Counter Culture

There are weeks when television and film seem to be engaged in the same conversation. This is one of them. Across the schedules we find stories about reinvention, reputation, political upheaval and cultural legacy. Nelson Mandela emerges from prison to become a symbol of resistance. David Bowie transforms popular culture. James VI and I is re-examined through a modern lens. The American Revolution and Brexit become stories about nations wrestling with identity. Even many of the week’s films explore individuals trying to redefine themselves in changing worlds.

The arrival of the World Cup adds a further sense of occasion. England’s clash with Croatia is likely to dominate conversation, but there is plenty here for those whose passions lie elsewhere. History, music, literature, politics, wildlife, science and cinema all receive generous treatment.

🌟 This week’s highlights are Free Nelson Mandela, The American Revolution and Children of Men, three works which examine how people respond when history forces change upon them.

Selections and reviews are from Pat Harrington and apologies for the late posting which is a result of his hospitalisation for observation for a medical condition.

Saturday 13th June

🌟 Trooping the Colour: The King’s Birthday Parade
BBC One, 10.30am

Trooping the Colour returns with all the familiar splendour: the immaculate drill, the Household Division at full strength, and that unmistakable blend of ceremony and choreography that Britain still performs better than almost anyone. Yet the pageantry now sits in a subtly altered landscape. The past year’s royal difficulties — health scares, absences, shifting public sentiment — hover at the edges of the spectacle, giving this year’s parade a slightly more fragile undertone.

And then there’s the growing visibility of Republic, whose Not My King banners have become a recurring counter‑melody at major royal events. Their presence doesn’t overwhelm the ceremony, but it does frame it differently: a reminder that national rituals are no longer received with automatic deference, and that the monarchy now marches in step with a more contested public mood.

The result is a Trooping that feels both timeless and newly complicated — the grandeur intact, the context unmistakably changed.

🌟 The Magnificent Seven (1960)
BBC Two, 3.15pm

Sturges’s classic still rides tall: a western built on pure cinematic instinct, where myth, morality and melancholy sit easily alongside gunfights and swagger. What makes it endure isn’t just the action but the chemistry — a band of drifters, outlaws and idealists trying to be better men than their circumstances allow. It’s Hollywood myth‑making at full tilt, polished to a shine yet edged with just enough regret to give it weight. A film that knows exactly why the genre mattered, and why it still does.

Cyrano
BBC Two, 5.00pm

A chance to revisit Joe Wright’s lush, musical reimagining of Rostand’s classic — a tale where wit becomes armour and love demands both courage and concealment. Peter Dinklage gives the story its emotional centre, playing Cyrano with a bruised intelligence that makes the familiar tragedy feel newly intimate. The film’s blend of stylised romance, aching self‑sacrifice and Wright’s painterly visuals turns an old favourite into something tender, modern and quietly disarming.

Shanghai Noon (2000)
5 Action, 6.55pm

Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson strike gold in this breezy East‑meets‑West buddy romp. Chan’s acrobatic brilliance and Wilson’s laid‑back drawl shouldn’t work together, yet somehow they click perfectly — a clash of styles that becomes the joke, the charm and the engine of the whole film. The action is inventive, the humour easygoing, and the western backdrop gives it all a sun‑bleached swagger. One of the most purely enjoyable buddy westerns of its era, and still a delight to revisit.

🌟 Heatwave Night
BBC Four, from 7.00pm

BBC Four devotes an evening to the long, strange summer of 1976 — the drought, the dust, the cracked earth and the half‑remembered stories that have since hardened into national folklore. It was the year Britain baked, hosepipes were banned, tempers frayed and an entire generation formed its first memories of heat as something almost mythical. These programmes sift through the facts and the fantasies, revisiting a season when the country felt both sun‑struck and slightly unhinged. A warm, nostalgic dive into a moment that still glows in the collective imagination.

Originals at the BBC
BBC Four, from 8.35pm

This archive‑rich trawl through pop history looks at the songs whose first versions were quietly eclipsed by the covers that later defined them. It’s full of fascinating reversals: Mick Jackson performing “Blame It on the Boogie” before the Jacksons turned it into a disco juggernaut; Liza Minnelli debuting “New York, New York” years before Sinatra claimed it as his own; and early, often surprising takes from David Bowie, Chaka Khan, Randy Newman, Randy Crawford, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and the Osmonds.

What emerges is a portrait of musical evolution in real time — the moment before a song becomes a standard, when it still belongs to its original voice. It’s a quietly revelatory reminder that the version we know best isn’t always the one that came first.

Harry and Meghan: Has America Had Enough?
Channel 5, 8.35pm

This timely documentary takes the temperature of the Sussexes’ standing in the United States, where the initial fascination has cooled into something more complicated. The film charts the arc from Oprah‑era sympathy to a landscape shaped by media fatigue, shifting public sentiment and the couple’s own high‑profile projects.

