There are weeks when Culture Vulture almost writes itself. This is one of them. We have Powell and Pressburger, Hitchcock, Ken Burns, Steinbeck, Priestley, Henry Moore, Malcolm X, the Pet Shop Boys, Chrissie Hynde, David Olusoga and a frankly indecent number of good films competing for our attention.My three highlights are very different beasts. Finding Britain’s Slave Traders with David Olusoga is television doing one of the things television can still do exceptionally well: taking history that has been tidied up, sentimentalised or pushed politely to one side and putting it back in the centre of the national story. An Inspector Calls, meanwhile, demonstrates why Priestley refuses to go away. Eighty years after the play was first performed, its arguments about wealth, responsibility and the consequences of our actions remain irritatingly alive. And for sheer pleasure, Pet Shop Boys Night offers Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe in all their elegant, ironic, melancholy glory.
Elsewhere, there is classic Hitchcock, the return of Blue Lights, a formidable run of late-night films, Led Zeppelin, Steinbeck, Hammer horror, Pop Art, housing drama, the British slave trade, space exploration and even the cultural politics of the buffalo. Not much room for boredom.
Saturday 26 September
10.35am – The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), BBC Two
Powell and Pressburger never do the obvious. They take a story that could have been a straight patriotic salute to a career soldier and turn it into something stranger, richer, and quietly devastating. Time rolls over Clive Candy like a tide — friendships shift, loyalties blur, the country he serves keeps reinventing itself — yet he clings to a code that once made perfect sense and now feels like an antique he’s determined to polish anyway.
Roger Livesey carries all of this with a kind of effortless gravity. He’s funny without trying to be, dignified without pomp, and heartbreakingly human in the moments when he realises the world has moved on and isn’t waiting for him to catch up. The film drifts between eras with a painter’s confidence, one minute broad and comic, the next unexpectedly tender.
People sometimes talk about Colonel Blimp as if it’s a cosy old favourite, but that undersells it. Beneath the warmth and wit sits a sharp critique of British self‑image — the comforting myths, the stubbornness, the belief that honour alone can navigate a century that refuses to play by the old rules. It’s a portrait of a man out of time, drawn with affection but never sentimentality.
The Space Race in Colour — 8pm, Channel 4, 1/2
The opening part explores the extraordinary acceleration of space exploration during the 1950s and 60s. What makes the story endure is not simply the technology but the mixture of scientific ambition, military competition, propaganda and genuine human curiosity driving it. Colour footage gives familiar history an unusual immediacy.
Chrissie Hynde and the Pretenders at the BBC — 8.45pm, BBC Two
A welcome trawl through the BBC archive devoted to one of rock music’s genuinely distinctive figures. Hynde has always possessed that rare combination of toughness, intelligence and effortless cool. The songs have aged rather better than many of the fashions surrounding them. Catch up via iPlayer.
The Space Race in Colour — 9pm, Channel 4, 2/2
The second instalment turns to Kennedy’s 25 May 1961 pledge to land an American on the Moon before the decade was out. An audacious political promise that became an engineering challenge on an almost unimaginable scale. We know the ending; the fascination lies in remembering how improbable it once seemed.
Chrissie Hynde at Glastonbury — 10pm, BBC Two
The Pretenders’ 2023 Glastonbury appearance. Hynde remains a commanding live performer, and the set provides a useful reminder that this catalogue goes a good deal deeper than the obvious hits.
Arena: Alone with Chrissie Hynde — 11.30pm, BBC Two
This 2017 portrait is the more intriguing part of the evening. We follow Hynde from clothes shopping in Paris to hanging out with Sandra Bernhard in New York. Less a conventional rock biography than an intimate encounter with a famously self-contained artist.
Withnail and I — 12.20am, Channel 4 (1987)
Some films don’t age so much as ferment, and Withnail and I is one of them — sharper, stranger, sadder every time you return to it. On the surface it’s a shambolic comedy about two out‑of‑work actors fleeing a grim London flat for a countryside that turns out to be even grimmer. But underneath the booze, the bravado and the endless quotable lines, there’s a story about friendship stretched thin by desperation, about youth quietly slipping away while you’re busy performing your own downfall.
