Archive for TV Shows

Culture Vulture 26 September–2 October 2026

September 26, 2026 at 9:20 am · Filed under Culture Vulture, Film & DVD Reviews, TV Shows, YouTube ·Tagged Culture Vulture, film, film review, movies, Pat Harrington, TV reviews, TVGuide

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)

RaMell Ross approaches Colson Whitehead’s novel with the same instinct that shaped Hale County This Morning, This Evening: a refusal to flatten experience into tidy narrative. Instead of marching through the horrors of a Jim Crow‑era reform school, he asks you to inhabit the boys’ world — its routines, its silences, its sudden ruptures — until the brutality becomes inseparable from the landscape itself.

The story is rooted in real history, and Ross treats that history with a kind of solemn patience. He doesn’t sensationalise the abuse; he lets it sit in the frame, unadorned, impossible to look away from. The camera lingers on faces, on gestures, on the uneasy stillness of a place designed to break children. You feel the weight of the institution not through exposition but through the way the boys move, the way they watch each other, the way hope flickers and dims.

What’s striking is the visual language. Ross favours images that seem to breathe — long takes, unexpected angles, compositions that feel almost tactile. It’s demanding, because he isn’t guiding you with conventional dramatic beats. He’s inviting you into a state of attention, asking you to experience the boys’ vulnerability and resilience from the inside rather than as observers.

The result is purposeful, unsettling, and deeply human. A story of racism and institutional violence told without melodrama, without shortcuts, and without compromise. It’s not an easy watch, but it’s not meant to be.

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)

Spike Lee doesn’t approach Malcolm X as a monument. He treats him as a man in motion — someone whose beliefs, loyalties and sense of self kept shifting as he tried to make sense of a country determined to deny him dignity. That’s why the film needs its full three‑hour sweep. It isn’t just recounting events; it’s tracing a life lived in chapters, each one reshaping the next.

Denzel Washington’s performance is the spine of it. He doesn’t imitate Malcolm so much as inhabit him, letting the swagger of the early years give way to discipline, then conviction, then a kind of hard‑won clarity. You watch him evolve — the hustler, the prisoner, the minister, the international figure — and Washington makes each transformation feel inevitable without ever losing the man underneath. It’s one of those performances where you forget you’re watching an actor.

Lee matches that intensity with scale. Nightclubs, prison cells, mosques, Harlem streets, Mecca — the film moves through them with purpose, never rushing, never padding. The politics are present, of course, but they’re rooted in experience: the racism Malcolm endured, the community he fought for, the fractures within the movements he joined. The film refuses to freeze him into a single pose. It shows the contradictions, the growth, the moments of doubt, the flashes of revelation.

By the time it reaches its final stretch, the epic length feels earned. You’ve travelled with him, seen the cost of his convictions, and understood why his voice still echoes.

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 film moves with a calm confidence, each scene tightening the moral stakes without ever resorting to bombast. Berlin is rendered as a place of frost and fracture, a city where every conversation feels like it might be overheard. Spielberg’s restraint is deliberate: he wants you to feel the weight of diplomacy, the slow grind of negotiation, the way ordinary decency becomes radical in a climate built on suspicion.

And then there’s Mark Rylance. His Abel is a marvel of understatement — a man who seems to occupy the frame without disturbing it, speaking softly, observing everything, revealing almost nothing. It’s one of those performances where the smallest gesture carries the most weight. He steals scenes not by dominating them, but by refusing to perform in the way everyone expects.

The result is a Cold War drama that’s quietly gripping, beautifully crafted, and anchored by two actors who understand that tension doesn’t need noise. It’s a film about integrity under pressure, and Spielberg gives it the space to breathe.

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.

11.25pm – Shame (2011), Film4

McQueen’s films never give you a comfortable angle, and Shame is the one where that refusal becomes the whole point. It’s a portrait of addiction stripped of melodrama, glamour or tidy psychology — just a man circling the same impulses, the same rituals, the same hollow aftermath, until the repetition itself becomes suffocating. Michael Fassbender commits to it with a kind of frightening honesty. There’s no vanity in the performance, no attempt to soften the edges. He plays Brandon as someone who has built his life around avoidance, and the cost of that avoidance is written into every gesture.

The film’s bleakness isn’t decorative. McQueen shoots New York as a place of glass, steel and distance — beautiful in a way that feels hostile, a city that reflects Brandon back at himself without offering any warmth. The camera holds him in long, unbroken takes, forcing you to sit with the discomfort rather than escape it through editing. When Carey Mulligan’s character enters the story, the dynamic shifts: her vulnerability exposes his, and suddenly the emotional isolation he’s been maintaining looks less like control and more like collapse.

What makes Shame so unsettling is its refusal to explain. There’s no neat origin story, no therapeutic breakthrough, no final act redemption. McQueen isn’t interested in diagnosing Brandon; he’s interested in showing what it feels like to be trapped inside a life that looks functional from the outside and is anything but. The film’s power comes from that restraint — the sense that everything you need to understand is already there, in the silence, in the repetition, in the way Fassbender’s face tightens when he’s trying not to feel anything at all.

It’s a remarkable piece of filmmaking, but not something you put on to wind down a night. It asks for attention, patience and a willingness to sit with discomfort. And it earns all of it.

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.

Paul Giamatti’s Mr Hunham is a marvel of irritation — a man so entrenched in his own disappointment that he’s practically fossilised. He’s funny, but not in a way that asks for approval; the humour comes from how thoroughly he’s barricaded himself behind intellect and routine. Opposite him, Dominic Sessa’s Angus Tully has that brittle teenage bravado that cracks the moment anyone looks too closely. They’re both stranded at Barton Academy for the holidays, two people who would never choose each other’s company and yet slowly, almost reluctantly, begin to matter.

And then there’s Da’Vine Joy Randolph. She gives the film its centre of gravity. Her Mary carries grief like a weight she’s learned to balance, and Randolph plays her with such warmth and sorrow that every scene she’s in deepens the film. She doesn’t push for emotion; she lets it rise naturally, and when it does, it’s devastating.

Payne keeps the tone beautifully judged — warm but never sugary, sharp but never cruel. The period detail is lived‑in rather than nostalgic, the humour dry, the pacing unhurried. What emerges is a story about unlikely connection, about people who’ve been sidelined by life finding a way, briefly, to step back into it.

It’s tender, funny, and quietly profound. A winter film that understands the season isn’t always merry, but that kindness, when it arrives, can feel like a small miracle.

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)

Hardy’s original remains one of British cinema’s strangest, most enduring creations — a film that feels less like a mystery and more like a ritual you’ve accidentally wandered into. Edward Woodward’s devout, increasingly frantic policeman arrives on a remote Scottish island in search of a missing girl, only to find a community whose beliefs, songs and sunlit cheerfulness unsettle him more than any overt threat.

The collision between Christianity and paganism is handled with unnerving calm. Nothing on Summerisle is played as overtly sinister; it’s the normality of the islanders’ behaviour that makes Woodward’s desperation feel so stark. Christopher Lee, in one of his finest performances, presides over it all with a kind of aristocratic serenity — charming, articulate, and utterly convinced of the logic guiding his people.

Folk music, police procedural, religious debate and creeping dread shouldn’t coexist, yet here they fuse into something singular. The film’s power lies in how gently it leads you toward horror, how the bright colours and open landscapes make the final revelation feel both inevitable and shocking.

Forget the remake. This is the real thing — a wonderfully unsettling masterpiece.

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.

Read our full review

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

Permalink Leave a Comment

Culture Vulture: 19–25 September 2026

September 19, 2026 at 8:49 am · Filed under Culture Vulture, Film & DVD Reviews, Radio, TV Shows ·Tagged counterculturegb, Culture Vulture, film, film review, movie-review, TVGuide

Across the next seven days we get war, slavery, sectarianism, surveillance, geopolitics, psychological horror, Hollywood myth and more than one look at the ways the past refuses to stay safely in the past. Even the lighter choices have a bit of edge to them. Gene Wilder gets his due, Sting gets a night of his own, and Dolly Parton’s great Glastonbury performance returns to BBC Two.

Three things particularly caught my eye. Made in Dagenham remains an immensely likeable account of working women deciding they have had quite enough of being underpaid. Cyprus Avenue, with Stephen Rea at its centre, is a very different proposition: blackly funny, disturbing and rooted in the politics and psychology of Northern Ireland. And there is a strong run of classic film throughout the week, from West Side Story and Shadow of a Doubt to A Foreign Affair and Hobson’s Choice.

There is plenty more besides. Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, James Cameron, Bernard Rose, Charles Dickens, Persia, Carthage, Troy and Dolly Parton all find their way into this week’s selection.

Saturday 19 September

West Side Story — BBC Two, 2.45pm (1961)
Still one of the great screen musicals. Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins turn Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim’s reworking of Romeo and Juliet into something sweeping, romantic and tragic. Natalie Wood and Richard Beymer are Maria and Tony, caught between the Jets and Sharks on the streets of New York.

The Riddle of the Sands — Talking Pictures, 4.30pm (1979)
Michael York and Simon MacCorkindale in an old-fashioned but very enjoyable espionage adventure based on Erskine Childers’ novel. Two British yachtsmen stumble across signs of a German invasion plan in the years before the First World War.

The Adjustment Bureau — Film4, 6.55pm (2011)

There’s a pleasing bait‑and‑switch to The Adjustment Bureau. It starts like a straight political drama — Damon as the rising star who’s just tripped over his own shoelaces — and then, almost casually, the film opens a door into a different genre entirely. Not with spectacle, but with a quiet, unnerving suggestion: what if the choices you think you’re making aren’t really yours at all.

Damon carries that idea with a kind of grounded bewilderment. He’s not a man built for metaphysics; he’s built for stump speeches and handshakes. So when the world tilts, he tilts with it — not dramatically, just enough to show the strain of someone trying to reconcile the life he believes he’s steering with the one that seems to be steering him.

And then there’s Emily Blunt, who gives the film its spark. She doesn’t arrive as a grand romantic destiny; she arrives like a collision. A chance meeting, a flash of connection, the sort of moment people spend years telling themselves was fate. The Bureau, of course, insists it was a mistake. A glitch. Something that needs correcting. But the film understands that once you’ve felt something real, the idea of “correction” becomes absurd.

The men in hats — bureaucrats of destiny — are both comic and chilling. They’re polite, officious, almost apologetic as they rearrange human lives. That’s the unsettling part: the machinery of fate looks less like divine intervention and more like middle management.

The film doesn’t pretend to have a grand philosophical answer. It’s more interested in the fight — the stubborn, human refusal to accept that our lives are pre-written. Damon and Blunt make that fight feel worth watching, worth believing in. Even when the rules wobble and the logic smudges, the emotional truth holds.

A romance, yes. A thriller, sort of. But mostly a story about two people who decide that if the universe has a plan, it can damn well make room for them.

Maps of Power: USA — PBS America, 7.35pm
The first of tonight’s geographical histories looks at the United States and the extent to which geography has shaped the decisions of its governments.

Maps of Power: Russia — PBS America, 8.50pm
Russia’s enormous scale, its frontiers and its historical vulnerability to invasion all come into play in the second instalment.

Paris Police 1910 — BBC Four, 9pm and 9.55pm
Back to Belle Époque Paris for this gritty French crime drama. Jérémie Laheurte plays ambitious detective Antoine Jouin, pounding the boulevards of a city prosperous on the surface but rather less civilised underneath. Four series are available on iPlayer.

Dolly Parton Night — BBC Two, from 9.15pm; 10pm in Wales
Dolly’s remarkable 2014 Glastonbury set is the centrepiece of an evening devoted to one of country music’s great performers. Sisters in Country and Dolly Parton at the BBC follow.

Maps of Power: China — PBS America, 9.55pm
The final programme of the evening considers how China’s historical position and geography have helped shape its geopolitical importance.

Made in Dagenham — BBC One, 11.40pm; 12.55am in Scotland (2010)

Made in Dagenham wears its politics lightly, but it never softens them. It’s a film with real warmth — the kind that comes from people who know exactly what they’re fighting for — and a proper streak of anger running beneath the humour. Sally Hawkins leads the machinists with that mix of steel and vulnerability she does so well: a woman who didn’t set out to be a symbol, but becomes one because the alternative is simply putting up with injustice.

What the film captures beautifully is the texture of workplace solidarity. The clatter of the sewing machines, the banter, the small acts of care — all the things that make a factory more than just a place to clock in. When Ford decides the women’s skill is somehow worth less, the insult isn’t abstract. It’s personal. It’s about dignity. And the film never lets you forget that equal pay wasn’t handed down from on high; it was fought for, organised, argued, and won by workers who refused to be quiet.

There’s a lovely, understated pro‑union pulse to the whole thing. Not in speeches, but in the way people gather in rooms, listen to one another, disagree, regroup, and push forward. The film understands that collective action is messy, human, and absolutely essential. It also understands that victories come from ordinary people deciding they’ve had enough — not from politicians discovering a conscience.

Bob Hoskins is a joy here: gentle, principled, and quietly furious on behalf of the women he supports. He gives the story its moral ballast, reminding you that solidarity isn’t just a slogan; it’s a responsibility.

Funny, warm, and properly political, Made in Dagenham is a reminder that the rights we take for granted were carved out by workers who stood together and refused to be sidelined. It’s a crowd‑pleaser, yes — but one with calluses on its hands.

Sunday 20 September

Blithe Spirit — Talking Pictures, 7pm (1945)

There’s a particular pleasure in watching Blithe Spirit: that mix of Coward’s clipped, wicked dialogue and David Lean’s early, quietly confident direction. It’s a comedy about hauntings, but not the sort that relies on shadows or shocks. The ghosts here are social, emotional, marital — and occasionally literal.

Rex Harrison plays Charles Condomine with that dry, faintly exasperated charm he did better than almost anyone. He’s a man who thinks he’s in control of his household, his marriage, his evening — until the universe decides otherwise. When the ghost of his first wife, Elvira, materialises, she doesn’t drift in with solemn warnings. She arrives with mischief in her eyes, played by Kay Hammond as someone who enjoys being dead far more than she ever enjoyed being married. Her scenes have a lovely, teasing energy: half flirtation, half sabotage.

Lean lets the supernatural elements sit lightly on top of the domestic chaos. The film isn’t really about ghosts; it’s about the way old relationships linger, the way past loves refuse to stay politely in the past, and the way one man’s tidy life can unravel with a single unexpected visitor.

And then Margaret Rutherford sweeps in as Madame Arcati, and the whole thing lifts another inch off the ground. She’s glorious — eccentric without being cartoonish, utterly convinced of her own methods, and so energetically committed to her séances that you can’t help but believe in them too. Every scene she touches becomes funnier, stranger, and somehow more grounded, because Rutherford plays her with such sincerity. She’s not the joke; she’s the engine.

The film moves with a kind of breezy confidence: elegant, sharp, and just a little wicked. It’s Coward’s wit filtered through Lean’s eye, and the result is a supernatural comedy that still feels fresh — a reminder that hauntings can be as much about personality clashes as paranormal ones.

Wilder — Sky Documentaries, 9pm
A documentary portrait of Gene Wilder, whose particular mixture of gentleness, nerves and barely contained mania made him one of the most distinctive comic actors of his generation. Catch up via NOW.

David Ireland Remembers Cyprus Avenue — BBC Four, 10pm
Belfast-born playwright David Ireland looks back at the play that became one of his defining works.

Cyprus Avenue — BBC Four, 10.20pm
Then the play itself. This 2019 version, filmed largely at London’s Royal Court Theatre, stars Stephen Rea as Eric Miller, a loyalist in the midst of psychotic episodes who becomes convinced that his five-week-old granddaughter is Gerry Adams — “without the beard”.

That premise sounds outrageous because it is. Ireland pushes it into territory that is comic, frightening and profoundly uncomfortable. Eric is both absurd and tragic, and Rea gives him a terrible humanity.

Monday 21 September

The Heiress — Film4, 4pm (1949)

The Heiress is one of those films that looks, at first glance, like a polite period drama — fine manners, fine houses, fine fabrics — and then quietly reveals itself as something far sharper. At its centre is Olivia de Havilland, giving a performance so precise and so deeply felt that the whole film seems to gather around her. Her Catherine Sloper is wealthy, yes, but painfully shy, raised under the cold scrutiny of a father who mistakes cruelty for guidance. She moves through rooms as though apologising for taking up space.

Montgomery Clift enters the story like a gust of fresh air — charming, attentive, the sort of man who seems to see Catherine rather than the awkwardness her father insists upon. But the film never lets you relax into the romance. There’s always a question hanging in the air: is he drawn to her, or to her inheritance? Clift plays that ambiguity beautifully, with a softness that could be sincerity or calculation, and the tension between those possibilities gives the film its slow, tightening grip.

Ralph Richardson, as Catherine’s father, is formidable in a way that doesn’t require volume. His disapproval is quiet, methodical, and devastating. He believes he knows his daughter’s worth — or lack of it — and the damage that belief inflicts is the film’s true haunting. Watching Catherine navigate the space between these two men is like watching someone learn, painfully, where her own boundaries lie.

What makes the film endure is the transformation at its heart. Catherine begins as a figure almost defined by hesitation, but de Havilland lets you see the shift — the gathering of resolve, the slow hardening of someone who has finally understood the cost of being underestimated. By the time the film reaches its famous final stretch, she is no longer the timid young woman we met. She has become something steadier, colder, and entirely her own.

Elegant, unsettling, and anchored by three superb performances, The Heiress is a drama that starts quietly and ends with a door closing that you feel in your bones.

Ancient Megacities: Carthage — PBS America, 7.30pm
The first of three visits to great cities of the ancient world begins in Tunisia. Carthage: One City, Two Empires explores a city fought over, destroyed and rebuilt, whose ruins still speak of Mediterranean power struggles.

Clickbait Clinic with Stacey Dooley — BBC One, 8.30pm
Stacey Dooley enters the strange economy of online attention, misinformation and content designed first and foremost to make us click. The full series is available on iPlayer.

Finding Britain’s Slave Traders with David Olusoga — Part 1 of 2
David Olusoga investigates Britain’s connections to the slave trade and the people who profited from it.

Miranda’s Victim — Film4, 9pm (2023)

Miranda’s Victim takes a story most viewers think they already know — the origin of the Miranda warning — and turns it back toward the person whose life was shattered long before it became a line recited in every American cop show. Abigail Breslin plays Patricia Weir with a quiet, stubborn resilience, never reaching for theatrics, never smoothing over the rawness of what she endured. Her performance is built on stillness: the kind of strength that doesn’t announce itself, but refuses to be pushed aside.

For a UK audience, it’s worth spelling out what the Miranda warning actually is. In the United States, police must tell a suspect — before questioning them — that they have the right to remain silent, that anything they say can be used in court, and that they have the right to a lawyer even if they can’t afford one. If officers fail to give that warning, whatever the suspect says may be thrown out. It’s a cornerstone of American criminal procedure, born from the 1966 Supreme Court case Miranda v. Arizona. Most people know it from TV dramas; fewer know the human cost behind it.

The UK caution, though similar, wasn’t copied from Miranda — it grew out of British case law and reforms in the 1970s–80s, especially after scandals involving forced confessions.

That’s where the film does something important. It refuses to treat Patricia Weir as a footnote in someone else’s landmark ruling. Instead, it shows how her pursuit of justice became entangled with a legal battle that would reshape police procedure across the United States. You see the hearings, the pressure, the way her trauma was pulled into a system more interested in constitutional theory than the young woman at its centre.

Breslin anchors the film, but the surrounding cast and direction keep the tone steady — restrained, serious, never sensationalised. The courtroom scenes have weight because they’re not about clever legal manoeuvres; they’re about a person trying to reclaim her voice while the world debates the meaning of her case.

It’s a courtroom drama, yes, but one that keeps its focus exactly where it should be: on the woman whose life was changed long before the legal precedent was set. Thoughtful, clear‑eyed, and quietly furious, Miranda’s Victim reminds you that behind every famous ruling is someone who didn’t get to choose the spotlight.

D.O.A. — Talking Pictures, 1.15am (1949)
A cracking noir premise: a man discovers he has been poisoned and has only a short time left to find out who killed him. Edmond O’Brien spends the rest of the film racing against his own death.