What emerges is a portrait of a brand in flux: admired by some for their independence, dismissed by others as overexposed, and increasingly caught in the crossfire of America’s culture‑war reflexes. The programme doesn’t pretend there’s a single narrative — instead it maps the competing ones, showing how quickly celebrity, royalty and activism can collide in the American imagination.

A brisk, revealing look at how the Sussex story plays across the Atlantic, and why the mood there may matter more than ever.

🌟 Ferrari (2023)
Sky Mix, 9.00pm

Michael Mann’s Ferrari is less a biopic than a pressure chamber — a portrait of Enzo Ferrari at the moment when ambition, obsession and personal tragedy all begin to collide. Adam Driver plays him as a man carved out of resolve and regret, running a company on the brink while navigating a private life held together by secrecy and strain.

Mann shoots the racing sequences with his trademark precision — mechanical violence, beauty and danger fused into one — but the film’s real charge comes from the emotional wreckage Ferrari can’t outrun. It’s sleek, sombre and quietly devastating, a study of a man who built an empire at a cost he could never fully control.

Ella Fitzgerald: Just One of Those Things
Sky Arts, 9.00pm

This superb profile traces Ella Fitzgerald’s rise from a troubled childhood to becoming one of the most luminous voices of the twentieth century. The film captures both the precision and the playfulness in her singing — that effortless glide across a melody, the improvisational daring, the way she could make even the most familiar standard feel newly minted.

What stands out is the contrast between the public brilliance and the private reserve: a woman who poured everything into performance yet kept much of herself hidden offstage. Through interviews, rare footage and a lovingly curated soundtrack, the documentary shows how she shaped American music while quietly navigating the pressures of race, gender and relentless touring.

Benedetta (2021)
Film4, 12.30am

Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta is a heady collision of religion, sexuality and power — a film that treats the convent not as a sanctuary but as a crucible where desire, faith and ambition combust. Virginie Efira is mesmerising as the nun whose visions may be divine revelation, psychological rupture or calculated self‑advancement; Verhoeven keeps all possibilities alive, letting the ambiguity do the unsettling work.

The film is provocative, yes, but never cheaply so. Its real charge comes from the way it exposes the machinery of authority — how institutions police bodies, weaponise belief and fear the unruly force of female agency. It’s bold, irreverent and sharply intelligent, a late‑night watch that refuses to behave.

Nostalgia (2022)
BBC Two, 1.20am

Mario Martone’s Nostalgia is a slow, beautifully bruised meditation on what it means to return to the place that shaped you — and to discover that time has rewritten it in ways you can’t quite reconcile. Pierfrancesco Favino gives a wonderfully inward performance as a man drawn back to Naples after decades away, only to find that memory, identity and the city itself no longer align.

The film moves with a kind of haunted patience, lingering in alleyways, courtyards and half‑forgotten rituals as it explores how the past can both anchor and endanger you. It’s a drama about homecoming that understands the ache beneath the idea — the knowledge that you can revisit the streets of your youth, but you can’t return as the person who once walked them.

A thoughtful, late‑night piece: atmospheric, melancholy and quietly gripping.

Sunday 14th June

Dial M for Murder (1954)
BBC Two, 2.00pm

Hitchcock’s chamber‑piece thriller remains a masterclass in controlled tension — a film that turns a London flat into a trap, a stage and a moral maze. Ray Milland is superb as the husband whose charm curdles into calculation, plotting the “perfect” murder with the cool logic of a man who believes he’s smarter than everyone in the room. Grace Kelly, luminous and poised, becomes the pivot around which the whole scheme twists.

What makes it endure is the precision: the way Hitchcock builds suspense from timing, angles, tiny gestures, the slow tightening of circumstance. It’s elegant, claustrophobic and wickedly satisfying — a reminder that sometimes the most gripping thrillers barely need to leave the living room.

Moby Dick (1956)
Legend, 5.40pm

John Huston’s muscular adaptation of Melville’s great American novel still carries the weight and weather of a true seafaring epic. Gregory Peck sheds his usual moral steadiness to play Captain Ahab as a man consumed from the inside out — all flint, fury and fatal purpose — driving his crew across the oceans in pursuit of the white whale that has become his destiny and his doom.

The film has a rugged grandeur: storm‑lashed decks, creaking timbers, and a sense of myth gathering like fog around the Pequod. Richard Basehart’s Ishmael provides the human anchor, watching as obsession tightens its grip on ship and captain alike.

A classic tale told with salt, sweat and tragic poetry — still gripping, still immense.

