Counter Culture

Another strong week across film, television, radio and streaming, with a recurring thread running through many of the selections: control, identity, and the tension between individual ambition and the systems that shape it. Whether it’s the predictive certainty of Minority Report, the quiet resistance of Local Hero, or the institutional pressures explored in this week’s radio picks, there’s a sense of individuals pushing against structures—sometimes successfully, often not.

Three highlights stand out. 🌟 Minority Report remains one of the most prescient visions of technological control ever put to screen. 🌟 Don’t Look Now continues to unsettle with its fragmented, deeply psychological approach to grief and perception. 🌟 The Essay: The Death and Life of Christopher Marlowe offers a thoughtful and necessary reminder that even our most celebrated cultural figures remain unresolved. Writing and selections are by Pat Harrington.

Saturday 18th April 2026

Soul (2020)
E4, 4.15pm

Pixar’s Soul is one of those rare animated films that feels genuinely philosophical without losing its emotional core. Following Joe Gardner, a jazz musician caught between life and the afterlife, it asks deceptively simple questions about purpose and fulfilment. What begins as a story about ambition gradually becomes something more reflective, even corrective.

The film’s strength lies in its refusal to equate success with meaning. Joe’s obsession with “making it” is gently dismantled, replaced by an appreciation of the everyday—the unnoticed textures of living that give life its richness. It’s a subtle shift, but one that lands with real force.

Visually, the contrast between the grounded reality of New York and the abstract metaphysics of the “Great Before” is striking. But it’s the emotional clarity that lingers. Soul doesn’t just entertain; it recalibrates.

Minority Report (2002) ITV2, 8.00pm

Minority Report is one of those films that feels as if it slipped through a crack in time. Spielberg made it in 2002, yet it watches like a dispatch from a future that has already arrived — a world where prediction masquerades as certainty and surveillance is simply the air everyone breathes.

What gives the film its charge isn’t just the premise of “pre‑crime,” though that remains chillingly elegant. It’s the way the story frames that premise as a kind of moral trap. Tom Cruise plays John Anderton with the brittle energy of a man who once believed in the system because it gave him something to hold onto. When that same system turns on him, the film stops being a chase thriller and becomes something more intimate: a study of what happens when a society decides that preventing harm is more important than understanding people.

Spielberg shoots this future in a cold, washed‑out palette — a world of glass, chrome, and gesture‑controlled screens that once looked fantastical but now resemble the prototypes sitting in tech labs. The surveillance isn’t loud or theatrical; it’s casual, woven into every surface. Retinal scans greet you like old friends. Advertisements whisper your name. The film’s great trick is that it never treats any of this as dystopian excess. It presents it as normal, which is precisely why it unsettles.

At the centre is the question the film refuses to tidy away: if you could stop a murder before it happens, should you? And if the answer is yes, what part of yourself do you surrender to make that possible? Spielberg doesn’t offer comfort. He lets the contradictions sit there, humming quietly beneath the action. The result is a film that lingers not because of its spectacle, but because it understands that the real danger isn’t the technology — it’s the certainty that comes with believing the technology is always right.

Black British Music at the BBC: Volume 1 BBC Two 8.45pm

An archival pulse running through decades of invention, defiance and cultural self‑definition. This first volume shows how Black British artists reshaped the national soundscape from the edges inward — pirate frequencies, club basements, community halls, and the stubborn brilliance of those who built new genres from limited means. What emerges is a counter‑history of Britain told through rhythm, resistance and reinvention

The Yardbirds Sky Arts 9pm

A sharp, affectionate dive into the band who treated the electric guitar as a site of experimentation rather than decor. The Yardbirds were the hinge between R&B sweat and psychedelic ambition, a restless workshop where Clapton, Beck and Page passed through like visiting technicians of chaos. The film captures a group whose impatience and curiosity helped rewrite the grammar of British rock.

Stormzy at Glastonbury 2019 BBC Two 11.15pm

A landmark performance that feels less like a set and more like a seismic cultural moment. Stormzy steps onto the Pyramid Stage carrying the expectations of a generation and turns them into spectacle, testimony and political clarity. Ballet dancers, statistics, grime beats and a crowd roaring like weather — it’s the night he moved from star to symbol, proving that Black British artistry can command the national stage on its own terms.

