There’s a strong thread running through this week’s selections: power, control, and the consequences of overreach. Whether it’s the theatre rivalries of All About Eve, the financial excess of The Wolf of Wall Street, or the geopolitical tensions of Clash of the Superpowers, the question is the same — who holds power, and what do they do with it?
Three highlights stand out. 🌟 All About Eve remains one of cinema’s sharpest dissections of ambition and performance. 🌟 Clash of the Superpowers: America vs China brings the present moment into focus with a clear-eyed look at global tension. 🌟 The Teacher emerges as the week’s key drama, building from a character study into something darker and more unsettling about perception, blame, and social pressure.
What follows is a week that moves between classic cinema, serious drama, and quietly probing documentaries — a reminder that the most interesting stories are often the ones that resist easy answers. Selections and writing is by Pat Harrington.
Saturday 28th March 2026
All About Eve (1950), BBC Two, 10:00 AM
Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s All About Eve remains one of the sharpest dissections of ambition ever put on screen. Set in the theatre world but really about human vanity, it follows the rise of Eve Harrington, an apparently devoted fan who ingratiates herself into the life of an established stage star — and then quietly begins to replace her.
What makes the film endure is its dialogue, which cuts with surgical precision. Bette Davis, as the ageing actress Margo Channing, delivers lines that feel both theatrical and painfully real, capturing the fear of irrelevance in a world that prizes youth.
There’s a cold honesty at the heart of it. Success is shown not as a reward for talent, but as something often taken through manipulation and timing. The performance never stops, whether on stage or off.
The Ipcress File (1965), BBC Two, 2:30 PM
A grounded, deliberately unglamorous take on espionage, with Michael Caine’s Harry Palmer offering a working-class counterpoint to Bond-era fantasy. The film leans into bureaucracy and suspicion rather than spectacle.
A mid‑afternoon showing of The Ipcress File almost heightens its contrarian streak. At an hour usually reserved for gentler fare, the film offers something far more abrasive: a deliberately unglamorous portrait of espionage where the fluorescent hum of an office carries more weight than any exotic backdrop. Michael Caine’s Harry Palmer stands at the centre of it — a working‑class presence who refuses to smooth himself into the fantasy of the Bond era. He is competent, sardonic, and acutely aware of the classed architecture of the institutions he serves.
The film leans hard into bureaucracy and suspicion. Files, forms, and petty rivalries matter as much as any geopolitical threat. The machinery of the state feels cumbersome, sometimes absurd, and always faintly hostile. Instead of spectacle, we get the slow grind of process: surveillance that is as much about internal policing as external enemies, and intelligence work that looks more like clerical labour under pressure than heroic improvisation.
Its visual style does a great deal of the storytelling. The canted angles, the obstructed sightlines, the sense that the camera itself is eavesdropping — all of it builds a quiet unease. The Cold War setting isn’t treated as a stage for heroics but as an atmosphere of institutional paranoia, where loyalties blur and the line between victim and perpetrator is never clean.
What stays with the viewer is the film’s scepticism — a sense that intelligence work is murky, compromised, and far removed from the clean narratives the genre often promises.
The Shallows (2016), BBC One, 10:30 PM
A stripped‑back survival thriller that understands the power of limitation. Blake Lively carries the film with a performance that feels both exposed and resolute, turning a bare‑bones premise into something taut and steadily tightening. The ocean becomes less a backdrop than an adversary—vast, indifferent, and always encroaching.
The film’s real craft lies in its restraint. Confinement isn’t a gimmick but a pressure chamber, allowing tension to accumulate in small, deliberate increments rather than through spectacle. Every decision, every shift of tide, feels consequential.
It’s a lean, unfussy piece of filmmaking—confident enough to trust silence, space, and a single determined protagonist. A reminder that simplicity, handled with clarity and purpose, can be its own form of intensity.