Tuesday 22 September

Shadow of a Doubt — Film4, 1.35pm (1942)

Hitchcock always said this was his favourite, and you can see why. It’s a thriller without the usual machinery — no grand conspiracies, no exotic locations, just a quiet American town where nothing much happens and everyone knows everyone else’s business. Into that calm steps Uncle Charlie, played by Joseph Cotten with a charm so smooth it almost feels lacquered. He’s the adored visitor, the worldly relative who brings stories, sophistication, a little glamour. The sort of man small towns instinctively lean toward.

Teresa Wright’s young Charlie worships him at first. She’s at that age where adults still seem like fixed points — reliable, admirable, unshakeable. Hitchcock lets that innocence sit for a moment before he begins to press on it. A stray comment, a shift in tone, a look held a beat too long. The film doesn’t shout its suspicions; it lets them seep in, the way unease does in real life.

What makes it so effective is the setting. Hitchcock takes the American home — the dinner table, the front porch, the neighbourly chat — and threads something poisonous through it. The tension comes from the idea that danger doesn’t always arrive from outside; sometimes it’s already sitting in your living room, smiling, telling stories, passing the potatoes.

Cotten is superb, playing Uncle Charlie as a man who knows exactly how to perform charm and exactly when to let the mask slip. Wright matches him with a performance that grows in strength as her certainty crumbles. You watch her shift from adoration to doubt to something harder, more adult, and Hitchcock gives that transformation real weight.

It’s a thriller built on atmosphere rather than spectacle, on the slow dawning horror that the person you love most might be the one you should fear. Hitchcock bringing murder into the American home — and proving he never needed a single special effect to make the walls close in.

Ancient Megacities: Troy — PBS America, 7.40pm
Part two of three, Troy: Birth of a Myth, asks what archaeology can tell us about the city behind Homer and how much historical truth might sit beneath the story of the Trojan War.

Housebound — Film4, 11.05pm (2014)
A New Zealand horror-comedy with a neat set-up. A young woman sentenced to home detention begins to wonder whether the family house in which she is trapped might genuinely be haunted.

Chevalier — Film4, 1.20am (2022)

Chevalier tells the story of Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint‑Georges — a man so gifted it’s almost absurd that history ever managed to sideline him. Violin virtuoso, celebrated composer, champion fencer, and a fixture in 18th‑century French society, he moved through the world with a confidence earned not by birthright but by sheer, dazzling ability. The film leans into that energy, giving him the kind of presence that makes everyone else in the room feel slightly underdressed.

Kelvin Harrison Jr is superb in the role. He plays Bologne not as a distant historical figure but as someone alive to every slight, every opportunity, every room he’s told he shouldn’t enter. There’s a spark to his performance — a mix of pride, frustration, and ambition — that makes the character feel modern without ever breaking the period setting. You see the thrill of his talent, but also the cost of being exceptional in a society determined to remind him of its limits.

The film doesn’t treat his achievements as museum pieces. It shows the sweat behind the brilliance, the politics behind the applause, and the way art becomes a battleground when the wrong person dares to excel. The music scenes have real electricity, not just because of the performances but because they’re charged with the sense that Bologne is fighting for more than applause — he’s fighting for recognition in a world that would prefer him invisible.

It’s a handsome production, lively and sharp, but what stays with you is the portrait of a man who refused to shrink himself to fit the era he lived in. Harrison Jr gives him the stature he deserves, and the film lets him take up the space history denied him.

Wednesday 23 September

Hombre — Film4, 4.30pm (1967)

Hombre is one of those westerns that looks spare on the surface — dry landscapes, tight dialogue, a story that moves with the unhurried confidence of people who know exactly what they’re doing — but underneath it carries a quiet, flinty power. Paul Newman plays John Russell, a white man raised by Apaches, and Newman gives him a stillness that’s almost confrontational. He’s a man who has learned to live without apology, without performance, without the need to make himself palatable to people who have already decided what he is.

The set‑up is simple: a stagecoach full of passengers who think they understand the world and their place in it. They look at Russell with suspicion, discomfort, sometimes outright contempt — until the journey turns dangerous and the hierarchy they cling to collapses. Suddenly the man they dismissed becomes the one person capable of keeping them alive. The film doesn’t hammer the point; it lets the shift play out in glances, in grudging acknowledgements, in the slow erosion of prejudice when survival is on the line.

Newman’s performance is beautifully restrained. He doesn’t give Russell swagger or righteous speeches. He gives him dignity — the kind that doesn’t need to be announced. When he acts, he acts decisively; when he speaks, it’s because silence won’t do. That economy makes him magnetic.

Martin Ritt directs with a clear eye for moral tension. The film isn’t just about danger on the trail; it’s about the uncomfortable truth that people often only recognise someone’s worth when they need something from them. Elmore Leonard’s story keeps the edges sharp: no easy redemption, no sudden transformations, just people forced to confront the gap between who they think they are and how they behave when the world stops being polite.

Lean, tough, and quietly devastating, Hombre is a western that trusts its audience to sit with discomfort — and rewards them with one of Newman’s most quietly commanding performances.

Belle — Film4, 6.45pm (2013)
Gugu Mbatha-Raw stars as Dido Elizabeth Belle, the mixed-race daughter of a Royal Navy captain raised within the aristocratic household of Lord Mansfield. Amma Asante’s film uses Dido’s unusual position to examine race, status and marriage in Georgian Britain.

The Secrets of Your Phone They Don’t Want You to Know — Channel 5, 7pm
Alexis Conran investigates that familiar suspicion: is your smartphone secretly listening to you? The programme looks at what phones really collect, how targeted advertising works and how much of what feels sinister has a more mundane — though not necessarily reassuring — explanation.

Ancient Megacities: Persepolis — PBS America, 7.40pm
The final programme in the series is Persepolis: Delusions of Grandeur, exploring the ceremonial capital of the Achaemenid Persian Empire and the architecture through which rulers projected power.

The Terminator — ITV4, 9pm (1984)
James Cameron’s lean, brutal science-fiction thriller has hardly an ounce of fat on it. Arnold Schwarzenegger is the machine sent back to murder Sarah Connor before her son can grow up to lead humanity’s resistance.

Scotland’s Golden Coast — More4, 9pm
A welcome change from the usual Highland-and-islands travelogue. This five-part series takes to Scotland’s east coast, beginning around the remarkable lighthouses of Elie Ness before heading towards the dunes and woodland of Tentsmuir Forest in Fife. Catch up via Channel 4 streaming.

Scandal — Talking Pictures, 9.05pm (1989)

Scandal revisits the Profumo affair with a cool, stylish confidence — not the tabloid pantomime it’s often reduced to, but something more human, more ambiguous, more interested in the people who were actually caught in the blast. Michael Caton‑Jones keeps the film taut and elegant, letting John Hurt’s weary charm as Stephen Ward, Joanne Whalley’s brittle poise as Christine Keeler, and Ian McKellen’s tightly‑wound Profumo carry the weight of a story Britain still can’t quite tell without flinching.

What the film captures — and what often gets lost in the folklore — is the strange mixture of glamour, loneliness and quiet damage that clung to the real people involved. When I was younger, I used to chat to an older Christine Keeler in the Chelsea Bun Diner near the World’s End Estate, where she lived for a time. She was nothing like the scandal‑era caricature: sharp, funny, wary, and very aware of how her life had been rewritten by other people. She carried the weight of the story, but she also carried the knowledge that the public had never really bothered to understand her.

Around the same period, I occasionally stayed at Profumo’s old dower house near Buntingford — a friend of my mother’s had bought it — and the old gardener would talk about Profumo with a kind of gentle loyalty. People who knew him personally tended to speak well of him. Not in the defensive, revisionist way, but with the quiet conviction that he’d been punished far more harshly than the circumstances warranted. They remembered a courteous, thoughtful man who rebuilt his life through charity work and humility. Hearing those stories, you realised how far the public version of the scandal had drifted from the private one.

The film leans into those contradictions. Hurt’s Stephen Ward is both facilitator and scapegoat; Keeler is both exploited and defiant; Profumo is both culpable and oddly sympathetic. Caton‑Jones understands that the real drama isn’t the salacious detail but the collision between private lives and public judgement — the way a government can be shaken not by espionage or ideology, but by the messy, human failings of the people inside it.

Stylish, sharp, and still unsettling, Scandal captures the moment Harold Macmillan’s government discovered that the real danger wasn’t foreign agents or political rivals — it was the stories people tell once the tide turns, and the people left living with them long after the headlines fade.

Thursday 24 September

A Foreign Affair — Film4, 12.45pm (1948)

Billy Wilder’s A Foreign Affair is one of those films that reminds me why he remains one of my favourite directors — sharp, unsentimental, and utterly unwilling to flatter the audience. On the surface it’s a breezy post‑war comedy: American politicians arrive in bomb‑shattered Berlin to inspect troop morale, only to find themselves entangled in nightclub intrigue, romantic complications and moral ambiguity. But underneath the wit is Wilder’s unmistakable outsider’s eye.

Jean Arthur is terrific as the prim, upright congresswoman Phoebe Frost, determined to expose corruption and restore American virtue to the occupation forces. Wilder has great fun with her earnestness, letting it collide with the reality of a city still half in ruins. And then there’s Marlene Dietrich, magnificent as Erika von Schlütow, the nightclub singer whose glamour, survival instincts and ambiguous past complicate everything. Dietrich doesn’t play the role — she inhabits it, turning every song and every glance into a reminder that Berlin’s moral landscape is far more complicated than the Americans want to believe.

Wilder understood that complexity because he lived it. Born Samuel Wilder in what is now Poland, raised in Vienna, he fled Germany in 1933 when the Nazis came to power. His mother, grandmother and stepfather were murdered in the Holocaust. That history shaped him: he arrived in Hollywood brilliant, traumatised, and with a clear-eyed refusal to romanticise the society that had given him refuge. It’s why he was sometimes criticised in the US for being “too cynical” or “too European” — a charge levelled at films like Ace in the Hole, Sunset Boulevard, Double Indemnity and even The Apartment. But that cynicism was really moral clarity, and it’s one of the reasons I like his work so much.

You see it here in the way he treats post‑war Berlin: not as a backdrop for American heroism, but as a place where survival blurs the lines between guilt and necessity. The comedy is sharp, but the edges are real. Wilder lets Arthur’s idealism and Dietrich’s pragmatism grind against each other until the film becomes something richer than satire — a portrait of a world trying to rebuild itself while everyone pretends the past is simpler than it was.

Funny, sly, and quietly pointed, A Foreign Affair is Wilder at his best: entertaining you while reminding you that the truth is rarely tidy, and that outsiders often see a country more clearly than it sees itself.

The Secret Life of Bees — Channel 5, 7pm
Steve Backshall attempts to persuade us that swarms and stings are nothing to panic about. His chosen method is fairly committed: allowing 10,000 bees to crawl across his face.

Dickens, Phantoms and Fictions — Sky Arts, 8pm
David Harewood explores Charles Dickens’ fascination with ghosts and the supernatural. Dickens loved a haunting, and there is more to that side of his imagination than A Christmas Carol alone.

Hobson’s Choice — Great TV, 9pm (1953)

David Lean’s Hobson’s Choice is one of those films that looks, at first glance, like a cosy slice of post‑war British comedy — bustling Salford streets, a bootmaker’s shop, a tyrannical father blustering his way through life — and then quietly reveals itself as something far sharper and far more satisfying. Charles Laughton’s Henry Hobson is a glorious creation: pompous, self‑important, half pickled in drink, and absolutely convinced of his own authority. He’s the sort of man who believes the world is arranged for his convenience, and is genuinely affronted when it isn’t.

But the real spine of the film is Brenda de Banzie’s Maggie, Hobson’s eldest daughter, who has spent years running the business while her father takes the credit. De Banzie plays her with a calm, implacable intelligence — a woman who has already weighed up her options and decided she’s done waiting for permission. Her partnership with John Mills’ shy, gifted bootmaker Willie Mossop is one of Lean’s loveliest pieces of character work: two people discovering their own worth, and each other’s, in a world that has underestimated them both.

Lean directs with a craftsman’s eye for working‑class life: the clatter of the workshop, the rhythm of trade, the small rituals that give a community its shape. The comedy is warm but never soft; the film understands that liberation often begins in the domestic sphere, in the simple refusal to accept the limits others set for you. Watching Maggie calmly dismantle her father’s authority — not with rebellion, but with competence — is one of the great pleasures of British cinema.

James Dean: The Emotional Man — Sky Arts, 10.15pm

Another attempt to prise apart one of Hollywood’s most enduring myths, and to look at the person who existed before the icon froze in place. James Dean’s early death turned him into a kind of cultural shorthand — rebellion, yearning, the beautiful outsider — but the documentary is more interested in the human being beneath all that inherited symbolism.

It traces the emotional landscape Dean carried with him: the fragility under the swagger, the longing under the cool, the sense of someone trying to find connection in a world that preferred him enigmatic. What emerges is a portrait of a young man who burned intensely but unevenly, whose vulnerability was not a pose but a condition, and whose performances were charged precisely because he never seemed entirely armoured against the world.

The film doesn’t try to tidy him into a single narrative. Instead, it lets the contradictions sit: the ambition and the insecurity, the sensitivity and the self‑destruction, the way he could be both magnetic and unreachable. It’s a reminder that the myth was built from something real — a person whose emotional life was messy, raw, and far more complex than the posters that came after.

A thoughtful, quietly affecting look at the man behind the legend, and at the cost of becoming a symbol before you’ve had the chance to fully become an adult.

Dispatches: Britain’s Gaza Secrets Exposed — Channel 4, 11.05pm
With access to unpublished internal White House documents, Dispatches examines how the UK government responded to allegations of Israeli war crimes in Gaza.

Friday 25 September

Play for Today: Wild — Channel 5, 9pm
The first of six new one-off dramas dealing with contemporary social questions. Daniel Mays, Joel Fry and Amit Shah play Lou, Dev and Alastair, old friends still clinging to their annual wild-camping tradition. The years move on. The ritual remains.

Sting Night — BBC Four, from 9.05pm
An evening following Sting from the Police years through his solo career to his headline performance at Radio 2 in the Park in 2024, along with an interview with Dermot O’Leary.

Immaculate — BBC Two, 10pm (2024)
Sydney Sweeney stars as an American novice who arrives at an Italian convent only to discover that the apparent sanctuary contains some very nasty secrets indeed. Religious horror with little interest in subtle reassurance.

His House — BBC Two, 11.20pm (2020)
One of the most interesting British horror films of recent years. A refugee couple from South Sudan are placed in a council house in England, where the ghosts they encounter may have followed them much further than anyone realises.

The Northman — Film4, 12.30am (2022)

Robert Eggers doesn’t do half‑measures, and The Northman is probably the purest expression of that yet — a Viking revenge saga delivered with the kind of ferocity, ritual intensity and mud‑soaked physicality that makes most modern epics look like polite cosplay. Alexander Skarsgård is a slab of focused fury as Amleth, the prince‑turned‑berserker whose life has been shaped by a single childhood vow. Eggers shoots him like a creature forged rather than born: all sinew, rage and prophecy.

The film is built on primal elements — blood, fire, omens, betrayal — but Eggers treats them with anthropological seriousness. Nicole Kidman and Claes Bang give the family drama its jagged edges, while Anya Taylor‑Joy threads something uncanny through the story, a reminder that in Eggers’ world the mystical isn’t decoration but part of the landscape’s logic. The result is a film that feels both mythic and brutally real, as if someone dug up a saga and filmed it without cleaning off the dirt.

Eggers’ refusal to compromise is what makes the film so gripping. The rituals are strange, the violence is intimate, the worldview is alien. He trusts the audience to meet the film on its own terms rather than sanding it down for comfort. That commitment gives The Northman its power: a revenge story that feels genuinely ancient, driven by fate, fury and the cold certainty that the gods are watching.

Visceral, operatic and utterly committed, it’s a Viking epic that doesn’t just depict a world — it drags you into it.

Streaming

Perfect Blue — Netflix — available now

Satoshi Kon’s 1997 animated psychological thriller follows pop idol Mima as she abandons music for acting and gradually loses any secure sense of where performance ends and reality begins. Unsettling, clever and enormously influential.

L.A. Confidential — Channel 4 streaming — available until Monday

One of the finest American crime films of the 1990s, L.A. Confidential still feels like a live wire — stylish, cynical and utterly gripping. Curtis Hanson takes James Ellroy’s labyrinthine novel and pares it down without losing the rot at its core: corruption, celebrity and policing colliding in 1950s Los Angeles, a city where image is currency and truth is an inconvenience.

Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce and Kevin Spacey form one of the great crime‑film triangles. Crowe’s Bud White is all bruised instinct; Pearce’s Ed Exley is ambition wrapped in righteousness; Spacey’s Jack Vincennes glides through Hollywood’s underbelly like a man who knows the game is rigged but enjoys playing it anyway. Kim Basinger’s Oscar‑winning turn as the Veronica Lake‑lookalike adds a cool, melancholy glamour that never tips into pastiche.

The surface sheen — the sharp suits, the neon, the immaculate production design — is constantly undercut by the brutality beneath. Every revelation feels like a trapdoor opening. Every alliance is temporary. Hanson isn’t reviving noir; he’s interrogating it, showing how power works in a city built on mythmaking and moral compromise.

Still one of the great modern crime films: stylish, cynical and gripping from first frame to last.

Wasteman — Netflix — Sunday 20 September

A British prison drama built around violence, loyalty and survival behind bars.

How to Live on Earth — YouTube — Sunday 20 September, 7pm

A documentary considering how human beings might begin working with the natural world rather than simply consuming it.

Youth — HBO Max — Monday 21 September

The first two episodes of Youth land this week, and they arrive with the kind of confidence that suggests the series already knows exactly what it wants to be. It’s a drama about ambition, identity and the pressure cooker of early adulthood — that moment when every choice feels definitive and every mistake feels like it might echo for years.

The show moves with a sleek, modern energy: sharp dialogue, clean visual style, and a cast that understands how to play the emotional volatility without tipping into melodrama. What stands out in these opening chapters is the way Youth treats its characters’ dreams seriously. Not sentimentally, not cynically — seriously. The series recognises that the intensity of being young isn’t trivial; it’s formative. The friendships feel lived‑in, the rivalries sting, and the sense of possibility hangs over everything like a challenge.

There’s a confidence in the pacing too. The first two episodes don’t rush to define the whole world; they give you just enough to understand the stakes, then trust you to follow the characters as they collide, connect and come undone. If the rest of the season maintains this balance of style and emotional clarity, Youth could turn out to be one of the more compelling new dramas of the autumn.

A Quiet Place: Day One — Netflix — available until Thursday

The prequel rewinds the clock to the first hours of the invasion, dropping the silence‑obsessed terror into the noise and chaos of New York City. What makes it gripping isn’t just the spectacle — though the early sequences have a dreadful, rolling inevitability — but the way it shows ordinary people trying to make sense of something that refuses to be understood. The film leans into panic, confusion and the awful realisation that survival now depends on suppressing the very instinct to scream. It’s a story about the moment civilisation snaps, told with a kind of intimate dread that makes the familiar streets feel suddenly hostile.

Last Seen — Apple TV — Wednesday 23 September

Episode four continues the show’s slow tightening of the screws. What began as a disappearance is now a web of competing truths, each character clinging to their version of events as the emotional fallout spreads. Apple’s trademark polish is there — clean visuals, careful pacing — but the real hook is the way the series treats grief and suspicion as twin forces, pushing people into choices they can’t easily walk back. This chapter deepens the fractures, letting small revelations land with the weight of something much larger waiting just out of sight.

4 Blocks Zero — HBO Max — Friday 25 September

Episode one sets out the show’s stall with confidence: a world of criminal alliances, neighbourhood loyalties and the kind of pressure that makes every decision feel like a test. The tone is gritty without being performative, more interested in the human cost of power than the glamour of violence. As an opener, it’s all about establishing the terrain — who holds sway, who’s pretending to, and who’s about to discover that the rules they thought they understood don’t apply anymore. If the series keeps this balance of tension and character detail, it could become one of HBO Max’s sharper autumn launches.