🌟 Tiger Island
BBC One, 7.15pm

A beautifully filmed journey into one of the planet’s most fragile wildlife refuges, where every frame seems to shimmer with both wonder and warning. The programme follows the tigers that haunt this isolated landscape — elusive, powerful, and increasingly vulnerable — while capturing the delicate web of life that surrounds them.

What gives it real force is the sense of precarity: a habitat under pressure, a species surviving on the thinnest of margins, and the people working to protect a world that could vanish with alarming speed. It’s immersive, urgent and quietly moving — a reminder of what’s at stake when wilderness meets the modern world.

Michael Palin’s Hemingway Adventure
BBC Four, 8.15pm

Palin’s travelogue is a genial, gently obsessive pursuit of Ernest Hemingway’s shadow — following the writer’s footsteps from Key West to Cuba, from Parisian cafés to African plains. What begins as a literary pilgrimage becomes a portrait of the man behind the myth: the bravado, the tenderness, the damage, and the restless need to keep moving.

Palin brings his trademark curiosity and lightness of touch, treating Hemingway not as a monument but as a complicated human being whose life spilled across continents and genres. The result is part biography, part journey, part meditation on why certain writers refuse to fade.

A thoughtful, engaging evening with two great travellers — one on screen, one in memory.

🌟 Free Nelson Mandela
Channel 4, 9.00pm

This major documentary series opens with a stark, unflinching examination of apartheid — not as distant history, but as a system of white supremacy engineered to control every aspect of Black South African life. The episode traces the machinery of segregation, the brutality used to enforce it, and the early resistance movements that began to challenge the state’s grip.

What gives the film its power is the way it balances the political with the personal: the rise of Nelson Mandela set against the wider struggle of a people fighting for dignity, representation and the right simply to exist on equal terms. It’s rigorous, moving and necessary — a reminder of how oppression is built, and how it is eventually dismantled.

Bowie: The Man Who Changed the World
Sky Documentaries, 9.00pm

A familiar but always worthwhile study of one of modern culture’s most influential figures.

🌟 A Time to Kill (1996)
Legend, 9.00pm

Joel Schumacher’s adaptation of John Grisham’s novel remains a gripping, morally charged courtroom drama, set in a Deep South still riven by race, rage and old injustices. Matthew McConaughey plays the young lawyer drawn into a case that forces the town — and the audience — to confront the limits of justice when the law and lived experience collide.

Samuel L. Jackson brings fierce, wounded gravity to the father at the centre of the trial, while the film builds its tension not from legal theatrics but from the volatile atmosphere outside the courtroom: mobs, threats, and a community on the brink.

It’s slick, urgent and emotionally loaded — a 90s thriller that still knows how to get under the skin.

Later… with Jools Holland
BBC Two, 10.00pm

Jools returns with a line‑up that spans eras and energies: Mike D of the Beastie Boys, bringing the wry charm and hip‑hop heritage only he can; the smoky, soulful intensity of Baby Rose; and the radiant, genre‑defying presence of Beverly Glenn‑Copeland, whose late‑career renaissance feels like a gift every time he performs.

It’s one of those eclectic Jools nights where the contrasts do the work — hip‑hop royalty, a rising voice steeped in emotion, and a visionary elder statesman of experimental soul all sharing the same musical floor. A quietly special edition.

🌟 Children of Men (2006)
BBC Two, 10.45pm

Alfonso Cuarón’s dystopian masterpiece still feels frighteningly close to the bone — a world collapsing under infertility, authoritarianism and despair, rendered with such immediacy that it barely feels like science fiction at all. Clive Owen gives one of his finest performances as the weary bureaucrat dragged, almost against his will, into protecting the one fragile spark of hope left on Earth.

Cuarón’s long, fluid takes remain astonishing: chaos unfolding in real time, violence without glamour, humanity flickering in the rubble. Yet for all its grit and grime, the film carries a quiet, stubborn belief in the possibility of renewal.

A modern classic — urgent, immersive and emotionally shattering.

Boiling Point (2021)
Channel 4, Midnight

Stephen Graham is electrifying in this ferocious, real‑time restaurant drama, a single unbroken shot that traps you in the pressure cooker of a London kitchen on the brink. What begins as controlled chaos slowly unravels into something rawer and more revealing — a portrait of overwork, ego, exhaustion and the fragile humanity beneath the chef’s whites.

The camera never lets you escape, weaving through cramped spaces and frayed tempers as service spirals out of control. It’s tense, immersive and brilliantly acted, a late‑night watch that leaves your pulse racing long after the plates stop clattering.

