Counter Culture

This week’s Culture Vulture moves restlessly between power and resistance, private obsession and public mythmaking. Across the schedule, institutions are questioned, reputations dismantled, and history revisited from oblique angles. 🌟 Highlights include Joanna Hogg’s haunted chamber piece The Eternal Daughter, Channel 4’s urgent Palestine Action: The Truth Behind the Ban, and the incendiary political cinema of How to Blow Up a Pipeline. Elsewhere, British independent film, classic Hollywood, prestige documentary, and cult spectacle reward curiosity and late nights. Reviews and selections are by Pat Harrington.

Saturday 17 January 2026

🌟 The Eternal Daughter (2022) BBC Two, 11:00pm

Hogg’s film feels like the moment a long‑shuttered room is finally opened: dust motes rising, air shifting, memory stirring in ways both tender and treacherous. In The Eternal Daughter, she pares her instincts down to their purest form, crafting a chamber piece where the walls themselves seem to listen. Tilda Swinton’s dual performance becomes a kind of living palimpsest—mother and daughter layered atop one another, indistinguishable at times, painfully separate at others. It’s not a gimmick; it’s the thesis.

What begins with the grammar of a ghost story—the creaking corridors, the watchful windows, the sense of a presence just out of frame—slowly reveals itself as something far more disquieting. Hogg isn’t interested in hauntings so much as the emotional residue we inherit, the unspoken debts and unexamined loyalties that shape us long after childhood has ended. The hotel becomes a psychological annex, a place where the daughter’s creative impulse collides with her filial guilt, and where the mother’s silence speaks louder than any apparition.

Hogg’s precision is almost forensic. Every pause feels intentional, every withheld revelation a reminder that the most devastating truths are the ones we circle rather than confront. The film’s quietude is not gentleness but pressure—an atmosphere thick with the weight of what cannot be said. By the time the emotional architecture finally reveals itself, the effect is less like a twist and more like a reckoning.

It’s a small film in scale, but not in consequence. Hogg gives us a story about the stories we construct to make sense of our parents, and the painful liberation that comes when those stories falter. The devastation is not loud; it arrives like a memory you’ve spent years avoiding, suddenly unavoidable, quietly rearranging the room around you.

Fergie and the Fake Sheikh Scandal Channel 5, 9:20pm

A tabloid-age morality tale examining how celebrity, deception, and entrapment culture collided at the turn of the millennium. Less interested in sensationalism than in the machinery behind it, the documentary exposes how reputations were engineered—and destroyed—by a media ecosystem that thrived on humiliation.

Obsession (1949) Talking Pictures, 9:00pm

There’s something almost surgical about Obsession—a film that slices cleanly through the polite veneer of post‑war Britain to expose the rancid underlayer beneath. It’s noir without the American swagger, a chamber drama where the shadows feel damp rather than stylish, and where the real violence is psychological, not ballistic. Edward Dmytryk, working in exile, brings a kind of outsider’s clarity to the material: he sees the brittleness of British respectability and taps it like a cracked teacup.

The result is a thriller that feels startlingly modern. The film’s emotional temperature is cold, its cruelty precise. There’s no romanticism in this portrait of obsession—no smoky seduction, no doomed glamour. Instead, we get a study in class resentment and the corrosive entitlement of a man who believes his status grants him moral exemption. The kidnapping plot becomes a pressure cooker, not because of what might happen, but because of what the characters reveal about themselves when the social scaffolding slips.

What lingers is the bitterness. The film seems to understand, long before British cinema was ready to admit it, that the war hadn’t purified the nation’s soul; it had merely rearranged the furniture. Beneath the clipped accents and tidy rooms lies a rot that feels eerily contemporary. Dmytryk doesn’t shout this; he lets it seep in, frame by frame, until the genteel façade collapses under its own hypocrisy.

It’s a lean, quietly vicious little masterpiece—one that reminds you how much menace can be conjured from a closed door, a polite smile, and a man who believes he’s been wronged.

Sunday 18 January 2026

🌟 How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2022)

Film4, 11:40pm

There’s a flinty directness to this film that feels almost shocking in an era of hedged statements and carefully triangulated messaging. It borrows the propulsive mechanics of a heist thriller—ticking clocks, tight crews, improvised logistics—but repurposes them into something far more volatile: a cinematic argument delivered with the clarity of a manifesto and the tension of a fuse burning down.

