Counter Culture

Welcome to this week’s Culture Vulture. Love and power. Empire and collapse. Romance, revenge, political reckoning. This week’s television and film schedule doesn’t just entertain — it excavates. It moves from the ashes of Vesuvius to the fallout of Iraq, from Valentine’s ballads to the moral ambiguity of espionage and ambition. Rome looms large, both as ancient superstructure and modern metaphor, while Britain turns again to one of its most divisive prime ministers, testing the stories it tells about itself.

Across the week, desire is set against duty, myth against memory, and private longing against public consequence. The programmes form a kind of emotional and political atlas: lovers separated by fate, leaders undone by their own certainty, rebels crushed or sanctified by history, and artists trying to make sense of the ruins left behind. Even the lighter offerings carry shadows — nostalgia threaded with unease, comedy edged with mortality, romance haunted by what it chooses not to say.

This is a schedule about reckoning: with power, with legacy, with the stories that survive us.

Selections and reviews are by Pat Harrington.

🌟 Highlights this week:

The Tony Blair Story (BBC Two / Channel 4) — political biography as national self-examination.

The Taste of Things (BBC Four) — sensual, slow cinema about love expressed through craft.

Bonnie and Clyde (BBC Two) — still electric, still destabilising American myth.

Saturday 14th February

Zulu Legend, 2:00pm

A siege film that helped crystallise Britain’s imperial self‑image, Zulu stages its drama with almost ritual clarity: red coats set against an immense, indifferent landscape; a tiny outpost bracing itself against a tide it cannot comprehend. The film’s power lies not only in its spectacle but in the way it frames discipline as both virtue and burden — a brittle shield held up against fear, doubt, and the sheer scale of the world beyond the mission walls.

Its visual command remains undeniable: the geometry of the defensive lines, the choreography of movement across open ground, the contrast between rigid military order and the fluidity of the Zulu forces. Yet the politics of its era sit heavily on the frame. You can feel the film straining to honour courage while avoiding the deeper truths of empire, creating a kind of mythic standoff where psychology matters more than context.

What lingers is the study of hierarchy under pressure. Officers and enlisted men negotiate authority in real time, their clipped exchanges revealing cracks in the Victorian ideal of composure. Watch how fear travels — not in grand gestures, but in glances, hesitations, and the way men cling to routine as if it were armour. The film becomes, almost inadvertently, a portrait of a system trying to hold itself together as the world presses in from all sides.

Wuthering Heights Sky Arts, 7:00pm

Emily Brontë without the drawing‑room varnish. This Bristol Old Vic staging tears away the polite Victorian framing and lets the novel’s raw weather in — the moorland wind, the ferocity, the ungovernable longing. What emerges is a story driven not by manners but by appetite, where Heathcliff and Cathy feel less like characters and more like forces of nature grinding against the limits of their world.

The production leans into obsession as a kind of inheritance: love as curse, memory as trap. There’s a physicality to it — bodies flung across space, emotions that refuse to be domesticated — that restores the novel’s original strangeness. These aren’t literary ornaments but volatile presences, shaped by cruelty, class, and the bleak grandeur of the landscape.

Watch how the staging treats the moors not as backdrop but as a psychological terrain. The wildness outside becomes the wildness within, and the result is a Wuthering Heights that feels closer to myth than melodrama: a storm given human form.

The Roman Empire by Train with Alice Roberts Channel 4, 9:00pm

Episode two takes Roberts south into the shadow of Vesuvius — Herculaneum’s petrified streets, Capua’s amphitheatre, and the lingering imprint of Spartacus. It’s a journey through the architecture of revolt, where stone and ash become a kind of forensic record. Roberts has a gift for making empire tactile: the weight of masonry, the scorch of history, the way rebellion leaves marks long after the bodies are gone. What emerges is a portrait of Rome not as abstraction but as lived environment — built, broken, and contested.

Sleepless in Seattle Film4, 9:00pm

Romance in its gentlest, most disarming form. Nora Ephron builds a world where connection travels by radio waves and longing feels both old‑fashioned and strangely modern. What stands out now is the film’s faith — almost radical in our era — that two people can find each other through sincerity rather than spectacle. Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan orbit one another with a kind of soft gravitational pull, their stories unfolding in parallel until destiny, or something like it, nudges them into alignment. It’s a film that believes in hope without embarrassment, and that’s its quiet power.