Marvel’s Spidey and the Avengers: Halloween Team-Up — Disney+ — Friday 25 September

A lighter, seasonal diversion: Spidey and friends teaming up with the Avengers when Hallows’ Eve starts causing Halloween‑themed chaos. It’s bright, brisk and pitched squarely at younger viewers, but there’s a charm in the way it treats teamwork and problem‑solving as the real superpowers. The Halloween setting gives the episode a playful energy — pumpkins, costumes, mild peril — and the crossover format means there’s always another hero ready to swing, blast or thunder into frame. A cheerful, sugar‑rush special for the end of September.

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple — Sky Cinema /NOW — Friday 25 September

The revived 28 Years Later saga continues with a chapter that leans into the mythology of the outbreak rather than simply repeating the familiar beats. The Bone Temple pushes the story into darker, more ritualistic territory, exploring how survivors have built belief systems around catastrophe — some hopeful, some terrifying. The atmosphere is thick with unease: abandoned spaces, whispered histories, and the sense that the infection’s legacy is no longer just biological but cultural. If the previous instalment was about endurance, this one is about what people become when the world has been broken for so long that rebuilding feels like a superstition.

Coming soon

Lupin: Season 4 — Netflix — 23 October

The new season arrives next month, and it looks set to push Lupin into even murkier, more ambitious territory. What’s always made the series work isn’t just the heists — though they’re consistently elegant, playful and beautifully staged — but the way Assane Diop’s story blends charm with bruised history. Omar Sy remains one of the most effortlessly charismatic leads on television, and Season 4 seems ready to test that charisma against consequences he can no longer outrun.

The show has always balanced spectacle with emotional weight: the thrill of the con set against the cost of living a life built on masks. This season appears to lean harder into that tension. Assane’s past isn’t just catching up with him; it’s reshaping the world around him. Family, loyalty and revenge — the series’ core themes — return with sharper edges, and the glimpses we’ve had suggest a story that’s less about outsmarting the authorities and more about outsmarting fate.

Expect the usual pleasures: Paris as a stage set for mischief, puzzles that click together with satisfying precision, and Sy’s ability to turn a raised eyebrow into a plot twist. But Season 4 looks like it’s aiming for something bigger — a reckoning, not just another escape.

If the show delivers on that promise, Lupin could be heading into its strongest run yet.

Radio

Saturday 19 September

A Streetcar Named Desire — Radio 4 Extra, 11am and 5pm

The 2017 dramatisation of Tennessee Williams’ landmark play returns in the year marking 75 years since the release of the celebrated film adaptation. That film gave us Marlon Brando’s Stanley Kowalski and Vivien Leigh’s Oscar-winning Blanche DuBois, but the power was there on stage first.

Opera on 3: Strauss’s Elektra — Radio 3, 6pm

Strauss at his most uncompromising. Elektra isn’t an opera that sidles up politely — it arrives like a psychological earthquake, all jagged edges, obsession and the kind of orchestral force that feels less like accompaniment and more like a character in its own right. Radio 3’s broadcast gives you the full weight of it: murder as legacy, revenge as destiny, and a score that treats restraint as an outdated superstition.

What makes Elektra so extraordinary is the way Strauss pushes everything to breaking point. The harmonies grind, the rhythms lurch, and the orchestra seems to claw at the singers as much as support them. Elektra herself is one of opera’s great dramatic creations — a woman consumed by the need to avenge her father, trapped in a household where every relationship has curdled into something poisonous. When the music erupts, it’s not decoration; it’s the sound of a mind under siege.

Even on radio, the sheer intensity comes through. You hear the metallic shimmer of the strings, the brutal brass writing, the way Strauss uses the orchestra to make the air feel charged and unstable. It’s a work that refuses comfort, refuses sentiment, and refuses to let the listener sit passively.

A night of operatic fire: raw, relentless and thrillingly alive.

Tuesday 22 September

Assignment — BBC World Service

John Murphy travels to Poland as the war in neighbouring Ukraine grinds on. Poland welcomed millions of Ukrainians after Russia’s invasion, but attitudes have changed sharply since 2022. The programme asks why sympathy has faded in some quarters and why “go back to Ukraine” sentiment has grown both online and in everyday life.

Thursday 24 September

End Terrace — Radio 4, 2.15pm

This one has an extra connection for us. Philip Catherwood, whose drama The Pitch found its subject in Gaelic football and which we reviewed during our Edinburgh Festival coverage, now turns to another part of Northern Irish life.

Maggie, played by Abigail McGibbon, lives at the end of a Belfast terrace. Local loyalists want her gable wall for a new mural. She has no wish to see her home covered in symbols of violence and, with the help of 16-year-old street artist Kyle, played by Daniel McRyan, she decides not to give way.

It is a simple dramatic situation with plenty underneath it: ownership, memory, territory and the question of who gets to decide what a community says about itself.

Friday 25 September

Friday Night Is Music Night — Radio 3, 7.30pm

A Bernstein special from the BBC Concert Orchestra under Martin Yates.

Naturally, West Side Story looms large. We get the explosive Mambo along with I Feel Pretty, Jet Song, America and Tonight from Yates’s 1992 arrangement West Side Story Suite No. 2.

But Bernstein was far more than one musical, however great that musical might be. The programme also reaches back to On the Town from 1944, on through Candide in 1956 and eventually to The Madwoman of Central Park West from 1979.

Guest singers are Sophie Evans, Caroline Sheen, Rob Houchen and Damien Humbley.

A good way to close a week which, appropriately enough, began with West Side Story itself on BBC Two.

Selections and reviews by Pat Harrington.

Advert

Permalink Leave a Comment

Culture Vulture 12–18 September 2026

September 11, 2026 at 11:23 am · Filed under BBC, Music, Netflix, Streaming, TV Shows, Walter Presents ·Tagged film, Film Reviews, movies, Netflix, TV guide, TV reviews

There is plenty to get stuck into this week, but three things stand out. The Last Night of the Proms remains one of those great television occasions, even if you normally only dip into classical music. England Till I Die looks like the most potentially unsettling piece of factual television, following an East Sussex anti-immigration activist over nine months. And film-wise, it is hard to look past The Red Shoes, Powell and Pressburger’s extraordinary 1948 masterpiece, still looking and feeling unlike almost anything else.

There is strong music programming too, with Chaka Khan and Simple Minds headlining Radio 2 in the Park, while BBC Four gives Friday night over to the Rolling Stones. Film4 supplies plenty across the week, and the streaming services offer a mix of crime, dystopia, politics and dysfunctional spies.

Saturday 12 September

The Red Shoes — 9.50am, BBC Two (1948)

Powell and Pressburger at full voltage: colour as emotion, movement as destiny, and a story that understands, with unnerving clarity, the price artists sometimes pay for brilliance. The film opens with a kind of deceptive lightness — the bustle of students, the chatter of rehearsal rooms — but even in those early scenes there’s a sense of something larger gathering, a tension between ordinary life and the pull of the stage.

Moira Shearer’s Vicky Page is one of those performances that seems to glow from within. She’s young, ambitious, and utterly sincere, and the film treats her not as a symbol but as a person caught between two forces: the joy of creation and the demands of those who claim ownership over it. Anton Walbrook’s Lermontov, all icy poise and implacable will, becomes the gravitational centre of the film. He doesn’t shout, he doesn’t threaten; he simply expects the world to bend to his vision. And in the world of The Red Shoes, that expectation is almost enough to make it happen.

The famous ballet sequence — still astonishing, still unmatched — feels like cinema stepping into another dimension. It’s not a filmed performance; it’s a dream, a hallucination, a manifesto. Powell and Pressburger let the stage dissolve into pure imagination, and for a few minutes you’re watching something that doesn’t seem bound by the usual rules of filmmaking. It’s the moment where the film declares, without hesitation, that art can be overwhelming, intoxicating, and dangerous.

What follows is inevitable, tragic, and strangely beautiful. The film isn’t moralising; it isn’t wagging a finger about ambition. It’s simply honest about the cost. For some people, the choice between life and art isn’t a choice at all — and The Red Shoes understands that with a kind of terrible sympathy.

A masterpiece, yes, but more than that: a film that still feels alive, still capable of unsettling you, still able to make you think about the things you love and what they demand in return.

Lawrence of Arabia — 1.30pm, BBC Two (1962)

Lean’s desert epic isn’t just large‑scale cinema — it’s cinema that seems to expand as you watch it, pushing outward into myth, psychology and the uneasy glamour of heroism. The first thing that strikes you is the sheer physical beauty of it: the desert not as backdrop but as a kind of vast, indifferent character, swallowing men, ambitions and empires without distinction. Freddie Young’s cinematography gives the landscape a monumental stillness, and Lean lets that stillness interrogate the people moving through it.

At the centre is Peter O’Toole, incandescent and unsettling. His Lawrence is not a straightforward adventurer but a man drawn to extremes — extremes of courage, extremes of self‑invention, extremes of delusion. O’Toole plays him with a kind of brittle radiance, as if the performance itself is lit from inside. You see the charisma, the intelligence, the recklessness, and the slow, painful recognition that the legend he’s building is also consuming him.

The film’s sweep is extraordinary, but what makes it endure is its ambivalence. It understands the seduction of grand narratives — the lone visionary, the desert campaign, the forging of alliances — but it also understands the cost. Lean never lets the spectacle drown out the politics or the psychology. The triumphs feel real, but so do the fractures, the betrayals, the dawning sense that Lawrence’s story is as much about the limits of empire as the possibilities of individual will.

Long, certainly. Magnificent, unquestionably. But more than that: a film that still feels like a challenge — to the viewer, to history, and to the idea of heroism itself.

Rosaline — 3pm, Film4 (2022)

A playful spin on Romeo and Juliet, yes, but what makes Rosaline interesting is the way it quietly punctures the solemnity that usually clings to Verona. By shifting the frame to Romeo’s overlooked ex, the film exposes the fragile architecture of the “great romance” — how much of it is timing, how much is teenage melodrama, and how much is simply who gets written into the centre of the story.

Kaitlyn Dever’s Rosaline is sharp, wounded, and wonderfully unimpressed by the myth-making around her. Through her eyes, the familiar beats of Shakespeare’s tragedy become something closer to a comedy of misplaced certainty. The film doesn’t mock the original; it just recognises that the intensity of first love can look very different once you’re no longer the one swept up in it.

There’s a breezy confidence to the whole thing — modern without being smug, affectionate without being reverent. And beneath the jokes, there’s a small but sincere point: change the narrator, and the legend shifts. The story you thought you knew becomes something else entirely.

Vera Cruz — 6.35pm, 5 Action (1954)

Aldrich’s Vera Cruz is one of those westerns that feels like it’s already leaning toward the genre’s darker future — cynical, sharp‑edged, and amused by its own ruthlessness. Gary Cooper and Burt Lancaster make a terrific, uneasy pairing: Cooper with that worn, moral gravity he carried so naturally, Lancaster all swagger, teeth and opportunism. They’re heading south not for honour or destiny but for profit, and the film never pretends otherwise.

What’s striking is how modern the tone feels. The Mexican setting isn’t treated as exotic backdrop; it’s a political landscape full of shifting loyalties, revolutionaries, mercenaries and people trying to survive the chaos. Aldrich shoots it with a kind of muscular clarity — dust, sweat, sudden violence — and lets the humour bubble up from the characters’ sheer audacity. Lancaster in particular seems to enjoy every moment of being a charming bastard.

The film’s cynicism isn’t bleak; it’s invigorating. You can see the seeds of the spaghetti western here, the move away from clean moral lines and toward something more ambiguous, more dangerous, more fun. Vera Cruz knows exactly what it is: a tough, stylish adventure where trust is a luxury and everyone’s playing an angle.

Last Night of the Proms — 7.10pm, BBC Two; 9pm, BBC One. Catch up via BBC iPlayer.

One of those fixtures in the television calendar that needs little introduction, beginning on BBC Two before moving across to BBC One for the climax of the evening.

Avengers: Endgame — 8.15pm, Channel 4 (2019)

A film built as a finale and delivered as an event. Endgame arrives carrying the weight of a decade’s worth of Marvel storytelling, and it doesn’t shy away from the scale of that responsibility. It’s unabashedly big, unabashedly emotional, and determined to give every character and every long‑running thread its moment.

The opening stretch is unexpectedly quiet, almost reflective, before the film swings into its playful time‑heist detour — a victory lap through the MCU’s own history. Then comes the vast, operatic climax, a sequence so crowded with heroes and spectacle that the screen feels barely able to contain it.

What keeps the film grounded is its sincerity. Beneath the CGI and the noise, there’s a clear understanding that endings matter. Some arcs close gently, others with thunderous fanfare, but each feels like part of a story finally being tied off.

Long, loud and built for maximum impact — but also surprisingly heartfelt. A blockbuster that knows exactly what it means to its audience.

Radio 2 in the Park: Chaka Khan — from 9pm, BBC Two. Catch up via BBC iPlayer.

Chaka Khan, the soul, funk and disco queen, is the headline draw on day one of the annual shindig. Her set, shown in full from 10pm, should be a crowd-pleaser.

Before that comes an hour of highlights from Stirling City Park, including performances from ABC, Lulu, Emeli Sandé and Texas.

The evening then heads into the archives, with Chaka Khan at the BBC at 11pm, followed by Texas at the BBC at 11.40pm.

Saint Omer — 1.50am, BBC Two (2022)

Alice Diop’s Saint Omer is a courtroom drama in form but something far more unsettling in effect. Inspired by a real case, the film approaches its subject with a calm, almost forensic stillness, refusing melodrama and letting the details speak for themselves. That restraint is precisely what makes it so gripping. Every pause, every hesitation, every quiet admission seems to echo in the room.

Diop isn’t interested in easy judgments. She’s interested in the uncomfortable territory where empathy, horror and uncertainty overlap. Through the eyes of Rama, a novelist observing the trial, the film becomes a study of how we try — and often fail — to understand the inner lives of others. The performances are extraordinary in their understatement; nothing is pushed, nothing is embellished, and the result is a kind of emotional slow burn that’s far more powerful than a conventional courtroom thriller.

Demanding, yes. You have to meet the film on its own terms. But the reward is a drama that lingers long after it ends — precise, unsettling, and quietly devastating.

Sunday 13 September

Gunfight at the O.K. Corral — 2.55pm, 5 Action (1957)

A western cut from the old studio cloth, polished, purposeful and carried by the sheer presence of its stars. Burt Lancaster’s Wyatt Earp is all upright resolve, a man who seems carved out of frontier duty, while Kirk Douglas’s Doc Holliday brings the volatility — charm, danger, and that flicker of self‑destruction that Douglas could summon so effortlessly. Together they give the film its spine: one steady, one unpredictable, both irresistible to watch.

Robert Aldrich directs with a kind of muscular classicism. The film isn’t trying to reinvent the genre; it’s honouring it. Wide streets, dusty saloons, men circling each other with the knowledge that violence is both inevitable and absurd. The build‑up to the famous showdown is deliberate, almost ritualistic, and when the bullets finally fly, it feels less like action and more like the fulfilment of a legend Hollywood had been polishing for decades.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s — 8pm, Sky Arts (1961)

A film wrapped in charm, glamour and that unmistakable early‑60s sheen, yet one that carries a complicated legacy. Audrey Hepburn’s Holly Golightly remains the centre of gravity — a performance so light it almost floats, yet anchored by a melancholy the film never fully names. She gives Holly a kind of shimmering fragility: a woman performing freedom while quietly terrified of what real closeness might demand. It’s one of cinema’s defining turns, and still astonishing in its precision.

George Peppard provides the steadier counterpoint, all quiet observation and gentle exasperation, while Henry Mancini’s score does half the emotional work — Moon River drifting through the film like a memory you’re not quite ready to confront. The elegance is undeniable.

But the film’s dated elements are impossible to ignore, and rightly so. Some choices now land with a thud, reminders of an era Hollywood preferred to gloss over. Acknowledging that doesn’t diminish Hepburn’s achievement; if anything, it sharpens it. Her Holly survives the film’s flaws and transcends them, becoming one of those rare characters who feels both iconic and strangely intimate.

A classic with caveats, but Hepburn’s performance remains untouchable.

Unmissable Moments at the BBC Proms 2026 — 8pm, BBC Four. Catch up via BBC iPlayer.

Two hours of mixed delights from this year’s Proms.

Radio 2 in the Park: Simple Minds — 10pm, BBC Two. Catch up via BBC iPlayer.

Simple Minds take centre stage for the second night of Radio 2 in the Park, bringing a formidable catalogue of songs with them.

Vesper — 11.10pm, Film4 (2022)

A striking piece of European science fiction that proves ambition isn’t measured in budget. Vesper imagines a future ravaged by ecological collapse, but it does so with a painter’s eye — damp forests, biotechnological oddities, and a world where every living thing seems half‑engineered and half‑feral. It’s grim, but not in the usual dystopian way; the film’s bleakness feels organic, lived‑in, almost mournful.

Raffiella Chapman gives the story its pulse. Her Vesper is resourceful, wary, and quietly determined, navigating a landscape where survival depends on ingenuity rather than firepower. The film’s strength lies in its restraint: no bombastic action, no glossy spectacle, just a slow, unsettling immersion in a future where nature has mutated beyond human control.

For a low‑budget production, it’s visually bold — intricate world‑building, strange textures, and a sense of scale achieved through imagination rather than money. The result is a sci‑fi film that feels genuinely otherworldly.

Ambitious, atmospheric and far more memorable than many bigger, louder dystopias.

Monday 14 September

Oliver! — 6.05pm, Film4 (1968)

Carol Reed’s lavish musical takes Oliver Twist and turns it into a full‑throated spectacle — big sets, big choruses, and Lionel Bart’s songs delivered with absolute gusto. It’s the kind of production that wears its scale proudly, every frame polished, every number staged to fill the screen. The story’s darker edges are softened, of course, but they’re still there if you look: the poverty, the fear, the precariousness of Oliver’s world.

What stands out now is how the film handles the women of Dickens’ novel, especially Nancy. Her arc gives the musical its emotional weight, a reminder that beneath the bright tunes lies a story shaped by sacrifice and danger. Counter Culture recently explored this in our piece on the women of Oliver Twist, and Reed’s version of Nancy carries that same tragic force — a character who anchors the film even as the spectacle swirls around her.

As a musical, though, Oliver! remains irresistible. Big tunes, big performances, and an Oscar‑winning production that still knows exactly how to entertain.

Epstein: Money, Power and Abuse — Panorama Special — 8pm, BBC One.

A Panorama special examining Jeffrey Epstein, the money and influence surrounding him, and the abuse at the heart of the story.

The Thin Blue Line — 10pm, Sky Documentaries (1988)

Errol Morris’s landmark documentary remains one of the clearest examples of non‑fiction cinema changing the real world. Through meticulous interviews and stylised reconstructions, Morris dismantles the official story surrounding the murder of Dallas police officer Robert W. Wood, exposing contradictions, coached testimony and a prosecution more interested in a conviction than the truth. The film’s impact wasn’t theoretical: Randall Dale Adams, the man at the centre of the case, had his conviction overturned in 1989 after twelve years behind bars, with prosecutors declining to retry him. Adams walked free, while the evidence increasingly pointed toward David Ray Harris — who later ended up on death row for an unrelated killing.

Calm, precise and quietly devastating, The Thin Blue Line shows how a documentary can do more than illuminate a case; it can correct one.

Get Carter — 11.05pm, BBC Two (1971)

Jack Carter returns to Newcastle for his brother’s funeral and quickly realises the official story doesn’t add up. What begins as a family obligation turns into a cold, methodical hunt for the truth, dragging him through a city where every door he opens reveals something more rotten than the last.

Caine plays Carter with unnerving stillness — a man who already knows the world is corrupt and is simply confirming the details. The violence is abrupt, the humour dry enough to sting, and the landscape itself feels complicit: terraces, slag heaps, concrete estates, all part of the film’s bleak moral weather. Mike Hodges strips away glamour until only cause, effect and consequence remain.

Brutal, unsentimental and still one of the finest British crime films ever made.

Tuesday 15 September

Garbo: Where Did You Go? — 8pm, Sky Arts.