Richard E. Grant’s Withnail is a masterpiece of controlled chaos: all flailing elegance, theatrical misery and the kind of self‑destruction that would be unbearable if it weren’t so funny. Paul McGann’s “I” is the ballast — anxious, hopeful, already half aware that the life they’re clinging to is unsustainable. Together they stumble through a world that feels permanently waterlogged, chasing dignity, escape, or at least a drink strong enough to make the day tolerable.
What stays with you isn’t just the comedy, though it’s still lethal. It’s the melancholy that creeps in around the edges, the sense that this is the last chapter of a friendship that can’t survive adulthood. The final scenes land with a weight the film has been quietly preparing you for — the moment when the performance ends and one of them has to step into a future the other can’t face.
It’s still desperately funny. It’s still painfully sad. And it still feels like one of the great British films about the moment youth gives way to something colder. A film about friendship, failure and the end of youth masquerading as an extended drinking session.
Nostalgia — 12.35am, BBC Two (2022)
Mario Martone’s brooding return-to-Naples drama follows a man confronting the city and memories he left behind decades earlier.
Martone’s film moves at the pace of someone returning to a place they once knew intimately but can no longer read. Naples isn’t just a backdrop here; it’s a living archive of everything the protagonist abandoned — the streets he grew up on, the rituals he shed, the mistakes that hardened into memory. When he walks back into the city, it’s as if the past has been waiting for him, patient and unforgiving.
There’s a brooding stillness to the way Martone frames the neighbourhoods: sun‑bleached courtyards, narrow alleys that seem to close in as he tries to navigate them, faces that carry decades of unspoken history. The film doesn’t rush to explain anything. It lets the geography do the talking, and the geography has a long memory.
What emerges is a portrait of a man trying to reconcile who he was with who he became — and discovering that the city has its own version of him, one he can’t easily escape. The drama is quiet, almost stealthy, but it builds into something weighty: a reckoning with guilt, loyalty and the kind of nostalgia that isn’t warm at all, just persistent.
It’s patient, atmospheric filmmaking — the sort that trusts you to sit with the silences and the shadows. Martone understands that returning home is never simple, and rarely comforting. Here, it’s a confrontation.
Sunday 27 September
The 39 Steps — 12.40pm, BBC Two (1935)
Hitchcock was still working within the British studio system when he made The 39 Steps, but you can already see the whole toolkit forming — the wrong man on the run, the cool blonde with secrets of her own, the set‑pieces that snap into place with a magician’s timing. What’s striking, ninety years on, is how light it all feels. Robert Donat barely seems to break a sweat as he’s dragged from London to the Highlands and back again, accused of murder, chased by spies, handcuffed to a stranger who’d rather be anywhere else.
There’s a looseness to Donat’s performance that keeps the film buoyant. He’s charming without being smug, quick without being slick, and always looks as though he’s enjoying the absurdity of the situation just enough to keep you on his side. Hitchcock matches him beat for beat: scenes tumble into each other with a rhythm that feels almost musical, jokes land in the middle of danger, and the plot — which is nonsense in the best possible way — clicks forward with beautiful economy.
What’s remarkable is how modern it still feels. The pacing is ferocious, the humour dry, the storytelling stripped down to essentials. No fat, no fuss. Just a man, a mystery, and a director discovering how to make cinema move like a living thing.
It’s fast, funny, and built with such confidence that you can see the future Hitchcock in every frame. Nearly a century later, it still runs like a train.
Our Man in Havana — 12.55pm, Talking Pictures TV (1959)
Greene’s own adaptation gives Carol Reed exactly the material he thrives on: a world where danger and absurdity sit so close together you can’t quite tell which is which. Havana, caught in the last flicker of pre‑revolutionary glamour, becomes a stage for one of the great comic deconstructions of espionage — a place where the shadows are long, the drinks are strong, and the intelligence services are so desperate for information they’ll believe almost anything, provided it arrives on the right form.
Alec Guinness plays Wormold with that immaculate, slightly baffled charm he could summon without effort. He’s a vacuum‑cleaner salesman who stumbles into British intelligence and quickly discovers that inventing agents, plots and blueprints is far easier than actually running them. His sketches of imaginary weapons — lifted straight from the parts of his own appliances — are accepted as gospel by men who should know better. Guinness never pushes the comedy; he lets the madness of the situation do the work, and the result is funnier, and sadder, than a broader performance would allow.