Last Night in Soho (2021) Film4, 11.20pm

Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho opens with the shimmer of a dream — a young woman stepping into London with the kind of wide‑eyed hope the city still knows how to inspire. At first, the film plays like a love letter to the 1960s: neon lights, velvet shadows, and the seductive promise that another era might offer a cleaner, more glamorous version of yourself. But Wright is too sharp, too historically alert, to let nostalgia sit unchallenged. The past here isn’t a sanctuary; it’s a trapdoor.

The film’s visual language does most of the early seduction. Mirrors ripple, identities blur, and the boundary between observer and participant dissolves. Wright uses reflections not as gimmick but as argument — a reminder that every fantasy contains its own distortion. The doubling of Eloise and Sandie becomes a kind of haunting, a warning about how easily admiration can slide into possession.

What stays with you, though, is the film’s critique of the stories we tell about “better times.” The Soho of the 60s is all surface sparkle until you look too closely. Behind the music and the dresses and the promise of reinvention lies a machinery of exploitation that hasn’t aged a day. Wright isn’t subtle about it, but he doesn’t need to be. The point is that nostalgia edits out the harm, and the film refuses to let that erasure stand.

It’s an uneven film — bold in its ideas, occasionally messy in its execution — but its ambition is unmistakable. Wright reaches for something thornier than homage: a reckoning with the dangers of longing for a past that never truly existed. And even when the film stumbles, its sincerity and visual daring keep it compelling. It’s a ghost story about memory, glamour, and the price of looking backward for too long.

The Promised Land (2023) BBC4, 11.35pm

Led by Mads Mikkelsen, The Promised Land is a stark historical drama about ambition and endurance. Set against the harsh Danish landscape, it follows a man determined to claim land and status against overwhelming odds.

The film’s stripped-back approach works in its favour. The environment is unforgiving, and human ambition is shown in all its contradictions—both admirable and destructive.

It’s a slow burn, but a compelling one, grounded in the reality that progress rarely comes without cost.

Sunday 19th April 2026

Local Hero (1983) Film4, 11.00am

Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero drifts in with the gentlest of breezes, but there’s steel beneath its softness. On the surface it’s a whimsical tale: an American oil executive dispatched to a remote Scottish village to buy the entire place, only to find himself undone by its calm, its rhythms, its refusal to play by the rules of corporate logic. Yet the film’s real trick is how quietly subversive it is. It smiles as it sharpens the knife.

The humour is feather‑light — a raised eyebrow here, a dry aside there — but the questions it asks are anything but trivial. What does it mean to own land? What does it mean to belong to it? And where is the line between value and price? The villagers aren’t portrayed as innocents waiting to be rescued from modernity. They understand perfectly well what’s being offered. They simply measure worth in ways that don’t fit neatly into a balance sheet.

Forsyth lets the story unfold through atmosphere rather than plot mechanics. Long shots of coastline, the hush of the night sky, the sense that time moves differently in places untouched by frantic ambition. The film invites you to slow down, to listen, to notice the small things that capitalism tends to bulldoze in its hurry to quantify everything.

What lingers is the mood — that gentle melancholy of a world on the cusp of being bought, sold, or simply misunderstood. Local Hero reminds you that not everything can be captured in a contract. Some things resist commodification by their very nature: community, landscape, the feeling of standing under a sky so wide it makes your concerns look small.

A soft film, yes, but one with a quietly radical heart.

The Firm (1993) Channel 5, 2.55pm

Sydney Pollack’s The Firm moves with the polished confidence of early‑90s Hollywood, all clean lines and expensive suits, but beneath that sheen lies a story about the quiet corrosion of ambition. It begins simply enough: a bright young lawyer, freshly minted and hungry for success, steps into a world that promises everything he thinks he wants. The trouble is that the promise comes with clauses no one mentions until it’s too late.

Tom Cruise plays Mitch McDeere with that familiar mix of charm and tightly wound anxiety — a man who believes he can outwork any problem, only to discover he has walked into a system designed to swallow him whole. The firm he joins looks rational, respectable, almost paternal. But the deeper he goes, the more he realises that the logic holding it together is rotten. Corruption here isn’t loud or theatrical; it’s procedural, contractual, woven into the everyday operations of success.