🌟 World Cup 2026: Haiti v Scotland — BBC One, 2.00am

Scotland return to the World Cup stage for the first time in 28 years, opening their Group C campaign against Haiti — a match that feels both historic and quietly nerve‑shredding. Steve Clarke’s side arrive in good form after strong warm‑up wins, but the pressure is unmistakable: with Morocco and Brazil looming later in the group, this is the game they simply have to take something from.

Haiti, making their first World Cup appearance in over half a century, won’t make it easy. Expect a cagey start, flashes of jeopardy, and the hope that Scotland’s midfield spine — McGinn, McTominay, Christie — can impose control when it matters.

A late‑night (or very early‑morning) appointment for the Tartan Army, and a moment decades in the making.

Monday 15th June

🌟 The Power of the Dog (2021)
BBC Two, 12.05am

Jane Campion’s magnificent deconstruction of western mythology unfolds with a slow, coiled intensity — a frontier drama where the real battles are waged in silence, glances and buried wounds. Benedict Cumberbatch is extraordinary as Phil Burbank, a man whose cruelty masks a deeper, more dangerous vulnerability, while the wide Montana landscapes feel less like freedom and more like emotional terrain waiting to erupt.

Campion strips the western of swagger and replaces it with psychological precision: masculinity as performance, desire as threat, power as something that shifts in the smallest of gestures. Every frame is controlled, unsettling and quietly devastating.

A modern masterpiece — tense, elegant and lingering long after the credits fade.

Gagarine (2020)
Film4, 1.30am

A quietly luminous film that turns a crumbling Paris housing estate into a place of dreams, memory and fragile hope. Ladj Ly and Fanny Liatard blend social realism with a touch of science‑fiction poetry, following teenager Youri as he tries to save the only home he’s ever known — transforming the tower block into a kind of spacecraft built from longing and imagination.

The result is moving without sentimentality: a portrait of community under threat, of youth inventing escape routes when none are offered, and of the small acts of care that keep people afloat. It’s tender, inventive and unexpectedly cosmic

🌟 Brexit: A Very British Civil War
BBC Two, 9.00pm

The concluding part of the documentary examining Britain’s defining political conflict.

Dolly: The World’s Most Famous Sheep
Channel 4, 10.00pm

The story of the scientific breakthrough that quietly rewrote the rules of modern biology. This documentary revisits the creation of Dolly the sheep — the first mammal cloned from an adult cell — and unpacks the mix of brilliance, controversy and sheer audacity behind the experiment.

It’s a tale of lab‑coat ingenuity and global shockwaves, charting how a single sheep in a Scottish shed forced the world to rethink ethics, genetics and the boundaries of possibility. Clear, accessible and surprisingly moving, it captures the moment science stepped into a new era.

OnlyFans: Inside the Machine
BBC One, 10.55pm

A look inside one of the most influential — and divisive — platforms of the digital age, tracing how a site built on direct creator‑to‑audience connection became a lightning rod for debates about labour, autonomy, exploitation and the economics of online fame. The documentary digs into the company’s inner workings, the people who rely on it, and the wider cultural forces that turned a niche service into a global flashpoint.

It’s brisk, revealing and quietly unsettling — a portrait of a platform that reshaped the internet while raising questions society still hasn’t fully answered.

Tuesday 16th June

Letter to Brezhnev (1985)
BBC Two, 12.05am

A small film with a big heart, this Liverpool romance captures the grit and charm of 1980s Merseyside with disarming honesty. Alexandra Pigg and Peter Firth bring a lovely, tentative chemistry to a story that begins as a chance encounter and blossoms into something far more hopeful — all against the looming backdrop of Cold War politics and everyday economic struggle.

What makes it endure is its mix of humour and yearning: a city battered by circumstance but still capable of producing moments of joy, defiance and sheer romantic audacity. It’s tender, funny and quietly political — a reminder that even in bleak times, people still dream of escape, connection and something better.

Sign of the Pagan (1954)
Film4, 3.15pm

A proudly old‑fashioned slice of Hollywood spectacle, pitched somewhere between historical pageant and sword‑and‑sandals intrigue. Jack Palance cuts a striking figure as Attila the Hun — all brooding menace and coiled ambition — while Jeff Chandler’s Roman general provides the square‑jawed counterweight in a tale of empires clashing and destinies foretold.

The film has that unmistakable 1950s studio sheen: lavish sets, bold colours, and a script that treats history as a canvas for myth rather than accuracy. It’s grand, earnest and enjoyably overblown — the kind of matinee epic where the drama is big, the stakes are bigger, and subtlety is left at the city gates.

Rosa Elettrica
Sky Atlantic, 9.00pm

A stylish Italian crime thriller with a cool, modern pulse, steeped in neon shadows and moral ambiguity. The series follows a young woman pulled into the circuitry of organised crime, where loyalty is fragile, power shifts without warning, and every choice seems to spark another dangerous consequence.

