Culture

From Tudor intrigue and American paranoia to Bowie beneath the floodlights and Aretha reclaiming the airwaves, this week’s Culture Vulture ranges widely across cinema, television and sound. There is something quietly defiant about these selections. History refuses to stay buried, old scandals echo into the present and entertainment itself becomes a way of understanding power, identity and memory. Whether it is Gordon Banks and football folklore, Muhammad Ali refusing to fit into easy categories or Russell T Davies returning to themes of love and belonging, the week rewards curiosity.

Three selections stand out. 🌟 The Lion in Winter remains one of the sharpest battles of wills ever committed to film, a royal family drama that could have been written yesterday. 🌟 Shergar: The Racehorse and the IRA revisits one of Ireland’s great unsolved mysteries where sport, politics and organised violence intersect. And 🌟 Dear England arrives as a reminder that football stories are rarely just about football at all, but about national identity, expectation and the fragile business of collective belief.

Culture Vulture, as ever, offers an alternative route through the schedules.

Saturday 30th May 2026

🌟 Shergar: The Racehorse and the IRA
Channel 4, 8.00pm
Catch up via Channel 4 streaming

The disappearance of Shergar remains one of those stories that feels suspended between crime thriller and national myth. The Derby winner who seemed destined for sporting immortality vanished in 1983 and was never recovered, leaving behind rumour, accusation and unanswered questions. Channel 4 revisits the case through the complicated intersection of horse racing, Irish politics and the shadow world of paramilitary activity.

What gives the story its grip is that Shergar was more than a horse. He represented prestige, money and status, and his disappearance carried emotional resonance well beyond racing circles. Even now the case provokes disagreement over motive, culpability and what may have happened during those lost days.

Good documentaries know when mystery matters more than neat resolution. This looks set to recognise that uncertainty is often part of the story itself.

The Count of Monte Cristo (2002)
5Star, 6.20pm

Revenge dramas live or die on the audience believing not merely in injustice but in the wounded intelligence of the person seeking redress. Kevin Reynolds’ adaptation of Alexandre Dumas understands this instinctively. Jim Caviezel’s Edmond Dantès begins as an ordinary sailor betrayed by jealousy and greed, only to emerge from imprisonment transformed into a calculating avenger.

The story remains irresistible because its pleasures are both emotional and theatrical. Dantès does not simply seek revenge; he curates it. His enemies are dismantled piece by piece, and the audience enjoys the spectacle even while sensing the moral cost.

Guy Pearce makes an especially effective Mondego, his treachery rooted not in grand villainy but insecurity and entitlement. Pearce understands that envy often wears the face of friendship before revealing its sharper edges.

The film compresses and simplifies Dumas, sometimes drastically, yet retains the novel’s central heartbeat — the fantasy that intelligence and patience might defeat privilege and corruption.

There is also something enduringly appealing about its romantic sweep. Modern cinema can sometimes be nervous about emotional sincerity, but Monte Cristo embraces melodrama with confidence and charm.

A handsome, entertaining adventure that still carries enough darkness beneath the swordplay to linger.

Ghost Trail (2024)
BBC Four, 9.05pm

Jonathan Millet’s Ghost Trail plays less like a thriller and more like a man trying to walk through the wreckage of his own mind. The Syrian war sits in the background like a bruise that never quite fades, and the film follows a lone figure moving across Europe in pursuit of a man he believes once held the power to destroy him.

What gives the film its quiet force is the way it refuses to turn suffering into a set‑piece. Trauma isn’t staged or stylised; it’s carried. You see it in the way the protagonist holds himself, in the pauses before he speaks, in the way memory seems to press down on him like weight rather than narrative.

Millet keeps the pacing spare, almost ascetic. Scenes breathe. Silences stretch. The tension comes not from the machinery of genre but from the unease of not knowing what justice might look like, or whether it’s even possible after so much damage. Suspicion becomes a kind of weather system the characters move through.