The Taste of Things 🌟BBC Four, 9:35pm

Cooking as devotion; intimacy shaped through ritual. Trần Anh Hùng’s film moves with a slow, confident breath, savouring texture, silence, and the unspoken language of people who understand each other through craft. Every dish becomes an act of care, every gesture a negotiation of love and longing. It’s a romance built not on declarations but on the choreography of a shared kitchen — a world where flavour becomes feeling and the work of creation is its own form of tenderness.

Bullet Train Channel 4, 10:00pm

Assassins, coincidence, and a streak of neon‑lit nihilism. David Leitch’s film is stylish, self‑aware, and relentlessly kinetic — a pop‑violence carousel where fate, bad luck, and competing agendas collide at 200mph. It’s less about plot than momentum, a candy‑coloured brawl stitched together with deadpan humour and an almost comic‑book sense of inevitability. The pleasure is in the choreography: blades, banter, and bodies ricocheting through a sealed metal world that refuses to slow down.

Love Songs at the BBC BBC Two, 10:00pm–12:00am

Three volumes of archival romance, stitched together from decades of studio sessions and televised longing. The BBC vaults open onto a parade of voices: Dusty Springfield giving heartbreak its velvet edge; Elton John turning confession into spectacle; Sade smoothing desire into something effortless; Annie Lennox making melancholy feel operatic. You get Motown polish, 70s soul, 80s synth‑soft yearning, and the kind of live‑room intimacy that modern pop rarely allows.

It’s love as broadcast history — a chronicle of how Britain has sung about devotion, disappointment, and the hope that someone, somewhere, is listening. The pleasure is in the shifts of tone: torch songs, power ballads, whispered promises, all preserved in the glow of studio lights. A reminder that romance, in all its forms, has always found its way onto the airwaves.

Fresh Film4, 11:10pm

Modern dating horror with a serrated satirical bite. Mimi Cave’s debut takes the rituals of courtship — apps, charm, curated vulnerability — and pushes them to grotesque extremes, turning intimacy into a literal transaction. What begins as a meet‑cute curdles into a study of power, appetite, and the commodification of bodies, all wrapped in a cool, stylish aesthetic that makes the brutality feel even more pointed. It’s a film that understands the anxieties of contemporary romance and exaggerates them just enough to feel uncomfortably plausible.

Mary Beard’s Ultimate Rome PBS America, from 1:00pm (back-to-back)

Empire examined through infrastructure, citizenship, and the long arc of decline. Beard moves through aqueducts, roads, forums, and frontiers with her usual forensic clarity, showing how Rome’s power was engineered as much as imagined. She strips away the marble‑and‑myth version of antiquity to reveal a society held together by bureaucracy, mobility, and the constant negotiation of who counted as Roman. Across these back‑to‑back episodes, grandeur becomes something lived rather than legendary — a system built by people, strained by ambition, and ultimately undone by its own scale.

Sunday 15th February

Lord of the Flies BBC One, 9:00pm

Episode two deepens the fracture: Jack hunts, order frays, and the island’s thin social contract buckles. Golding’s thesis — that civilisation is a fragile performance — remains unsettlingly durable. This version captures the escalation, though its polish sometimes blunts the book’s feral edge; the chaos feels curated when it should feel contagious. Still, the moral slide is unmistakable, and the boys’ drift toward violence lands with a familiar, queasy inevitability.

Cape Fear Legend, 9:00pm

Scorsese’s operatic revenge thriller, all sweat, dread, and moral corrosion. De Niro coils himself into a kind of biblical fury — a serpent‑like Max Cady whose righteousness curdles into something apocalyptic. The film plays like a nightmare in primary colours: thunder, neon, and the relentless pressure of a man convinced he’s an instrument of justice. It’s melodrama sharpened to a blade, a study in fear as performance and punishment.