Noomi Rapace narrates a portrait of the enigmatic Greta Garbo, one of cinema’s most famous and famously elusive stars.

The Royals: Time to Go? — 9pm, Channel 4. Catch up via Channel 4 Streaming.

A look at the monarchy and the increasingly familiar question of what place, if any, the institution should have in modern Britain.

Sicario — 10.40pm, BBC One (2015)

Denis Villeneuve’s border thriller is tense, morally murky and superbly controlled, with Emily Blunt, Benicio del Toro and Josh Brolin all excellent.

The Proposition — 11.35pm, Talking Pictures TV (2004)

A brutal, sun‑blasted Australian western built on a screenplay by Nick Cave — and if you know his work, the fingerprints are unmistakable. Violence, guilt, family, the harsh indifference of the landscape: Cave threads all of it through a story that feels both mythic and painfully human. As a big admirer of Cave, it’s hard not to relish how his sensibility shapes the film’s rhythm — the dialogue spare, the atmosphere heavy, the morality scorched at the edges.

The plot is simple and savage. Captain Stanley offers outlaw Charlie Burns an impossible bargain: hunt down and kill his older brother Arthur, a man responsible for atrocities, in exchange for the freedom of their youngest sibling. What follows is a slow, grim march through dust, heat and conscience. John Hillcoat directs with a stark, unblinking eye, letting the landscape do half the storytelling — a place where civilisation is a thin veneer and violence feels almost elemental.

Performances are flinty and lived‑in. Guy Pearce’s Charlie is a man hollowed out by loyalty and dread, while Danny Huston’s Arthur moves with the unsettling calm of someone who has already accepted damnation. The film’s brutality isn’t gratuitous; it’s part of the moral weather Cave and Hillcoat conjure so effectively.

Bleak, poetic and unforgettable — a western that feels like a ballad written in blood and dust.

You Were Never Really Here — 12.40am, Film4 (2017)

Lynne Ramsay and Joaquin Phoenix deliver a bruising, fragmented revenge film that is far more interested in trauma than conventional action.

Wednesday 16 September

Greed — 9pm, Film4 (2019)

Michael Winterbottom takes aim at obscene wealth, fast fashion and self-satisfied celebrity culture, with Steve Coogan doing what Steve Coogan does very well.

A River Runs Through It — 9pm, GREAT! TV (1992)

Robert Redford’s beautifully photographed drama follows two brothers growing up in early‑20th‑century Montana, their lives shaped by family, faith and the quiet rituals of fly‑fishing. What begins as a simple coming‑of‑age story deepens into something far more reflective: a film about the ties that bind, the choices that break us, and the things we can never quite say to the people we love.

The landscapes are extraordinary — rivers, forests, long summer light — all captured with a painterly calm that mirrors the film’s emotional restraint. Brad Pitt and Craig Sheffer give quietly affecting performances, their characters drifting together and apart as adulthood complicates the certainties of childhood. Redford’s narration adds a gentle melancholy, turning the film into a kind of elegy for a time, a place and a family that can’t be held onto.

Graceful, contemplative and deeply felt. A film that moves like the river at its centre: steady, luminous and quietly unforgettable.

England Till I Die — 10pm, Channel 4. Catch up via Channel 4 Streaming.

A sharp and unsettling slice of reportage. Filmmaker Jamie Roberts follows Liam, an East Sussex anti-immigration activist, over nine months.

Sicario 2: Soldado — 10.40pm, BBC One (2018)

The follow-up drops Emily Blunt and doubles down on Brolin and del Toro. Darker, harsher and less subtle than the original, but still gripping.

Our Ladies — 1.45am, Film4 (2019)

A group of Catholic schoolgirls descend on Edinburgh for a choir competition and immediately discover they’re far more interested in freedom, mischief and possibility than in hitting the right notes. What follows is a chaotic, funny and unexpectedly tender day out, as friendships shift, loyalties wobble and each girl tests the limits of who she might become once the school walls aren’t around her.

The film’s strength is its honesty. It doesn’t romanticise teenage rebellion, but it doesn’t scold it either. The humour is sharp, the dialogue rings true, and the performances capture that mix of bravado and vulnerability that defines being young and desperate to escape the version of yourself adults insist on seeing. Edinburgh becomes part of the adventure — messy, tempting, full of corners where trouble and opportunity blur together.

Funny, warm and considerably less pious than their teachers might like. A small gem of a coming‑of‑age film.

Thursday 17 September

The Secret Life of Bees — 7pm, Channel 5.

A look at the extraordinary variety of Britain’s bees — some 270 species — exploring their history, science and habitats. It begins with a visit to King Charles III’s bees at Highgrove.

Heatwaves & Food Prices: Saving on Your Supermarket Shop? — Tonight — 7.30pm, ITV1/STV.

Kate Quilton explores how the UK’s heatwaves have affected farmers and food prices.

The Theory of Everything — 9pm, Film4 (2014)

Eddie Redmayne won the Oscar for his portrayal of Stephen Hawking, with Felicity Jones equally impressive as Jane Hawking.

RED — 10.45pm, ITV1 (2010)

A slick, tongue‑in‑cheek action comedy built around the idea that the world’s most dangerous operatives are now supposed to be enjoying quiet retirement — and are utterly incapable of it. Bruce Willis’s Frank Moses is dragged back into the chaos when his past resurfaces, and he promptly reunites with a motley crew of former colleagues who are even less suited to domestic tranquillity than he is.

Helen Mirren is a delight as a refined assassin who still misses the adrenaline; John Malkovich steals scenes as a paranoid wildcard who’s usually right; and Morgan Freeman brings the easy charm of someone who’s seen everything and is still amused by most of it. The chemistry is the film’s real engine — older, sharper, funnier performers having a ball with material that lets them be both dangerous and daft.

Light, breezy and knowingly ridiculous, RED proves that retirement and tranquillity do not necessarily go together — especially when your old friends are armed to the teeth.

Io Capitano — 11.25pm, Film4 (2023)

Matteo Garrone’s migration drama follows two Senegalese teenagers, Seydou and Moussa, as they attempt the dangerous, often deadly journey to Europe — a route that promises opportunity but delivers exploitation, violence and unimaginable risk. What begins as a hopeful adventure quickly becomes a test of endurance, as the boys move through deserts, detention centres and the brutal economics of human trafficking.

Garrone films their odyssey with a stark, unblinking honesty. There’s no melodrama, no sensationalism, just the steady accumulation of hardship and small, fragile moments of kindness. The performances are remarkable in their simplicity: two boys trying to stay human in circumstances designed to strip that humanity away. The film’s power lies in its refusal to look away, and in its insistence that migration is not an abstract debate but a lived experience carried by real people with real dreams.

Tough, humane and quietly devastating — a story told with clarity, compassion and a refusal to simplify the truth.

Talking Pictures: David Lean — 11.30pm, BBC Four.

Following our Saturday selection of Lawrence of Arabia, this is a welcome opportunity to learn more about the man behind it. An archive-based insight into the life and career of director David Lean.

Friday 18 September

Shadow of a Doubt — 11am, Film4 (1943)

One of Hitchcock’s own favourites. Joseph Cotten brings menace into small-town America as Uncle Charlie, and the darkness gradually seeps through the respectable surface.

Coastal Unit — 9pm, More4. Walter Presents.

A French cop drama with a breezier touch than the genre usually allows. Brilliant rookie Lucia Passente is paired with jaded, old‑school veteran Victor Bruno Salomone, and the show leans into the fun of that mismatch — her sharp instincts and modern methods colliding with his weary pragmatism and “seen it all” attitude. The cases are serious enough, but the tone is lighter, warmer, more character‑led than the average procedural.

The coastal setting helps. Sun, sea and small‑town tensions give the series a relaxed rhythm, even when the investigations turn knotty. What keeps it engaging is the dynamic between the leads: Lucia’s energy pushing against Victor’s cynicism, each quietly learning from the other as they navigate crimes, colleagues and the odd personal complication.

Philadelphia — 9pm, GREAT! TV (1993)

Tom Hanks won his first Oscar for this landmark mainstream drama about AIDS, discrimination and dignity, with Denzel Washington alongside him.

Rolling Stones Night — from 10.10pm, BBC Four. Catch up via BBC iPlayer.

Unbelievably, the Rolling Stones are now up to their 25th studio album, and BBC Four marks their extraordinary longevity with an evening devoted to the band.

First up is a 2015 concert recorded at Hollywood’s Fonda Theatre, where the Stones performed their classic 1971 album Sticky Fingers in its entirety for the first — and, to date, only — time.

That is followed by two episodes of the 2022 series My Life as a Rolling Stone: Mick at 11.35pm, followed by Ronnie at 12.35am.

Starve Acre — 11pm, BBC Two (2023)

Matt Smith and Morfydd Clark anchor this bleak folk‑horror tale set in a Yorkshire landscape that seems determined to smother any hope. The story begins with a family grieving the loss of their young son, trying to hold themselves together in an isolated farmhouse where silence feels heavier than comfort. As Smith’s character becomes obsessed with the land’s strange history — old rituals, older stories, and something buried that should have stayed buried — the film shifts from domestic sorrow into something far more unsettling.

What makes Starve Acre effective is its restraint. The horror isn’t loud; it creeps. The countryside is shot not as pastoral beauty but as a place where ancient forces linger just out of sight, waiting for grief to weaken the boundary between the living and whatever came before. Clark brings a brittle, aching vulnerability, while Smith’s slow slide into obsession gives the film its unnerving pulse.

Bleak, atmospheric and quietly chilling — a folk‑horror story where the land itself feels like the antagonist.

Moonage Daydream — 1.20am, Channel 4 (2022)

Brett Morgen’s kaleidoscopic David Bowie documentary is less biography than sensory experience, making extensive use of Bowie’s own words, music and archive material. Take a look at the review I wrote when it was out at the cinema.

Streaming

Netflix

The Doll — all six episodes available from Wednesday 16 September.

A Polish drama centred on the ambitious Stanisław, a man determined to climb the social ladder while becoming increasingly consumed by his infatuation with Isabella.

Teenage Wasteland — available now.

Set in 1991 in blue-collar Middletown, New York, this tells the story of a teacher who creates a class called Electronic English in an attempt to connect with and engage his students.

Prime Video

You and Me Against the World — available from Friday 18 September.

Student Alma Lancaster is hiding rather a lot from her family. She is supposed to be studying law but is actually taking a filmmaking course. As if that were not enough, she is also involved with the rebellious Vadim, another part of her life unlikely to meet with family approval.

MobLand — Season 2 — episodes released weekly from Friday 18 September.

The criminal clans are back, including the Harrigans, with rivalries, alliances and family loyalties once again at the centre of things.

The Wizard of the Kremlin — available now.

A drama about the rise of Vladimir Putin and the political world surrounding his ascent to power.

Apple TV+

Slow Horses — Season 6, Episode 1 — available Wednesday 16 September.

Jackson Lamb and the dysfunctional inhabitants of Slough House return for another series.

Disney+

City of Blood — all eight episodes available Wednesday 16 September.

In a dystopian Berlin ruthlessly divided between rich and poor, sisters Phoebe, Soma, Paisa and Bea find themselves on opposite sides of the class divide. As they dig into the city’s criminal networks, they discover who is really pulling the strings.

Vampires.

Leaving Soon

Brassed Off — available on Channel 4 until Wednesday 16 September.

The Yorkshire mining community rallies around its colliery brass band against a backdrop of threatened pit closures, redundancies and a way of life being dismantled.

Coming Soon

The Diplomat — Series 4 — Netflix, available 15 October.

Radio

Saturday 12 September

The Bayeux Tapestry — 6am, 11am and 5pm, Radio 4 Extra.

An unusual recording from 1944 taking listeners through the story told by the Bayeux Tapestry.

Archive on 4: First Contact — 8pm, Radio 4.

A fascinating and difficult subject: indigenous peoples who remain uncontacted by the outside world. Survival International estimated in a November 2025 report that there are 196 uncontacted peoples around the world, chiefly in the Amazon basin.

Sunday 13 September

Between the Ears: A Circular History of the Loop — 7pm, Radio 3.

The loop — the repeated phrase, drum beat, guitar riff or fragment of sound — has become fundamental to modern music. This explores its history, including the wonderfully inventive methods of BBC Radiophonic Workshop composer Delia Derbyshire, for whom even tapping a metal lampshade with a small hammer could become raw musical material.

Monday 14–Friday 18 September

The Essay: In Voice — 9.45pm, Radio 3.

With the help of ear, nose and throat specialist Declan Costello, tenor Nicky Spence investigates how the human voice actually works. A week of essays looking at that most familiar, personal and surprisingly complicated of instruments.

Tuesday 15 September

Life as a Muse — 4pm, Radio 4.

Does the muse still have a place in the way we think about art and creativity? This considers the traditional idea of the muse while challenging some of the assumptions — and power relationships — that have come with it.

Selections and reviews by Pat Harrington

Advert

A communication failure occurred during the delivery of this message. Please try to resend the message later. If the problem continues, contact your email admin.

The following organization rejected your message: CO1PEPF00012E80.mail.protection.outlook.com.

Permalink Leave a Comment

Betrayal, Class and the Making of Ross Poldark

September 8, 2026 at 10:31 am · Filed under BBC, Books, TV Shows ·Tagged Aidan Turner, BBC Poldark, British television, class conflict, Eleanor Tomlinson, George Warleggan, historical drama, period drama, Poldark, TV, Winston Graham

Ross Poldark returns from war expecting to step back into the life he left behind. Instead, he finds it gone. His home is stripped, his inheritance carved up, and Elizabeth — the woman he once imagined as central to his future — now married to Francis. The BBC adaptation turns this shock into the engine of a story about identity: how a man rebuilds himself when the world he thought he belonged to has quietly replaced him.

A Homecoming That Shatters Everything

The opening episode of Poldark (2015–2019) doesn’t ease Ross back into Cornwall; it confronts him with the truth. He arrives with the posture of someone who believes he still has a place there. That confidence falters the moment he steps inside Nampara. The rooms are bare, the hearth cold, the silence heavy. It feels less like a home and more like a reminder that he has been erased.

Aidan Turner once said Ross “comes home to nothing,” and the series makes that literal. The emptiness becomes the emotional climate of the early episodes. Ross isn’t returning to a life frozen in time — he’s returning to a life that has already moved on. Elizabeth and Demelza stand on opposite sides of that rupture: one tied to the world Ross expected, the other to the world he must now learn to navigate.

The Betrayal Ross Never Saw Coming

Ross’s homecoming contains one of the most quietly brutal reversals in modern period drama. He walks into the church expecting to reclaim Elizabeth, only to see her hand in Francis’s. The moment is devastating. It’s a betrayal that removes the ground beneath him.

Winston Graham wrote that Ross returns to a world that has “moved on without him” and the adaptation leans into that cruelty. Francis and Charles haven’t just assumed Ross dead — they’ve benefited from it. Wheal Leisure is theirs. Nampara has been stripped. Even Jud and Prudie have abandoned the estate. Ross’s return isn’t met with welcome or relief; it’s met with the realisation that his place in Cornwall has already been filled.

Eleanor Tomlinson captured the moment bluntly: “Ross loses everything in one breath — his home, his future, and the woman he thought was his destiny.”

Francis: A Man Unravelling in Plain Sight

Francis Poldark is one of the show’s quiet tragedies. His insecurity is ever present. Kyle Soller, who plays him, once remarked that Francis is “terrified of Ross because Ross is everything he wishes he could be.” The series shows that terror in small, telling ways.

Watch Francis at the Wheal Leisure shareholders’ meeting: the brittle laugh, the defensive posture, the way he clings to status as if it might hold him together. His jealousy doesn’t erupt in a single moment — it accumulates. In one early scene, Francis watches Ross and Elizabeth speak across a crowded room, and something inside him tightens. Later, his attempts to undermine Ross’s mining efforts feel less like strategy and more like desperation — a man drowning who grabs at anything, even his cousin, to stay afloat.

Francis steals Ross’s life, but never feels safe living in it.

Elizabeth: The World Ross Lost

Elizabeth is often misread as cold, but the series paints her as someone shaped — and limited — by her upbringing. She chooses Francis because she believes Ross is dead, but also because she has been raised to value stability above everything else. Reputation is her armour, and she wears it even when it restricts her.

Heida Reed said Elizabeth “chooses safety,” and the early episodes support that reading. Watch her at Trenwith: the slight hesitation before she speaks, the way she stands just behind Francis at social gatherings, the way she looks at Ross with longing edged by caution. She embodies the world Ross once expected to inherit — refined, orderly, predictable.

But she cannot follow Ross into the chaos that defines his return. She is the past, not the future.

Demelza and the Courage to Stand Beside Him

Demelza’s arrival shifts the entire rhythm of the show. She enters Ross’s life not as a romantic counterpart but as a force of disruption. In the early episodes, she is sharp‑eyed, stubborn, and unafraid of Nampara’s emptiness. Her first act is practical: she cleans. Her second is emotional: she stays.

Eleanor Tomlinson described Demelza as someone who “sees Ross clearly — not the hero, not the gentleman, but the man.” The series proves that repeatedly. When Ross spirals after Wheal Leisure’s failures, she steadies him. When he lashes out, she pushes back. When he retreats into grief, she refuses to let him disappear.

One of the most striking moments comes when she sings at Trenwith. The room falls silent. Elizabeth watches. Francis watches. Ross watches. For a brief moment, Demelza stands at the centre of a world that once excluded her. She doesn’t belong to Ross’s past; she belongs to what he can become.

The Mine That Makes Him Who He Is

Wheal Leisure is more than a business venture. It’s the one thing Ross can rebuild with his own hands. The mine is loud, dangerous, unpredictable — nothing like the polite world of Trenwith. In Episode 3, when the mine floods and Ross throws himself into the chaos to save his men, the series shows exactly what drives him: not pride, but responsibility.

Jack Farthing, who plays George Warleggan, said Ross fights the Warleggans because “they represent everything that destroyed him.” The mine becomes the battleground for that conflict. George uses influence and money; Ross uses sweat and stubbornness. Demelza stands beside him through every collapse and reopening.

The mine isn’t a symbol. It’s a wound Ross keeps reopening because he cannot bear to let the world take anything else from him.

The Night with Elizabeth: A Step Backward

Ross’s night with Elizabeth is one of the most controversial moments in the series, and one of its most important. It isn’t framed as romance. It’s framed as regression. Ross seeks out Elizabeth because he wants to feel like the man he was before war, before betrayal, before responsibility.

Aidan Turner explained Ross’s mindset simply: “He goes to Elizabeth because he wants to feel like the man he used to be.” The scene reflects that. The lighting is soft, the room quiet, the moment heavy with nostalgia. But nostalgia can be a trap. When Demelza learns what Ross has done, her devastation is understated and deeply human.

Ross’s betrayal isn’t passion. It’s a retreat into a world that no longer exists and a denial of what should be.

Ross Finally Chooses Who He Wants to Be

Ross’s transformation doesn’t happen in a single moment. It happens slowly, in the aftermath — in the way he looks at Demelza when she withdraws, in the way he tries to repair what he broke, in the way he finally understands that love is not inherited but earned.

Demelza becomes the measure of Ross’s growth. She demands honesty. She demands accountability. And Ross, gradually and painfully, becomes a man capable of giving both. By the later seasons, his loyalty to her is no longer impulsive. It is steady. It is chosen.

Conclusion

Ross Poldark’s story is not only a romance. It is a reconstruction. Betrayal tears apart the life he expected; class conflict shapes the life he must build; love — real love — forces him to confront the man he is capable of becoming.

Elizabeth is the past Ross cannot reclaim. Demelza is the future he must grow into.

Winston Graham wrote that Ross “must learn that love is not a memory — it is a choice.” The BBC series shows that choice again and again, until Ross finally makes it.

By Mia Fulga

Permalink Leave a Comment

Culture Vulture 5–11 September 2026

September 5, 2026 at 8:17 am · Filed under Culture Vulture, TV Shows ·Tagged best TV shows UK, British TV schedule, Disney Plus UK, Netflix, new TV releases UK, on‑demand TV UK, Prime Video UK, streaming recommendations UK, UK streaming guide, UK streaming platforms, UK television listings, UK TV guide, weekly TV highlights

It is difficult to write that without remembering exactly where you were when the planes hit the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001. For those of us old enough to have watched events unfold live, the images have never quite gone away. The second aircraft. The smoke. The people standing in the streets staring upwards. Then the towers coming down.