It sits comfortably in that European tradition where filmmakers trust the audience to live with ambiguity. No explanatory flashbacks, no moral signposts, no tidy catharsis — just the slow, unsettling drift of a man trying to decide what he owes to the past and what he can still salvage from the future.

A reminder, stark and unadorned, that crossing a border doesn’t mean leaving a war behind.

David Bowie: Serious Moonlight
Sky Arts, 9.00pm

As a lifelong Bowie obsessive, I always return to 1983 with a kind of fascinated ambivalence. This was the moment when the great shape‑shifter — the man who’d spent a decade outrunning categories — suddenly became a global pop phenomenon. Serious Moonlight captures him right at that pivot point, balancing mass adoration with the cool intelligence that made him Bowie in the first place.

The setlist is almost indecently rich: Heroes, Fashion, Space Oddity, Young Americans, Life on Mars?, and the irresistible, sun‑lit swagger of Let’s Dance. But what holds the attention isn’t just the songs — it’s the way he moves through them. There’s that familiar Bowie duality: fully present yet somehow hovering above the moment, performer and anthropologist of his own fame.

Concert films often wilt as decades pass, victims of their own hairstyles and shoulder pads. Bowie, though, rarely dates. He seems to exist slightly outside the calendar, as if time bends a little to accommodate him. Even here, in his most commercially accessible era, he’s still playing with persona, still testing the edges of what a pop star can be.

A reminder, for those of us who’ve followed him through every incarnation, that even at his most mainstream he never stopped being singular.

Playboy: Secrets of the Centrefolds
12.35am

The Playboy empire remains one of the twentieth century’s strangest cultural contradictions — marketed as liberation while frequently entangled in exploitation and image-making. This documentary strand explores the experiences behind the mythology.

The Great Fire: London Burns
PBS America, 7.35pm
The Great Fire: Death and Destruction
PBS America, 8.35pm
The Great Fire: A City Rebuilt
PBS America, 9.35pm

This three-part examination of the Great Fire promises not simply disaster reconstruction but social history. Fires reveal inequalities as much as architecture, and London’s catastrophe of 1666 reshaped the city physically and psychologically.

Sunday 31st May 2026

🌟 Dear England
BBC One, 9.00pm
Episode 3 of 4 – All episodes on iPlayer

Football dramas often stumble by mistaking fandom for storytelling. James Graham’s Dear England avoids that trap by recognising that Gareth Southgate’s England represented something larger than tournament results.

The drama explores pressure, vulnerability and the attempt to rebuild a national sporting culture too often trapped by fear and nostalgia.

Even viewers indifferent to football may find themselves unexpectedly drawn in.

The Book of Life (2014)
BBC One, 10.00am

Animated cinema occasionally dares to look genuinely distinctive. Jorge Gutierrez’s The Book of Life does precisely that, drawing on Mexican folklore and Day of the Dead traditions with vivid imagination.

Rather than chasing generic fantasy, the film embraces cultural specificity, giving it warmth and personality.

There is romance, humour and adventure, but also reflection on family expectation and memory.

The visual design alone deserves admiration.

A colourful and heartfelt alternative to formula animation.

Genevieve (1953)
Talking Pictures TV, 1.00pm

There’s a particular strain of British comedy that thrives on mild disorder — not slapstick, not farce exactly, but the gentle unravelling of people who think they’re far more dignified than they are. Genevieve remains one of the loveliest examples. Built around the London–Brighton veteran car run, it turns a simple motoring jaunt into a quietly escalating contest of pride and wounded male ego.

Kenneth More and John Gregson spark off each other with an ease that feels almost accidental. The humour doesn’t come from contrived set‑pieces but from personality: two men who can’t quite admit how much they care about winning, or how ridiculous that makes them look.

Yes, there’s nostalgia — the soft glow of post‑war Britain, the charm of old engines and older manners — but there’s also a slyness to it. A knowing look at masculinity, rivalry, and the middle‑class urge to turn everything into a test of character.