Reed keeps the tone light but never flimsy. Beneath the jokes lies a clear-eyed view of Cold War bureaucracy: the memos, the committees, the blind faith in paperwork, the willingness to inflate nonsense into national security. Glamour is stripped away, replaced by a kind of weary procedural chaos. Everyone is pretending, and everyone is invested in the pretence.
It’s a delight — nimble, dry, and quietly scathing. A spy film where the most dangerous thing isn’t the enemy, but the machinery of espionage itself, grinding on regardless of whether any of it makes sense.
The Lady Vanishes — 2.05pm, BBC Two (1938)
Hitchcock’s British period is full of treasures, but this one has a particular snap to it — a thriller that never forgets to be playful, a comedy that never loses its grip on tension. It begins with the bustle of a European railway station, all chatter and mild chaos, then slips onto a train where reality seems to bend ever so slightly. A woman disappears, and almost everyone insists she was never there. That simple hook becomes a kind of game: who’s lying, who’s confused, and who’s quietly steering events from the shadows.
Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave make a terrific pair, sparring their way through the mystery with a lightness that keeps the film buoyant even as the stakes rise. Hitchcock uses the confined setting beautifully — corridors, compartments, dining cars — each space tightening the screws a little more. The humour is dry, the pacing brisk, and the whole thing has that early-Hitchcock confidence where he seems to be discovering just how much fun he can have with an audience’s nerves.
Eighty‑odd years later, it still works. The wit, the suspense, the sheer elegance of the storytelling — all intact. It’s one of his most entertaining British films, and a reminder that he didn’t need Hollywood to be Hitchcock.
Eva Longoria: Searching for France — 7.15pm, BBC Two
Longoria continues the travel-and-food format with France as her destination. These programmes work best when the celebrity presenter gets out of the way and allows local history, food and people to take over. Full series on iPlayer.
Assault on Precinct 13 — 9pm, Great Action (1976)
Carpenter was still early in his career when he made Assault on Precinct 13, but the confidence is already there — that stripped‑back style, the refusal to waste a frame, the sense that he knows exactly how to wind an audience up without ever raising his voice. The setup is brutally simple: a near‑abandoned police station, a handful of people inside, and a faceless gang outside who seem less like criminals than a force of nature. No speeches, no psychology, just pressure.
What makes it sing is the economy. Carpenter takes a tiny budget and turns it into something elemental. The station becomes a kind of frontier outpost, the siege a modern‑day western smuggled into an urban nightmare. The characters aren’t grand or mythic — they’re ordinary, scared, improvising — which somehow makes the tension worse. You feel every corner tightening, every option closing.
The violence is sudden, the humour bone‑dry, and the atmosphere thick enough to chew. Carpenter’s score pulses underneath it all, that cold, insistent rhythm that feels like a heartbeat you can’t slow down.
It’s lean, merciless filmmaking — a reminder of how much you can do with almost nothing when you understand pacing, space and dread. A siege movie that never pretends to be anything else, and ends up being far more because of it.
Platoon — 10pm, BBC Two (1986)
Oliver Stone’s Vietnam War film remains raw, angry and morally divided. Willem Dafoe and Tom Berenger embody competing visions of soldiering while Charlie Sheen’s young recruit is caught between them. Sometimes unsubtle, certainly, but its fury is genuine.
An Inspector Calls — 10pm, BBC Four
Priestley’s play is a morality tale built like a piece of clockwork: one room, one family, one visitor who refuses to let anyone wriggle out of their own part in a young woman’s death. The 2015 adaptation leans into that structure without ever feeling stagey. It has a kind of eerie stillness — the Birling home glowing with wealth and certainty — and then David Thewlis walks in and the temperature drops.
Thewlis’s Inspector Goole doesn’t raise his voice or posture. He simply arrives, and from that moment the celebration curdles. He has that unsettling calm that makes you lean forward, the sense that he already knows every answer and is waiting to see whether the Birlings will tell the truth or cling to their self‑image. One by one, the family’s polished surfaces crack: the smugness, the entitlement, the insistence that responsibility is something for other people. Priestley’s machinery is visible, yes, but it’s purposeful — each revelation landing with the weight of a moral argument rather than a plot twist.