What makes it so bracing is its refusal to flatter the viewer. The film doesn’t offer the comfort of moral distance or the easy posture of condemnation. Instead, it forces you into the cramped, anxious spaces where its characters operate—young people who have concluded, with grim logic, that lawful protest has been absorbed, neutralised, and rendered decorative. Their plan is not framed as heroism, nor as nihilism, but as a response to a world in which delay has become its own form of violence.

The structure is deceptively simple: each character’s backstory arrives not as exposition but as justification, a ledger of harms that makes their radicalisation legible without insisting on your approval. The film’s power lies in this tension. It neither sermonises nor sensationalises; it simply refuses to pretend that the climate crisis can be met with polite incrementalism.

Stylistically, it’s stripped to the bone. No indulgent speeches, no swelling strings, no narrative hand‑holding. The urgency is baked into the form—lean, breathless, and morally abrasive. By the end, you’re left with the unsettling sense that the film hasn’t tried to persuade you so much as confront you, asking whether the ethics of waiting are still defensible when the clock is visibly, audibly running out.

It’s a rare thing: a thriller that treats its audience like adults, and a political film that understands the stakes well enough not to blink.

Four Kings – Rise of the Kings (1 of 4) Channel 4, 10:00pm

The first chapter of this landmark documentary doesn’t just revisit an era of British boxing dominance—it reopens a cultural archive the nation has never properly reckoned with. Rise of the Kings introduces the four men who reshaped British sport from the margins outward: Frank Bruno, Lennox Lewis, Nigel Benn, and Chris Eubank. All Black, all prodigiously gifted, all carrying the weight of a country that cheered them in the ring while questioning their belonging outside it.

What emerges is not a simple tale of athletic ascent but a study in how Britain constructs—and constrains—its heroes. The episode traces the early trajectories of these fighters with a forensic calm: the racism they absorbed, the class barriers they smashed through, the uneasy dance between public adoration and private cost. Each man becomes a case study in the contradictions of late‑20th‑century Britain: celebrated yet scrutinised, embraced yet othered, mythologised yet rarely understood.

The filmmaking is admirably unhurried. It lets the archival footage breathe, allowing the swagger, vulnerability, and sheer physical charisma of these boxers to speak for itself. But threaded through the narrative is a sharper argument: that these four athletes didn’t just dominate their divisions—they forced open cultural space for Black British identity at a time when the country preferred its icons uncomplicated.

By the end of the hour, you feel the stakes. This isn’t nostalgia; it’s reclamation. A reminder that the nation’s sporting mythology was built, in part, on the shoulders of men who were fighting more than opponents. They were fighting for recognition, for dignity, and for the right to define themselves.

If the series continues with this level of clarity and emotional intelligence, it won’t just document an era—it will correct the record.

Four Kings – The Battle for Britain (2 of 4) Channel 4, 11:00pm

Episode two plunges straight into the feverish heart of 1990s British boxing—a moment when four Black British fighters weren’t just dominating the sport, they were commanding the nation’s attention with a force that felt seismic. The Battle for Britain captures the week when everything converged: Benn vs Eubank, Lewis vs Bruno, millions watching, and the country briefly rearranging its cultural centre of gravity around the ring.

What the episode reveals, with a clarity that borders on uncomfortable, is how much pressure these men carried. The rivalries weren’t just athletic; they were racialised, politicised, and relentlessly commodified. Benn and Eubank’s animosity becomes a kind of national theatre—two men forced into archetypes they never asked for, their identities flattened into marketable conflict. Meanwhile, Lewis and Bruno shoulder the burden of representing a Britain that still struggled to imagine heavyweight greatness in a Black British body.

The filmmaking is sharp, almost prosecutorial. It lays out the stakes without melodrama: the injuries that threatened to derail the fights, the media circus that demanded spectacle, the promoters who understood exactly how much money could be made from pitting these men—and their public personas—against one another. Yet beneath the noise, the documentary keeps returning to the human cost: the discipline, the fear, the private negotiations with pain and expectation.

What lingers is the sense of a country watching itself through these fighters. Their success became a proxy for national pride, yet their failures were treated as personal betrayals. The episode doesn’t editorialise; it simply lets the archival footage and the testimonies speak, revealing a Britain that was both enthralled by and uneasy with the power of these Black champions.

It’s riveting, but also quietly damning. A portrait of a week when British boxing reached its commercial zenith—and when the men at its centre bore the weight of far more than belts.

Chris McCausland: Seeing Into the Future

BBC Two, 6:15pm

Blending humour with seriousness, McCausland explores disability, perception, and technology without sentimentality. Abstract ideas are grounded in lived experience, resulting in a thoughtful, humane documentary.