A small, bright pleasure of a film, and very British in the best sense.

The Searchers (1956)
BBC Two, 3.30pm

The Searchers is one of those films that refuses to settle neatly into the heroic myth of the American West. John Ford gives you the sweeping vistas, yes — those vast, indifferent landscapes that seem to swallow people whole — but the emotional terrain is far more jagged. And at the centre stands John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards, a figure who is both magnetic and deeply troubling.

Wayne plays him with a hard, unyielding intensity. He’s a man driven by purpose, but the purpose curdles. What begins as a rescue mission slowly reveals itself as something darker: obsession, prejudice, a worldview so rigid it threatens to break everyone around him. Ford never softens it, never reassures the audience with easy moral signposting.

The Monument Valley backdrops are majestic, almost mythic, yet the story they frame is anything but comforting. The film keeps circling the same uneasy question: what happens when the man riding out to save the day is also the one carrying the deepest poison?

Few westerns have the courage to look that squarely at hatred, or to acknowledge how violence can twist a person long after the shooting stops. And the older the film gets, the more unsettling it becomes — as if time only sharpens its edges.

A classic, yes, but one that sta.

Top Hat (1935)
BBC Four, 7.15pm

Pure elegance from Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Depression-era escapism at its most graceful.

The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
Sky Arts, 9.00pm

Few films capture the texture of political paranoia as cleanly as The Manchurian Candidate. Even now, its Cold War anxieties feel uncomfortably close to home. Frank Sinatra gives one of his sharpest performances, playing a man circling a truth he can barely articulate, let alone face.

What makes the film endure isn’t just its thriller mechanics but its sense of psychological intrusion — the idea that the real danger isn’t out on the battlefield but inside the mind, quietly rewired. The satire is razor‑edged, the mood icy, and the implications still sting.

A reminder that conspiracy, manipulation and manufactured certainty are not relics of another era but recurring features of political life.

The Nice Guys (2016)
BBC One, 10.30pm

Shane Black’s scruffy detective comedy pairs Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling to glorious effect.

The Blues Brothers (1980)
BBC Two, 10.45pm

Some films strain for cool; The Blues Brothers simply assumes it. Part musical, part anarchic road movie, it barrels forward with the confidence of two men who believe — quite sincerely — that God wants them to save an orphanage and that the best way to do it is by assembling the greatest rhythm‑and‑blues band in Illinois.

What keeps it irresistible is the film’s total commitment to its own glorious absurdity. Car chases that defy physics, musical numbers that erupt without warning, and a parade of legends — Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, James Brown — who treat the chaos as perfectly normal.

It shouldn’t work. It absolutely does. A hymn to deadpan mayhem and the healing power of a good horn section.

South Bank at 75: You Are Here
BBC Two, 10.00pm
Catch up via iPlayer

A celebration of one of Britain’s great cultural institutions and the conversations that have shaped it.

Monday 1st June 2026

🌟 Tiptoe
Channel 4, 9.00pm
Episodes 1 and 2 – also available via Channel 4 streaming

Russell T Davies has spent much of his career exploring the spaces where private lives and public attitudes collide. From Queer as Folk to It’s A Sin, he has shown a gift for mixing wit, emotion and social observation without reducing characters to arguments. Tiptoe arrives carrying inevitable expectation.

The drama promises to examine relationships and identity with Davies’ familiar combination of warmth and confrontation. His scripts rarely avoid discomfort, but they also recognise humour and tenderness as survival mechanisms.

That matters because television drama can sometimes become strangely bloodless when attempting seriousness, mistaking solemnity for emotional truth. Davies understands that life rarely behaves so tidily.

The shadow of Queer as Folk inevitably hangs nearby, particularly with Channel 4 making his breakthrough series newly available again. Yet revisiting Queer as Folk is a reminder not only of how provocative it once felt, but how playful and alive it remains.