What the adaptation captures so well is the play’s anger. Not loud, not theatrical — just steady, focused, and aimed squarely at the idea that privilege can insulate you from consequence. It can’t. Priestley knew that in 1945, and the story hasn’t lost any of its bite.
It’s an excellent version, atmospheric without fuss, and anchored by Thewlis’s quietly relentless performance. And if you miss it live, it’s sitting on iPlayer, waiting for you to step into that dining room and watch the façade crumble.
J. B. Priestley documentary — 11.15pm, BBC Four
A 1973 programme made as Priestley approached his 80th birthday. A fitting companion piece, allowing the man himself to reflect on a career that moved between novels, theatre, broadcasting and public argument.
Monday 28 September
Finding Britain’s Slave Traders with David Olusoga — 9pm, BBC Two
The concluding part of Olusoga’s superb and devastating two-parter. Edward Colston’s name became nationally notorious in 2020 when his statue went into Bristol Harbour, but Olusoga’s point is that Colston was no aberration. Hospitals, schools, theatres and civic institutions benefited from fortunes entangled with slavery, while the privatisation and expansion of the trade fed British economic growth.
The casual brutality inflicted upon millions of Africans makes this difficult viewing. It should be. This is not somebody else’s history. It is part of Britain’s national story, and Olusoga is particularly good at joining the individual lives to the larger economic structures. Both episodes are on iPlayer.
Nobody — 9pm, Film4 (2021)
Bob Odenkirk makes an unexpectedly convincing action hero as an apparently ordinary suburban father whose old skills resurface spectacularly. Ridiculous in places, but knowingly so. A very efficient piece of pulp entertainment.
Henry Moore Night — from 10pm, BBC Four
A whole evening devoted to Moore begins with reminiscences from his daughter Mary. BBC Four remains at its best when it raids the archive like this rather than trying to imitate mainstream television.
The Culture Show: Henry Moore — 10.10pm, BBC Four
The late Alan Yentob examines Moore’s work and his relationship with television. Moore understood early that broadcasting could take sculpture beyond galleries and into millions of homes.
Dead Man’s Shoes — 10.50pm, Film4 (2004)
Meadows has made plenty of tough films, but this is the one where the darkness feels baked into the soil. No swagger, no genre polish, no cathartic showdown — just a man walking back into the town that failed his brother and refusing to let anyone pretend it didn’t happen. Paddy Considine gives a performance that seems to vibrate with purpose. He’s frightening, yes, but never in a showy way. The terror comes from how still he is, how certain. You can see the grief sitting just behind the rage, shaping every decision.
The film unfolds like a bad memory resurfacing. Meadows shoots the Midlands with a stark intimacy: empty fields, quiet estates, the kind of places where cruelty can hide because nobody’s looking. The men Considine is hunting aren’t master criminals; they’re small‑time bullies who thought they’d gotten away with something. Meadows refuses to glamorise any of it. Violence arrives without flourish, without slow‑motion, without the usual cinematic cushioning. It’s ugly, abrupt, and leaves a mark.
What lingers, though, isn’t the brutality. It’s the sorrow. The bond between Considine’s character and his brother — shown in those grainy, affectionate flashbacks — gives the film its spine. You understand exactly why he’s doing this, and you understand the cost. By the time the final reckoning arrives, the film has stripped revenge of every comforting illusion. There’s no triumph here, no release. Just consequence.
It’s brutal, intimate, unforgettable — Meadows at his most uncompromising, and Considine at his most extraordinary.
Nickel Boys — 11.05pm, BBC Two (2024)
Monitor: Henry Moore — 11.10pm, BBC Four
A 1960 programme in which Hugh Weldon visits Moore. Television archive material of this kind offers something modern profiles often cannot: the artist speaking before his reputation has hardened completely into history.
Henry Moore at Home — 11.35pm, BBC Four
Moore guides viewers around his own art collection. There is always something revealing about discovering what artists themselves choose to live with.
Face to Face: Henry Moore — 12.25am, BBC Four
John Freeman interviews Moore in the famously austere Face to Face format. No gimmicks, nowhere to hide, just questions and answers. A fine conclusion to the evening.