Midnight Run Great TV, 9:00pm

A buddy movie with bruises and heart. De Niro and Grodin spar, bicker, and negotiate their way toward a reluctant respect that feels earned rather than engineered. Martin Brest keeps the pace loose but purposeful, letting the chemistry do the heavy lifting: one man running from his past, the other running out of patience. What emerges is a road‑movie fugue of bad luck, sharp dialogue, and the slow realisation that unlikely alliances can be the most enduring.

Newsnight – Interview with Gisèle Pelicot BBC Two, 10:00pm

A grave, necessary broadcast. Pelicot speaks in the long shadow of a case that shocked France, and the world — a story of manipulation, coercion, and institutional failure that forced a reckoning far beyond the courtroom. Her testimony has already reshaped public debate around power, consent, and the blind spots that allow abuse to flourish. What stands out is her bravery: the steadiness with which she recounts what happened, and the refusal to let silence protect those who harmed her.

Newsnight gives the space and seriousness the moment demands. Testimony as defiance; television as witness.

Crimes of the Future BBC Two, 11:55pm

Cronenberg’s surgical futurism at its most deliberate: a world where pain has vanished, bodies mutate as casually as ideas, and art becomes an incision. Crimes of the Future treats flesh as philosophy — organs as manifestos, performance as provocation — pushing its characters into a future where evolution and exploitation blur. It’s cool, clinical, and strangely mournful, a meditation on what humanity becomes when the body stops obeying the old rules.

A film that asks you not just to watch, but to contemplate what’s growing beneath the surface.

Queer BBC Three, 11:55pm

Burroughs’ longing rendered febrile, intimate, and slightly unmoored. This adaptation leans into the novel’s jittery interiority — desire without resolution, affection warped by self‑loathing, and the ache of wanting someone who can’t quite be reached. It’s a story built from glances, hesitations, and the restless drift of a man chasing connection across a landscape that keeps slipping from his grasp.

A fragile, hallucinatory portrait of yearning that refuses tidy catharsis.

Monday 16th February

Carry On Screaming Talking Pictures, 2:15pm

A slice of British comic history, delivered with the series’ trademark mix of innuendo, slapstick, and cheerful irreverence. The Carry On films occupy a peculiar but enduring place in the national imagination — low‑budget farces that began in the late 1950s as service comedies before mutating into a long‑running satire of British institutions, from hospitals to holidays to the police. What they lacked in polish they made up for in timing, ensemble chemistry, and a kind of bawdy resilience that carried them through two decades of cultural change.

Carry On Screaming is one of the more distinctive entries: a Hammer‑horror pastiche with fog, capes, and Kenneth Williams at his most gloriously mannered. It shows the series at a moment when it was experimenting with genre while still clinging to its familiar rhythms — double‑takes, misunderstandings, and jokes that land through sheer commitment. A reminder of how these films, for all their datedness, became part of Britain’s comic DNA.

Late Night with the Devil Film4, 11:05pm

A 1970s chat show becomes a séance, and the era’s hunger for spectacle curdles into something genuinely uncanny. The film plays with the grammar of live television — studio lights, audience patter, the illusion of control — and then lets the supernatural seep through the cracks. What begins as ratings desperation turns into a study of how far broadcasters will push the boundary between entertainment and exploitation.

Media spectacle meets the occult, and the result is a clever, creeping horror about the dangers of inviting darkness on air.

Tuesday 17th February

The Sting Legend, 2:30pm

A pair of small‑time grifters — a smooth hustler and a washed‑up old pro — team up to take down a Chicago crime boss after one of their own is killed. What follows is a long con built from false fronts, rigged bets, and a web of deceptions so intricate it feels like a stage play unfolding in real time.

Con artistry becomes choreography. Newman and Redford glide through the deception with an ease that borders on musical, every gesture part of a larger design. The film’s charm lies in its precision: the period detail, the ragtime swagger, the pleasure of watching two performers at the height of their powers outwit everyone in the room — including, occasionally, the audience.

Notorious Talking Pictures, 4:30pm

Hitchcock’s romantic espionage classic, where love and sacrifice knot themselves into something quietly devastating. Ingrid Bergman’s Alicia is recruited to infiltrate a Nazi circle in post‑war Rio, and Cary Grant’s Devlin becomes both handler and hesitant lover — a dynamic built on mistrust, longing, and the cost of duty.