What sets it apart is its atmosphere: elegant, moody and charged with a distinctly European sense of fatalism. The plotting is sharp, the performances simmer, and the cityscape becomes a character in its own right — seductive, treacherous, impossible to escape.

A sleek, confident slice of contemporary Italian noir.

🌟 The American Revolution — BBC Four, 10.00pm
The opening chapters of a major new history of the United States, told with a clarity that cuts through centuries of myth‑making. This first instalment traces the tensions, ideas and imperial missteps that pushed Britain’s colonies from grumbling dissent to outright rebellion — a story of taxes, pamphlets, protests and the slow ignition of a political identity that would reshape the world.

What stands out is the programme’s sense of scale: intimate portraits of the people who lived through the upheaval set against the vast geopolitical forces grinding into motion. It’s rigorous, vivid and refreshingly unsentimental — a strong start to a series that promises to re‑examine a revolution everyone thinks they already understand.

Science Fiction in the Atomic Age: Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury
Sky Arts, 10.50pm

A fascinating study of two giants whose imaginations helped define what modern science fiction could be. Clarke, the cool rationalist of the space age, and Bradbury, the lyrical chronicler of human longing and dread, make for a compelling contrast — one looking outward to the stars, the other inward to the soul.

The programme traces how their work emerged from the anxieties and exhilarations of the Atomic Age: technological leaps, existential threats, and a world suddenly aware of its own fragility. Through interviews, archive material and sharp critical insight, it shows how both writers shaped not just a genre but the way we think about the future itself.

A richly engaging hour for anyone who loves the crossroads where imagination meets history.

Knives Out (2019)
Film4, 11.40pm

Rian Johnson’s witty and ingenious revival of the murder mystery — Knives Out Johnson’s modern whodunnit is a gleeful reinvention of the Agatha Christie template — a country house, a dead patriarch, a squabbling family, and a detective who sees more than he lets on. What lifts it is the tone: sly, spry, and fizzing with character, from Daniel Craig’s drawling Benoit Blanc to Ana de Armas’s quietly brilliant moral centre.

The film delights in misdirection and social satire, peeling back layers of entitlement and ego while keeping the mystery satisfyingly tight. It’s clever without being smug, funny without undercutting the stakes, and packed with the kind of detail that rewards a rewatch.

A sparkling, precision‑tooled crowd‑pleaser — the murder mystery reborn with a grin.

Wednesday 17th June

The Lavender Hill Mob (1951)
Film4, 5.15pm

One of Ealing’s finest: a perfectly judged caper that pairs Alec Guinness’s mild‑mannered bank clerk with Stanley Holloway’s genial schemer in a plot to smuggle stolen gold out of the country. What begins as a modest fantasy of escape blossoms into a wonderfully daft criminal enterprise, executed with that trademark Ealing blend of wit, warmth and gentle anarchy.

Guinness is magnificent — precise, understated, and quietly hilarious — while the film’s escalating absurdity never loses sight of the human foibles beneath the farce. A small comic masterpiece, still sparkling after seven decades.

Titans of the Cold War
PBS America, 7.50pm

A pivotal chapter in the long standoff between East and West, charting how the arrivals of Nikita Khrushchev and Dwight D. Eisenhower reshaped the Cold War’s trajectory. The programme captures a moment when bluster, brinkmanship and back‑channel diplomacy all collided — Khrushchev’s volatile mix of reformist impulses and showmanship meeting Eisenhower’s steadier, military‑minded pragmatism.

It’s a study in contrasts and consequences: two leaders inheriting a world on the edge, each trying to manage nuclear anxiety, ideological rivalry and the uneasy hope that dialogue might avert catastrophe. A brisk, insightful slice of Cold War history, illuminating the personalities who steered the superpowers into a new, uncertain phase.

🌟 England v Croatia – FIFA World Cup 2026
ITV1, 8.00pm

The World Cup rolls into its first truly seismic evening as England open their campaign against Croatia — a fixture heavy with history, expectation and the familiar national cocktail of hope and dread. Gareth Southgate’s side arrive with a squad brimming with talent but carrying the weight of a country that always wants this to be the year.

Croatia, perennial tournament disruptors, remain as technically sharp and tactically stubborn as ever, even as a new generation steps out from under the long shadow of Modrić. It’s a meeting of styles as much as reputations: England’s pace and directness against Croatia’s control and patience.

A match guaranteed to dominate the national conversation — tense, tactical and impossible to ignore.

🌟 Children of Men (2006)
BBC Three, 9.00pm

A second chance this week to catch Alfonso Cuarón’s dystopian masterpiece — a film that still feels alarmingly close to the world outside the window. Set in a Britain buckling under infertility, authoritarianism and despair, it follows Clive Owen’s weary civil servant as he’s pulled into protecting the one fragile spark of hope left on Earth.