Tuesday 29 September
The American Buffalo — 3.50pm, PBS America
Ken Burns turns his attention to the buffalo and, inevitably, to America itself. The near-destruction of the animal becomes inseparable from westward expansion, Indigenous dispossession and the mythology of the frontier. Burns can sometimes take his time getting somewhere, but when the subject deserves space, that becomes a strength.
Blue Lights — 9pm, BBC One, 1/6
The Belfast police drama returns. A community event begins to spiral, placing officers back inside the complicated network of loyalties, grudges and pressures that made the earlier series so compelling. Its great strength has always been its refusal to reduce policing in Northern Ireland to simple heroics.
Malcolm X — 10.40pm, BBC One (1992)
In Ten Pictures: Britney — 11.10pm, BBC Three
Britney Spears’ extraordinary and often disturbing public life reconstructed through ten photographs. The format works when the images become doorways into larger questions about fame, control and the voracious celebrity culture that surrounded her.
Wednesday 30 September
Bridge of Spies — 6.15pm, Film4 (2015)
Spielberg treats the Cold War as a landscape of quiet manoeuvres rather than grand theatrics, and Bridge of Spies is one of his most elegant explorations of that world. Everything here is measured: the diplomacy, the paranoia, the moral pressure. Tom Hanks plays James Donovan with that steady, unshowy conviction he does better than almost anyone — a lawyer who finds himself negotiating the exchange of Soviet spy Rudolf Abel for downed American pilot Gary Powers, and refuses to abandon the principles that brought him into the job in the first place.
The Shaman’s Grave — 8pm, BBC Four
Germany, 1934. The bones of an ancient priestess are exhumed and appropriated by the National Socialists in support of Aryan mythology. A fascinating reminder that authoritarian regimes do not merely rewrite recent history; they frequently attempt to annex the ancient past as well.
Hammer: Heroes, Legends and Monsters — 12.45am, Sky Arts
A celebration of the studio that gave British horror its own unmistakable combination of Gothic colour, blood, sex and theatricality. Hammer’s Dracula and Frankenstein films were once dismissed as lurid entertainment; their visual influence now seems undeniable.
Thursday 1 October
The Holdovers— 9pm, Film4 (2023)
Payne has a knack for stories that look modest on the surface and then quietly open up into something far more generous. The Holdovers is one of his best: a Christmas tale that refuses to be sentimental, a comedy that keeps finding pockets of bruised humanity, a drama that understands how people can be stuck without quite knowing it.
The Client — 9pm, Legend (1994)
John Grisham adaptation with Susan Sarandon and a young Brad Renfro. A boy who knows too much about a mob murder becomes trapped between prosecutors and organised crime. Glossy 1990s legal thriller territory, but Sarandon gives it steel.
Florence Foster Jenkins — 11.05pm, BBC Two (2016)
Meryl Streep plays the famously wealthy New York socialite whose love of singing vastly exceeded her ability to do it. Hugh Grant is particularly good as the husband trying to sustain both Florence’s dreams and the elaborate illusion surrounding her.
Friday 2 October
War — 9pm, Sky Atlantic, also shown at 2am early Friday, catch-up via NOW
Dominic West and Sienna Miller lead a glossy legal drama that embraces the pleasures of the genre rather than apologising for them. Big personalities, courtroom manoeuvring and moral ambiguity: this looks designed to be consumed rather than merely admired.
Scarface — 9pm, Legend (1983)
De Palma doesn’t do restraint here — he builds a world of neon, sweat and cocaine where everything is dialled up past sanity, and then lets Al Pacino tear through it like a man convinced excess is the same thing as destiny. Tony Montana’s rise is all swagger and momentum, a swagger so intoxicating that generations have mistaken it for aspiration. But the film itself is far clearer: this is a man poisoning every room he enters, burning every bridge, destroying anything that might tether him to humanity.
Pacino’s performance is volcanic, but there’s method in the madness. He plays Tony as someone who believes he can outshout consequence, a man whose hunger is so ferocious it becomes grotesque. De Palma matches him with operatic flourishes — the camera swooping, the colours screaming, the violence erupting without warning. It’s vulgar, deliberately so, because the world Tony builds is vulgar. The film isn’t celebrating it; it’s diagnosing it.