Television has changed enormously since 1999. So too has the political and cultural atmosphere surrounding sexuality and belonging. Tiptoe enters that conversation at a moment when questions of identity again dominate public debate.

Whether it becomes essential television remains to be seen, but Davies rarely lacks ambition and almost never lacks something worth saying.

Monolith (2022)
Film4, 9.00pm

Science fiction does not require giant budgets to generate unease. Monolith proves the point through admirable restraint. Much of the film unfolds through the voice and experience of a disgraced journalist investigating strange reports connected to mysterious black bricks.

The set-up sounds eccentric and, admittedly, it is. Yet the film cleverly uses isolation and ambiguity to create atmosphere.

There is something distinctly contemporary about its concern with information, credibility and digital storytelling. The protagonist lives in a world where truth competes with rumour and attention itself becomes currency.

The limited setting works to the film’s advantage. Rather than feeling constrained, the story develops an almost claustrophobic intimacy.

Genre cinema sometimes benefits from knowing exactly what not to explain.

A quietly unnerving piece of speculative storytelling.

🌟 Dear England
BBC One, 9.00pm
Episode 4 of 4

James Graham’s drama reaches its conclusion with Gareth Southgate and England confronting the pressures that accompany modern football. Yet the appeal of Dear England lies not in match results but emotional architecture.

Southgate emerges less as sporting saviour than reluctant national therapist, trying to reshape attitudes inherited through decades of disappointment and defensive masculinity.

Football occupies an unusual place within British life — simultaneously entertainment, identity and emotional shorthand. Graham’s drama understands this instinctively.

By exploring vulnerability alongside competition, the series offers something richer than simple sporting biography.

Even those who know the outcomes may find themselves invested in the emotional journey.

Ancient Greece: The Dark Chronicles
Begins Monday – Part 1 of 5

Civilisation documentaries sometimes present antiquity as settled fact, all marble certainty and textbook chronology. The attraction of this new series lies in its promise to examine the more shadowy and uncertain origins of Ancient Greece.

The “dark” in Dark Ages history often refers not to barbarism but gaps in evidence — periods where archaeology and scholarship must work harder to reconstruct vanished worlds.

That uncertainty makes history exciting.

Leonora Carrington: The Lost Surrealist
BBC Four, 10.50pm

Carrington remains one of surrealism’s most fascinating and frequently overlooked figures. Artist, novelist and myth-maker, she moved through twentieth-century upheaval refusing easy categorisation.

Documentaries about artists often reduce creative lives to chronology. Carrington deserves something stranger and more adventurous.

BBC Four generally understands this territory well.

King Rat (1965)
Talking Pictures TV, 1.45am

Bryan Forbes’ adaptation of James Clavell’s novel turns the prison camp drama into something morally slippery and psychologically revealing.

George Segal’s opportunistic anti-hero survives through barter and manipulation, exposing how systems of deprivation reshape ethics.

The film avoids patriotic simplification and instead studies power in miniature.

Uncomfortable and intelligent.

Tuesday 2nd June 2026

Belle (2013)
Film4, 6.45pm

Amma Asante’s Belle begins with historical curiosity and develops into something more resonant — a period drama attentive not only to romance and costume but race, inheritance and social status.

Inspired by the life of Dido Elizabeth Belle, the film explores eighteenth-century Britain through a perspective too rarely granted centre stage.

Gugu Mbatha-Raw brings intelligence and emotional nuance to the role.

The film recognises that privilege and exclusion often coexist in uneasy proximity.

Beautifully staged and quietly political.

Carlito’s Way (1993)
Legend, 9.00pm

Brian De Palma’s crime drama deserves discussion alongside the director’s better-known gangster films. Al Pacino plays Carlito Brigante, recently released from prison and desperate to escape criminal life.

What makes the film moving is that Carlito genuinely wants redemption.