A quarter of a century later, television and radio inevitably return to 9/11 this week. Some of the programmes revisit familiar territory, but others ask questions which remain unresolved. Panorama’s 9/11: The Saudi Connection looks at newly released material concerning possible Saudi links to the hijackers. Radio 4 hears directly from seven people caught up in the attacks. Then, on the anniversary itself, Sky History repeats 102 Minutes Inside the Towers. There are plenty of 9/11 documentaries around this week, but that one retains an immediacy which is difficult to shake off.

It isn’t all remembrance, of course.

Freddie Mercury would have turned 80 this week, prompting competing Queen nights from the BBC and Sky Arts. BBC Four gives us two episodes of one of my favourite sitcoms, The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, while Radio 4 Extra offers its rather lovely audio reincarnation. We also get Buddy Holly, Penda’s Fen, Martha Argerich, Robert Redford, plague, crusades and enough excellent films to fill a small repertory cinema.

Quite a week, then.

Saturday 5 September

6.30pm – Waterloo (1970), ITV4

Bondarchuk’s colossal staging of Napoleon’s downfall remains one of cinema’s great acts of madness and magnificence. It isn’t just big — it’s absurdly big, the sort of logistical gamble that would give a modern producer heart palpitations. Before computers could conjure armies out of pixels, this was done the old, brutal way: thousands of real soldiers marching, charging, falling, regrouping across vast fields churned into mud.

What you get is weight — the physical heft of cavalry pounding through smoke, the chaos of infantry lines buckling and reforming, the sheer human density of a battlefield recreated at full scale. Bondarchuk doesn’t merely depict Waterloo; he tries to rebuild it.

Rod Steiger’s Napoleon is a storm of ego, exhaustion and fatal certainty, while Christopher Plummer’s Wellington watches it all with the cool detachment of a man who knows history is tilting his way. But the real star is the spectacle itself: a reminder of a vanished era when cinema occasionally attempted the impossible, and sometimes succeeded.

6.30pm – Queen Live in Rio, Sky Arts

Sky Arts gets its Queen celebrations underway early with the band in concert.

7.50pm – Queen: Is This the Real Life?, Sky Arts

A look back over Queen’s extraordinary career.

8.00pm – Captain Marvel (2019), Channel 4

Brie Larson steps into the MCU with a performance that’s flinty, poised and quietly self‑assured, anchoring Marvel’s detour into the mid‑1990s — all dial‑up modems, Blockbuster Video and grunge‑era attitude. What’s striking, revisiting it now, is how much of the film’s charm comes from its refusal to hurry. It’s less a straight‑line origin story and more a slow unravelling: a woman piecing together a life that’s been deliberately scrambled, discovering that the people who trained her may not be the people she should trust.

The buddy‑movie chemistry with Samuel L. Jackson gives the film its warmth, and the de‑aged Nick Fury — still years away from the cynicism that will calcify him — is a delight. Ben Mendelsohn’s Talos, meanwhile, steals scenes with a wry, weary humour that undercuts the usual Marvel bombast.

It’s not the studio’s flashiest entry, but it has a sturdiness and clarity of purpose that still lands. A story about reclaiming agency, wrapped in neon lighting, cosmic punch‑ups and a soundtrack that leans hard into the era.

9.00pm – Queen at the BBC, BBC Two

Freddie Mercury would have been 80, and the BBC has sensibly gone rummaging through an exceptionally rich archive.

Queen Night begins with a compilation of performances including Radio Ga Ga and Bohemian Rhapsody. There are worse ways to spend a Saturday evening.

Catch up via BBC iPlayer.

9.00pm – Freddie Mercury: The Untold Story, Sky Arts

Meanwhile, over on Sky Arts, a profile following Mercury from his arrival in Britain through Queen’s rise to global stardom and his untimely death in 1991.

9.00pm – Lorne, Sky Documentaries

A documentary about Lorne Michaels, the man behind Saturday Night Live and one of the most influential figures in American television comedy.

9.00pm – The Dark Knight Rises (2012), ITV2

Nolan closes out his Batman trilogy with a film that feels less like a sequel and more like a reckoning. Eight years after The Dark Knight, Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne is a man hollowed out by grief and self‑imposed exile — limping, reclusive, and dangerously convinced that Gotham no longer needs him. Into that vacuum strides Tom Hardy’s Bane, a villain built like a siege engine and fuelled by a kind of militant certainty.

Hardy plays him with an unnerving calm: the voice, the posture, the deliberate pacing all suggest someone who has already decided how the story ends. He isn’t chaotic like the Joker; he’s methodical, ideological, and terrifying precisely because he believes he’s the hero of his own revolution. When he breaks Batman — physically, psychologically, symbolically — it lands with the weight of a trilogy snapping in half.

What follows is Nolan at his most operatic: a city under occupation, a hero clawing his way back from ruin, and a finale that pushes the scale to its limit without losing the emotional thread. Anne Hathaway’s Selina Kyle adds a sharp, sardonic counterpoint, and Michael Caine’s weary Alfred provides the film’s bruised heart.

It’s a grand, heavy, sometimes unwieldy conclusion — but it has conviction, and it gives Bruce Wayne something rare in superhero cinema: an ending that feels earned.

10.00pm – Queen: Live at the Hammersmith Odeon, BBC Two

Queen’s 1975 Christmas concert. The band were on the cusp of becoming absolutely enormous and you can see why.

10.20pm – Queen: Days of Our Lives, Sky Arts

Part one of the story of the band.

11.05pm – Freddie Mercury: The Final Act, BBC Two

A documentary about the final years of Mercury’s life and the extraordinary tribute concert which followed his death.

11.45pm – Apocalypse Now (1979), Film4

Coppola’s voyage upriver remains one of cinema’s great acts of delirium — a film that doesn’t simply depict madness but seems to breathe it, sweat it, and let it seep into every frame. Even after all these years, it still feels like something too large and too strange to have been made by human hands, a fever dream mounted with the resources of a major studio and the instincts of a man teetering on the edge.

What overwhelms isn’t just the scale — though the scale is astonishing — but the density of the experience. The jungle feels alive in a way few films have ever matched: humid, predatory, vibrating with unseen threat. Willard’s journey becomes a kind of moral erosion, each stop along the river stripping away another layer of certainty until all that’s left is the raw, unfiltered question of what a human being becomes when the structures around him collapse.

And then there’s Kurtz, waiting in the shadows like a myth that’s grown teeth. Brando’s presence is so heavy, so strange, that the film seems to tilt around him. The final stretch plays less like narrative and more like ritual — a confrontation staged in whispers, firelight and the oppressive heat of a world where sanity has long since evaporated.

12 midnight – Brighton Rock (2010), BBC One

The later adaptation of Graham Greene’s novel arrives with a chill already in its bones. Sam Riley’s Pinkie is a quieter, more coiled presence than earlier incarnations — a young man whose menace comes not from swagger but from an unnerving stillness, as if violence is simply the next breath he hasn’t yet taken.

Setting the story in the 1960s gives the film a different texture: the Mods-and-Rockers backdrop adds a restless, volatile energy, and Brighton itself feels less like a seaside escape and more like a pressure cooker. The pier, the backstreets, the cafés — all of them carry that Greene sense of moral rot just beneath the surface.

Andrea Riseborough’s Rose is heartbreakingly sincere, clinging to Pinkie with a devotion that feels both tender and tragic. Her innocence isn’t played as naivety but as a kind of doomed hope, which makes the story’s darker turns land with real weight. Helen Mirren, as Ida, brings a sharp, worldly counterpoint — a woman who sees exactly what Pinkie is and refuses to let the truth slip quietly away.

It’s a lean, shadowed film, faithful to Greene’s bleak worldview and carried by Riley’s icy restraint. Not as iconic as the 1947 version, but it has its own grim pulse.

12.20am – Freddie Mercury: The Great Pretender, Sky Arts

Another opportunity to explore the man behind one of rock music’s greatest showmen.

12.35am – Freddie Mercury: In Ten Pictures, BBC Two

Mercury’s life examined through a small collection of professional and private photographs.

12.45am – A Quiet Place Part II (2020), Channel 4

Krasinski’s sequel doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel — it simply tightens every bolt. The world is already broken, the rules already established, and the film wastes no time reminding you how lethal a single careless sound can be. What follows is a lean, tense continuation that expands the story without diluting its simplicity.

Emily Blunt carries the film with that same fierce, exhausted determination, but it’s Millicent Simmonds who becomes the emotional centre this time — resourceful, brave, and increasingly convinced that survival requires more than hiding. Cillian Murphy adds a welcome layer of ambiguity: a man hollowed out by loss, dragged reluctantly back into responsibility.

The monsters remain terrifying not because of what they look like, but because of what they demand: absolute silence, absolute vigilance, absolute awareness of every twig, tile and loose grain of gravel. Krasinski stages the set‑pieces with surgical precision — parallel action, rising dread, and that awful knowledge that one mistake is all it takes.

Sunday 6 September

6.00pm – BBC Proms: American Classics, BBC Two

The penultimate weekend of the Proms offers a concert recorded before a capacity audience at the Royal Albert Hall on 24 August.

Copland’s nostalgic Appalachian Spring sits alongside Bernstein’s Symphonic Dances from West Side Story and Gershwin’s glorious Rhapsody in Blue. Quite a mixture, but a very enjoyable one.

Catch up via BBC iPlayer.

6.40pm – Steel Magnolias (1989), Film4

A film that wears its warmth openly but never hides the steel underneath. Steel Magnolias begins as a portrait of Southern friendship — all teasing, gossip, hairspray and ritual — and slowly reveals itself as something far deeper: a study of resilience, community and the way women hold each other up when life turns cruel.

The beauty salon is the film’s emotional engine, a place where laughter ricochets off the walls and where heartbreak is absorbed gently, almost ceremonially. It’s a sanctuary, but not a sentimental one; these women know exactly how hard life can be, and they meet it with humour sharp enough to cut through the darkest moments.

The cast is extraordinary, and the chemistry is the reason the film still lands. Sally Field’s ferocious maternal love, Shirley MacLaine’s acerbic brilliance, Dolly Parton’s effortless warmth, Olympia Dukakis’ regal wit, Daryl Hannah’s gentle awkwardness and Julia Roberts’ luminous vulnerability — each performance distinct, yet perfectly interlocking.

What begins as a breezy comedy becomes, almost imperceptibly, a story of grief handled with honesty rather than manipulation. The emotional blow, when it comes, is devastating precisely because the film has earned it. And by the end, you’re left with something rare: a sense that you’ve spent time with real people, whose laughter and sorrow feel lived rather than performed.

7.00pm – Paths of Glory (1957), Great Action

Kubrick’s blistering anti‑war drama still hits like a moral thunderclap. On the surface it’s a First World War story — mud, trenches, impossible orders handed down by men who will never see the front — but what the film is really dissecting is the machinery of authority, and how easily it grinds ordinary soldiers into dust.

Kirk Douglas gives one of his finest performances as Colonel Dax, a man trying to hold onto decency in a system that treats human lives as expendable chess pieces. His fury isn’t theatrical; it’s the quiet, exhausted anger of someone who understands exactly how rigged the game is. Opposite him, the generals are drawn with icy precision: men who speak of honour while sending others to die for their own vanity.

The courtroom scenes remain devastating — Kubrick strips away sentiment and lets the cruelty stand naked. And the final moments, often discussed, still carry a strange, fragile humanity: a reminder that even in the bleakest circumstances, people can recognise each other’s suffering.

8.00pm – BBC Proms, BBC Four

A major attraction of this year’s Proms: the great Martha Argerich, now 85, performs Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 2 with the Munich Philharmonic under Lahav Shani.

Katie Derham and Petroc Trelawny present.

Catch up via BBC iPlayer.

10.00pm – Peter Egan Remembers A Taste of Honey, BBC Four

Peter Egan looks back at the BBC’s 1984 adaptation of Shelagh Delaney’s groundbreaking play.

10.00pm – Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), BBC Two

Newman and Redford at their most effortlessly magnetic — two men who seem to glide through the film on charm, wit and a kind of doomed buoyancy. What’s striking, watching it again, is how lightly the film carries its melancholy. It’s a story about outlaws who know the world is changing faster than they can outrun it, yet it never collapses into gloom; instead, it leans into the pleasure of their partnership, the banter, the mischief, the sheer joy of watching two actors who understand exactly how to play off each other.

George Roy Hill’s direction gives the film its easy swing: sun‑bleached landscapes, comic detours, sudden bursts of danger, all stitched together with a confidence that feels almost casual. Katherine Ross adds a quiet, steady grace, and Burt Bacharach’s score — yes, including that song — gives the film its unmistakable, slightly off‑beat flavour.

It’s one of those rare films where likability isn’t a surface trait but the whole engine. You enjoy spending time with these men even as you sense the walls closing in. And when the final freeze‑frame arrives, it feels less like an ending and more like a salute.

10.15pm – A Taste of Honey, BBC Four

The 1984 television adaptation itself.

11.00pm – United 93 (2006), Channel 5

Paul Greengrass’s restrained and deeply unsettling account of United Airlines Flight 93. Twenty-five years on from 9/11, this is not comfortable viewing. Nor should it be.

11.45pm – Siân Phillips Remembers Under Milk Wood, BBC Four

Siân Phillips looks back at the various adaptations of Dylan Thomas’s extraordinary work.

11.50pm – Let’s Get Lost (1988), Talking Pictures TV

Bruce Weber’s beautiful, melancholy documentary about jazz trumpeter Chet Baker.

11.55pm – Under Milk Wood, BBC Four

A star-studded performance of Dylan Thomas’s great radio play.

1.00am – Bombshell (2019), Channel 4

A sharp, unsettling drama that turns a real‑world scandal into something tense, propulsive and uncomfortably intimate. Charlize Theron, Nicole Kidman and Margot Robbie form a formidable trio — each playing a woman navigating the toxic, paranoid ecosystem of Fox News at the height of the Roger Ailes sexual‑harassment revelations.

Theron’s transformation into Megyn Kelly is astonishing: the voice, the posture, the brittle self‑possession of someone who knows exactly how dangerous her workplace has become. Kidman brings a weary defiance as Gretchen Carlson, the first to risk everything by speaking out. And Robbie, as a composite character, gives the film its emotional core — a young woman dazzled by the promise of success, only to discover the cost of entry.

The film moves with the pace of a thriller, but its impact comes from the small, human moments: the whispered warnings, the coded conversations, the way fear shapes behaviour long before anyone says a word. It’s slick, angry, and unafraid to show how institutions protect power at the expense of the people inside them.

1.05am – Mothering Sunday (2021), Film4

A quiet, elegant adaptation of Graham Swift’s novel, with Odessa Young, Josh O’Connor and Olivia Colman.

Monday 7 September

6.40pm – Besieged Fortresses: Legendary Battles, PBS America

The first of four programmes begins in 1190. Philip II of France and Richard the Lionheart head for the Holy Land during the Third Crusade, with the fortified city of Acre among their objectives.

8.00pm – Panorama: 9/11: The Saudi Connection, BBC One

Twenty-five years after 9/11, questions remain.

Jane McMullen examines newly released documents suggesting that people working for Saudi Arabia may have played a role in assisting the plotters. The Saudi government denies involvement, but a US judge has ruled that a case brought by victims’ families against the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia may proceed.

Particular attention falls on Omar al-Bayoumi, who was questioned by British police, and on the uncomfortable question of why potentially important evidence remained hidden for so long.

Catch up via BBC iPlayer.

11.05pm – A Thousand and One (2023), BBC Two

Teyana Taylor is extraordinary here — fierce, wounded, tender, and utterly convincing as Inez, a woman trying to carve out a life with her son in a New York that keeps shifting beneath her feet. A.V. Rockwell’s film isn’t just a character study; it’s a portrait of a city in flux, where gentrification, policing and poverty quietly reshape the possibilities available to ordinary people.

What gives the film its power is the intimacy of the storytelling. It’s built from small, lived‑in moments: cramped apartments, street corners that feel both dangerous and familiar, the fragile routines that hold a family together. Taylor plays Inez with a kind of combustible love — protective to the point of ferocity, yet always aware that the world is bigger and harsher than she can control.

Josiah Cross, as her son Terry, brings a quiet intelligence that deepens the film’s emotional pull. Their relationship evolves in ways that feel painfully real: affection, frustration, loyalty, secrets, all shaped by the pressures of a city that doesn’t care who they are or what they’re trying to build.

11.10pm – Testament of Youth (2014), BBC One

Vera Brittain’s First World War memoir reaches the screen with Alicia Vikander in the central role.

Tuesday 8 September

6.40pm – Besieged Fortresses: Legendary Battles, PBS America

Part two of four: Rhodes: The Ultimate Battle.

9.00pm – The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, BBC Four

One of my favourite sitcoms of all time.

Reggie Perrin works at Sunshine Desserts and appears, from the outside, to be an ordinary suburban middle-aged man. Inside, though, everything is beginning to come apart.

David Nobbs’s writing produces a particular kind of bewitching oddity. The commuter train excuses. CJ. The hippopotamus. Reggie’s increasingly desperate attempts to escape the conventions of work and family life. It is surreal without ever forgetting that there is something rather sad underneath it all.

And Leonard Rossiter is simply magnificent.

The opening episode was first shown exactly 50 years ago.

Catch up via BBC iPlayer.

9.30pm – The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, BBC Four

The second episode takes us further into Reggie’s considerably kookier family.

If you’ve never seen the series, start here. If you have, you probably don’t need convincing.

10.00pm – Timewatch: The Killer Wave of 1607, BBC Four

In January 1607, a huge wave devastated parts of the Bristol Channel coastline. Was it simply an exceptional storm surge, or was Britain struck by a tsunami?

11.05pm – Gosford Park (2001), BBC Two

Robert Altman’s Gosford Park remains one of the most elegant dissections of class ever put on screen—a country‑house murder mystery that treats the whodunnit as the least interesting thing happening. What makes the film endure is its extraordinary sense of observation. Altman isn’t interested in the aristocrats’ theatrics so much as the quiet, relentless labour happening below stairs: the servants who see everything, absorb everything, and are granted none of the power that comes from knowledge. The ensemble cast is absurdly good—Maggie Smith firing off barbs like a sporting event, Helen Mirren and Kelly Macdonald giving the downstairs world its emotional spine, and Clive Owen gliding through the film with a kind of dangerous stillness. Julian Fellowes’ script lays the groundwork for Downton Abbey, but Altman’s direction keeps it sharper, funnier, and far more cynical. It’s a film about performance—social, emotional, hierarchical—and the murder becomes simply another mask slipping. Even twenty‑five years on, Gosford Park feels effortlessly precise: a beautifully calibrated satire wrapped in a country‑house classic.

1.40am – The Black Book (1949), Talking Pictures TV

Anthony Mann’s Reign of Terror — retitled The Black Book for reasons known only to distributors — is one of those fascinating hybrids Hollywood occasionally produced: a French Revolution thriller shot like a hard‑boiled noir. The guillotine may loom over the plot, but the mood is pure shadowy intrigue, all sharp angles, suspicious glances and danger lurking in every alleyway.

Mann treats revolutionary France less as a historical setting and more as a pressure chamber. Robespierre’s reign becomes a kind of proto‑gangster empire, complete with secret lists, double‑crosses and a city where trust is a luxury no one can afford. Richard Basehart’s Robespierre is icy and implacable, while Robert Cummings and Arlene Dahl navigate the plot with the wary alertness of people who know one wrong move means the blade.

It’s brisk, atmospheric and surprisingly tense — a political thriller dressed in period costume, shot with the same muscular precision Mann would later bring to his westerns. A curio, yes, but a stylish and gripping one.

Wednesday 9 September

11.45am – The Monkey’s Paw (1948), Talking Pictures TV

A compact little chiller built around one of the great cautionary tales: the seductive danger of getting exactly what you asked for. This adaptation leans into the story’s creaking‑floorboard atmosphere — a modest British production that understands the power of suggestion, dread and the slow tightening of fate.