What’s often missed is how sad it is. Beneath the swagger sits a man who can’t stop escalating, who mistakes paranoia for strength, who keeps climbing even when the ladder is clearly on fire. By the time the final act arrives, the excess has curdled into inevitability. The fall isn’t a twist — it’s the only possible ending for someone who’s spent the entire film proving he can’t live in any world that isn’t built entirely around him.
Pet Shop Boys Night — from 9.05pm, BBC Four
An evening devoted to Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe, whose combination of dance music, melancholy, irony and immaculate pop intelligence has proved remarkably durable.
Pet Shop Boys at the BBC — 9.05pm, BBC Four
Archive performances remind us how many great singles there are. The Pet Shop Boys understood that pop could be emotionally direct and archly detached at the same time.
The Substance — 10pm, BBC Two (2024)
Coralie Fargeat doesn’t nibble at her themes — she bites straight through them. The Substance is a ferocious piece of body‑horror satire, a film that takes the entertainment industry’s obsession with youth and beauty and pushes it to a grotesque, hilarious, stomach‑turning extreme. Demi Moore is superb as a star whose relevance is slipping, her performance pitched perfectly between icy control and mounting desperation.
The film’s central conceit — a product that allows you to generate a younger, “better” version of yourself — is played not as sci‑fi but as nightmare logic. What follows is messy, excessive, and very deliberately impossible to look away from. Fargeat’s images are loud, sticky, and confrontational; subtlety is not on the menu, and that’s precisely why it works.
Beneath the splatter sits a razor‑sharp anger about how women are consumed, discarded and remade by an industry that worships youth while punishing ageing.
The Last Samurai — 10.45pm, ITV1 (2003)
Tom Cruise stars as an American soldier drawn into Japan during the turbulent transition of the Meiji period. Historically simplified, certainly, but handsome, sincere and powered by an excellent Ken Watanabe performance.
The Wicker Man — 12.15am, BBC Two (1973)
Carlito’s Way — 12.25am, Legend (1993)
Al Pacino plays former gangster Carlito Brigante, attempting to escape the criminal world only to discover that old loyalties and bad choices have long memories. De Palma directs with swagger, Sean Penn is wonderfully reptilian, and the final stretch is a masterclass in suspense.
The Pet Shop Boys evening continues with Reel Stories: Pet Shop Boys, the 2023 programme in which Tennant and Lowe sit down with Dermot O’Leary and revisit clips from their career, before concluding with their 2024 Radio 2 in the Park headline performance from the Dreamworld: The Greatest Hits Live tour. Both are also on iPlayer.
Streaming
Netflix
Becoming Led Zeppelin — from Sunday 27 September
A documentary tracing the origins of Led Zeppelin through new interviews, previously unseen footage and performances. The great attraction is that the story is largely told by the band themselves. For devotees there will be familiar territory, but unseen archive material involving Zeppelin is hardly something to complain about.
East of Eden — all seven episodes from Thursday 1 October
Another adaptation of John Steinbeck’s sprawling family saga. Steinbeck gives television plenty to work with: sibling rivalry, parental failure, inherited guilt, money, morality and the constant possibility that people might become something other than what their families expect. Seven episodes should at least give the story room to breathe.
Channel 4 Streaming / Walter Presents
3PU: Paris Police Psychiatric Unit — all six episodes from Friday 2 October
A French thriller centred on the intersection between policing and psychiatry. Walter Presents has built its reputation on European dramas that assume viewers are capable of following something more demanding than the conventional procedural, so this is one to investigate.
Kill Jackie — all eight episodes from Friday 2 October
Catherine Zeta-Jones plays Jackie Price, who has traded her former life as one of Europe’s biggest cocaine dealers for the apparently respectable world of art dealing. Unfortunately, respectable reinvention is rarely enough to make a criminal past disappear. An enjoyably lurid premise and exactly the sort of thing that could become a weekend binge.
Leaving Soon
Stan & Ollie — BBC iPlayer, available until Sunday 27 September
Steve Coogan and John C. Reilly capture Laurel and Hardy late in their careers, touring Britain as their fame begins to fade. Rather than simply impersonating the comedy legends, both actors find the affection, disappointment and dependency beneath the partnership. Gentle, sad and very good. Catch it while you can.