Pacino gives a performance filled with melancholy and self-awareness, while Sean Penn delivers one of cinema’s great performances as crooked lawyer Dave Kleinfeld.

The tension comes not from whether violence exists, but whether history can be escaped.

De Palma stages suspense with characteristic elegance.

A tragic gangster picture about fate, loyalty and the impossibility of outrunning reputation.

Artsnight: A Tribute to Carla Lane
BBC Four, 8.00pm
Catch up via iPlayer

Carla Lane possessed a rare ability to write comedy grounded in recognisable human frustration. From The Liver Birds to Bread, her work balanced humour with social observation and emotional truth.

This tribute revisits a writer who understood ordinary lives without patronising them.

Muhammad Ali
BBC Four, 10.00pm

Ken Burns’ portrait of Muhammad Ali remains one of the most complete attempts to understand a man who refused to be contained by any single role. Boxer, activist, showman, dissenter — Ali kept shifting shape, and the documentary’s strength lies in acknowledging that complexity rather than sanding it down.

Burns doesn’t chase a tidy narrative. Instead, he sits with the contradictions: the bravado and the vulnerability, the political courage and the personal cost, the way Ali could be both a unifying symbol and a divisive presence. It’s a study of a man who changed sport and then stepped beyond it, becoming a figure onto whom entire eras projected their anxieties and hopes.

This conveys the sense of a life lived at full voltage — principled, provocative, and never less than compelling. Ali didn’t just transcend boxing; he rewrote the terms on which an athlete could exist in public.

Wednesday 3rd June 2026

The Future with Hannah Fry
BBC Two, 7.30pm
Full series available via iPlayer

Television science can sometimes drift towards the reassuringly spectacular — dazzling graphics, simplified certainties and declarations of imminent revolution. Hannah Fry tends to resist that temptation. Her strength lies in curiosity and clarity rather than grandstanding.

This edition turns to nuclear fusion, that tantalising scientific horizon forever described as both transformative and frustratingly distant. Fusion has occupied a strange place in public imagination for decades — part engineering challenge, part technological dream, forever hovering between promise and practical reality.

Fry is particularly good at translating complexity without patronising her audience. That matters because science is often treated as something delivered from on high rather than explored collectively.

Fusion, if realised, carries obvious implications for energy, economics and environmental policy, but the human drama behind scientific endeavour is equally compelling — persistence, rivalry, failure and breakthrough.

At its best, science television reminds us that knowledge itself is an adventure.

Penny Serenade (1941)
Talking Pictures TV, 9.10am

Hollywood melodrama has fallen out of fashion among critics wary of open emotion, yet Penny Serenade is a reminder of why audiences once embraced it so fiercely. There’s a sincerity to it — unguarded, unembarrassed — that feels almost radical now.

Irene Dunne and Cary Grant play a couple weathering love, disappointment and the fragile hope of parenthood. The story edges towards sentimentality, of course it does, but it earns its weight through the performances. Grant, so often remembered for his wit and immaculate poise, gives one of his most vulnerable turns here; the mask slips, and what’s underneath is raw and deeply human.

The film understands grief not as a grand collapse but as something that gathers quietly — a slow accumulation of moments, losses, compromises. It’s in the silences, the hesitations, the way two people try to keep moving forward even when the ground shifts beneath them.

Its emotional honesty lingers long after the final scene. A small reminder, delivered without apology, that sincerity still has its place.

Its emotional honesty lingers long after the closing scenes.

The Caine Mutiny (1954)
Film4, 12.45pm

Military dramas frequently present leadership as either noble certainty or outright villainy. The Caine Mutiny wisely prefers ambiguity.

Humphrey Bogart’s Captain Queeg remains one of cinema’s most fascinating authority figures — insecure, obsessive and gradually destabilised under pressure.

The film asks difficult questions about obedience and responsibility. Was mutiny justified, or did the crew simply lose faith too quickly? Such uncertainty keeps the drama alive.