Pollack lets the tension build slowly, almost methodically. The dread comes not from sudden shocks but from the dawning recognition that escape is a negotiation, not a sprint. Every choice Mitch makes carries a cost, and the film is at its strongest when it lingers on that moral arithmetic — the way ambition can narrow your field of vision until you no longer see the compromises accumulating at your feet.

It’s unmistakably a product of its era: the tailored paranoia of post‑Reagan America, the belief that institutions are both necessary and fundamentally untrustworthy. Yet the themes feel stubbornly current. The idea that a system can look legitimate while operating on coercion; that success can be a trap disguised as an opportunity; that the price of getting out is never the same as the price of getting in.

The Firm endures not because of its twists, but because it understands how corruption actually works — quietly, professionally, with a smile.

Northern Soul at the BBC BBC4 10pm

A warm, kinetic trawl through the BBC archives that treats Northern Soul not as nostalgia but as a living pulse. The footage hums with sweat, longing and the democratic magic of the dancefloor — a place where working‑class kids found transcendence in rare vinyl and all‑night stamina. What emerges is a portrait of a movement built on devotion: to the music, to the scene, to the idea that joy can be engineered through rhythm and repetition. A reminder that subcultures don’t fade; they echo.

My Wife, My Abuser: The Secret Footage Channel 5 10.30pm

A stark, quietly devastating documentary that refuses to sensationalise what is already unbearable. The secret recordings form a kind of counter‑narrative to the public face of the relationship — a slow, chilling accumulation of coercion, minimisation and fear. What the film captures best is the way abuse rearranges a person’s sense of reality, narrowing their world until escape feels both necessary and impossible. It’s difficult viewing, but its clarity is its strength: a reminder that domestic abuse thrives in silence, and that testimony — even shaky, handheld, covert — can be an act of survival.

The King’s Speech (2010) BBC2, 10.00pm

The King’s Speech is less a royal drama than a quiet study of a man wrestling with the limits of his own voice. Colin Firth’s George VI isn’t framed as a symbol or an institution; he’s a figure caught between duty and dread, someone for whom public speaking is not a ceremonial obligation but a private torment made visible. The film’s power lies in how gently it approaches that contradiction — authority built on fragility.

What anchors the story is the relationship at its centre. Geoffrey Rush’s Lionel Logue could easily have been written as the quirky mentor, the outsider who teaches the king to loosen up. Instead, the film leans into something more intimate: two men negotiating trust across class, expectation, and the rigid etiquette of the time. Their sessions become small acts of rebellion, moments where the monarchy’s grandeur falls away and you’re left with two human beings trying to find a way through fear.

Tom Hooper directs with a measured hand. The rooms feel slightly too large, the corridors a little too long — spaces that dwarf the man expected to fill them. It’s a subtle reminder that power doesn’t always feel like power from the inside. Sometimes it feels like exposure.

The film never quite breaks out of its own comfort zone; it’s polished, reassuring, and content to stay within the boundaries of prestige drama. But within those limits, it’s remarkably effective. It understands that vulnerability can be as compelling as authority, and that the struggle to speak — literally and metaphorically — can reveal more about a leader than any grand gesture.

Monday 20th April 2026

Dream Horse (2020) Film4, 6.45pm

Dream Horse takes a story you think you already know — the plucky outsider, the long‑shot racehorse, the improbable rise — and roots it firmly in the soil of a real Welsh community. What could have been a tidy feel‑good narrative becomes something more grounded, because the film never forgets that the dream in question isn’t owned by one person. It’s shared, argued over, paid for in instalments, and carried collectively.

There’s an honesty to the way the film treats ambition. It isn’t framed as a lone individual striving for greatness; it’s a village deciding, almost shyly, that it deserves something good. The syndicate isn’t glamorous, but it’s sincere — a group of people who pool what little they have not out of greed, but out of a desire to feel part of something larger than their daily routines. That sense of togetherness gives the film its emotional ballast.

The warmth here feels earned rather than engineered. The humour is gentle, the setbacks believable, and the triumphs modest enough to feel real. You sense the pride of a community that has spent years being told to expect very little, suddenly discovering that hope can be a collective act.

No, the film doesn’t reinvent the underdog genre. It doesn’t need to. Its strength lies in its refusal to overreach. It understands that the most moving stories are often the simplest: people coming together, taking a chance, and finding a measure of dignity in the attempt.