The Eyes of Tammy Faye (2021)

Channel 4, 2:15am

There’s a strange, irresistible shimmer to this film—a lacquered surface that initially feels like pure kitsch, only to reveal hairline fractures where something far more human leaks through. The Eyes of Tammy Faye understands that American televangelism was always theatre first and theology second, and it leans into that tension with a kind of fascinated precision. The result is a portrait of a woman who lived her life as both performer and believer, often unable to distinguish where one role ended and the other began.

What anchors the film is the central performance, which refuses to treat Tammy Faye Bakker as either punchline or martyr. Instead, we get a study in contradictions: a woman whose vulnerability was real, whose compassion was often ahead of her time, and whose capacity for self-deception was almost operatic. The film doesn’t excuse her complicity in the empire she helped build, but it does illuminate the emotional machinery that kept her smiling even as the walls buckled.

The glossiness is deliberate. The saturated colours, the immaculate wigs, the relentless cheerfulness—they’re all part of the ecosystem that made Tammy Faye both iconic and impossible to fully grasp. But beneath the glitter lies a more unsettling truth about the American appetite for spectacle, and the way faith can be packaged, monetised, and weaponised when charisma becomes currency.

What lingers is the sense of a woman who believed in love and forgiveness with a sincerity that outpaced her understanding of the system she was feeding. The film captures that duality with a steady hand: the calculation behind the camera-ready grin, and the genuine ache behind the mascara-streaked tears.

Monday 19 January 2026

The Terminator (1984) ITV4, 9:00pm

Cameron’s breakthrough still hits with the force of something forged under pressure—industrial, unadorned, and utterly sure of its purpose. What’s striking, revisiting it now, is how little fat there is on the film. Every scene feels sharpened to a point, every cut driving the story forward with the cold logic of the machine at its centre. It’s action cinema before the bloat set in, built on momentum rather than spectacle.

But beneath the propulsive surface lies a darker, more resonant architecture. The film channels the anxieties of its era—nuclear dread, technological overreach, the sense that humanity was sleepwalking into its own obsolescence—and distils them into a narrative that feels mythic in its simplicity. The Terminator isn’t just a villain; it’s an idea made flesh, the embodiment of a future that refuses to wait its turn. The slasher DNA is unmistakable: the unstoppable force, the final girl, the sense of being hunted by something that cannot be reasoned with. Yet Cameron threads through it a kind of bruised romanticism, a belief that resistance, however fragile, still matters.

What lingers is the film’s discipline. No quips, no narrative detours, no self-conscious winks. Just a relentless pursuit—of Sarah Connor, of survival, of a future that might yet be rewritten. In an age of maximalist blockbusters, The Terminator feels almost ascetic, a reminder that tension and meaning can be engineered with precision rather than excess.

🌟 The Souvenir (2019) BBC Two, 11:00pm

Hogg’s film unfolds with the delicacy of someone turning over a memory they’re not entirely sure they’re ready to revisit. It’s a coming‑of‑age story, yes, but one stripped of the usual narrative scaffolding—no grand revelations, no cathartic speeches, just the slow, painful accumulation of experience. What emerges is a portrait of a young woman learning to see clearly, even as the man she loves is committed to obscuring everything, including himself.

The emotional damage is observed with almost forensic restraint. Hogg refuses melodrama, which paradoxically makes the heartbreak sharper. The relationship at the film’s centre is defined by asymmetry—of class, of confidence, of emotional literacy. Julie’s privilege cushions her but also blinds her; Anthony’s charm masks a rot he cannot or will not confront. Their dynamic becomes a study in how power operates quietly, through tone, through implication, through the stories we allow others to tell about us.

What’s remarkable is how Hogg uses the act of filmmaking itself as both subject and method. Julie’s artistic formation is inseparable from her romantic entanglement; the camera becomes a tool for understanding what she couldn’t articulate in the moment. The film feels like a reconstruction of a wound—precise, atmospheric, and unflinchingly honest about the cost of loving someone who is disappearing in front of you.

The atmosphere is almost tactile: the muted rooms, the half‑finished student films, the sense of a life being assembled piece by tentative piece. Hogg lets class seep in at the edges, never lecturing but always aware of how it shapes who gets forgiven, who gets believed, who gets to make art from their mistakes.