Cuarón’s long, fluid takes remain astonishing: chaos unfolding in real time, violence stripped of glamour, humanity flickering in the rubble. Yet for all its grit, the film carries a quiet belief in the possibility of renewal.

Urgent, immersive and emotionally shattering — absolutely worth a repeat viewing.

The Idea of You (2024)
BBC One, 10.40pm

Anne Hathaway brings warmth, wit and a quietly bruised honesty to this thoughtful romantic drama about a woman who stumbles into an unexpected relationship that upends the neat borders of her life. What begins as a chance encounter with a younger pop star becomes a story about desire, agency and the courage it takes to choose happiness when the world insists you shouldn’t.

The film balances fantasy with emotional truth, letting Hathaway’s performance anchor the glamour in something recognisably human — the longing to feel seen, the fear of being judged, the thrill of rediscovery.

Thailand: The Dark Side of Paradise
BBC Three, from 10.40pm

A revealing look behind Thailand’s tourist image.

They Live (1988)
Legend, 11.10pm

John Carpenter’s cult satire remains as sharp as a boot to the ribs — a gleefully subversive blend of sci‑fi, action and anti‑consumerist rage. Roddy Piper’s drifter discovers a pair of sunglasses that reveal the world as it truly is: billboards barking obedience, elites exposed as skeletal overlords, and capitalism literally wearing a human mask.

Carpenter plays it deadpan and furious, mixing B‑movie swagger with a political bite that feels even more relevant now than it did in ’88. The famous alleyway punch‑up is still absurdly glorious, but it’s the film’s bleak wit and prophetic clarity that linger.

Thursday 18th June

Ad Astra (2019)
Film4, 6.40pm

Brad Pitt gives one of his most restrained and affecting performances in this visually ravishing sci‑fi odyssey. Set in a near‑future solar system fraying at the edges, the film follows an astronaut sent on a mission to track down his long‑lost father — a legendary explorer whose obsession may now threaten humanity itself.

James Gray turns what could have been a straight adventure into something more intimate: a story about isolation, legacy and the emotional gravity we carry across vast distances. The imagery is stunning — moon‑buggy chases, Neptune’s blue haze, the quiet terror of deep space — but it’s the film’s melancholy pulse that lingers.

A thoughtful, beautifully crafted journey into the cosmos and the self.

🌟 Catch Me If You Can (2002)
TLC, 9.00pm

Steven Spielberg’s breezy true‑life tale of deception and reinvention remains one of his most purely enjoyable films. Leonardo DiCaprio is irresistible as Frank Abagnale Jr., the teenage con artist who slips through America in a blur of forged cheques, borrowed identities and audacious charm, while Tom Hanks’s dogged FBI agent gives the chase its steady, beating heart.

Spielberg keeps the tone light without ever losing sight of the loneliness beneath the bravado, turning a cat‑and‑mouse caper into a story about yearning, escape and the strange American romance of becoming someone new.

🌟 Queen James
BBC Two, 9.00pm

A fresh, incisive examination of James VI and I — a monarch whose intellect, insecurities and political instincts shaped two kingdoms at a moment of profound change. The programme digs into the culture and court politics that surrounded him: the factional manoeuvring, the ideological battles, and the delicate dance between king and favourites.

It also confronts, without sensationalism, the long‑debated question of James’s sexuality. His intensely intimate relationships with men such as Esmé Stewart, Robert Carr, and George Villiers have led many historians to argue that he was gay or bisexual — a dimension of his life that shaped both the dynamics of his court and the anxieties of those who served within it.

What emerges is a portrait of a ruler both shrewd and vulnerable, navigating union, religion, reputation and desire in a world that scrutinised every gesture. A sharp, engaging hour that reframes a familiar figure with welcome clarity and complexity.

The Accused: Beyond Reasonable Doubt
Channel 4, 10.00pm

The opening episode tackles one of the most perilous fault lines in the justice system: the fragility of eyewitness testimony. Through real cases and forensic reconstruction, it shows how memory — fallible, suggestible, and easily distorted — can send an investigation veering off course, even when delivered with absolute confidence in the witness box.

The programme lays out the dangers with clarity: misidentification, pressure from police procedure, the subtle influence of expectation, and the devastating consequences when a jury mistakes certainty for truth. It’s sober, unsettling viewing, and a reminder that the line between justice and injustice can hinge on a single, unreliable recollection.

A compelling start to a series intent on probing the system’s most uncomfortable weaknesses.