The plot is simple enough: a family receives a mysterious talisman said to grant wishes, and discovers — with mounting horror — that every gift arrives twisted, corrupted, and paid for in full. What the film captures so well is the creeping inevitability of it all. Each wish feels like a step down a staircase you can’t climb back up, and the characters’ growing desperation gives the story its grim momentum.

It’s a reminder of why W.W. Jacobs’ tale endures. The fear isn’t in monsters or shadows, but in the awful realisation that the worst thing that can happen is not being denied what you want — but getting it.

6.40pm – Besieged Fortresses: Legendary Battles, PBS America

Part three of four: The Great Siege of Malta.

9.00pm – Britain’s Forgotten Girls, BBC Two

A difficult but important documentary.

Through survivors, whistleblowers and people who tried to raise the alarm, it examines why young girls across Britain continue to be groomed, trafficked and sexually exploited by organised drug gangs.

Authorities have been warned repeatedly over two decades. The disturbing question is why so many of the same failures continue.

9.00pm – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017), Film4

Martin McDonagh’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri remains one of the most bracing pieces of American cinema of the last decade—a film that starts with fury and never quite lets you settle. Frances McDormand’s performance is the anchor: a mother weaponising grief with a kind of flinty determination that feels both heroic and deeply uncomfortable. The billboards themselves—three stark red slabs demanding justice—become a moral battleground, pulling the town into a spiral of recrimination, guilt and unintended consequences. McDonagh’s great trick is refusing to give anyone clean lines. The characters are messy, contradictory, sometimes appalling, sometimes tender, and the film insists on sitting with that complexity rather than smoothing it into a neat arc. Sam Rockwell’s arc, in particular, is a study in how people can be both monstrous and capable of change, often in the same breath. It’s a darkly comic drama, but the humour is barbed, arriving in the cracks between pain rather than as relief. Even now, the film feels like a provocation—an invitation to consider how anger can illuminate, distort and, occasionally, transform. A midnight‑black comedy with real moral weight.

10.00pm – Tommy Robinson: Where’s the Money Gone?, Channel 4

Following the previous week’s programme on Reform and with political tensions running high, Dispatches reporter Matt Shea turns his attention to Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, better known as Tommy Robinson.

Shea has spent a year looking into his finances and asks some serious questions about where the money surrounding his campaigning comes from and where it goes.

10.15pm – Penda’s Fen, BBC Four

Now this is something special.

In the last summer before adulthood, the puritanical son of a village parson finds his certainties about religion, politics, sexuality and Englishness disturbed by homoerotic visions and supernatural apparitions.

Among those apparitions are the pagan King Penda and, because this is Penda’s Fen and ordinary rules have long since stopped applying, Edward Elgar.

Strange, provocative and unique.

Catch up via BBC iPlayer.

11.20pm – Boiling Point (2021), Film4

Stephen Graham is blisteringly good in this one‑shot pressure‑cooker drama set over a single night in a London restaurant, where every frayed nerve and bad decision hits at once. The film’s power comes from its relentlessness: orders pile up, tempers flare, mistakes snowball, and the camera refuses to look away. What starts as controlled chaos slowly unravels into something rawer and more revealing, exposing the exhaustion, ego and quiet desperation behind the pass. It’s tense, immersive and brilliantly acted.

Thursday 10 September

4.25pm – A Room with a View (1985), Film4

Merchant Ivory at their most elegant and assured — a film that seems to float, all sunlight, longing and the quiet ache of English restraint. What makes it endure isn’t just the beauty (though Florence is captured with such adoration it feels almost like a character in its own right), but the way it balances romance with wit, social observation with genuine emotional clarity.

Helena Bonham Carter, still early in her career, gives Lucy Honeychurch a luminous uncertainty — a young woman pulled between propriety and desire, between the world she’s been taught to inhabit and the one she glimpses when she’s finally allowed to breathe. Julian Sands’ George Emerson is the perfect counterpoint: open, idealistic, a man who refuses to apologise for feeling deeply.

Around them, the supporting cast is a small constellation of British greats. Maggie Smith’s Charlotte Bartlett is a masterpiece of flustered repression; Judi Dench brings warmth and curiosity; Daniel Day‑Lewis is hilariously, painfully precise as the priggish Cecil Vyse.

It’s one of those films that feels like a holiday for the soul — gentle, funny, romantic, and touched with just enough melancholy to make the joy matter.

9.00pm – Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), BBC Four

Another chance to bask in one of cinema’s great double‑acts before the channel shifts its spotlight solely onto Redford later in the evening. What’s remarkable, revisiting it yet again, is how effortlessly the film still charms. Newman and Redford don’t just play Butch and Sundance — they embody a kind of easy, loping camaraderie that feels almost mythic now, two men moving through the West with wit as quick as their draw.

The film’s pleasures are deceptively simple: the banter, the sun‑drenched landscapes, the way danger seems to arrive with a shrug rather than a drumroll. Yet beneath the breeziness sits a quiet melancholy. These are outlaws out of time, men whose world is shrinking even as they grin their way through it.

George Roy Hill stitches comedy, romance and impending doom together with astonishing lightness. Katherine Ross brings a gentle steadiness, and Burt Bacharach’s score adds that unmistakable, slightly off‑centre charm that has become part of the film’s DNA.

BBC Four showing it as a prelude to their Redford focus feels right. It’s the film that made him a star, and the one that still shows why.

9.00pm – The Great Plague: The Village That Saved Britain, Channel 5

Historian Ruth Goodman tells the extraordinary story of Eyam in Derbyshire.

In 1665 the young parish priest William Mompesson helped introduce drastic measures intended to prevent bubonic plague spreading from the village into surrounding communities.

It was an act of remarkable collective courage. The price was appalling. Over 14 months, 258 villagers died.

Archaeologist Raksha Dave contributes on the science, while AI-generated imagery is used to recreate aspects of the story.

Catch up via Channel 5 streaming.

9.00pm – The Ladykillers (1955), Great TV

The original, the real deal, and still one of Ealing’s most wickedly delightful comedies. Accept no substitutes indeed — because nothing matches the peculiar, irresistible charm of Alec Guinness leading a gang of hopeless criminals who find themselves outwitted, out‑maneuvered and ultimately undone by one elderly landlady with impeccable manners and an unshakeable moral compass.

Guinness is a marvel here: all hollow cheeks, sinister politeness and a smile that looks like it’s been sharpened rather than worn. His Professor Marcus is both absurd and unsettling, a criminal mastermind whose “mastery” collapses the moment reality intrudes. Around him, the gang — Peter Sellers, Herbert Lom, Cecil Parker and Danny Green — form a perfect comic ensemble, each one a different flavour of incompetence.

And then there’s Katie Johnson as Mrs Wilberforce, the film’s beating heart. She’s gentle, devout, slightly bewildered by the world, yet possessed of a quiet, immovable strength that the criminals never see coming. Her scenes with the gang are miniature comic miracles: polite conversation layered over rising panic, civility clashing with criminal intent.

The whole thing is a masterclass in tone — dark but never cruel, whimsical but never weightless. Ealing at its finest, and a reminder that sometimes the sweetest characters are the ones you should fear most.

10.45pm – Talking Pictures: Robert Redford, BBC Four

Following Butch Cassidy, a timely look at the life and career of Robert Redford.

12 midnight – Belfast (2021), BBC Two

Branagh’s semi‑autobiographical film is shaped with the clarity of memory rather than the precision of reportage — a childhood seen in flashes of fear, humour, confusion and love. It’s a story about the Troubles, yes, but told from the height of a small boy, which means the violence arrives as something both terrifying and strangely distant, a disruption to the rhythms of ordinary life rather than a political thesis.

Jude Hill is wonderful as young Buddy, all wide‑eyed curiosity and worry, trying to make sense of a world that suddenly feels unstable. Around him, Branagh assembles a superb ensemble: Caitríona Balfe and Jamie Dornan as parents trying to hold the family together; Judi Dench and Ciarán Hinds offering warmth, wisdom and the kind of quiet resilience that becomes the film’s emotional anchor.

Shot in luminous black‑and‑white, the film has a gentle, reflective tone — not nostalgic exactly, but tender, as if Branagh is sifting through the fragments of his own past with care. The music, the humour, the sense of community under strain: it all builds into a portrait of a city and a family trying to stay whole when the world around them fractures.

12.55am – Radical (2021), Film4

A quietly gripping drama built around a simple, potent idea: what happens when a teacher decides that the system has failed his students, and chooses to tear up the rulebook rather than keep pretending it works. Eugenio Derbez gives one of his strongest dramatic performances as Sergio, a man teaching in a neglected Mexican border town where resources are scarce, futures feel pre‑written, and hope is something children learn not to rely on.

What makes the film land is its sincerity. It isn’t a glossy “inspirational teacher” story; it’s grounded in the realities of poverty, corruption and institutional neglect. The classroom scenes have real spark — messy, funny, unpredictable — and the film takes care to show how Sergio’s unconventional methods aren’t magic, but a lifeline that gives his students permission to think beyond survival.

The children themselves are superb, especially Jennifer Trejo as Paloma, whose intelligence is both a gift and a burden. Her storyline gives the film its emotional weight, reminding you that talent means nothing without opportunity.

Radical is earnest, humane and quietly political — a film about education as resistance, and about the small acts of belief that can change a child’s trajectory.

Friday 11 September

1.00pm – Cowboy (1958), Legend

A wonderfully off‑beat western that pairs Glenn Ford’s seasoned trail boss with Jack Lemmon’s city‑bred hotel clerk, creating one of the genre’s most enjoyable odd couples. What begins as a clash of temperament — Ford’s dry, no‑nonsense professionalism versus Lemmon’s eager, slightly deluded romanticism about frontier life — slowly becomes a story about respect earned the hard way.

Ford is superb: calm, flinty, carrying the authority of a man who’s seen everything the West can throw at him. Lemmon, meanwhile, brings that unmistakable blend of comic timing and emotional sincerity, charting a transformation from naïve dreamer to someone who understands the grit behind the myth.

Delmer Daves directs with a light touch, letting the humour and character work sit alongside the harsher realities of cattle‑drive life — storms, stampedes, long nights, and the constant negotiation of pride. It’s a western that’s less about gunfights and more about the slow forging of character.

A smart, charming film, and a reminder of how good Lemmon could be when he stepped outside comedy and into the dust and danger of the frontier.

9.00pm – 102 Minutes Inside the Towers, Sky History

There is a raft of television marking the 25th anniversary of 9/11. Each programme approaches it differently and each, in its own way, is haunting.

But spare some time for this one.

Using footage recorded by people in and around the World Trade Center between the first impact and the collapse of the second tower, 102 Minutes Inside the Towers strips away much of the retrospective commentary. You experience events through those who were actually there.

Today is the anniversary itself.

Catch up via NOW.

9.00pm – Layer Cake (2004), Great Action

Daniel Craig’s pre‑Bond calling card, and still one of the sharpest British crime films of the 2000s — sleek, cynical and very aware that the drug trade isn’t glamorous, just exhausting. Craig’s unnamed protagonist (the film’s great joke: he’s a man who prides himself on having no myth) is a successful, discreet cocaine middleman who believes he can simply retire, step away, and let the chaos continue without him.

Naturally, the universe — and several very dangerous people — have other ideas. Matthew Vaughn directs with a cool, clipped confidence, stitching together a world where every favour is a trap, every ally is temporary, and every “simple job” hides three more complications. The tone is pure modern noir: stylish but never cartoonish, violent but never indulgent, and threaded with a dry humour that keeps the tension taut.

Craig is superb: calm, calculating, already carrying the weary elegance that would make him such a compelling Bond. Around him, the cast is a murderer’s row of British talent — Colm Meaney, Michael Gambon, Sienna Miller, Tom Hardy — all circling like sharks with competing agendas.

9.05pm – Peeping Tom (1960), Talking Pictures TV

Michael Powell’s masterpiece, and one of the most notorious cases of a film being punished for seeing too clearly. On release it was treated as a kind of cinematic crime — critics savaged it, audiences recoiled, and Powell’s British career was effectively destroyed overnight. Time, thankfully, has done what the moment could not: recognised it as a bold, unsettling, brilliantly crafted study of voyeurism, trauma and the act of filmmaking itself.

Carl Boehm’s Mark Lewis is one of the great disturbing screen presences: gentle, polite, almost shy, yet carrying a private horror he can neither escape nor fully understand. Powell shoots his world with a clinical precision that feels decades ahead of its time — a film about looking, about being looked at, and about the violence that can hide inside the frame.

What makes Peeping Tom so extraordinary now is how modern it feels. Its questions about spectatorship, exploitation and the ethics of the camera are sharper than ever, and its blend of psychological depth and formal daring remains astonishing.

A film once condemned as obscene now stands as one of the essential works of British cinema — visionary, unsettling, and impossible to forget.

10.30pm – Buddy Holly Night, BBC Four

Buddy Holly would have turned 90 this week.

One of the founding fathers of rock and roll, his recording career lasted for an almost absurdly short time, yet his influence runs through everything that followed.

BBC Four begins with an Arena documentary first shown in 1985. Members of the Crickets appear alongside contemporaries the Everly Brothers and famous admirers including Paul McCartney and Keith Richards, both of whom acknowledge Holly as a formative influence.

It is followed by Arena’s 1993 film Peggy Sue: Tales of Rock ’n’ Roll, in which Peggy Sue Gerron Rackham, the woman whose name became immortalised in one of Holly’s best-loved songs, takes a revealing trip down memory lane.

Catch up via BBC iPlayer.

Streaming Choices

Netflix – The Secret Woman
Available now

A tense, stylish Danish thriller that folds domestic unease into full‑blown psychological danger. When a seemingly ordinary woman begins to suspect that her carefully curated life is being manipulated, the story shifts from quiet paranoia to something far more dangerous. It’s sleek, modern Nordic noir: clipped dialogue, cold interiors, and a slow tightening of dread as secrets begin to surface. Claes Bang and Natalie Madueño give the drama its bite — two performances built on charm, menace and the fear of what people hide behind respectability.

Netflix – The Whisper Man
Available now

A dark, atmospheric thriller adapted from Alex North’s bestselling novel, steeped in small‑town unease and the lingering trauma of past crimes. When a father and son move to a quiet village hoping for a fresh start, they find themselves drawn into the echo of an old case — a series of disappearances linked to a killer known only as “The Whisper Man.”

The film leans into dread rather than spectacle: creaking houses, half‑open doors, and the unsettling sense that danger is already inside the frame. Robert De Niro, Michelle Monaghan and Adam Scott anchor the story with performances that balance grief, suspicion and the fear of repeating history. It’s tense, moody and built around the idea that the past never stays buried — it waits, whispering.

BBC iPlayer – Dolly Parton: Here I Am

Available now

A warm, generous and surprisingly intimate documentary that traces Dolly Parton’s rise from rural Tennessee to global icon, treating her not as a myth but as a working artist whose discipline, humour and sheer creative drive shaped one of the most remarkable careers in music. The film moves through the milestones — the Porter Wagoner years, the songwriting breakthroughs, the pop‑country crossover, the business empire — but always returns to the woman at the centre: sharp, funny, self‑aware, and endlessly committed to the craft.

It’s packed with performance clips, interviews and behind‑the‑scenes glimpses that show how Dolly built her persona not as a mask, but as a kind of armour: glittering, witty, and entirely on her own terms. A celebration of resilience, reinvention and the power of storytelling.

Netflix – Anora
Available from Thursday 3 September

Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or winner arrives on Netflix with all the electricity that’s made it the most talked‑about American indie of the year — a raw, funny, bruising portrait of love, money and the brutal power dynamics that sit beneath both. Mikey Madison is extraordinary as Anora, a Brooklyn stripper whose whirlwind marriage to the son of a Russian oligarch detonates into chaos when the family decides to “fix” the situation.

Baker shoots with his trademark mix of neon‑lit glamour and street‑level grit, letting the film swing between tenderness and panic as Anora fights to hold onto the one thing she believes is finally hers. It’s fast, messy, humane and often very funny — a film that understands how desire and desperation can blur into each other when the world keeps reminding you of your place.

Netflix – Fauda, Season 5
Available from Tuesday 8 September

The Israeli thriller returns for a fifth season. Doron heads to Marseille to go deep undercover after an old friend goes rogue on a revenge mission.

Netflix – Untold: Mr. T, I Pity the Fool
Available from Tuesday 8 September

Netflix’s Untold series has always thrived on the tension between myth and man, but Untold: Mr. T, I Pity the Fool may be the first instalment where the myth is so enormous, so neon‑lit and so culturally baked‑in, that the documentary has to work twice as hard to remind us there’s a human being underneath the gold chains. Fortunately, it succeeds—mostly because Mr. T himself remains one of the most compelling personalities American pop culture has ever produced.

The film charts the rise of Laurence Tureaud from Chicago’s tough South Side to global icon status, and it does so with a pace and swagger that mirrors its subject. The early sections—his childhood, his stint as a bodyguard, the creation of the now‑legendary mohawk—are handled with a brisk confidence. Netflix knows these beats are familiar, but it also knows they’re irresistible. Mr. T’s origin story has the flavour of folklore: the bullied kid who reinvented himself as a walking symbol of strength, discipline and defiance.

Where the documentary becomes genuinely absorbing is in its exploration of the contradictions that made Mr. T so magnetic. He was a cartoonish tough guy who preached kindness. A symbol of brute force who refused to swear. A man who wore more gold than a Bond villain but spoke constantly about humility, faith and responsibility. The film doesn’t shy away from the paradox, and that’s where it finds its emotional weight.

The A‑Team era is, of course, the centrepiece. The documentary treats it as both a cultural explosion and a personal crucible. Mr. T’s fame was colossal—merchandise, catchphrases, talk‑show appearances, the whole 1980s media circus—but the film is careful to show the toll it took. There’s a particularly strong section on his battle with cancer, which is handled with dignity and without sentimentality. It’s here that the documentary earns its place in the Untold canon: the mask slips, the myth pauses, and the man speaks plainly.

Stylistically, this is one of the more polished Untold entries. The editing is sharp, the archive footage is well‑chosen, and the talking‑head interviews are refreshingly free of the usual nostalgia‑drunk hyperbole. The filmmakers seem to understand that Mr. T doesn’t need embellishment. He’s already larger than life; the trick is to bring him back down to human scale without losing the fun.

If there’s a flaw, it’s that the documentary occasionally feels too reverent. Mr. T’s career had misfires, oddities and outright disasters—some of which are touched on, but none lingered on long enough to give a full picture. The Be Somebody… or Be Somebody’s Fool! era, for instance, is ripe for deeper exploration. Still, the film’s generosity of spirit matches its subject, and that’s hard to begrudge.

Ultimately, Untold: Mr. T, I Pity the Fool is a warm, engaging and surprisingly thoughtful portrait of a man who became a symbol. It reminds us why Mr. T mattered—and why he still does. In an age of performative toughness and empty bravado, he remains the real deal: a man who turned strength into a moral stance, kindness into a brand, and a catchphrase into a philosophy.

ITVX – Poldark

All five series available from Thursday 10 September

Rewatching Poldark in 2026 is a reminder of just how confidently ITV can still deliver a sweeping, old‑fashioned epic when it chooses to. The show arrived in 2015 with the kind of cultural noise usually reserved for prestige imports, but what made it stick wasn’t the hype—it was the sincerity. Across five series, Poldark commits fully to being a romantic, political, windswept melodrama, and that commitment is precisely why it works.

The early episodes remain the strongest: Ross returning from the American War of Independence to a Cornwall hollowed out by poverty, corruption and grief. It’s a classic setup, but the execution is sharp. Aidan Turner’s performance anchors the whole thing—he plays Ross as a man permanently at war with himself, torn between duty, pride and a stubborn refusal to accept the world as it is. The series never pretends he’s flawless; instead, it leans into his contradictions, which gives the drama a welcome grit beneath the gloss.