By the time the film reaches its final, quietly astonishing gesture, you realise you’ve been watching not just a love story but the forging of an artist—through pain, through confusion, through the slow, necessary act of learning to trust one’s own vision. It’s devastating in the way real memory is: not loud, but lingering, impossible to shake.

What’s Love Got to Do with It (2022) BBC One, 11:40pm

A culturally alert romantic comedy that examines modern marriage through the lens of tradition and compromise, keeping character at its centre while engaging seriously with social expectation.

🌟 The Souvenir Part II (2021) BBC Two, 12:55am

Hogg’s follow‑up doesn’t behave like a sequel so much as an aftershock—quieter, more deliberate, but carrying a deeper, more resonant force. Where The Souvenir charted the bewilderment of first love and first loss, Part II turns its attention to what comes after the devastation: the long, uneven labour of rebuilding a self that no longer fits the world it once inhabited.

What’s remarkable is how Hogg refuses the easy arc of recovery. Grief here isn’t a narrative obstacle to be cleared; it’s a climate, a weather system Julie must learn to navigate. The film tracks her attempts to make sense of what happened not through confession or catharsis, but through the act of creation itself. The student film she struggles to complete becomes a kind of emotional archaeology—an attempt to excavate the truth from memory, performance, and the stories she once accepted without question.

The atmosphere is richer, more expansive than in Part I, yet the emotional precision remains razor‑sharp. Hogg lets the contradictions breathe: the way Julie’s privilege both cushions and distorts her experience; the way art can clarify and obscure in the same gesture; the way grief can sharpen ambition even as it hollows out certainty. The film becomes a meditation on authorship—of one’s work, one’s past, one’s identity.

Taken together, the two films form an unusually intimate diptych, one of the most quietly radical achievements in recent British cinema. They chart the formation of an artist not through triumph but through vulnerability, confusion, and the slow, necessary work of learning to see clearly. Part II doesn’t resolve the story; it reframes it, revealing that the real souvenir isn’t the relationship lost, but the self that emerges in its wake.

Panorama: Maxed Out – The Credit Card Trap BBC One, 8:00pm

A forensic examination of modern debt culture as interest rates rise and lenders shift risk onto consumers. Quietly furious, the programme exposes how systemic pressure is reframed as personal failure.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Sky Atlantic, 9:00pm

There’s a welcome shift in scale here—a retreat from the apocalyptic sweep of Game of Thrones toward something more intimate, almost pastoral, without losing the moral turbulence that defines Westeros. Set a century earlier, the story follows Ser Duncan the Tall and his young squire Egg, a pairing that feels deceptively simple until you realise how much of the realm’s future is quietly coiled inside their relationship.

What distinguishes this prequel is its refusal to chase spectacle for its own sake. Instead, it leans into character: the awkward decency of Dunk, a man whose honour is instinctive rather than performative; the sharp, watchful intelligence of Egg, whose identity carries implications neither of them can fully outrun. Their travels take them through a Westeros still recognisable but less ossified—its power structures in flux, its loyalties brittle, its violence more personal than operatic.

The tone is gentler than its predecessor, but no less pointed. The show understands that the moral uncertainty of this world doesn’t always announce itself with dragons or dynastic collapse. Sometimes it’s a question of who gets fed, who gets punished, who gets believed. Dunk and Egg move through these tensions with a kind of earnestness that feels almost radical in a landscape built on cynicism.

What emerges is a story about the small acts of integrity that shape history long before anyone realises history is being made. The stakes may be quieter, but they’re no less consequential. In its best moments, the series feels like a reminder that Westeros was always at its most compelling not when kingdoms fell, but when ordinary people tried—often clumsily, often at great cost—to do the right thing.

Tuesday 20 January 2026

The Fighter (2010) Legend, 9:00pm

A bruising, performance‑driven boxing drama that understands victory as something provisional, never permanent, always paid for in flesh and family. The film’s real contest isn’t in the ring but in the cramped Lowell living rooms where loyalty becomes both a lifeline and a trap. Every punch lands with the weight of obligation, every small triumph shadowed by the cost of carrying those you can’t quite leave behind. It’s a story of survival as much as sport, where the emotional stakes are as punishing—and as compelling—as the physical ones.

🌟 The Crying Game (1992) Film4, 11:30pm

A film that refuses to sit neatly in any genre box, its power drawn from the things it withholds as much as what it reveals. Jordan builds a world of secrecy and emotional dislocation where every gesture feels loaded, every silence edged with threat. The ambiguity isn’t a trick but a texture—an invitation to sit with uncertainty and let the unease accumulate. Decades on, it still has the capacity to unsettle, not through shock but through the quiet, lingering sense that something essential has slipped just out of reach.