The film sits at a pivotal moment in Hitchcock’s development: the shift from his British thrillers to the sleek, psychologically charged Hollywood style that would define him. Notorious blends suspense with emotional precision, showing how espionage corrodes intimacy and how devotion can become its own form of peril.

Love and sacrifice entwined, with the tension tightening frame by frame.

Renfield Film4, 9:00pm

Dracula reframed through dependency and dark comedy. Nicholas Hoult plays Renfield, the long‑suffering familiar who has spent a century fetching victims, cleaning up carnage, and absorbing the emotional shrapnel of serving the world’s most toxic boss. When he stumbles into a self‑help group for people trapped in abusive relationships, he begins to realise that his devotion to Dracula isn’t loyalty — it’s codependence weaponised.

The plot follows Renfield’s attempt to break free: moving into his own apartment, trying to form normal connections, and tentatively imagining a life not dictated by fear or obligation. But Dracula, played by Nicolas Cage in full theatrical relish, refuses to be abandoned. Cage leans into operatic menace — velvet‑lined ego, wounded pride, and a level of camp grandeur that makes every entrance feel like a gothic punchline.

As Renfield allies with a determined New Orleans cop, the film becomes a collision of genres: supernatural slapstick, action mayhem, and a surprisingly sincere story about reclaiming autonomy from someone who feeds on your weakness. Beneath the gore and gags sits a pointed metaphor about leaving controlling relationships — and the messy, exhilarating work of choosing yourself.

A horror‑comedy with bite, charm, and just enough sincerity to make the absurdity land.

The Tony Blair Story 🌟 BBC Two, 9:00pm – Episode 1 of 3, “Who Are You?”

The opening chapter revisits a leader who promised transformation and left behind a country still arguing over the bill. The programme charts Blair’s ascent through the language of modernisation — the smile, the spin, the centrist gloss — while quietly exposing how much of that project relied on presentation over substance. New Labour’s early triumphs are set against the machinery that enabled them: media choreography, ruthless message discipline, and a willingness to blur ideology in pursuit of power.

Reformer or war criminal? The question isn’t posed for shock value; it’s the unavoidable hinge of his legacy. This episode sharpens the contradictions rather than smoothing them: the peace‑broker who embraced interventionism, the communicator who mastered sincerity, the leader who rebranded Britain while deepening its fractures. A portrait of ambition that now reads as prelude to disillusionment — political biography as an autopsy of a project that remade the country and then lost its moral centre.

Bonnie and Clyde 🌟BBC Two, 11:00pm

A landmark of New Hollywood and the moment the old studio system finally cracked. Arthur Penn’s film detonated onto screens in 1967 with a mix of French New Wave cool, Depression‑era grit, and a level of violence that felt shocking not just for its bloodshed but for its beauty. Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway play the outlaw lovers as icons in the making — glamorous, reckless, and already half‑mythologised even as the bullets start flying.

The plot traces their rise from petty theft to folk‑hero celebrity, a crime spree reframed as a rebellion against a country failing its young. But the film’s real power lies in how it exposes the machinery of American mythmaking: the press that romanticises them, the public that cheers them on, and the violence that ultimately consumes them. Glamour fused with brutality; legend forged in real time.

A rupture moment — the point where American cinema stopped playing safe and started telling stories that bled.

Storyville – “The Darkest Web” BBC Four, 10:00pm

A documentary that begins with a simple premise — undercover officers entering encrypted criminal marketplaces — and quickly reveals the scale of what lies beneath the surface of the internet. The film traces how investigators embed themselves in darknet forums, posing as buyers, brokers, or facilitators, navigating spaces where anonymity is currency and every interaction could be a trap. What emerges is a portrait of a digital underworld built on encrypted messaging, cryptocurrency laundering, and the illusion of consequence‑free crime.

It also makes clear the human cost of this work. These officers are exposed to some of the most vile material circulating online, absorbing psychological damage so that ordinary people never have to see it. It’s a true sacrifice — a form of service that rarely receives public recognition, yet underpins every successful operation.