Suez: 24 Hours That Ended The British Empire (1/2) Channel 4 9pm

A taut, unsettling reconstruction of the day Britain discovered the limits of its own power. The film treats Suez not as distant history but as a hinge moment — the instant the imperial story collapsed under its own illusions. Cabinet rooms, crisis cables, and the quiet panic of a nation realising it no longer calls the tune. What emerges is a portrait of hubris meeting reality, and the uncomfortable birth of the modern geopolitical order.

Scotland: Rome’s Final Frontier BBC4 10pm

An atmospheric journey into the northern edge of empire, where Rome’s ambitions met a landscape — and a people — that refused to yield. The programme blends archaeology, terrain and political imagination to show how the frontier was less a line than a negotiation: forts, roads, rebellions, and the stubborn autonomy of the Caledonian tribes. A thoughtful exploration of what happens when imperial certainty meets a place that simply won’t be conquered

The Look of Love (2013) Film4, 11.05pm

Michael Winterbottom’s The Look of Love traces Paul Raymond’s rise with a kind of cool detachment, as if the film itself is wary of being seduced by the world it depicts. Steve Coogan plays Raymond not as a showman or a villain, but as a man who built an empire out of desire and then discovered, too late, that desire offers no shelter. The result is a portrait of excess that feels strangely airless — a life filled with everything except meaning.

Winterbottom resists the temptation to turn Raymond’s story into spectacle. The clubs, the glamour, the money: they’re all present, but they’re framed with a deliberate flatness, as though the camera is quietly asking what any of it is really worth. The film keeps circling back to isolation — the way success can hollow out the very person it’s meant to elevate. Coogan leans into that emptiness, giving Raymond a brittle charm that never quite disguises the loneliness underneath.

What’s striking is the absence of judgement. The film doesn’t moralise, nor does it celebrate. It simply observes: a man who could buy almost anything, yet struggled to hold onto the things that mattered. The emotional weight comes not from scandal or provocation, but from the quiet recognition that a life built on indulgence has limits, and that those limits close in long before the story ends.

Tuesday 21st April 2026

Storyville: Speechless (2/2) BBC Four 10pm

A sharp, unsettling look at the free‑speech wars that have torn through American campuses over the past decade. This final part traces how universities — once imagined as laboratories of argument — became flashpoints where identity, safety, power and principle collided. The film captures the contradictions: students demanding protection from harm while insisting on the right to challenge authority; institutions caught between moral duty and political pressure; speakers turned into symbols long before they reach a lectern. What emerges is a portrait of a culture struggling to decide whether disagreement is a threat or a necessity, and what it costs when conversation itself becomes contested ground.

Britain’s Nuclear Secrets: Inside Sellafield BBC Four 11.30pm

A rare, disquieting look inside the most secretive industrial site in the country. Sellafield emerges as a place where history, danger and national responsibility sit uneasily together — Cold War legacies, experimental reactors, and the long shadow of waste that will outlive us all. The documentary balances technical detail with human stakes, revealing a facility that is both an engineering marvel and a reminder of the costs of atomic ambition.

The Royal Hotel (2023) BBC3, 11.35pm

The Royal Hotel builds tension through atmosphere rather than plot. Set in an isolated environment, it explores vulnerability and threat with unsettling precision.

Its restraint is key. The film trusts the audience to feel the unease rather than spelling it out.

A quietly disturbing piece of work.

Wednesday 22nd April 2026

The Adjustment Bureau (2011) Film4, 6.55pm

The Adjustment Bureau begins with the sheen of a political romance, then quietly tilts into something stranger — a world where chance is not chance at all, and where unseen custodians nudge human lives back onto their “proper” paths. It’s a high‑concept premise, but the film treats it with a kind of earnest curiosity rather than cold abstraction. The question at its centre is disarmingly simple: how much of our lives do we actually steer?

Matt Damon and Emily Blunt give the story its emotional weight. Their connection feels spontaneous, almost accidental — which is precisely why the film insists it must be interrupted. The tension doesn’t come from chases or spectacle, but from the idea that love itself might be an administrative error, something the universe didn’t intend. That friction between feeling and fate gives the film its pulse.

Visually, it’s a world of doors that open onto other places, corridors that fold into one another, and men in hats who operate like bureaucratic angels. The imagery is playful, but the implications are not. Every intervention raises another question about autonomy, responsibility, and the quiet machinery that shapes our choices. The film’s ambition lies in how it frames destiny not as myth, but as paperwork.