What really elevates Poldark, though, is its sense of place. Cornwall isn’t just a backdrop—it’s a character. The mines, the cliffs, the storms, the constant battle between human ambition and unforgiving landscape: it’s all woven into the storytelling with a confidence that feels almost novelistic. The show’s political threads—class conflict, workers’ rights, the brutality of early industrial capitalism—are handled with more bite than you’d expect from a Sunday‑night drama. It’s romantic, yes, but never soft‑headed.

As the series progresses, the tone shifts into broader, more operatic territory. Some storylines sprawl, some villains twirl their moustaches a little too enthusiastically, and the emotional stakes occasionally tip into excess. But even at its most heightened, Poldark retains a sincerity that keeps it grounded. The relationship between Ross and Demelza is the show’s spine, and Eleanor Tomlinson’s performance gives it warmth, wit and a moral clarity that often outshines the hero himself.

Five series is a long run for a period drama, but Poldark earns it. The final episodes land with genuine emotional weight, tying together themes of loyalty, justice and the cost of idealism. It’s not perfect—few long‑form dramas are—but it remains one of ITV’s most confident achievements of the last decade: lush, political, romantic and defiantly old‑school in the best possible way.

Channel 4 Streaming – Walter Presents: The 12: Botox Murders
All eight episodes available from Friday 11 September

A Belgian courtroom drama based around the mureder of a famous author and his pregnant wife.

Apple TV – Dark Matter, Season 2, Episode 3
Available Friday 11 September

Episode 3 tightens the season’s focus on consequences and identity, pushing Jason into increasingly unstable territory while giving Daniela her strongest material yet. The multiverse concept is used less as spectacle and more as psychological pressure, with alternate selves acting as uncomfortable mirrors rather than sci‑fi gimmicks. Visually, the episode leans into controlled unease—clean Apple TV+ precision with subtle distortions that keep everything slightly off‑centre.

It’s a quieter instalment, but a pivotal one: tense, thoughtful and loaded with implications for the rest of the season.

Leaving Soon

Channel 4 – Midnight Run
Available until Tuesday 8 September

A warning worth heeding. If you haven’t seen Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin in one of the great odd-couple road movies, this is the moment.

Radio

Sunday 6 September

10.00am – The Reunion, BBC Radio 4

Another contribution to the 25th-anniversary coverage of 9/11, and potentially one of the most moving.

From New York, Kirsty Wark talks to seven people whose lives became entwined with the attacks. History is often discussed through politicians, decisions and statistics. The Reunion works differently. It gives the microphone back to the people who were actually there.

1.30pm – The Return of the Youth Club, BBC Radio 4

Youth services have taken an extraordinary battering since 2010.

This programme looks at what disappeared along with them and asks whether the Government’s proposed £500 million investment can revive a sector which once provided friendship, structure, opportunity and somewhere to go for generations of young people.

Monday 7 September

3.00pm – The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, BBC Radio 4 Extra

The first half of the streamlined 2022 audio adaptation by Jon Canter.

Simon Greenall returns and David Haig proves himself a Rossiter for our times.

I love the original television series, so adaptations have quite a standard to meet. This delightful two-part homage manages it without merely impersonating what came before.

Tuesday 8 September

3.00pm – The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, BBC Radio 4 Extra

Part two.

Very much worth hearing if you retain the same affection for Reggie and Sunshine Desserts that I do.

4.00pm – Last Frames: The Story of Bill Biggart, BBC Radio 4

Photographer Bill Biggart headed towards the World Trade Center with his cameras as others were fleeing.

He died when the second tower collapsed.

The photographs recovered afterwards provide an extraordinary visual record of his final hours and of the catastrophe he was determined to document.

Wednesday 9 September

3.00pm and 9.00pm – Posters of Montmartre, BBC Radio 4 Extra

A richly atmospheric wander through the artistic soul of Paris, using the posters of Montmartre as a doorway into the district’s bohemian past. Rather than treating them as decorative relics, the programme understands them as living fragments of a neighbourhood that once thrummed with cabaret energy, creative rebellion and the kind of nightlife that shaped entire artistic movements.

What emerges is a portrait of Montmartre as both muse and marketplace — a place where performers, painters and provocateurs advertised themselves with bold colours, exaggerated poses and a flair that still feels modern. These posters become tiny time capsules: glimpses of smoky cafés, crowded dance halls, and the swagger of artists who knew how to sell a fantasy.

It’s a gentle, evocative listen, perfect for anyone who enjoys cultural history told with warmth and curiosity. A reminder that sometimes the most revealing stories of a city aren’t found in its monuments, but pasted to its walls.

Permalink Leave a Comment

The Mentalist – Season 1, Episode 1 (“Pilot”) Spoilers

September 1, 2026 at 11:42 am · Filed under Streaming, TV Shows ·Tagged Bruno Heller, CBI Investigation, CBS Drama, Counter Culture, Crime Television, David Nutter, Patrick Jane, Pilot Episode, Red John, Simon Baker, The Mentalist, TV, TV Ser, TV Analysis

When The Mentalist first aired on CBS in September 2008, it arrived in a crowded field of procedural dramas. Yet its pilot stood apart — not through forensic spectacle, but through the quiet precision of a man reading the world like a book. Patrick Jane, played with deceptive ease by Simon Baker, is introduced not as a detective but as a fallen showman, a former “psychic” whose gift is observation rather than prophecy. The episode, written by Bruno Heller and directed by David Nutter, is a masterclass in character‑driven storytelling that balances crime‑scene intrigue with psychological depth.

The Opening: A False Calm

The first scene is deceptively domestic — a missing‑child case that turns into a murder. Jane wanders through the victim’s home, making tea, chatting lightly, and dismantling illusions. His charm disarms, his insight cuts. Within minutes, he exposes the rot beneath the family’s polite veneer, provoking a confession and a killing. It’s a shocking introduction: a consultant whose empathy is both weapon and wound.

The Case That Defines Him

Soon after, the California Bureau of Investigation investigates a double homicide marked with the blood‑red smiley face of Red John — the serial killer who murdered Jane’s wife and child. But Jane sees through the imitation. The placement of the symbol is wrong, the psychology inconsistent. He declares it a copycat, and he’s right. This moment crystallises the show’s thesis: truth hides in detail, not mysticism.

Patrick Jane: The Broken Magician

Jane’s brilliance is inseparable from his guilt. Once a television psychic, he mocked Red John on air — and paid with his family’s lives. The pilot lets this history seep through gestures rather than exposition: the tightening jaw, the hollow apartment with a mattress on the floor, the haunted stillness when he sees the killer’s mark again. Baker’s performance oscillates between levity and despair, a rhythm that becomes the series’ heartbeat.

The Ensemble: Friction and Balance

The CBI team forms the moral architecture around Jane’s chaos.

Teresa Lisbon (Robin Tunney) is the pragmatic leader, torn between admiration and exasperation.
Kimball Cho (Tim Kang) offers dry humour and discipline — the procedural ballast.
Wayne Rigsby (Owain Yeoman) brings warmth and curiosity.
Grace Van Pelt (Amanda Righetti) embodies idealism, her belief in intuition clashing with Jane’s cynicism.

Their interplay grounds the episode, turning what could be a one‑man show into a dynamic study of belief versus reason.

Craft and Direction

David Nutter’s direction mirrors Jane’s mind: deliberate, observant, never rushed. The camera lingers on gestures — a swallow, a glance, a misplaced object — inviting viewers to play detective. The pacing alternates between stillness and sudden confrontation, echoing Jane’s own volatility. Critics at the time noted the show’s tonal difference from Psych or Monk: less whimsy, more melancholy, a procedural with a soul.

Themes That Haunt the Series

Observation as Power – Every truth is visible if you know where to look.
Deception and Consequence – Jane’s past fraudulence fuels his present honesty.
Trauma and Redemption – Solving crimes becomes his penance.
Morality and Manipulation – His empathy often blurs into exploitation; the pilot dares viewers to question whether justice justifies deceit.

Why It Endures

The pilot succeeds because it trusts silence. It doesn’t shout its brilliance; it lets us discover it, as Jane would. Beneath the procedural framework lies a meditation on guilt and the human need to make sense of chaos. The final image — Jane alone in his bare apartment, the blood‑red smiley face on the wall — is both closure and curse. It promises a series where every solved case is another step toward an impossible peace.

Reviewed by Christopher Storton

Permalink Leave a Comment

Culture Vulture 29 August–4 September 2026

August 29, 2026 at 9:14 am · Filed under BBC, Culture Vulture, Film & DVD Reviews, TV Shows, Walter Presents ·Tagged British TV drama, British TV review, film, TV, TV guide, tv highlights

There’s a distinctly end-of-summer feel to this week’s Culture Vulture, but the schedules are far from winding down. In fact, there’s a very strong run of films across the week, some returning television favourites and a streaming slate which ranges from period crime to superheroes and prestige drama.

Three things stand out for me. First, BBC Two gives us the complete Godfather trilogy across Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. Whatever your view of the third film, that is still quite a proposition.

Secondly, there’s an excellent musical thread running through the weekend, from Wham! and the Beach Boys to the Mamas and the Papas, not forgetting a Proms evening devoted to James Bond. And finally, Gogglebox returns for its 28th series on Friday. There are programmes which reinvent television and programmes which simply understand television. Gogglebox has always belonged rather comfortably in the second category.

Here’s what caught my eye.

Saturday 29 August

6.10pm, PBS America — Athens: Birthplace of Democracy

A look back to the city and political culture which gave the Western world one of its most enduring — if frequently contested — ideas.

7.30pm, BBC Two — BBC Proms: Daniel Bartholomew-Poyser Has a Licence to Thrill

Daniel Bartholomew-Poyser and the BBC Concert Orchestra turn their attention to the music of James Bond. Bond themes have always been unusually ambitious bits of popular music in their own right, so there is plenty here for an orchestra to get its teeth into. Catch up via BBC iPlayer.

9pm, BBC Four — Kabul

Drama set against the chaos surrounding the fall of Kabul in August 2021. The full series is available on BBC iPlayer.

9pm, Sky Arts — Chaplin (1992)

Attenborough’s sweeping biopic isn’t shy about its own grandeur, and Robert Downey Jr meets that scale with a performance that’s all quicksilver brilliance and bruised vulnerability. He doesn’t impersonate Chaplin so much as inhabit him — the physical precision, the darting intelligence, the melancholy that sits just behind the eyes. It’s a turn that reminds you how astonishingly gifted Downey was even before his later reinventions.

The film itself is a handsome, old‑school studio epic: big sets, big emotions, big narrative leaps. Attenborough charts Chaplin’s rise from poverty to global fame with a kind of museum‑quality reverence, but he’s at his best when he lets the cracks show — the political battles, the personal failings, the way genius and ego grind against each other. The supporting cast is a parade of familiar faces, each dropping in to sketch a moment in Chaplin’s turbulent life, but it’s Downey who keeps the whole thing alive, electric, and strangely intimate.

Not a perfect film, but a fascinating one — and worth revisiting for a performance that still feels like lightning in a bottle.

9pm — Wham! 10 Days in China

A look at Wham!’s groundbreaking 1985 visit to China, when George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley became the first major Western pop act to tour the country.

10.25pm, BBC Two — Wham! at the BBC

More George and Andrew, this time through the BBC archives.

10.30pm, Channel 5 — Kinky Boots (2005)

A film that knows exactly what it’s doing and does it with a grin. Kinky Boots takes the very real anxieties of a failing Northampton shoe factory and spins them into a buoyant, big‑hearted fable about reinvention. The premise — pivoting from sturdy brogues to flamboyant, high‑heeled fetish boots — is inherently comic, but the charm lies in how sincerely it treats the people involved.

Joel Edgerton gives the factory’s reluctant heir a nicely rumpled decency, but it’s Chiwetel Ejiofor who detonates the film’s energy. His Lola is a force of nature: glamorous, sharp, wounded, and utterly magnetic. Every scene he’s in lifts the film from gentle workplace comedy into something with real emotional voltage. The dynamic between Lola and the factory lads — suspicion giving way to curiosity, then respect — is handled with a light touch that never tips into sermonising.

It’s a story about survival, pride, and the unexpected places solidarity can bloom. Warm, funny, and quietly radical in its insistence that tradition and transformation don’t have to be enemies. A crowd‑pleaser with a bit of steel in its spine.

1.35am, BBC Two — Compartment No. 6 (2021)

A film that moves in small, almost imperceptible shifts — the kind that creep up on you and suddenly feel enormous. Compartment No. 6 traps two strangers in the narrow, rattling purgatory of a long train ride: a Finnish archaeology student fleeing a complicated relationship, and a Russian miner whose bluntness initially feels like a personal attack. It begins in discomfort — the kind of social claustrophobia anyone who’s ever been stuck in the wrong carriage at the wrong time will recognise.

What follows is beautifully observed, never hurried. Director Juho Kuosmanen has a gift for noticing the tiny gestures that reveal people: a half‑smile, a defensive shrug, the way irritation softens into curiosity. The film’s great strength is its refusal to force intimacy; instead, it lets connection emerge in the gaps between language, in shared cigarettes, in the bleak humour of bad weather and worse circumstances.

The Arctic Circle looms like a metaphor — cold, distant, unreachable — yet the journey towards it becomes unexpectedly warm. By the time the train judders into its final stops, the film has quietly built something tender out of loneliness, miscommunication and the strange, fragile alliances that form when two people have nowhere else to go.

Sunday 30 August

5.25pm, Sky Arts — The Beach Boys: Endless Harmony

The Beach Boys story told through archive footage, music and the complicated relationships behind all those immaculate harmonies.

5.25pm, BBC Two — The Italian Job (1969)

A film so woven into British pop culture that it barely needs announcing — but it deserves celebrating. The Italian Job remains the purest expression of late‑60s swagger: Michael Caine at his most effortlessly charismatic, a caper built on cheek and precision, and a vision of Britain that believed ingenuity could outshine brute force.

Everything about it is engineered for delight. The Minis — red, white and blue — dart through Turin with balletic confidence, turning the city into a playground of tunnels, rooftops and improbable escape routes. Quincy Jones’ score snaps and struts. The supporting cast, from Noël Coward’s magnificently patrician Mr Bridger to Benny Hill’s chaotic cameo, adds texture to the film’s comic‑criminal ecosystem.

And then there’s that ending. The bus, the cliff, the gold, the unresolved teeter that has fuelled half a century of debate. It’s the perfect final note: audacious, funny, and refusing to tidy itself away. A caper that knows the value of leaving you suspended — grinning, guessing, and wanting just a little more.

6.20pm, ITV4 — Waterloo (1970)

Bondarchuk’s thunderous epic of Napoleon’s last stand still has the power to astonish. Before computers made massed battles a matter of software, this was done the hard way: tens of thousands of real soldiers manoeuvred across vast fields, cavalry charges thundering through smoke, and artillery barrages staged with unnerving force.

Rod Steiger gives a brooding, volatile Napoleon; Christopher Plummer’s Wellington is all cool calculation. But the real star is the scale — the sheer logistical madness of recreating Waterloo with such detail and weight. It’s old‑school spectacle, the kind that reminds you what cinema can do when ambition meets an army.

7pm, BBC One — Hamza: African Birds of Prey

Hamza Yassin turns his attention to Africa’s magnificent birds of prey. Catch up via BBC iPlayer.

7.40pm, Sky Arts — California Dreaming: The Songs of the Mamas and the Papas

The music and story of one of the defining vocal groups of the 1960s.

9pm, Film4 — A Few Good Men (1992)

Cruise brings the drive; Nicholson brings the detonation. Rob Reiner’s military courtroom drama is sharply written and tightly paced, but it’s Nicholson who tilts the whole thing on its axis. As Colonel Jessup, he strides in late, occupies the film for barely a handful of scenes, and still manages to dominate it through sheer force of personality.

Cruise’s young Navy lawyer pushes, probes and tries to stay upright under the weight of the institution he’s challenging, but the film’s electricity comes from the collision between the two men — idealism meeting absolute authority. By the time Nicholson delivers his famous tirade, the verdict is already in: he steals the picture cleanly, confidently, and without breaking a sweat.

9pm, BBC One — Vigil

The thriller returns to the schedules, with the full series available on BBC iPlayer.

9pm, ITV1 — Trigger Point

More bomb disposal tension, with the full series available on ITVX.

10pm, BBC Two — The Godfather (1972)

Coppola’s first chapter in the Corleone saga remains one of cinema’s great acts of world‑building: shadowed rooms, whispered loyalties, and violence delivered with ritualistic calm. Brando’s Vito is the film’s centre of gravity, a weary patriarch whose authority seems to bend the air around him.

But it’s Pacino who quietly reshapes the story. His Michael begins as the outsider — the son who insists he’s not part of the family business — and Pacino plays those early scenes with a stillness that barely registers as ambition. Across three hours, that stillness hardens. Every decision, every silence, every glance nudges him further into the darkness.

By the time he closes the door in the final shot, the transformation is complete: a man who thought he could stand apart has become the very thing he feared. It’s one of the most controlled, chilling performances ever put on film.

11pm, Yesterday — Sir Alex Ferguson: Never Give In (2021)

A portrait of Ferguson that refuses to settle for the familiar mythology. Yes, the football is there — the trophies, the authority, the ferocious competitive instinct — but the documentary’s real interest lies elsewhere. It looks at the man after the noise has faded: his childhood, his marriage, the rhythms of family life, and the frightening vulnerability of his 2018 brain haemorrhage.

What emerges is a study in memory and mortality. Ferguson reflects on the past not as a sequence of victories but as a series of turning points, losses, recoveries, and the people who shaped him. The film’s quietness is its strength. It shows how someone defined by control confronts the one thing he cannot command: time.

Bank Holiday Monday 31 August

7pm, Sky Arts — Six Minutes to Midnight (2019)

A quietly tense pre‑war thriller with a premise that feels almost too strange to be true: an English finishing school on the Sussex coast where the daughters of high‑ranking Nazi officials are being groomed into perfect ambassadors for the Reich. Eddie Izzard plays a teacher who stumbles into a web of espionage, suspicion and political brinkmanship as Europe edges towards catastrophe.

The film mixes seaside gentility with gathering storm clouds — polite manners, crisp uniforms and the unsettling sense that something poisonous is being cultivated behind closed doors. It’s a story about loyalty, identity and the danger of looking away just when history is about to turn.

8pm, BBC One — The Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo

One of Edinburgh’s great annual spectacles, with massed bands, military precision and the Castle providing a backdrop television could scarcely improve upon.

10.30pm, BBC Two — The Godfather Part II (1974)

The rare sequel that doesn’t just match its predecessor but deepens it. Coppola builds a vast, mournful tapestry of power, family and the corrosive cost of ambition, cutting between two men at two moments in American history: Michael consolidating his empire in the 1950s, and young Vito climbing from poverty to influence half a century earlier.

Pacino’s performance is glacial, terrifying in its restraint — a man hollowing himself out in the name of control. De Niro, meanwhile, gives Vito warmth and quiet resolve, showing how the foundations of the Corleone dynasty were laid with community, necessity and a kind of rough‑edged honour.

The contrast is devastating. One rises to protect his family; the other destroys his in the name of protecting it.

11pm, BBC One — Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994)

The film that turned Richard Curtis’s brand of romantic comedy into a global export. Hugh Grant’s stammering charm was already familiar, but here it crystallised into something irresistible: the diffident Englishman who can’t quite get out of his own way.

What’s easy to forget is just how big a cultural moment this was. A modestly budgeted British film that became an international phenomenon, reshaping the genre for a decade and launching a wave of imitators. Its mix of sharp wit, emotional honesty and unabashed sentiment still works because it never sneers at its characters — it lets them be awkward, hopeful, foolish and occasionally profound.

11.30pm, Film4 — Carol (2015)

Todd Haynes crafts this with exquisite control — every glance, every pause, every shift in light doing as much storytelling as the dialogue. Cate Blanchett’s Carol is poised, elegant, and quietly aching; Rooney Mara’s Therese is all tentative curiosity, drawn into a relationship that feels both impossible and inevitable.

The film moves like a piece of chamber music: restrained, precise, and emotionally devastating in its quietest moments. Haynes lets the 1950s setting press in from all sides — the social constraints, the unspoken rules — while never losing sight of the tenderness at the centre.

