomfort as a narrative tool. It doesn’t chase redemption arcs or easy catharsis. Instead, it lets the characters flounder, exposing the fragility beneath their bravado. The satire lands because it’s rooted in behaviour that feels depressingly familiar: the defensiveness, the performative wokeness, the panic that comes when old certainties collapse.

Season 4 proves that Alpha Males hasn’t lost its nerve. It remains a series that pokes at the soft underbelly of male insecurity with a grin and a wince, offering comedy that’s as revealing as it is uneasy. Still sharp, still uncomfortable — and still necessary.

Tehran Apple TV+ Season 3 episodes relasing weekly from Friday 9th of January

Espionage as identity fracture. The show doubles down on the idea that every operation costs something internal. Loyalties blur, motives erode, and survival becomes an act of self‑invention. What’s compelling is its refusal to treat espionage as spectacle — instead it frames it as a slow unravelling, where the real tension lies in what each character can no longer afford to admit.

The Ring Channel 4 Streaming all ten episodes available from Friday 9th of January

Procedural, opaque, unsparing. It moves with the confidence of a show that refuses to flatter its audience, letting process become atmosphere. Motives are hinted at rather than explained; character emerges through action, not confession. What grips is its refusal to offer catharsis — a drama that trusts you to live with what it withholds.

Rick Stein’s Birthday Paramount+ available from Saturday 4th of January

Curiosity as continuity. Stein treats celebration not as indulgence but as an excuse to keep learning — a journey stitched together by appetite, memory, and the quiet pleasure of paying attention. The programme’s charm lies in its steadiness: no reinvention, no theatrics, just a man following his interests with the confidence of someone who knows that enthusiasm, sustained over decades, becomes its own kind of legacy.