🌟 The Piano (1993) BBC Two, 12:00am

ane Campion’s ferociously sensual drama turns silence into its own kind of speech, a language carved out of longing, resistance, and the brutal asymmetries of colonial power. Holly Hunter’s Ada communicates an entire inner world through gesture and breath, her piano becoming both sanctuary and weapon, the only place where desire can be articulated without permission. Campion frames the New Zealand landscape as something vast and indifferent, a terrain that exposes the characters’ vulnerabilities as sharply as it shapes them. What emerges is a story where intimacy is negotiated through touch rather than words, where autonomy is fought for in the smallest, most physical acts. It remains a film of startling emotional force, its quietest moments carrying the weight of a scream.

The Rosenbergs: Atomic Spies PBS America, 8:35pm

A sober reassessment of one of the Cold War’s most polarising cases, examining evidence, ideology, and hysteria with careful restraint.

Wednesday 21 January 2026

Goldfinger (1964) ITV4, 9:00pm

Goldfinger has always sat near the top of my Bond canon, not because it is the most sophisticated or politically comfortable entry, but because it crystallises the series at the exact moment it understood its own power. It’s the film where the franchise stops experimenting and starts declaring itself—stylised, swaggering, and utterly aware of the cultural machinery it’s building. Watching it now, you can feel the template locking into place: the cold open as miniature thriller, the villain as outsized industrialist, the gadgets as both spectacle and satire. It’s Bond becoming Bond in real time, and there’s something irresistible about that confidence.

What draws me back most is the film’s sense of texture—its unapologetic embrace of excess, glamour, and danger as intertwined forces. Goldfinger’s world is one where wealth is both intoxicant and weapon, where the sheen of luxury is always a little too bright, a little too brittle. The film understands that seduction and threat are two sides of the same coin, and it plays them with a theatricality that feels almost operatic. Even the colour palette seems to conspire in this: gold as fetish, gold as corruption, gold as the thing that blinds men to their own downfall. It’s a visual metaphor delivered with a wink and a razor edge.

Then there’s Sean Connery, at the height of his dangerous charm. This is the Bond who moves through rooms as if he owns them, who treats violence as an extension of wit, who understands that the performance of masculinity is half the job. Connery’s Bond is not yet weary or self‑aware; he’s a man who believes in his own myth, and the film lets us see both the allure and the absurdity of that. It’s a performance that feels carved from the era’s anxieties about power, sex, and national identity, even as it pretends to be nothing more than a stylish adventure.

Goldfinger himself remains one of the franchise’s most compelling antagonists precisely because he is not a shadowy ideologue but a businessman with delusions of grandeur. His plan is ludicrous, yes, but it’s rooted in a recognisable logic of accumulation and control. He’s the kind of villain institutions create when they mistake ambition for virtue. And Oddjob—silent, implacable, almost ritualistic in his violence—feels like the embodiment of that logic’s consequences. Together they give the film a weight that offsets its more playful instincts, grounding the spectacle in something darker and more systemic.

Ultimately, Goldfinger endures for me because it captures the Bond franchise at its most self‑assured and least apologetic, a moment when style, menace, and fantasy align with almost mechanical precision. It’s a film that understands the seduction of power while quietly acknowledging its rot, that revels in its own artifice while hinting at the costs beneath the surface. In a series defined by reinvention, Goldfinger remains the touchstone—the one that shows how the myth was built, and why it still holds such sway.

Victoria: A Royal Love Story BBC Four, 9:00pm

A portrait of monarchy that works from the inside out, tracing the contours of power not through ceremony or statecraft but through the fragile, private spaces where affection becomes a political force. The film understands that Victoria’s authority was never exercised in isolation; it was shaped, softened, and sometimes constrained by the emotional dependencies that defined her marriage and her court. What emerges is a study of a woman negotiating the impossible dual role of sovereign and spouse, where vulnerability is not a weakness but a condition of rule.

It’s a story that treats intimacy as a form of governance, showing how personal loyalties and private tensions ripple outward into public consequence. The relationship between Victoria and Albert becomes a kind of constitutional experiment—two people trying to reconcile love with duty, individuality with expectation, all under the relentless scrutiny of an empire hungry for symbols. Their partnership is rendered not as fairy tale but as negotiation, full of tenderness, frustration, and the quiet recalibrations that sustain a shared life.