Surveillance in the fibre‑optic age means algorithms, metadata, and patient infiltration rather than stakeouts and wiretaps. The documentary captures both the ingenuity and the fragility of these operations — how a single slip can collapse months of undercover work, and how the border between observer and participant threatens to blur.

A sober, unsettling look at the hidden architectures of the internet, and the people trying to hold the line in a space designed to evade them.

Wednesday 18th February

Alice Roberts: Our Hospital Through Time Channel 5, 8:00pm

t Bartholomew’s Hospital as living institution — nine centuries of care layered into stone, wards, and ritual. Founded in 1123 by Rahere, a courtier‑turned‑cleric, Barts is the oldest surviving hospital in Britain, its history running from medieval charity through Reformation upheaval, Victorian expansion, and the birth of the NHS. The architecture reads like an archive: Wren’s eighteenth‑century buildings, the later surgical wings, the modern specialist units — each era leaving its own philosophy of medicine etched into the fabric.

Roberts traces how treatment, training, and public health evolved within these walls, showing how a hospital becomes a mirror of the society it serves. A story of continuity and reinvention, where the past is never quite past, and care is both a practice and a legacy.

The Tony Blair Story BBC Two, 9:00pm – Episode 2 of 3, “Iraq”

The episode tackles the decision that didn’t just define Blair’s premiership — it detonated it. The road to Iraq is laid out as a sequence of choices that look increasingly indefensible in hindsight: intelligence massaged into certainty, legal advice narrowed to a sliver, dissent sidelined, and a prime minister so convinced of his own moral clarity that he mistook conviction for evidence. The programme shows how the case for war was built on foundations that were, at best, wishful thinking and, at worst, wilfully misleading.

The critique lands hardest in the aftermath. The collapse of the WMD narrative, the civilian toll, the regional unravelling — all set against Blair’s insistence that history would vindicate him. Instead, the episode suggests a leader trapped by his own rhetoric, unable to acknowledge the scale of the catastrophe he helped unleash. Trust in government never recovered; neither did Britain’s foreign‑policy credibility. The political damage was immense, but the human cost — borne by Iraqis and by those sent to fight — is the indictment that lingers.

A scathing, unflinching account of a decision that turned a moderniser into a cautionary tale, and a premiership into a warning about the dangers of certainty unmoored from reality.

Breaking the Code BBC Four, 10:15pm (preceded by Derek Jacobi Remembers at 10:00pm)

Alan Turing’s brilliance and persecution — a story that only grows more resonant as Britain continues to reckon with how it treats those who serve it. The drama traces his codebreaking genius at Bletchley Park, the mathematical imagination that helped shorten the Second World War, and the private life the state chose to criminalise. It’s a portrait of a man who gave the country an incalculable gift and was repaid with cruelty.

The aftermath still stings: the investigation, the conviction, the forced hormonal “treatment”, and the quiet devastation that followed. I have a quaint belief that people who do good things for the country should be looked after — not hounded, humiliated, or destroyed. Turing’s fate remains a national shame, even if some steps have since been taken to acknowledge the wrong:

• The 2001 statue in Manchester by Glyn Hughes, honouring Turing as a pioneer rather than a criminal.
• The 2009 public apology from Prime Minister Gordon Brown, recognising the state’s “appalling” treatment of him.
• The 2013 posthumous royal pardon, formally overturning his conviction.
• The 2017 “Turing Law”, extending posthumous pardons to thousands of men convicted under the same discriminatory legislation.
• His selection for the £50 note (issued 2021), placing his face — and his equations — at the centre of British currency.

These gestures don’t undo the harm, but they mark a slow, overdue shift in how the country remembers him.

A work of remembrance and indictment, carried by Jacobi’s precision and the moral clarity of a story Britain is still learning how to tell.

Sequin in a Blue Room Channel 4, 2:15am

A thriller‑tinged coming‑of‑age story set in the anonymous glow of hookup apps and private parties. Sequin, a sixteen‑year‑old drifting through desire and disconnection, slips into a world of coded invitations and shifting identities. After a chance encounter at the secretive “Blue Room” — a party where names are irrelevant and rules are few — he becomes fixated on finding a man he met only briefly. That search pulls him into a network of older men, blurred boundaries, and dangers he’s too young to fully read.