It’s true that the execution wobbles at times — the rules of the world shift, the metaphysics blur — but the ideas carry it. There’s something compelling about a film that treats free will as both fragile and worth fighting for, even when the odds are stacked in favour of cosmic management.

A romantic thriller, yes, but also a gentle provocation: if our lives are written in advance, what does it mean to insist on rewriting even a single line?

Grayson Perry Has Seen The Future (2/2) Channel 4 9pm

Perry’s concluding journey into Britain’s possible tomorrows is part social anthropology, part mischievous prophecy. He wanders through emerging subcultures, technological anxieties and the emotional weather of a country unsure of its next chapter. What gives the film its charge is Perry’s ability to treat the future not as a prediction but as a mirror — reflecting our fears, our contradictions and our stubborn hope that things might yet be remade. A thoughtful, gently provocative dispatch from the edge of what comes next.

Michael Jackson: An American Tragedy BBC Two 9pm

A sombre, unflinching examination of the forces that shaped — and ultimately consumed — one of the most mythologised figures in modern culture. The film traces the collision of fame, trauma and industrial pressure, showing how a child star was folded into a global commodity long before he understood the cost. What emerges is not a defence or a prosecution but a portrait of a system that devours its icons, leaving behind a legacy as contested as it is unforgettable.

Thursday 23rd April 2026

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande (2022) Film4, 9.00pm

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is a small film in scale but not in feeling. It unfolds almost entirely within the confines of a hotel room, yet the emotional territory it covers is far wider — desire, shame, ageing, the stories we tell ourselves about our own bodies. Emma Thompson gives one of her most open, unguarded performances, playing a woman who has spent a lifetime policing herself and is suddenly confronted with the possibility of pleasure.

The film’s simplicity is its strength. There’s no elaborate subplot, no contrived twist. Instead, it trusts in conversation — awkward, funny, painful, revealing. Daryl McCormack’s Leo brings a calm steadiness to the dynamic, not as a fantasy figure but as someone who understands that intimacy is as much about listening as it is about touch. Their exchanges become a kind of gentle excavation, peeling back years of self‑doubt and inherited expectations.

What’s striking is how quietly radical the film feels. It treats sexuality in later life not as a punchline or a problem, but as something entirely human. It refuses to rush its characters toward transformation; instead, it allows them to inch toward self‑acceptance, one uncomfortable truth at a time. The drama is modest, but the emotional stakes are real.

It doesn’t try to reinvent the form, and it doesn’t need to. Its honesty is enough. In a landscape crowded with noise, a film this small — and this sincere — feels like a gift.

The Wicker Man (1973) BBC Four 10pm

A film that still feels like a warning whispered through the heather. The Wicker Man remains one of British cinema’s strangest, most disquieting creations — a folk mystery where rational authority wanders into a community governed by older, deeper logics. The island’s rituals, songs and sunlit menace build towards an ending that is both inevitable and shocking, a collision between belief systems that cannot coexist. Half musical, half nightmare, wholly singular.

Ex‑S: The Wicker Man BBC Four 11.30pm

A thoughtful excavation of the myths, accidents and creative tensions that produced a cult masterpiece. This companion piece to The Wicker Man digs into the film’s troubled production, its near‑loss, and the strange afterlife that turned it from box‑office oddity into a touchstone of British folk horror. Cast, crew and critics trace how a modestly budgeted thriller became a cultural artefact — a reminder that some films don’t just endure; they gather power as the world catches up to them.

Friday 24th April 2026

Wall Street (1987) Great TV, 9.00pm

Oliver Stone’s Wall Street remains one of the defining portraits of late‑20th‑century capitalism — a world where ambition hardens into ideology and the pursuit of wealth becomes its own form of faith. The film captures the swagger of the era, but it also understands the hollowness beneath it. Gordon Gekko strides through the story like a prophet of profit, selling “greed is good” not as provocation but as common sense.

What gives the film its bite is the tension between critique and seduction. Stone exposes the machinery of excess — the deals, the bravado, the casual cruelty — yet he also shows why it’s tempting. The energy is intoxicating, the rewards immediate, the moral compromises easy to rationalise. Charlie Sheen’s Bud Fox is the perfect conduit: hungry, dazzled, and slowly reshaped by the very system he thinks he’s mastering.