The film also captures the emotional labour embedded in monarchy, the way a ruler’s inner world becomes a matter of national interest. Victoria’s hesitations, her attachments, her griefs—they all become part of the machinery of power, shaping decisions and public moods in ways that official histories often flatten. By foregrounding this, the film restores a sense of humanity to a figure too often reduced to iconography.

Visually and tonally, it leans into the tension between the intimate and the imperial: candlelit rooms set against vast ceremonial spaces, whispered conversations echoing beneath the weight of inherited authority. It’s a reminder that monarchy is always a performance, but one fuelled by very real emotional stakes.

What lingers is the sense of a woman learning to inhabit her own myth while resisting its erasure of her private self. Victoria: A Royal Love Story suggests that power is never simply bestowed; it is shaped in the crucible of relationship, vulnerability, and the messy, ungovernable terrain of the heart.

Symbols of Evil PBS America, 8:35pm

A documentary that treats iconography not as static imagery but as a living, volatile force—something that can be bent, sharpened, and ultimately weaponised. It traces how symbols migrate from cultural shorthand to instruments of fear, acquiring authority not through inherent meaning but through repetition, spectacle, and the willingness of institutions to invest them with power. What begins as a mark or motif becomes a mechanism of control, shaping behaviour long before a word is spoken.

The film is particularly sharp on the way symbols operate beneath conscious thought. They bypass argument and go straight for the nervous system, embedding themselves in collective memory until they feel inevitable. That inevitability is the danger: once a symbol becomes naturalised, it can be used to justify almost anything. The documentary shows how regimes, movements, and even corporations understand this instinctively, cultivating imagery that can rally, intimidate, or erase with equal efficiency.

There’s also a clear sense of how symbols mutate under pressure. They’re never fixed; they’re contested spaces where meaning is fought over, reclaimed, or corrupted. The film tracks these shifts with a kind of forensic patience, revealing how the same emblem can be a beacon of identity for one group and a threat to another. It’s a reminder that visual language is always political, always in motion, always vulnerable to capture.

Visually, the documentary leans into the starkness of its subject matter—archival footage, close‑ups of artefacts, and the unsettling quiet of objects that have outlived the people who once wielded them. That stillness becomes its own commentary on endurance: symbols often survive the ideologies that created them, lingering as warnings or temptations depending on who encounters them next.

What lingers is the film’s insistence that symbols are never neutral. They shape the emotional climate in which decisions are made, loyalties formed, and violence justified. Symbols of Evil asks viewers to look harder, to question the images that claim authority over them, and to recognise how easily meaning can be twisted when fear becomes the organising principle of public life.

Killer Grannies Crime + Investigation, 9:00pm

A macabre true-crime series examining cases where social expectations collapse. Hosted by June Squibb, it plays on shock while exposing how violence hides behind familiarity.

Thursday 22 January 2026

🌟 Palestine Action: The Truth Behind the Ban Channel 4, 10:00pm

A timely and urgent Dispatches special examining the government’s decision to proscribe Palestine Action. It raises serious questions about civil liberties, proportionality, and the criminalisation of protest.

Strange Journey: The Rocky Horror Picture ShowSky Arts, 11:00pm

Strange Journey: The Rocky Horror Picture Show — Sky Arts, 11:00pm

A documentary that treats Rocky Horror not as a relic of midnight‑movie nostalgia but as a living organism—still mutating, still misbehaving, still refusing to be domesticated by the culture that once tried to smother it. What Sky Arts captures so well is the sheer durability of this strange little phenomenon: a piece of queer, camp, outsider theatre that somehow outpaced censorship, scandal, and decades of moral panic to become a communal ritual. It’s a reminder that subculture doesn’t just survive pressure; it often thrives because of it.

The film digs into the show’s origins with a kind of affectionate forensic curiosity, tracing how Richard O’Brien’s oddball experiment—part glam rock, part B‑movie pastiche, part sexual awakening—found its audience precisely because it didn’t ask for permission. The documentary understands that Rocky Horror’s power lies in its refusal to apologise for its own excess. It’s messy, transgressive, and defiantly unserious, and that unseriousness becomes a kind of liberation. You can feel the joy of a community discovering itself in real time.

There’s a sharp awareness, too, of how the show’s anarchic spirit became a lifeline for people who didn’t see themselves reflected anywhere else. The documentary gives space to the fans who built a culture around participation rather than passive consumption—shouting back, dressing up, claiming the cinema as a place where identity could be tried on, discarded, or embraced. It’s a portrait of fandom as self‑creation, long before the term became a marketing category.