The film captures queer adolescence in transient digital spaces: the thrill of possibility, the ache of invisibility, and the way intimacy can feel both immediate and unreachable. Small scale, sharp emotion — a story about longing, risk, and the fragile hope of being truly seen.

Thursday 19th February

Ed Stafford: Right of Passage Discovery, 9:00pm

A series built around the rituals that mark the transition from youth to adulthood across different cultures, with Stafford stepping into ceremonies that are as much about identity and belonging as they are about endurance. Each episode follows him as he joins communities whose rites of passage still carry social, spiritual, or ancestral weight — from initiation rituals and tests of courage to symbolic acts that bind individuals to their people.

The programme treats these rites not as exotic trials but as living frameworks: ways of teaching responsibility, resilience, and communal duty. Stafford’s presence is less about proving toughness and more about understanding why these traditions endure, what they demand, and what they give back. The physical challenges — isolation, pain, fear, or ritualised hardship — are only part of the story. The deeper focus is on the values encoded within them: respect for elders, continuity of knowledge, and the moment a young person is recognised as someone who now carries part of the community’s future.

Rites of passage, seen up close, become a reminder that adulthood is not just something that happens to you — it’s something societies shape, test, and welcome.

The Tony Blair Story 🌟 Channel 4, 9:00pm – Episode 3 of 3, “The Loss of Power”

The final reckoning — not a gentle fade‑out but a slow, public unravelling. This episode charts the years when Blair’s authority drained away in full view: cabinet rebellions, backbench mutiny, a party that no longer believed its own leader, and a country that had stopped listening. The programme shows a premiership hollowed by Iraq, trapped in its own justifications, and increasingly defined by the gap between the rhetoric of moral purpose and the reality of political fallout.

The scathing edge comes from the portrait of a leader who mistook stubbornness for principle. Blair clung to the idea that history would vindicate him even as the evidence mounted that history was moving on without him. The episode lays bare the contradictions: a moderniser who became a liability to his own project, a communicator who lost the public, a strategist who could no longer read the room. By the end, the handover to Brown feels less like a transition than an evacuation.

Reputation calcifies; consequence settles in. Political biography becomes a meditation on what happens when power outlives trust — and when a leader cannot see that the story has already closed around him.

The Beguiled Legend, 9:00pm

A Civil War chamber piece where desire curdles into danger. Sofia Coppola pares the story down to its essentials: a wounded Union soldier taken in by a secluded girls’ school in Virginia, his presence unsettling the fragile equilibrium of women who have been living in enforced stillness. What begins as an act of mercy becomes a slow‑burn contest of attention, jealousy, and power, each character negotiating the boundaries between compassion and self‑preservation.

Coppola turns the house into a pressure cooker — lace curtains, whispered alliances, and the creeping sense that repression is its own kind of violence. The soldier’s charm becomes a catalyst, exposing rivalries and long‑suppressed desires, until the genteel façade gives way to something far more ruthless. Desire, repression, quiet poison. A story about what happens when the world outside collapses and the world inside turns feral.

Long Shot BBC Two, 11:00pm

A political rom‑com with media‑savvy charm, pairing Charlize Theron’s poised Secretary of State with Seth Rogen’s shambolic journalist in a story that plays sincerity against spin. The plot follows her presidential ambitions colliding with their unlikely reconnection, forcing both characters to navigate the gap between public image and private desire.

The film works because it understands the theatre of modern politics: the choreography of messaging, the compromises demanded by donors and optics, and the way authenticity becomes a performance in itself. Beneath the jokes sits a sharper question about what it costs to be principled in a system built to sand down edges.

A glossy, surprisingly warm satire about power, idealism, and the hazards of falling for someone who refuses to stay on script.