Sunday 29th March 2026
Good Vibrations (2012), BBC Two, 12:05 AM
A spirited, big‑hearted portrait of Belfast’s punk eruption during the Troubles, anchored by Terri Hooley — that one‑eyed evangelist of noise, hope, and stubborn optimism. The film captures the improbable energy of the scene he midwifed: a cultural spark struck in a city frayed by fear, where music became both refuge and rebellion.
What the film gets right is the texture of that defiance. Punk here isn’t a fashion or a pose; it’s a refusal to let violence dictate the emotional weather. Hooley’s record shop becomes a fragile sanctuary, a place where young people could imagine a future not yet written. The film honours that without smoothing the rough edges.
And on a personal note: I once spent an evening in his company at the Pear Tree pub in Edinburgh during a festival — a night full of stories, laughter, and that unmistakable Hooley warmth.
It’s ultimately a film about building something new under pressure — culture as resistance, joy as a political act, and one man’s belief that music could carve out a space of possibility in a fractured world.
Charles Dance Remembers Little Eyolf, BBC Four, 10:00 PM
A thoughtful reflection on the demands of Ibsen’s work, grounded in performance and emotional weight.
It offers insight rather than nostalgia, highlighting the seriousness of the material.
A companion piece that deepens what follows.
Little Eyolf (1982), BBC Four, 10:15 PM
A stark psychological drama centred on grief and guilt, driven by intense performances from Diana Rigg and Anthony Hopkins.
The focus is on confrontation rather than action, with language carrying the weight.
Demanding, but deliberately so — a drama that refuses easy comfort.
Mindful Escapes, BBC Four, 11:50 PM
A quiet, meditative programme built around nature imagery and stillness.
It avoids explanation, allowing atmosphere to do the work.
In a crowded schedule, its restraint becomes its strength.
Monday 30th March 2026
Panorama: Dangerous Dogs – Is the Ban Working?, BBC One, 8:00 PM
An investigation into legislation and its real-world consequences. The programme frames questions rather than offering simple answers, examining policy in practice.As ever, the interest lies in the gap between intention and outcome.
🌟 Clash of the Superpowers: America vs China (2 of 2), BBC Two, 9:00 PM
A clear‑eyed examination of the world’s defining geopolitical tension, with Taiwan positioned — accurately and unavoidably — as the most volatile point of contact between two competing visions of global order. The documentary threads together history, military strategy, and present‑day diplomacy, showing how past grievances and shifting power balances shape the choices being made now.
What gives the film its weight is its refusal to pretend the story is settled. It presents a landscape in motion: alliances recalibrating, rhetoric hardening, and both Washington and Beijing navigating a rivalry neither can fully control. The programme resists the temptation to declare inevitabilities; instead, it sits with the uncertainty, the sense that the future is being negotiated in real time and could tilt in several directions at once.
The fragility is what lingers — a recognition that the world is watching a relationship whose consequences extend far beyond the Taiwan Strait, and whose next chapter remains unwritten.
The Teacher (1 of 4), Channel 5, 9:00 PM
Victoria Hamilton leads this school-set drama, opening with a teacher confident in her methods and sceptical of what she sees as modern sensitivities. Helen Simpson prides herself on preparing students for the real world, dismissing ideas of safe spaces and perceived fragility.
Her clash with influential pupil Cressida Bancroft quickly escalates. Accusations of manipulation and attention-seeking give way to something more serious when a tragic incident changes everything.
The episode sets up a story about authority and consequence. What begins as ideological conflict shifts into something darker, where certainty becomes liability.
Tuesday 31st March 2026
The Teacher (2 of 4), Channel 5, 9:00 PM
The drama deepens as Helen grapples with the aftermath of Dee’s suicide, carrying the weight of what happened in the detention room. A support meeting is convened, but Helen remains silent, consumed by guilt. The pressure builds not through revelation, but through what is left unsaid. It becomes a study in internal collapse — how quickly confidence can turn into isolation.
Storyville: Three Dads and a Baby, BBC Four, 10:00 PM
A sensitive and quietly ground‑breaking documentary that reframes ideas of family not through spectacle but through the texture of everyday life. Rather than emphasising the novelty of a three‑dad household, it lingers on the ordinary rhythms of care, compromise, and affection — allowing what might initially seem unconventional to feel entirely natural.