Visually and tonally, the film leans into the tension between the show’s DIY origins and its later cultural ubiquity. Archival footage sits alongside contemporary reflections, creating a sense of continuity rather than nostalgia. The message is clear: Rocky Horror isn’t something that happened; it’s something that keeps happening, sustained by the people who refuse to let it ossify into heritage.

What lingers is the documentary’s insistence that joy can be radical. Strange Journey frames Rocky Horror as a testament to the resilience of the marginal, the playful, and the defiantly strange.

Kindling (2023) — BBC Three, 11:30pm

A quietly devastating drama that treats grief not as a narrative obstacle to be conquered but as a landscape young men are forced to navigate without a map. Kindling is striking for its emotional openness, its willingness to sit with the inarticulate, the awkward, the half‑formed attempts at connection that so often define male friendship. The film understands that masculinity, especially in youth, is a performance stitched together from fear and tenderness, and it refuses to neaten any of that into a comforting arc.

What gives the story its force is the way it captures the rituals of closeness—shared jokes, late‑night confessions, the unspoken agreements that hold a group together even as everything around them fractures. These boys aren’t equipped with the language of grief, so they build their own, piecemeal and imperfect. The film honours that improvisation rather than judging it, showing how love can be expressed through presence, distraction, and the stubborn refusal to let someone drift away alone.

There’s a tactile quality to the filmmaking that mirrors the emotional texture: sunlight on skin, the roughness of grass, the small domestic spaces where illness and friendship collide. These details ground the story in lived experience, reminding us that grief is not abstract—it’s physical, exhausting, and often strangely beautiful in the way it binds people together.

What the film resists, crucially, is catharsis. There’s no grand revelation, no tidy reconciliation, no moment where everything suddenly makes sense. Instead, Kindling offers something truer: the sense that grief reshapes rather than resolves, that the people left behind must learn to carry both memory and absence without instruction.

In the end, it’s that refusal to simplify emotional mess that makes Kindling linger. It’s a film that trusts its audience to sit with discomfort, to recognise the fragility beneath bravado, and to see masculinity not as armour but as something porous, vulnerable, and capable of profound care.

🌟 The Elephant Man (1980) BBC Four, 11:50pm

David Lynch’s most compassionate film works by stripping away the sensationalism that so often clings to stories of physical difference. Instead of leaning into horror, Lynch lets the fear sit with the onlookers, not with John Merrick himself. The result is a drama where dignity slowly eclipses spectacle, where the camera lingers not on deformity but on the quiet, searching humanity beneath it. It’s a film that understands restraint as a moral choice, refusing to exploit what it seeks to honour.

What gives the film its emotional force is the relationship between Merrick and Dr. Treves—a bond built on curiosity, guilt, and a growing recognition of shared vulnerability. Lynch treats their connection with a tenderness that feels almost radical, allowing moments of stillness to carry the weight of entire conversations. In these silences, the film finds its centre: the idea that compassion is not an instinct but a discipline, something learned, faltered in, and returned to. Hopkins and Hurt play this dance with extraordinary delicacy, each gesture revealing the cost of seeing another person fully.

By the time the film reaches its devastating final movement, The Elephant Man has become something far larger than a biographical drama. It’s a meditation on how societies decide who counts as human, and how easily cruelty can masquerade as curiosity. Lynch’s monochrome London—soot‑choked, fog‑bound, oppressive—becomes a moral landscape as much as a physical one. Yet within that darkness, the film insists on the possibility of grace. It’s this insistence, quiet but unshakeable, that makes it one of Lynch’s most enduring works.

Friday 23 January 2026

The G (2023) Film4, 9:00pm

A thriller that trusts atmosphere over adrenaline, The G builds its tension grain by grain, letting unease seep into the frame until it becomes almost tactile. This is menace understood not as spectacle but as accumulation—the way a look lingers too long, a silence stretches just a beat past comfort, a familiar landscape begins to feel subtly misaligned. The film’s power lies in that patience, in its refusal to rush toward confrontation when dread can do the work more effectively.

What emerges is a portrait of threat that feels rooted in lived experience rather than genre mechanics. The characters move through the story with the wary alertness of people who know danger rarely announces itself; it arrives in increments, in the slow tightening of circumstance. The film honours that truth, allowing paranoia to bloom organically, shaped by class, isolation, and the quiet violences that institutions overlook. It’s a thriller that understands fear as something that grows in the gaps—between neighbours, between generations, between what is said and what is meant.