Friday 20th February

Lord Jim Talking Pictures, 1:55pm

Conrad’s great moral odyssey, rendered in widescreen. Peter O’Toole plays Jim, a young officer whose moment of cowardice during a crisis at sea becomes the wound he spends the rest of his life trying to cauterise. The plot follows him from port to port — a man in flight from his own shame — until he finds a remote community willing to see him as the hero he wishes he had been. That fragile redemption is tested by betrayal, violence, and the return of the past he thought he’d buried.

Honour, cowardice, redemption: the classic Conrad triad. The film leans into the novel’s central tension — whether a single failure defines a life, or whether a man can remake himself through courage, sacrifice, and the willingness to stand firm when it finally matters. A story about the weight of conscience and the cost of trying to live up to an ideal you once failed to meet.

A corrective to decades of rock history told through the wrong lens. Women Who Rock traces the lineage of artists who shaped the sound, style, and attitude of modern music, yet were too often sidelined in the official narratives. From blues matriarchs and punk pioneers to stadium‑filling icons and genre‑bending innovators, the series reframes women not as footnotes or muses but as architects — the people who built the foundations others stood on.

The programme digs into the erasures: the riffs borrowed without credit, the scenes built by women but branded by men, the industry gatekeeping that kept some of the most influential voices off the marquee. What emerges is a richer, truer history — one where creativity, defiance, and reinvention run through every era of rock, and where the artists who pushed the culture forward finally get the spotlight they always deserved.

Reclaiming rock history’s overlooked architects. A celebration, and a quiet rebuke.

The Myth of Marilyn Monroe Sky Arts, 3:00pm

A documentary that pulls apart the image to reveal the machinery behind it. Marilyn Monroe remains one of the most recognisable faces of the twentieth century, but the programme argues that the icon — the platinum hair, the breathy voice, the effortless allure — was both a shield and a cage. It traces how Norma Jeane was reshaped by studios, photographers, and public appetite into a symbol of desire, then held to the impossible standards of the fantasy she embodied.

The film moves through the key fractures: the early modelling years, the studio contracts that traded on her vulnerability, the battle for creative control, and the way fame magnified every insecurity. Interviews and archival material show how Monroe tried to reclaim her narrative — studying acting seriously, forming her own production company, pushing for roles with depth — even as the myth tightened around her.

Icon and vulnerability intertwined. Myth as prison and protection. A portrait of a woman who became larger than life and was diminished by it at the same time.

Lost Treasures of Rome National Geographic, 4:00pm

Pompeii’s villas and theatres reveal Rome’s wealth divide — a city frozen at the moment its social hierarchy was most exposed. This episode moves through the grand houses of the elite, where frescoes, gardens, and private bath suites advertised status as loudly as any modern luxury brand. These were spaces built for display: atriums designed to impress visitors, dining rooms arranged to showcase power, and art collections curated to signal education and taste.

Set against this are the more modest dwellings and public venues that tell a different story: cramped workshops, shared courtyards, graffiti‑lined walls, and the bustling theatres where ordinary citizens gathered for entertainment and escape. The contrast is stark. The same eruption that preserved marble colonnades also preserved the daily grind of those who served, laboured, and lived in the shadow of wealth.

The programme uses archaeology to map inequality with forensic clarity — who had space, who had privacy, who had beauty, and who had none of it. A reminder that Rome’s splendour was always built on a steep gradient, and that the ruins we admire today were once the backdrop to lives separated by status as much as by stone.

Green for Danger Talking Pictures, 6:10pm

A hospital‑set murder mystery where the antiseptic calm barely conceals the fractures of a country still reeling from war. Set in a rural surgical unit during the Blitz, the film begins with what appears to be a routine operation — until the patient dies on the table and suspicion settles over the medical staff like a fog. Each doctor and nurse carries their own secrets, resentments, and wartime exhaustion, and the operating theatre becomes a stage where professional composure masks private turmoil.

Enter Alastair Sim’s Inspector Cockrill, whose dry wit and eccentric manner cut through the veneer of civility. As he unpicks alibis and motives, the film reveals a world where trust is fragile, authority is strained, and the pressures of wartime service distort even the most disciplined environments. The clipped politeness of the staff only heightens the unease: beneath the starch and protocol lies fear, jealousy, and the sense that the war has frayed everyone’s nerves to breaking point.