The film’s observational style gives it a gentle, unforced power: it watches rather than declares, inviting viewers to sit with the emotional intelligence of the relationships it portrays. Thoughtful, humane, and quietly effective, it’s exactly the kind of intimate, boundary‑nudging storytelling that Storyville does best.
Wednesday 1st April 2026
The Teacher (3 of 4), Channel 5, 9:00 PM
Public perception turns against Helen, with online abuse and vandalism pushing her further into crisis. At the same time, Sam becomes entangled in Cressida’s influence, suggesting the story is widening beyond its original conflict. The series sharpens here, showing how quickly narratives form — and how difficult they are to resist once established.
Hatton Garden: The Great Diamond Heist, Channel 4, 10:00 PM
A retelling of one of Britain’s most audacious robberies, this documentary steps past the tabloid mythology to look squarely at the men who planned it and the brittle logic that held their scheme together. Rather than indulging in caricature — the ageing villains, the improbable camaraderie, the whiff of nostalgia for a disappearing criminal underworld — it treats the heist as a human enterprise: flawed, determined, and ultimately undone by its own internal contradictions.
The film moves methodically through planning, execution, and collapse, showing how competence and delusion can coexist in the same breath. What emerges is less a caper than a study in overreach: ambition stretching just beyond its natural limits, and the quiet inevitability of consequences catching up. It’s a story about the seduction of the big score, but also about the limits of bravado when reality refuses to play along.
Belfast (2021), BBC Two, 11:45 PM
A late‑night broadcast of Belfast feels almost deliberate — a film about memory arriving at an hour when the city itself seems to thin out and quieten. What unfolds is a personal, gently lit portrait of childhood during the Troubles, told not through the machinery of politics but through the textures of ordinary life: the street as a universe, neighbours as constellations, fear and affection braided together in the same breath.
The film holds its balance with remarkable care. It never denies the tension humming beneath every scene, yet it refuses to let that tension eclipse the warmth of family, the rituals of community, or the stubborn, everyday acts of care that keep people upright in difficult times. It’s a story built from lived experience — not an argument, not an explainer, but a remembering.
The style is simple and direct, almost deceptively so. Its emotional clarity comes from attention to the small things: a child’s vantage point, the way adults shield and falter, the sense of a world both expanding and closing in. Nothing is overstated. Nothing is ornamental. It trusts the viewer to feel the weight of what’s unsaid.
What remains is an emotionally grounded a
Thursday 2nd April 2026
Oliver! (1968), Film4, 3:25 PM
A lavish, full‑throated musical that marries West End exuberance with Dickens’ enduring social conscience. The film’s world is deliberately heightened—sets that look painted by gaslight, choreography that moves like a collective dream—but the performances keep it grounded, human, and emotionally legible. Ron Moody’s Fagin, in particular, walks that uneasy line between charm and exploitation, reminding us that survival in Victorian London was often a matter of moral compromis
For all the colour and theatricality, the film never fully escapes the shadow of the workhouse. Inequality sits beneath every melody: the hungry children singing for “more,” the casual brutality of authority, the fragile solidarities formed among the dispossessed. It’s a musical that entertains without ever letting you forget the structural cruelty that shapes its characters’ lives—a reminder that spectacle can illuminate injustice as sharply as any social tract.
The Teacher (4 of 4), Channel 5, 9:00 PM
The conclusion brings consequences into focus. Helen is told her position is untenable, with the tragedy now fully attributed to her actions. At the same time, the narrative shifts into urgency as Sam appears to be in danger, drawn further into Cressida’s orbit. Helen’s credibility is questioned, complicating her attempts to act. The finale ties together responsibility, perception, and truth. What matters is not just what happened, but who gets believed.
Sunset Boulevard (1950), Sky Arts, 9:00 PM
A dark, enduring reflection on Hollywood’s capacity to manufacture dreams and devour the people who believe in them, anchored by Gloria Swanson’s extraordinary, self‑mythologising performance. The film’s brilliance lies in how it refuses to choose between satire and tragedy: it exposes the absurdity of the studio system while mourning the human cost of its illusions.