The film’s world is all glass towers and sharp angles, a landscape built to reflect desire back at itself. But as the story unfolds, the shine dulls. The cost of buying into Gekko’s philosophy becomes clear, not through grand speeches but through the quiet erosion of loyalty, integrity, and self‑respect.

Wall Street endures because it refuses to settle into simple condemnation. It shows the appeal of excess even as it dismantles it. That ambivalence — the push and pull between critique and allure — is what gives the film its edge.

Engineering Europe National Geographic 10pm

A sleek, quietly ambitious survey of the infrastructure that holds a continent together. The programme treats bridges, tunnels, grids and megaprojects not as inert feats of engineering but as expressions of political will — the places where ambition, geography and compromise meet. What gives it its charge is the sense of Europe as a living machine: intricate, interdependent, occasionally fragile, yet capable of astonishing collective invention. A reminder that the future is often built in steel and concrete long before it appears in speeches.

Don’t Look Now (1973) BBC2, 11.05pm

Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now is one of those films that seems to breathe — slow, uneasy breaths that pull you deeper into its fractured world. Set in a wintry, waterlogged Venice, it’s less a conventional thriller than a study of grief and perception, where every reflection and every shadow feels charged with meaning. Roeg’s editing — jagged, intuitive, almost psychic — turns memory into something unstable, a force that intrudes rather than comforts.

Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie play a couple trying to navigate the aftermath of loss, and the film treats their grief not as a plot device but as a lens that distorts everything they see. Venice becomes a maze of half‑glimpsed figures, echoing footsteps, and colours that seem to flare with warning. The city is beautiful, but the beauty is uneasy — a place where nothing aligns quite as it should.

Roeg’s mastery lies in the way he fragments the experience. Scenes bleed into one another; time folds; images recur with unsettling insistence. You’re never entirely sure whether you’re watching premonition, memory, or misinterpretation. That ambiguity is the point. The film understands that grief alters perception, and that the line between intuition and fear can be perilously thin.

It’s a film that rewards attention — not because it hides clues, but because it trusts the viewer to sit with uncertainty. And long after it ends, the mood lingers: the chill of the canals, the flicker of red in the corner of your eye, the sense that some losses never quite let go.

Pearl (2022) Channel 4, 1.05am

Pearl is psychological horror delivered with an unnerving stillness, anchored entirely by Mia Goth’s astonishing performance. She plays a young woman trapped on a rural farm, dreaming of escape with a desperation that curdles into something far darker. The film isn’t interested in jump scares; it’s interested in the slow, painful process of watching someone’s fantasies turn against them.

Ti West shoots the story in bright, almost storybook colours — a deliberate contrast to the violence simmering underneath. That visual cheerfulness becomes its own kind of menace, as if the world itself refuses to

And now, radio

Radio continues to offer something different—space for reflection, for complexity, and for ideas that unfold over time. This week’s selections explore literature, memory, and political storytelling with a depth that rewards attention.

The Essay: The Death and Life of Christopher Marlowe
Radio 3, Monday to Friday, 9.45pm

Led by Jerry Brotton, this series revisits Christopher Marlowe and his enduring influence on William Shakespeare.

It’s less about answers and more about questions—identity, legacy, and how history is constructed.

Last Word: Doing Death Differently
Radio 4, Monday to Friday, 1.45pm

Presented by Matthew Bannister, this reflective run examines how attitudes to death and remembrance have changed over time.

Measured, thoughtful, and quietly revealing.

Follow the Money
Radio 4, Wednesday, 2.15pm

Follow the Money takes All the President’s Men as its anchor point, but what it’s really interested in is the alchemy of journalism — the way facts become narrative, and narrative becomes history. Watergate is the case study, yet the programme keeps circling a broader question: how do reporters turn fragments, whispers, and half‑truths into a story the public can actually grasp?

There’s a quiet fascination in hearing how the investigation unfolded, not just as a political scandal but as a piece of storytelling shaped by deadlines, instinct, and the slow accumulation of detail. The programme treats journalism as both craft and construction: a discipline that demands precision, but also an art that relies on framing, emphasis, and the choices of what to leave unsaid.

It’s as much about narrative as it is about politics — a reminder that the stories we rely on to understand power are themselves built, revised, and contested. And in an age saturated with information, that reflection feels anything but historical.