A clever, atmospheric thriller where post‑war unease seeps into every corridor. Civility becomes a mask, and the hospital — supposedly a place of safety — turns into a crucible of suspicion.

The Damned United BBC Two, 11:00pm

Brian Clough as Shakespearean figure — a man of volcanic charisma, brilliance edged with insecurity, and a talent for turning every slight into a crusade. The film follows his ill‑fated 44 days at Leeds United, a club he loathed and a dressing room that never wanted him. What emerges is less a sports biopic than a character study of pride, obsession, and the way a leader can be undone by the ghosts he insists on wrestling.

Michael Sheen plays Clough with a mix of swagger and brittleness: the public bravado, the private doubt, the need to prove himself not just better than Don Revie but better than the version of himself he fears he might become. The plot cuts between his glory years at Derby — the rise, the trophies, the intoxicating sense of destiny — and the Leeds tenure, where every decision feels like a misstep and every room seems to shrink around him.

It’s a story about ambition curdling into self‑sabotage, about a man who could inspire loyalty in thousands yet alienate those closest to him. A football tragedy told with theatrical precision, where the pitch becomes a stage and Clough strides across it like a flawed king convinced the crown should already be his.

Red Joan BBC One, 12:35am

Espionage and late‑life reckoning. The film opens with Joan Stanley — a quiet, retired civil servant — arrested in her garden and confronted with the life she thought she had buried. Through interrogations and flashbacks, the story traces her transformation from idealistic physics student to reluctant spy, drawn into the world of atomic secrets during the Second World War. What begins as intellectual excitement becomes a moral crisis: should one country hold the power to annihilate the world, or is sharing knowledge a form of preventing catastrophe?

The plot follows Joan’s entanglement with a charismatic communist lover, her work on the British atomic programme, and the slow erosion of her certainty as she realises the stakes of the information she’s passing on. The film frames her actions not as simple treachery but as a collision between personal loyalty, political conviction, and the terror of a world on the brink of nuclear imbalance.

In the present day, the reckoning is quieter but sharper. Joan must explain to her son — and to herself — whether she acted out of idealism, fear, or self‑deception. Conviction versus betrayal. A life lived in the shadows finally dragged into the light, where the question of guilt becomes far more complicated than the headlines ever allowed.

Streaming Choices

Dangerous Liaisons Channel 4 Streaming – Season 1 available from Saturday 14th February

A lush, cynical prequel to the French classic, this tale of seduction and social warfare revels in manipulation and ambition. Alice Englert and Nicholas Denton bring sharp intelligence to a world where intimacy is currency and love is merely leverage.

Obsessed Walter Presents (Channel 4) – Series 1 available from Friday 20th February

A suburban fresh start turns sour in this tense French thriller. What begins as domestic renewal becomes psychological siege, with paranoia and proximity doing most of the dramatic heavy lifting.

Watching You Disney+ – All six episodes available from Friday 20th February

A one-night stand spirals into digital nightmare when hidden cameras expose more than intimacy. Slick and unsettling, this Australian thriller taps into modern anxieties about surveillance, shame and the illusion of privacy.

The Templars ITVX – All six episodes available from Thursday 12th February

Medieval spectacle meets existential crisis as an order of knights battles war, plague and political decay. Armour and intrigue abound, but the series is strongest when it questions faith and authority in collapsing times.

Love Me, Love Me Prime Video – Available from Friday 13th February

Glossy young-adult melodrama set against an elite Italian school. Love triangles, grief and reinvention collide in a sunlit coming-of-age romance that knows exactly which heartstrings it wants to pull.

56 Days Prime Video – All eight episodes available from Wednesday 18th February

A supermarket meet-cute gives way to suspicion in this sleek romantic thriller. As secrets surface, the series probes how easily intimacy can mask deception.

The Occupant Paramount+ – Available from Thursday 19th February

A survival drama with a psychological edge: stranded in frozen isolation after a helicopter crash, a geologist must rely on a mysterious voice over the radio. Tense, claustrophobic and morally ambiguous.

A week where empires fall, myths are dismantled, and love — in all its forms — is interrogated rather than assumed.

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