Courtroom scenes crackle with tension and moral complexity. A superb study of hierarchy and doubt.

Corsage (2022)
Film4, 1.30am

Historical drama can become trapped inside museum glass, reverential and lifeless. Corsage refuses that fate.

Vicky Krieps plays Empress Elisabeth of Austria not as decorative icon but restless, intelligent and constrained woman resisting the suffocating rituals of imperial life.

The film deliberately unsettles expectations.

Modern flourishes and tonal dislocation prevent history becoming comfortable heritage.

Krieps delivers a remarkable performance full of wit, sadness and defiance.

The result feels unexpectedly contemporary.

A fascinating portrait of rebellion against image and expectation.

Bombshell (2019)
Film4, 11.40pm

The downfall of Roger Ailes and the sexual harassment scandal surrounding Fox News became one of the defining media stories of recent years. Bombshell dramatises those events with energy and star power.

Charlize Theron, Nicole Kidman and Margot Robbie anchor the film, though Theron’s transformation into Megyn Kelly remains particularly striking.

The film moves briskly, sometimes at the expense of deeper analysis, yet it captures something vital about institutional culture and the pressures surrounding power.

Media organisations often market themselves as truth-tellers while quietly reproducing their own internal silences.

That contradiction gives Bombshell its charge.

Sharp, unsettling and highly watchable.

Fire Island (2022)
Channel 4, 1.55am

Austen and queer comedy might sound like an unlikely pairing, but Fire Island makes the connection feel effortless. It lifts the bones of Pride and Prejudice and relocates them to the sun‑bleached chaos of the famous holiday enclave, where romantic misreadings and class anxieties play out with a distinctly modern charge.

The humour is bright, quick on its feet, and affectionate rather than arch. But beneath the jokes sits something more attentive: a clear‑eyed look at friendship, exclusion, and the quiet negotiations of belonging that shape queer spaces. The film never treats representation as homework. Instead, it lets its characters exist with warmth, contradiction and the kind of emotional looseness that feels lived‑in rather than symbolic.

Playful, clever, and unexpectedly touching — a reminder that reinvention can be both joyful and sincere.

Thursday 4th June 2026

🌟 The Lion in Winter (1968)
Sky Arts, 9.00pm

Some family gatherings end in awkward silences; Henry II’s Christmas court makes most domestic disputes look like a mild disagreement over the turkey. Anthony Harvey’s The Lion in Winter gathers a cast operating at full, almost operatic intensity, with Peter O’Toole’s combustible Henry squaring off against Katharine Hepburn’s Eleanor of Aquitaine — a woman who has turned wounded brilliance into a political art form.

James Goldman’s dialogue is a feast in itself: barbed, witty, and laced with the kind of intelligence that assumes the audience can keep up. Every exchange feels like a duel, every line a strategic move. Royal politics here aren’t about crowns and territories so much as psychological warfare — old grievances sharpened into weapons, love and resentment tangled beyond separation.

Hepburn is extraordinary: amused one moment, furious the next, always calculating, always alive to the shifting balance of power. She gives Eleanor a dangerous sparkle, a sense that she’s playing three games at once and winning at least two of them.

What the film understands — and what gives it its enduring bite — is that the great political struggles of history often begin at the dinner table, long before they spill into the chronicles. Power, after all, is a family business.

Timeless, literate, and gloriously savage.

Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased)
Rewind TV, 12 noon and 8.00pm
Catch up via Freeview Play

Few television premises sound quite as cheerfully eccentric as a detective aided by his dead partner. Yet Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) possesses the charm and imaginative confidence characteristic of late-1960s British television.

There is nostalgia here, certainly, but also invention.

Lion (2016)
Film4, 11.20pm

True stories often arrive already heavy with emotion, but Lion earns its power by refusing to push or manipulate. It trusts the story — and the audience — enough to let the feeling emerge naturally.