And finally, streaming choices

The Mill
Channel 4 Streaming, Series 1–2 available from Saturday 18th April

The Mill is a drama that refuses to tidy up the past. It plunges you into the early industrial era with a starkness that strips away any lingering romance: the clatter of machinery, the rigid routines, the sense that every hour of the day is owned by someone else. It’s a portrait of Britain at the moment work became systematised — and people became units within that system.

What gives the series its force is the way it treats labour not as backdrop but as lived experience. The workers aren’t passive figures in a historical tableau; they’re individuals negotiating power that is exercised through rules, punishments, and the constant threat of being replaced. Their resistance is small, often quiet, but never insignificant. The show understands that survival itself can be a form of defiance.

And the themes feel uncomfortably current. The language of efficiency, productivity, and discipline hasn’t vanished — it’s simply been rebranded. Watching the mill owners justify exploitation with the confidence of men who believe themselves rational, you can hear the faint echo of modern management speak. The series doesn’t labour the comparison; it trusts you to feel it.

Unsentimental, clear‑eyed, and quietly furious, The Mill reminds us that the structures built in the 19th century didn’t disappear. They evolved. And we’re still living with their consequences.

Kevin
Prime Video, all eight episodes available from Monday 20th April

An unusual, quietly philosophical series about a house cat rejecting domestic life. Strange, reflective, and oddly resonant.

The Fortress
ViaPlay, all seven episodes available from Saturday 18th April

he Fortress is a drama that tightens its grip gradually, the kind of slow‑burn series where the air seems to thin as the episodes progress. It’s a story about containment in every sense — borders, bodies, information — and it unfolds with the confidence of a show that knows atmosphere can be more oppressive than any overt threat.

The world it builds feels sealed off, almost hermetically. Control isn’t exercised through spectacle but through the quiet enforcement of rules, routines, and expectations. Characters move through landscapes that look open yet feel claustrophobic, as if the environment itself is conspiring to keep them in place. The tension comes from that contradiction: wide horizons paired with shrinking freedoms.

The pacing is deliberate. Scenes stretch, silences accumulate, and conversations hover on the edge of saying too much. That restraint is the point. The series wants you to feel the pressure its characters live under — the sense that every choice is monitored, every deviation noted, every attempt at autonomy quietly discouraged.

What emerges is a portrait of a society that has mistaken safety for stasis. The mechanisms of control are subtle, almost mundane, but their cumulative effect is chilling. Some characters adapt, some resist, and some simply endure, but all of them feel the weight of a system that has forgotten how to breathe.

Atmosphere does the heavy lifting here. The show trusts mood over momentum, unease over action. And in that patience, it finds something unsettlingly resonant.

Stranger Things: Tales from ’85
Netflix, available from Thursday

Stranger Things: Tales from ’85 takes the familiar Hawkins mythology and refracts it through animation, loosening the tone just enough to let the series play with its own iconography. Freed from live‑action realism, the show leans into stylisation — brighter colours, sharper angles, a world that feels both recognisable and newly elastic.

Set between the cracks of the main timeline, it expands the universe without overburdening it. The stories are smaller, stranger, and more self‑contained, as if the series is testing what happens when you shift the emphasis from nostalgia to imagination. The result is a version of Stranger Things that feels lighter on its feet but still threaded with the unease that defines the original.

What’s interesting is how the change in medium alters the mood. Animation allows the supernatural elements to feel more fluid, more dreamlike, while the emotional beats land with a different kind of clarity. It’s less about recreating the 1980s than about reinterpreting them — a memory of a memory, filtered through style.

A reimagining rather than a retread, and one that suggests the Stranger Things universe still has room to breathe.

Crime 101 (2026)
Prime Video, available now

Crime 101 is a crime film that deliberately sidesteps the usual fireworks. Instead of chases and shootouts, it leans into character — the small hesitations, the private calculations, the way control becomes its own kind of currency. It’s a story about people trying to stay one step ahead of each other without ever raising their voices.

The restraint is the point. The film treats criminality not as spectacle but as a discipline: routines, patterns, the quiet satisfaction of staying invisible. When things begin to slip, the tension comes not from chaos but from the fear of losing that hard‑won control. Performances carry the weight here, giving the film a steady, unshowy pulse.

It’s a crime story pared back to its essentials — precise, contained, and more interested in psychology than pyrotechnics. And that simplicity is what makes it linger.