The Last Man on Earth (1964)
Talking Pictures TV, 11.15pm

Vincent Price is superb in this stark, unsettling adaptation of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend — a film whose influence can be felt in everything from Night of the Living Dead to modern zombie cinema. Shot in eerie, depopulated Italian streets, it follows a lone survivor haunting his own ruined world, battling vampiric creatures by night and crushing loneliness by day.

Price plays it with a weary, haunted dignity, turning what could have been pulp into something strangely elegiac. The film’s low‑budget ingenuity and bleak tone give it a power that still resonates, decades later.

Friday 19th June

El Dorado (1966)
5 Action, 1.15pm

Howard Hawks reunites with John Wayne for a late‑career western that wears its age with easy charm. Wayne plays a seasoned gunfighter drawn into defending a small town alongside Robert Mitchum’s boozy sheriff and James Caan’s eager young sidekick — a trio whose chemistry gives the film its unhurried pleasure.

There’s plenty of classic Hawksian business: dry humour, camaraderie forged under pressure, and action that unfolds with relaxed assurance rather than bluster. It’s a film more interested in character than spectacle, and all the better for it.

A mellow, quietly irresistible slice of old‑school western storytelling.

Milan with Michael Portillo
9.00pm

Michael Portillo turns his eye — and his famously exuberant wardrobe — to one of Europe’s great cities, tracing Milan’s blend of industry, elegance and restless modernity. From the Duomo’s marble forest to the quiet rituals of the aperitivo hour, he explores a city where fashion, finance and centuries of artistic ambition sit comfortably side by side.

Portillo is at his best here: curious, lightly professorial, and genuinely engaged with the people who keep Milan’s cultural engine humming. The result is a portrait of a city that’s both grand and intimate, stylish yet grounded.

A graceful hour in the company of a guide who knows how to make history feel alive.

🌟 Elvis’s ’68 Comeback Special
BBC Four, 9.00pm

The King’s great reclamation of self and swagger — a televised resurrection that turned a fading Hollywood idol back into a livewire performer. Dressed in black leather, framed by a tight studio crowd and a crackling sense of danger, Elvis tears through his catalogue with a hunger that had been missing for years.

What makes the special so electrifying is its mix of intimacy and spectacle: the loose, joking sit‑down sessions where he reconnects with his roots, and the big, theatrical numbers that remind you why he became a phenomenon in the first place. It’s a portrait of an artist rediscovering his edge in real time.

Still one of television’s most iconic musical moments — and a thrill to revisit.

🌟 The Horse Whisperer (1998)
Great TV, 9.00pm

Robert Redford directs and stars in this quietly moving drama about healing, forgiveness and the slow work of finding your way back to yourself. After a devastating accident leaves both a teenage girl and her horse traumatised, her mother brings them to Redford’s Montana ranch — a place where patience, open skies and hard truths begin to do what medicine alone cannot.

Redford plays the role with understated grace, letting the film breathe in long, lyrical stretches of landscape and silence. Kristin Scott Thomas brings emotional steel as the mother trying to hold everything together, while the story unfolds with a sincerity that never tips into sentimentality.

A spacious, heartfelt film about second chances — and the courage it takes to accept them.

New Life (2023)
Film4, 11.30pm

An intelligent, tightly wound horror‑thriller that begins as a chase movie and gradually reveals something far stranger — and far more moving — beneath its surface. A woman on the run and the agent pursuing her seem locked into a familiar cat‑and‑mouse rhythm, but the film keeps shifting the ground under your feet, peeling back layers of fear, guilt and transformation.

What makes it stand out is the emotional depth threaded through the tension: moments of stillness that hint at lives derailed long before the plot catches up with them. By the time the truth emerges, the horror has become something unexpectedly humane.

Lean, surprising and quietly affecting.

The Invitation (2022)
Channel 4, 12.10am

A stylish gothic horror blending vampires, class and dark romance. A lush, slow‑burn gothic tale that uses its vampiric premise to probe something more human — desire, power and the social hierarchies that feed on both. The film wraps its blood‑dark themes in candlelit corridors, whispered secrets and a romance steeped in danger, letting the supernatural elements sharpen the class tensions rather than overshadow them.

It’s atmospheric without being overwrought, seductive without losing its bite, and smart enough to know that the scariest monsters are often the ones society quietly enables. A beautifully made slice of gothic unease.

Streaming Choice

Polar Park — Channel 4 Streaming, from Friday 19th June

Polar Park arrives on Channel 4 via Walter Presents, adapted by Gérald Hustache‑Mathieu from his own cult 2011 film Poupoupidou. Set in Mouthe, officially the coldest town in France, it follows David Rousseau (Jean‑Paul Rouve), a crime novelist who drifts into the Jura mountains in search of inspiration and instead finds a series of murders staged as famous artworks.