By the time the tension finally crests, the film has earned every pulse of it. The G lingers because it recognises that the most unsettling stories are the ones that don’t explode—they seep, stain, and settle, leaving you with the sense that the real danger was never the event but the atmosphere that made it possible.

Benny’s Back (2018) BBC Three, 11:30pm

A compact, quietly unsettling drama, Benny’s Back understands that the real shock of a return isn’t the event itself but the way it destabilises the emotional architecture people have built in someone’s absence. The film treats Benny’s reappearance not as a plot twist but as a fault line, exposing the compromises, resentments, and half‑healed wounds that families learn to step around. It’s a story that trusts the audience to read the room—to notice the glances that last a beat too long, the pauses that say more than the dialogue ever could.

What makes the film compelling is its refusal to impose a neat emotional logic on the characters. Benny isn’t framed as saviour or saboteur; he’s simply a presence that forces everyone else to confront the versions of themselves they’ve been avoiding. The drama unfolds in the small ruptures—routine unsettled, loyalties tested, old patterns reasserting themselves with unnerving ease. The performances lean into this ambiguity, playing the tension with a kind of lived‑in naturalism that suggests a history too complicated to articulate.

By the end, Benny’s Back hasn’t resolved its tensions so much as illuminated them. The film’s power lies in its restraint, in its understanding that some returns don’t bring closure but clarity—an uncomfortable, necessary recognition of what has changed and what stubbornly hasn’t. It’s a drama that lingers precisely because it leaves space for the unsaid, trusting silence to carry the emotional truth.

Discovering Meryl Streep Sky Documentaries, 4:00pm

A career-spanning portrait of an actor whose intelligence and adaptability reshaped mainstream cinema across five decades.

Streaming Choice

Sandokan — Netflix (from Monday 19 January)

A lush, swashbuckling adventure centred on Sandokan, the Malaysian pirate‑prince who wages a guerrilla war against British colonial power. The series follows his battles across Borneo and the South China Sea, where rebellion, loyalty, and mythmaking collide with his unexpected romance with Lady Marianna, the consul’s daughter drawn into his world. What emerges is a tale of resistance wrapped in spectacle and desire, driven by a hero who refuses to bow to empire.

Drops of Gold – Season 2 — Apple TV+ (episodes 1–2 from Wednesday 21 January)

Season 2 picks up three years after the inheritance battle, sending Camille and Issei on a globe‑spanning quest to uncover the origin of a legendary wine even Alexandre Léger couldn’t identify. Their rivalry deepens into a fraught partnership as they navigate centuries‑old secrets, buried histories, and the emotional fallout of their shared past. The result is a richer, more expansive chapter—part mystery, part family reckoning—rooted in the show’s signature blend of sensory precision and high‑stakes oenological drama.

The Big Fake — Netflix (from Friday 23 January)

A gritty Italian period drama based on the true story of Toni Chichiarelli, a young painter in 1970s Rome whose talent leads him into the world of high‑stakes art forgery. The series follows his slide from idealistic artist to underworld operator, moving through galleries, criminal networks, and the shadowy overlap between culture and corruption. What emerges is a stylish, morally slippery character study about ambition, reinvention, and the dangerous allure of becoming someone other than yourself.

Cosmic Princess Kaguya — Netflix (from Thursday 22 January)

A neon‑bright reimagining of Japan’s oldest folktale, this animated musical follows Iroha, a Tokyo teenager who discovers a mysterious girl from the moon emerging from a glowing telephone pole. Drawn into the virtual world of Tsukuyomi, the two forge a creative partnership—part streaming hustle, part cosmic destiny—as Kaguya becomes an overnight star. The result is a dazzling blend of myth, metaverse, and emotional coming‑of‑age, driven by music, spectacle, and the fragile bond between two girls caught between worlds.

The Beauty — Disney+ (first three episodes from Thursday 22 January)

A glossy, unsettling thriller set in the global fashion world, where a string of supermodel deaths exposes a designer virus that makes its hosts physically flawless while hiding lethal consequences. FBI agents Cooper Madsen and Jordan Bennett are drawn into a chase that spans Paris, Venice, Rome, and New York as they uncover a conspiracy engineered by a tech billionaire using beauty as both lure and weapon. What unfolds is a stylish collision of glamour, body horror, and moral reckoning, tracing how perfection becomes the most dangerous currency of all.