Documentary: The Neo‑Nazi Who Lived a Secret Gay Life
Tahnaiya Russell’s documentary on Nicky Crane is a stark, absorbing portrait of a man living two violently contradictory lives — a notorious British Movement street fighter and a regular on London’s gay scene. It presents Crane’s brutality plainly, recounting incidents such as leading mobs attacking South Asians in Brick Lane and Black cinema‑goers in Woolwich , while also revealing the private world he kept hidden: the camp voice, the sensitivity, the nights spent at Heaven disco .
The film situates Crane within the fractured Britain of the 1970s and 80s — economic decline, racial tension, tabloid hostility, and the rising danger of the AIDS crisis . It shows how youth subcultures became battlegrounds where violence and extremism thrived . What emerges is not an excuse, but a refusal to flatten him: a man driven by delusion, insecurity, symbolism, and the need for belonging, capable of both harm and unexpected tenderness .
It’s a fascinating, unsettling piece of work — one that confronts the era’s anti‑gay hostility, the political weaponisation of sexuality, and the contradictions inside someone who caused real damage yet lived a life at odds with his own ideology.
Availability: The documentary is now available in full on YouTube.
Radio
Saturday 26 September
Seven Ages of Man with Michael Rosen — 10am and 10.15am, Radio 4
Rosen remains one of those broadcasters capable of taking a large subject and making it sound like a conversation rather than a lecture. Two compact instalments worth making time for.
Mapping India: The World’s Largest Count — 12.05pm, BBC World Service
India at census scale is almost impossible to comprehend: an enormous administrative exercise that is simultaneously about population, identity, resources and political power. Radio is well suited to getting behind the sheer numbers.
Sunday 27 September
The Soldier’s Return — 3pm, Radio 4
Melvyn Bragg’s novel turns its attention to the consequences of war after the soldier comes home. The battlefield may be behind him, but the conflict continues in family life, memory and the difficulty of returning to ordinary existence.
Monday 28 September
The Essay: The Sounding Isle — 9.45pm, Radio 3
Kate Kennedy follows in the footsteps of Dame Ethel Smyth, whose 1886 walking tour of Cornwall became a source of inspiration. A lovely premise: a contemporary composer encountering landscape through the traces left by another musician more than a century earlier.
Tuesday 29 September
A Place Called Home — 2.15pm, Radio 4
The first of six loosely connected dramas set against Britain’s housing crisis. Tanika Gupta places us inside a stressed West London tower block. Housing statistics are everywhere; drama can do something rather different by showing what those pressures actually feel like from inside a home.
Pop Art Remix — 4pm, Radio 4
Artist Gavin Turk challenges the assumption that Pop Art begins and ends in America. He looks back to the 1956 This Is Tomorrow exhibition at London’s Whitechapel Gallery, where British artists were already responding to transatlantic consumer culture with a mixture of attraction and suspicion. Turk’s own Pop, his 1993 reimagining of Warhol’s Elvis, makes him an unusually appropriate guide.
Wednesday 30 September
The Lives and Loves of a She-Devil — 3pm, Radio 4 Extra
Fay Weldon’s gloriously savage tale of marriage, revenge and female reinvention. The title alone announces that respectability is unlikely to survive intact.
Thursday 1 October
The Global Jigsaw — 10.30am, BBC World Service
This edition turns to the Tigris and Euphrates, rivers that are simultaneously geographical features, historical arteries and sources of modern political tension. The best World Service programmes are particularly good at showing how geography becomes geopolitics.
Friday 2 October
Cuttin’ It — Radio 4
Charlene James’s drama follows two Somali girls attending the same South London school who are not friends and who hold sharply opposed attitudes towards female genital mutilation — one shaped by ideas of cultural meaning, the other by an understanding of its brutality.
There is no disguising the subject. It is difficult material and not easy listening. That is precisely why drama can be useful here: it allows competing experiences and loyalties to be voiced without pretending that the harm involved is abstract.
That is Culture Vulture for 26 September–2 October 2026: an unusually strong week in which the archive is every bit as tempting as the new material. If I had to clear three spaces in the diary, they would be for Finding Britain’s Slave Traders, An Inspector Calls and Pet Shop Boys Night — but there is plenty around them worth staying in for.
Selections and reviews by Pat Harrington
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