What begins as a quirky detour becomes a stylish, snow‑dusted mystery with a distinctly French flavour: dry humour, melancholy charm and a sense that everyone in this remote community is performing a version of themselves. Hustache‑Mathieu uses the TV format to deepen the world of the original film — expanding characters, sharpening the visual language and leaning into the Coen‑esque mix of oddity and menace that critics praised on its ARTE debut.

The cast — including Guillaume Gouix and India Hair — play it with just the right level of deadpan sincerity, and the show’s wintry aesthetic gives it a personality that stands apart from the usual crime‑drama palette. It’s atmospheric, offbeat and quietly gripping: a murder mystery that’s as interested in mood and character as it is in clues.

Train-ing It with Joe Wilkinson — Channel 4 Streaming, from Friday 19th June

Joe Wilkinson’s travelogue is exactly the sort of quietly oddball delight Channel 4 does best. What begins as a simple rail journey becomes a rambling, self‑deprecating wander through Britain’s quirks, characters and minor absurdities. Wilkinson’s humour is warm, slightly baffled and never cruel, and the show’s charm lies in how happily it embraces the unglamorous. It’s gentle, funny and unexpectedly human — a series that finds meaning in missed connections, lukewarm tea and the strange poetry of public transport.

A Spark into Flame: Hamilton and Hip Hop — Disney+, from Tuesday 16th June

This documentary digs beneath the phenomenon of Hamilton to trace how hip hop reshaped the language of musical theatre. It’s part cultural history, part creative anatomy: a look at how rhythm, rhyme and political storytelling collided to produce a show that felt both radical and inevitable. The film is at its best when it connects Broadway to the wider currents of Black artistry — showing how a form born from resistance became the engine of a global hit. Smart, pacey and full of insight, it’s a reminder that revolutions in culture often begin with a beat.

Project Hail Mary — MGM+, from Thursday 18th June

This adaptation of Andy Weir’s novel leans into the joy of problem‑solving under impossible pressure. It’s part survival story, part cosmic mystery, anchored by a central performance that captures both the terror and the wonder of waking up alone in deep space with the fate of humanity on your shoulders. The film balances hard science with real emotional pull, and its unlikely partnership at the story’s heart gives it warmth amid the equations. Smart, inventive and surprisingly moving — a sci‑fi puzzle box with soul.

🌟 Poor Cow — StudioCanal Presents

Ken Loach’s debut feature still lands with a raw, unvarnished force. Poor Cow follows Joy, a young woman navigating the margins of 1960s London, and Loach shoots her life with a documentary eye that refuses sentimentality. Carol White is extraordinary — open, wounded, hopeful in spite of everything — and the film’s mix of social realism and emotional immediacy feels as fresh now as it did on release. A tough, tender portrait of a woman trying to carve out a future in a world that keeps closing in.

🌟 Kneecap — Prime Video

Kneecap is a riot of energy — a swaggering, politically charged, deeply funny portrait of Belfast’s most anarchic hip‑hop trio. It mixes satire, social commentary and sheer chaotic charm, blurring the line between myth‑making and autobiography. What gives the film its bite is the way it treats language, identity and rebellion not as themes but as fuel: everything burns bright, loud and unapologetically local. It’s bold, inventive and brimming with attitude — a cultural firecracker that refuses to behave.

Marching Powder — Prime Video

Danny Dyer’s Marching Powder is exactly the sort of swaggering, rough‑edged crime caper he was born to front. It’s loud, cheeky and unpretentious, built around Dyer’s gift for playing men who talk themselves into trouble faster than they can fight their way out of it. The film has that early‑2000s Brit‑crime energy — fast cuts, big characters, a plot that barrels forward on attitude as much as logic. It’s messy, funny and knowingly over the top, the kind of thing you watch with a grin because everyone involved clearly knows the game they’re playing.

The Woody Allen Collection — Prime Video

A new Woody Allen collection inevitably arrives with a double pull: the films themselves — sharp, funny, formally inventive — and the long shadow cast by the man who made them. Few directors have shaped modern screen comedy as deeply as Allen; fewer come with such a complicated public legacy.

Engaging with this set means holding both truths at once. The early work still crackles with wit and neurotic energy; the later films drift between nostalgia and self‑parody. But watching them now also means acknowledging the discomfort that surrounds Allen, and recognising that admiration for craft doesn’t require silence about the controversies.

The collection becomes, in that sense, a test case for how we approach socially compromised artists who are nonetheless undeniably talented. The answer isn’t to pretend the work exists in a vacuum, nor to erase it entirely, but to watch with awareness — to let context deepen, rather than flatten, our understanding.

As cinema, these films remain influential. As cultural objects, they ask us to think about the uneasy space where art, ethics and legacy meet.

🌟 The Tasters — Available to buy and rent