Counter Culture

Culture Vulture Podcast — 7–13 February 2026

Welcome back to Culture Vulture, your weekly guide to what’s worth watching, thinking about, and getting lost in. I’m Ryan, and this week’s lineup is shaped by ambition, aftermath, and the limits — moral, social, environmental — that define the stories we tell. Across film and television, creators are wrestling with what happens when people push beyond the boundaries of comfort, certainty, or even common sense. From ancient civilisations reanimated with fresh clarity to the melancholy arc of Concorde’s rise and retreat, it’s a week that asks us to look closely at the systems we inherit and the choices we make inside them.

Let’s dive in.

Saturday

We start on Saturday morning with Hitchcock’s Lifeboat . It’s one of his most controlled exercises in tension — a single location, a handful of survivors, and nowhere to hide. What makes it so enduring isn’t the wartime setting but the way crisis strips people down to their essentials. Class, ideology, and personal grievance all jostle for space in a vessel barely big enough to hold them. Eighty years on, its unease hasn’t softened. It’s a reminder that character is revealed more reliably by pressure than by comfort.

Later in the afternoon, Armando Iannucci’s The Personal History of David Copperfield offers something gentler but no less thoughtful. Dev Patel anchors a brisk, generous adaptation that treats Dickens not as a museum piece but as a living conversation about identity and belonging. The film’s theatrical flourishes and shifts in perspective feel true to the way memory works — fragmented, playful, and deeply human.

Then, as evening approaches, Flash Gordon bursts onto the screen in all its technicolour bravado. It’s a film that refuses subtlety at every turn, leaning into camp excess with total conviction. Ornella Muti’s Princess Aura embodies the film’s flirtatious streak — part seduction, part power play — and Queen’s operatic thunder does the rest. It’s pure sensation, and it knows exactly what it’s doing.

At 8.30pm, Alice Roberts opens her new series Ancient Rome by Train with a fresh look at Pompeii. Instead of treating the city as a frozen tableau, she restores its movement — the rhythms of work, trade, and domestic life that defined it long before disaster struck. It’s history delivered with clarity and restraint, trusting viewers to appreciate detail without spectacle.

And if you’re still awake in the early hours, Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse awaits. A storm‑lashed descent into isolation and myth, it traps Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson in a world where reality slips just enough to keep you unsteady. Hypnotic, punishing, and impossible to shake.

Sunday

Sunday night brings Betrayal , a drama that favours quiet tension over flashy espionage. Loyalties blur, relationships strain, and every conversation feels like it’s doing two jobs at once. It’s a restrained opener, but the psychological pressure is deliberate — a slow burn that could build into something gripping.

At 10pm, Emily reframes Emily Brontë not as a literary monument but as a young woman wrestling with desire, grief, and imagination. Emma Mackey gives a performance that’s restless and sharp, capturing creativity as something closer to compulsion than accomplishment. The moors become emotional weather, shifting with her inner life.

And past midnight, Past Lives offers one of the quietest, most devastating films of recent years. Built on pauses, glances, and the ache of paths not taken, it explores how intimacy evolves across continents and decades. Nothing is overstated, yet everything lands.

Monday

Monday’s standout is Knife Crime: What Happened to Our Boys? — a documentary that refuses sensationalism. Instead, it traces the long chain of decisions and omissions that shape young people’s lives: youth services stripped back, schools stretched thin, families without support. Interviews are handled with care, giving space to parents, frontline workers, and young people themselves. It’s difficult viewing, but necessary if the conversation is ever going to move beyond rhetoric.

Later, the first part of Concorde: The Race for Supersonic digs into the geopolitical gamble behind the aircraft’s creation. Concorde wasn’t just a technological marvel; it was a Cold War project driven by prestige, rivalry, and audacity. The documentary captures the scale of the ambition — and the fragility beneath it.

The second episode, airing immediately after, shifts from triumph to melancholy. Environmental protests, sonic‑boom anxieties, and overland bans shrink Concorde’s usefulness, turning a symbol of national pride into a luxury service for the few. It’s a thoughtful, elegiac conclusion.

Tuesday

On Tuesday, The Secret Science of Sewage takes a subject usually ignored and reveals its complexity. Sewage systems emerge as one of the great, uncelebrated feats of modern civilisation — protecting public health, managing environmental pressure, and absorbing the consequences of population growth. Engineers and microbiologists explain the ingenuity and fragility of the networks beneath our feet. Infrastructure is only boring until it fails.

Later that night, Deliverance returns with its undimmed power. What begins as a weekend adventure becomes a reckoning with masculinity, fragility, and the indifference of the natural world. The forest isn’t malevolent — just unmoved by human drama — and that’s what makes the film so unsettling.

Wednesday

Wednesday brings 3:10 to Yuma , a Western pared back to its essentials. Christian Bale and Russell Crowe circle each other in a moral negotiation where every conversation feels like a test of integrity. The tension builds not from spectacle but from the erosion of certainty — who these men are, what they owe, and how far they’ll go to hold their ground.

Earlier in the evening, Hunt for the Oldest DNA pushes the boundaries of what ancient material can reveal. Scientists extract fragments from environments once thought too degraded to yield anything meaningful, offering glimpses of ecosystems and climates that predate human memory. It’s lucid, absorbing, and quietly awe‑inspiring.

Thursday

Thursday’s highlight is Becoming Victoria Wood , a portrait that looks beyond the familiar warmth of her comedy to the discipline and craft behind it. Colleagues describe the rigour beneath the charm — the way she shaped a line, tightened a rhythm, and reworked a sketch until it landed exactly as intended. It’s a reminder that brilliance rarely happens by accident.

Later, Not Welcome: The Battle to Stop the Boats tackles one of Britain’s most charged political issues with steadiness rather than noise. It traces how policy, rhetoric, and electoral calculation collide with the realities faced by people on the move. The documentary refuses to soften contradictions or sand down the impact.

Friday

Friday night opens with Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre , a haunted echo of Murnau’s classic. Klaus Kinski’s Dracula is a lonely, plague‑ridden figure, and Isabelle Adjani’s Lucy brings luminous fatalism to the story. It’s eerie, mournful, and strangely beautiful — horror as existential condition.

Then comes Babylon , Damien Chazelle’s sprawling, chaotic portrait of early Hollywood. It’s a sensory overload of ambition, appetite, and reinvention, anchored by Margot Robbie and Diego Calva. The film isn’t interested in tidy nostalgia; it’s after the volatility of an industry reinventing itself in real time.

And finally, Queenpins offers a lighter close to the week — a brisk crime caper built around a real coupon‑fraud scheme. Kristen Bell and Kirby Howell‑Baptiste make a sharp double act, navigating the absurdities of consumer capitalism with wit and momentum.

STREAMING PICKS

On streaming, Lead Children delivers a stark, unsettling look at communities living with the consequences of environmental contamination. It’s restrained but quietly furious.

Lolita Lobosco returns for a third series with its blend of sunlit charm and knotty crime, while Speakerine offers a stylish, incisive drama set behind the scenes of French television’s golden age.

Cross deepens its psychological focus in its second season, and How to Get to Heaven from Belfast blends dark comedy with thoughtful reflections on faith, guilt, and reinvention.

That’s your week in culture — a mix of ambition, aftermath, and the stories that emerge when people push against the limits of their world. I’m Ryan, and this has been Culture Vulture. Thanks for listening, and I’ll be back next week with more to explore.

Script by Pat Harrington, voiced by Ryan

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