Wilder’s camera turns the mansion on Sunset into a mausoleum of thwarted ambition — a place where identity is performed, rehearsed, and finally lost. Swanson’s Norma Desmond is both monstrous and heartbreakingly fragile, a woman shaped by a system that discarded her and then blamed her for the wreckage. The result is a film that feels unsettlingly contemporary: a study of fame, delusion, and the stories we tell ourselves to survive.
Still sharp, still corrosive, still uncomfortably close to the world we live in.
Click to Kill: The AI War Machine, Channel 4, 10:00 PM
A stark, clear‑eyed examination of how artificial intelligence is reshaping the conduct of war, not in some imagined future but in the conflicts already unfolding around us. The film steps inside the labs designing autonomous weapons and into the militaries deploying them, tracing the uneasy handover from human judgement to machine‑driven decision‑making.
What distinguishes it is its grounding: engineers, soldiers, and those living in the shadow of these systems speak with a matter‑of‑fact precision that’s more chilling than any speculative warning. The documentary shows how automation enters quietly — in targeting assistance, in pattern recognition, in the promise of efficiency — until the question of accountability becomes blurred, then perilously thin.
The result is a portrait of a world edging towards a threshold it barely understands. A timely and unsettling watch, precisely because it reveals how much of tomorrow’s warfare is already embedded in today’s routines.
Friday 3rd April 2026
Funeral in Berlin (1966), BBC Two, 2:55 PM
A continuation of the Harry Palmer cycle that keeps its feet firmly on the ground, trading Bond‑era spectacle for something far more human and far more brittle. Set against the fault lines of a divided Berlin, the film leans into ambiguity — loyalties shifting, motives clouded, everyone operating in half‑light.
The tension comes not from set‑pieces but from uncertainty: Palmer navigating a world where every conversation is a negotiation and every ally might be a trap. It’s espionage stripped of glamour, but not of depth; a reminder that the Cold War was built as much on paperwork, favours, and quiet betrayals as on any grand manoeuvre.
A sharp, unshowy thriller that still carries the chill of its moment.
🌟 The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), BBC Two, 10:00 PM
A relentless, high‑voltage portrait of excess, driven by Leonardo DiCaprio’s ferociously charismatic turn as Jordan Belfort. Scorsese builds a world where speed, noise, and appetite become a kind of religion — a culture so intoxicated by its own momentum that consequence feels like an abstract rumour rather than an inevitability.
What makes the film endure is its refusal to settle into easy judgement. It stages the allure and the rot side by side: the adrenaline of the sales floor, the narcotic pull of wealth, the corrosive logic that turns ambition into appetite and appetite into damage. The comedy is sharp, the energy overwhelming, but beneath it all sits a steady moral undertow — the sense of a system that rewards the very behaviours it claims to condemn.
Fast, loud, and immersive, it remains a disturbingly clear mirror held up to a world where greed is not an aberration but an organising principle.
The Cure at the BBC, BBC Four, 9:00 PM
Archive performances tracing the band’s evolution across decades. A condensed history built through music rather than narration. A reminder of consistency within change.
The Cure: Radio 2 in Concert, BBC Four, 10:10 PM
A contemporary performance that bridges past and present. Confident, measured, and fully aware of its legacy. Completes the picture established by the archive material.
And finally, streaming choices
Sins of Kujo (Netflix) all ten episodes from Thursday 2 April
A dark, stylised manga adaptation that explores loyalty, power, and moral compromise. It leans into ambiguity rather than resolution, giving it weight beyond its genre.
Secrets of the Bees (Disney+) both episodes available from Wednesday 1 April
A quiet, meditative documentary that connects natural systems to wider environmental concerns without heavy-handedness.
Dumb Money (Paramount+) available from Friday 3 April
A sharp snapshot of financial rebellion and its contradictions, capturing both the thrill and the risk of collective action in modern markets.
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