Dev Patel plays Saroo Brierley, a boy separated from his family in India and later adopted by an Australian couple. Patel gives the film its emotional spine, charting the long, uncertain journey between the life he remembers and the life he’s built. Nicole Kidman and David Wenham offer quietly affecting support, their performances grounded in the everyday tenderness and strain of parenting a child shaped by loss.

What the film captures so well is the complexity of identity: the pull of memory, the ache of belonging, the way home can be both a place and a longing. Modern technology — so often a narrative shortcut — becomes here a bridge, a way of stitching together two halves of a life without diminishing either.

The result is deeply moving without tipping into sentimentality. A film about home in its deepest sense: the one you come from, the one you make, and the one you spend years trying to find again.

Friday 5th June 2026

The Ballad of Lefty Brown (2017)
Great Action, 6.45pm

Revisionist westerns often examine the myth of heroism through damaged or overlooked figures. The Ballad of Lefty Brown does precisely that.

Bill Pullman gives an engaging performance as ageing sidekick Lefty, unexpectedly pushed into the foreground after violence overturns familiar loyalties.

The western landscape remains beautiful, though melancholy hangs over it.

A modest but rewarding genre piece.

🌟 Nope (2022)
Film4, 9.00pm

Jordan Peele has rapidly become one of modern cinema’s most intriguing filmmakers because he recognises horror as social language rather than simple fright mechanism.

Nope begins with spectacle and gradually becomes an inquiry into spectatorship itself — our hunger to witness, record and commodify the extraordinary.

Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer provide contrasting energies, one inward and cautious, the other charismatic and restless.

The film blends science fiction, western imagery and monster movie tradition.

Yet beneath the thrills sits something more unsettling about entertainment culture and our appetite for disaster.

Strange, ambitious and visually extraordinary.

Celebrity Gogglebox
Channel 4, 9.00pm
Episode 1 of 7 – catch up via Channel 4 streaming

The appeal of Gogglebox has always rested on a simple truth: people enjoy watching other people react. Celebrity editions risk gimmickry, yet often succeed because familiar faces prove unexpectedly candid.

This year’s cast — from Vernon Kay and Paddy McGuinness to Bez and Shaun Ryder, Rylan and his mother Linda — promises the usual mixture of wit, irritation and affectionate chaos.

Have I Got News for You
BBC One, 9.00pm

Yet HIGNFY survives through sharp improvisation and the pleasure of watching certainty punctured.

David Tennant hosts, joined by Michael Gove and Chloe Petts. In politically turbulent times, satire increasingly finds itself competing with reality.

Aretha Franklin Night
BBC Four, from 9.00pm
Catch up via iPlayer

Aretha Franklin possessed one of those voices capable of sounding both intimate and monumental. BBC Four devotes the evening to the Queen of Soul, celebrating a performer whose artistry transcended genre and era.

Music television rarely needs elaborate justification when the subject is Aretha.

Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022)
BBC One, 11.20pmA horror film on the surface, but really a scalpel aimed at wealth, performance and the jittery anxieties of the very online generation. Bodies Bodies Bodies dresses itself as a murder‑mystery, yet the real bloodletting happens in the group chat — status, insecurity and self‑curation turning toxic long before anyone picks up a weapon.

The satire is razor‑clean. Every accusation feels like a performance, every confession a bid for sympathy, every friendship a negotiation of power. It’s funny, vicious and uncomfortably accurate about how quickly people implode when the Wi‑Fi drops and the masks slip.

A thriller for the age of curated selves and catastrophic overthinking — sharp, stylish and far more revealing than its neon chaos suggests.

The Lighthouse (2019)
Channel 4, 1.05am

Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse is less a film than a fever — a two‑handed descent into isolation, superstition and the kind of madness that grows when the sea won’t stop howling. It turns confinement into delirium, the walls closing in as reality begins to warp.

Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson clash magnificently, two men circling each other like rival myths. Dafoe’s barnacled old keeper speaks in curses and sea‑dog poetry; Pattinson’s younger man unravels in fits and starts, as if the island itself is prying him open.

Shot in stark black‑and‑white, the film feels ancient and alien, as though dredged up from some forgotten maritime

Radio Selections

Archive on 4: The Louisville Lip
Saturday, 8.00pm – Radio 4

Muhammad Ali continues to echo across this week’s schedules. This documentary revisits the boxer whose brilliance and provocation reshaped sport and public life.

Voices from the Beach
Sunday, 7.15pm – Radio 4

At the heart of Voices from the Beach is poet Sali Katebe, who arrived in Britain from landlocked Zambia and fell, almost immediately, for the strange, shifting magic of our coastlines. The programme uses his perspective as its anchor: someone encountering the sea not as a familiar backdrop but as a revelation — a place where sound, weather and memory seem to rearrange themselves.

Katebe’s voice threads through the piece like a tide‑line. He speaks of beaches as thresholds, as invitations, as spaces where the mind loosens and the past drifts closer. Around him, Radio 4 builds an immersive soundscape: gulls cutting across the air, waves folding over themselves, the soft percussion of shingle underfoot. It’s radio that breathes.

What emerges is part memoir, part meditation. Katebe reflects on belonging, on the pull of water for someone raised far from it, and on how coastlines can become a kind of emotional shorthand — for arrival, for solitude, for the quiet work of remaking a life. The programme listens closely to the small things: the way light changes on a grey afternoon, the rhythm of a walk taken to clear the head, the stories beaches seem to hold without ever speaking.

Reflective, atmospheric and quietly moving, it’s a reminder that the sea means different things depending on where you began — and that sometimes the most powerful journeys happen at the water’s edge.

Podcast Picks

We Was Robbed (Audible – available 28th May)

Gabriel Gatehouse investigates one of English football’s enduring mysteries — what derailed England’s 1970 World Cup defence, and was Gordon Banks somehow “knobbled”? The series mixes sporting folklore, forgotten detail and investigative curiosity with real verve.

Stateside with Kai and Carter

The Guardian launches a podcast for listeners exhausted by the churn of modern news. Three times weekly, Kai Wright and Carter Sherman unpack American stories with guests able to explain rather than inflame.

Kingdom of Fraud

Michele McPhee investigates a billion-dollar tax fraud involving Armenian mafia figure Levon Termendzhyan and Mormon sect leader Jacob Kingston.

True crime with scale, intrigue and stranger-than-fiction alliances.

Streaming Choice

Netflix

The Murder of Rachel Nickell

A sober, unsettling retelling of a case that scarred the 1990s. The documentary avoids lurid reconstruction, focusing instead on institutional failure, media frenzy and the human cost of a police force chasing the wrong man. Clear‑eyed, compassionate and quietly devastating.

Office Romance Available from Friday, 5 June 2026

It Ends With Us Available now

Colleen Hoover’s bestseller arrives on screen as a glossy, emotionally forthright drama about love, trauma and the patterns people struggle to break. Blake Lively anchors it with a performance that balances charm and bruised resolve. Melodrama with purpose, and more bite than expected.

Michael Jackson: The Verdict Available Wednesday, 3 June 2026

A cool, methodical examination of the legal battles that reshaped Jackson’s final years. Rather than reheating scandal, it traces the machinery of accusation, defence and public perception. The result is stark, unsettling and revealing about the pressures placed on a man already living inside a global myth.

Channel 4 Streaming

Walter Presents: The Devil’s Throat All 12 episodes from Friday, 5 June 2026

A taut Bulgarian thriller that blends crime drama with political unease. The investigation winds through corruption, folklore and buried trauma, giving the series a brooding, wintry charge. Dark, deliberate and quietly gripping.

Prime Video
The Legend of Vox Machina – Season 4
Rose