2.50am, Channel 4 — Sick of Myself (2022)

A pitch‑black Norwegian comedy that treats narcissism like a competitive sport. The film follows a young woman so desperate to stay at the centre of everyone’s attention that she escalates her behaviour from petty manipulation to outright self‑harm, all in the name of sympathy, notoriety and social currency.

It’s viciously funny and deeply uncomfortable — a satire of performative culture where every gesture is a bid for relevance and every relationship becomes collateral damage. The further she pushes things, the more horrifying and absurd it becomes, until you’re laughing and wincing in the same breath.

A brutally sharp look at the hunger to be seen, and the chaos that follows when that hunger becomes the whole personality.

Tuesday 1 September

3.10pm, Film4 — Send Me No Flowers (1964)

One of the most purely enjoyable Day–Hudson comedies, built on a premise so daft it becomes irresistible. Rock Hudson’s hypochondriac is convinced he’s dying, and in a fit of misguided gallantry decides the best thing he can do for Doris Day’s devoted wife is to line up her next husband.

What follows is a bright, breezy spiral of misunderstandings, jealousies and suburban chaos, powered by the duo’s effortless chemistry and a script that knows exactly how to let them sparkle. It’s feather‑light, colourful and cheerfully silly — the kind of comedy that feels like opening a window on a sunnier world.

5.15pm, Film4 — Spartacus (1960)

Kubrick’s Roman epic is colossal in every sense, but its most radical force sits behind the camera. Spartacus is the film that helped break the Hollywood blacklist: Kirk Douglas insisted that Dalton Trumbo — one of the “Hollywood Ten,” jailed and exiled from the industry for refusing to name names during the McCarthy anti‑Communist purges — be credited under his own name. It was an act of defiance that changed careers and cracked open one of the ugliest chapters in American film history.

On screen, the scale is staggering. Douglas’s Spartacus leads a slave revolt that feels genuinely seismic, and Laurence Olivier presides over Rome with icy patrician menace. Kubrick marshals armies, landscapes and political intrigue with a precision that still impresses, but the film’s heartbeat is its politics — both the rebellion it depicts and the one it quietly enacted in Hollywood.

A landmark of spectacle and a landmark of resistance.

9pm, BBC Three — Scamanda

A four-part documentary telling the extraordinary story of Amanda Riley, whose fraudulent cancer story deceived thousands.

11pm, BBC Four — I Am Martin Parr

A portrait of one of Britain’s most distinctive photographers. Available on BBC iPlayer.

11.05pm, BBC Two — The Godfather Part III (1990)

The trilogy’s closing chapter has lived in the shadow of its predecessors for decades, but taken on its own terms it’s a sombre, compelling epilogue. Coppola shifts the tone from operatic violence to something more reflective: a story about age, regret and the impossibility of outrunning one’s past.

Pacino’s Michael is older, wearier, and haunted by the choices that built his empire. The performance is fascinating — the coiled intensity is still there, but now it’s tempered by guilt and a longing for legitimacy that he can never quite grasp. Andy García brings volatile energy as Vincent, the heir apparent, while the film’s Vatican‑entangled plot adds a layer of moral rot that feels entirely appropriate for Michael’s final act.

It may not reach the heights of the first two films, but there is real power in watching a man who once controlled everything realise that the bill for his sins has finally come due.

11.45pm, Film4 — Journeyman (2017)

Paddy Considine’s second feature is a quietly devastating piece of work — intimate, unshowy and emotionally exact. He writes, directs and stars as Matty Burton, a middleweight boxer whose life is shattered by a catastrophic brain injury sustained during a title defence. What begins as a familiar sports narrative turns into something far more fragile: a study of identity, recovery and the terrifying uncertainty of a mind that no longer behaves as it once did.

Considine’s performance is remarkable in its vulnerability, and Jodie Whittaker matches him beat for beat as a partner trying to hold together a life that has suddenly come apart. The film never tips into melodrama; it stays close to the small, painful details of rehabilitation — the confusion, the anger, the flickers of hope.

A moving, humane drama about rebuilding from the inside out.

.1.35am, Film4 — Pixie (2020)

A darkly comic Irish caper that plays everything with a wink and a threat. Olivia Cooke is terrific as Pixie, a young woman whose charm is matched only by her talent for trouble. After a heist goes sideways, she heads off across rural Ireland with two hapless accomplices, a bag of stolen drugs and a growing list of very dangerous people trying to catch up.

The tone is gleefully off‑kilter — gun‑toting priests, eccentric gangsters, sharp dialogue and a sense that every decision is making things worse in a slightly hilarious way. Cooke anchors it all with a performance that’s sly, unpredictable and enormous fun. A lively late‑night watch with a streak of mischief running right through it.

Wednesday 2 September

10.55pm, Legend — The Fighter (2010)

A tough, lived‑in boxing drama that works because it’s really about the people orbiting the ring rather than the punches thrown inside it. Mark Wahlberg plays Micky Ward with understated grit, but the film’s charge comes from Christian Bale as Dicky Eklund — a former fighter, now a chaotic, crack‑addicted mentor whose glory days have curdled into delusion.

Bale doesn’t just play Dicky; he disappears into him. The jittery energy, the compulsive charm, the self‑sabotage — it’s all there, and it gives the film a rawness that most sports biopics never touch. Amy Adams adds steel as Charlene, the woman trying to pull Micky out of the gravitational pull of his family, while David O. Russell keeps the whole thing moving with bruising momentum.

A story about loyalty, damage and the fight to break free, anchored by one of Bale’s most ferociously committed performances.

Thursday 3 September

12.55pm, Legend — The Assassination Bureau (1969)

A wonderfully odd slice of Edwardian mischief, pitched somewhere between black comedy, adventure caper and social satire. Oliver Reed plays Ivan Dragomiloff, the suavely amoral head of a professional organisation devoted to murder-for-hire — a gentlemanly league of assassins who treat killing as a matter of honour, etiquette and contractual obligation.

Diana Rigg, sharp as ever, enters the story as a journalist determined to expose the Bureau’s existence. Her plan? Commission them to kill their own leader. What follows is a playful chase across Europe, full of elaborate assassination attempts, period charm and a tone that winks at the audience without ever tipping into outright farce.

It’s eccentric, stylish and very much its own thing — a late‑60s curiosity powered by Reed’s swagger and Rigg’s impeccable wit.

2.35pm, Talking Pictures TV — The Durant Affair (1962)

A compact, no‑nonsense British crime drama, the sort of film Talking Pictures excels at rescuing from obscurity. The Durant Affair sits firmly in that fascinating corner of early‑60s British cinema where modest budgets, tight scripts and character actors doing solid work combine into something unexpectedly engaging.

It’s not a headline title, and that’s precisely the appeal. These lesser‑screened crime pictures offer a snapshot of a filmmaking culture that was grittier, more workmanlike and often more inventive than the prestige productions of the era. If you enjoy digging into the hidden shelves of British film history, this is exactly the kind of curio that rewards the effort.

9pm, GREAT! TV — Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)

One of the crown jewels of Ealing comedy: elegant, wicked and delivered with a straight face sharp enough to cut glass. Dennis Price is superb as Louis Mazzini, the impeccably polite young man who decides that a handful of inconvenient relatives stand between him and a dukedom — a problem he approaches with calm, murderous efficiency.

Alec Guinness’s tour‑de‑force turn is the film’s great delight: he plays almost the entire D’Ascoyne family, from fussy parsons to pompous admirals to suffragette firebrands, each performance perfectly judged and slyly exaggerated without ever breaking the film’s refined tone.

It’s a comedy of manners wrapped around a string of killings, delivered with such charm and precision that its darkness feels positively civilised. A masterpiece of dry British wit.

9pm, BBC Two — A House Through Time

David Olusoga continues his exploration of the lives hidden within the history of a single house. The full series is available on BBC iPlayer.

12.05am, BBC Two — Respect (2021)

Jennifer Hudson doesn’t just play Aretha Franklin — she channels her. The film follows Franklin’s rise from a prodigiously gifted church singer to the undisputed Queen of Soul, tracing the battles she fought both publicly and privately to claim her voice, her artistry and her autonomy.

Hudson’s performance is the anchor: vocally astonishing, emotionally grounded, and delivered with a reverence that never slips into imitation. The film moves through the key chapters — the early gospel years, the breakthrough hits, the personal struggles, the political awakening — with a warmth that honours Franklin’s legacy even when confronting its darker corners.

It’s a conventional music biopic in structure, but the power of the story and the sheer force of Hudson’s presence make it resonate. A celebration of a singular talent and the long, hard road she walked to become herself.

Friday 4 September

9pm, ITV2 — The Dark Knight (2008)

Christopher Nolan’s Batman film remains a defining moment in modern superhero cinema — muscular, morally tangled and executed with a seriousness that reshaped what the genre could be. But its gravitational centre is, of course, Heath Ledger’s Joker, a performance so ferociously alive it still feels dangerous.

Ledger’s Joker isn’t a villain with a plan; he’s an agent of rupture. Everything about him — the smeared makeup, the hunched posture, the voice that slides between mock‑polite and feral — suggests someone who has studied human behaviour purely to learn how best to unsettle it. He isn’t interested in money or power; he wants to expose the fragility of order, to prove that civilisation is only ever one bad day away from collapse.

The brilliance of the performance is its unpredictability. Ledger plays him as a man who delights in rewriting the rules mid‑sentence, whose jokes land like threats and whose threats land like philosophy. Every scene tightens because you genuinely don’t know what he’ll do next. It’s not just a great comic‑book villain; it’s one of the great screen performances of the century.

Around him, Christian Bale’s Batman and Aaron Eckhart’s Harvey Dent form the film’s moral spine, but Ledger is the spark that turns the whole thing into a battle for the soul of Gotham. A landmark — and a reminder of how one extraordinary performance can tilt an entire film into legend.

9pm, Legend — Once Upon a Time in America (1984)

Sergio Leone’s final film is a vast, mournful gangster epic — less interested in crime than in the long shadows it casts over a life. Robert De Niro’s Noodles drifts through the story like a man permanently out of time, haunted by friendships broken, betrayals committed and memories that refuse to settle into anything stable.

Leone tells the tale at an unhurried, almost dreamlike pace. Scenes unfold with the weight of recollection rather than the urgency of plot: childhood in the Jewish ghettos of New York, the rise into organised crime, the fractures that tear the group apart, and the decades‑later reckoning that may or may not be real. The film’s structure — looping between eras, blurring the line between what happened and what Noodles believes happened — gives it a melancholy that’s closer to elegy than thriller.

De Niro is superb, playing Noodles as a man defined by regret, while James Woods brings electric volatility as Max, the friend whose ambition becomes a kind of curse. Ennio Morricone’s score does the rest, bathing the film in sorrow and nostalgia.

A sprawling, hypnotic masterpiece — a gangster film that moves at the pace of memory, and hits with the force of everything time refuses to heal.

9pm, Channel 4 — Gogglebox

It’s back for its 28th series. The format remains ridiculously simple — people watching television while we watch them — but when the casting works, so does the programme. Catch up via Channel 4 streaming.

9.20pm, Talking Pictures TV — Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971)

One of Hammer’s strangest and most intriguing late‑period horrors — a gender‑swapping twist on Robert Louis Stevenson that lets the studio lean into both gothic melodrama and something far more subversive. Ralph Bates plays Dr Jekyll as a driven, increasingly unhinged scientist whose experiments in extending human life lead him to create a female alter ego: Sister Hyde, played with icy poise by Martine Beswick.

The transformation conceit gives Hammer room to explore identity, repression and desire in a way that feels unusually bold for the era. Sister Hyde isn’t just a murderous counterpart; she’s a manifestation of everything Jekyll fears and covets, a figure who moves through Victorian London with a confidence and sensuality that destabilises him completely.

It’s lurid, atmospheric and knowingly provocative — a film that takes a familiar story and twists it into something slyly transgressive. One of Hammer’s more unusual delights.

11.05pm, BBC Two — Harvest (2024)

A quietly gripping drama, Harvest works in the space between rural stillness and creeping unease. Set in a farming community where tradition, hardship and unspoken tensions shape every relationship, the film follows a family facing a season that threatens to break them — financially, emotionally and morally.

What makes it compelling is its restraint. The drama unfolds in small, telling moments: the weight of responsibility passed between generations, the strain of keeping a livelihood alive, the way isolation can magnify every fear. The performances are grounded and naturalistic, giving the film a lived‑in authenticity that makes its darker turns hit harder.

It’s a thoughtful, atmospheric piece — a modern British drama that finds its power not in big plot swings but in the quiet, accumulating pressure of a life tied to the land. A strong, understated choice to round off the week.

Streaming

Netflix

Monster’s Ball — available now

A stark, emotionally bruising drama that moves with a quiet, deliberate intensity. Set against the backdrop of America’s deep racial and social fractures, the film follows two people whose lives have been shaped by grief, anger and generational damage, and who find themselves drawn together in circumstances that should make connection impossible.

What gives the film its power is the restraint: the performances are raw without ever tipping into melodrama, and the story unfolds in small, painful increments. It’s a film about the weight people carry, the ways they fail each other, and the fragile possibility of redemption. Hard‑hitting, but worth the emotional toll.

H Is for Hawk — available now

This adaptation of Helen Macdonald’s acclaimed memoir captures the strange, intimate process of training a goshawk while navigating overwhelming grief. It’s part nature study, part psychological portrait, and part meditation on how humans seek meaning in the wild when their own lives feel unmanageable.

The film leans into the book’s reflective tone, lingering on landscape, silence and the uneasy bond between handler and bird. It’s gentle but piercing, a story about control, surrender and the ways we try to rebuild ourselves through ritual and obsession. A beautifully made piece of contemplative nonfiction.

The Gentlemen — Season 2, from Thursday 3 September

Guy Ritchie’s criminal world returns for a second series, and it’s as swaggering, chaotic and sharply dressed as ever. The new run expands the turf wars, double‑crosses and entrepreneurial villainy that defined the first season, giving the ensemble more room to stretch into their particular flavours of misbehaviour.

There’s a confidence to the storytelling now: the humour is darker, the schemes more elaborate, and the tone sits comfortably between crime thriller and high‑end mischief. If you enjoyed the first season’s mix of violence, charm and sheer audacity, Season 2 doubles down on all of it.

Channel 4 Streaming / Walter Presents

Cold Courage — all episodes from Tuesday 1 September

A tense, politically charged thriller that follows two women drawn into a shadowy organisation dedicated to exposing corruption. The series moves between London’s media world, far‑right extremism and the murky spaces where influence and intimidation overlap, giving it a contemporary edge that feels uncomfortably close to reality.

What stands out is the character work: both leads are damaged, determined and navigating trauma while trying to dismantle something far bigger than themselves. It’s stylish, tightly plotted and full of the kind of moral ambiguity Walter Presents specialises in.

Devil’s Throat: The Demon’s Fall

A Bulgarian thriller steeped in folklore, superstition and the darker corners of rural life. The series blends procedural investigation with mythic undertones, creating an atmosphere where every discovery feels like it might be pointing toward something older and more unsettling than simple criminality.

The pacing is deliberate, the visuals striking, and the tension builds from the clash between modern policing and ancient belief. It’s one of those shows that creeps under the skin — not loud, but quietly unnerving.

Paramount+

Humans — all episodes from Thursday 3 September

A return to one of the most thoughtful sci‑fi dramas of recent years. Humans explores artificial intelligence not through spectacle but through domestic life, asking what happens when synthetic beings become indistinguishable from the people they serve.

The new availability of all episodes gives viewers the chance to appreciate the show’s slow‑burn evolution: from questions of labour and autonomy to full‑blown debates about consciousness, rights and revolution. It’s smart, grounded and emotionally resonant — sci‑fi with something real to say.

Sweden: Demons Fall — Series 2, from Friday 4 September

The second series deepens the supernatural mystery at the heart of this Swedish thriller. What began as a story of strange occurrences in a remote community now expands into a broader exploration of belief, fear and the legacies families try to outrun.

Series 2 is moodier, more ambitious and visually striking, with a stronger sense of dread threading through each episode. It’s Nordic noir with a supernatural twist — cold, atmospheric and compelling.

Prime Video

Mother Mary — available now

A bold, stylised drama that plays with the idea of celebrity myth‑making. The film follows a pop icon whose life becomes the subject of a sprawling biographical project, blurring the lines between truth, performance and the narratives artists build around themselves.

It’s visually lush and musically driven, with a central performance that embraces both the glamour and the vulnerability of fame. The film asks what it means to be seen, and what gets lost when a person becomes a symbol. Ambitious, intriguing and full of texture.

Disney+

The Mandalorian and Grogu — from Wednesday 2 September

The Star Wars universe heads back to familiar territory with Din Djarin and Grogu, and the new series leans into everything that made their partnership irresistible: stoic warrior energy, found‑family warmth and a galaxy full of danger, politics and creatures with questionable intentions.

Expect a broader canvas this time — bigger stakes, deeper lore and a sense that the pair are being drawn into events far beyond bounty hunting. It’s still recognisably The Mandalorian, but with the scale and emotional weight turned up. A welcome return for two of modern Star Wars’ most beloved characters.

Radio

Sunday 30 August

7.15pm, BBC Radio 4 — Bouncing Off the Walls: A Prison Soundscape

A striking piece of auditory documentary-making, this soundscape builds its world not through interviews or narration but through the textures of prison life itself. The clatter of doors, the echo of corridors, the hum of communal spaces — all of it arranged to give listeners a sense of the rhythms and pressures of an environment defined by confinement.

It’s an atmospheric listen, one that asks you to sit inside the sonic architecture of incarceration and consider what it reveals. Without commentary, the programme becomes a kind of immersive portrait: unsettling in places, unexpectedly human in others, and quietly powerful in the way it lets sound do the storytelling.

Monday 31 August

6pm, Boom Rock — The Stiff Records Story

A lively, affectionate dive into one of Britain’s most gloriously unruly independent labels. Stiff Records was never just a roster — it was an attitude, a gleefully anarchic challenge to the music industry’s self-importance. The programme traces the label’s rise through its defining artists, from Ian Dury’s swagger to Elvis Costello’s sharp intelligence and Madness’s irresistible energy.

What emerges is a portrait of a label that prized personality, risk and sheer cheek. The documentary captures the era’s DIY spirit and the sense that Stiff’s artists were rewriting the rules as they went. A treat for anyone who loves the scruffier, more inventive corners of British music history. Repeated Thursday at 9pm.

Tuesday 1 September

8.05am, 3.05pm and 10.05pm, BBC World Service — People Fixing the World

This edition tackles sepsis — a condition where minutes matter and early diagnosis can be the difference between life and death. The programme looks at innovators trying to speed up detection, from rapid-testing technologies to new approaches in frontline healthcare that aim to catch symptoms before they escalate.

It’s a clear-eyed, hopeful piece of reporting, focused on practical solutions rather than alarm. By spotlighting people working to close the gap between onset and treatment, the episode shows how small changes in process and technology could save thousands of lives worldwide.

Wednesday 2 September

10am, 4pm and midnight, BBC Radio 4 Extra — Mercury

Three chances across the day to catch this imaginative audio drama, which blends mystery, science and a touch of the uncanny. Mercury unfolds with a slow, deliberate pull, drawing listeners into a story where the boundaries between explanation and intuition blur.

It’s the kind of drama that rewards close listening: layered sound design, thoughtful pacing and a narrative that reveals itself piece by piece. Atmospheric, intriguing and well worth dipping into at whichever time suits.

Friday 4 September

8.30pm, BBC World Service — CrowdScience

This week’s episode takes a gleeful dive into the psychology of roller coasters — why some people crave the stomach-dropping, high-speed chaos of a ride while others would rather stay firmly on the ground. The programme explores the science of thrill-seeking, from brain chemistry to personality traits, and how our bodies interpret fear when we know we’re safe.

It’s an entertaining blend of neuroscience and amusement-park nostalgia, with plenty of insight into what drives human appetite for controlled danger. A fun, thoughtful listen that might even explain why you love — or loathe — being hurled around at improbable speeds.

That’s it for this week. Plenty of crime, music, history and heavyweight cinema, with enough lighter material scattered around to stop the whole thing becoming oppressive. If I were choosing just three, I’d make time for The Godfather Part II, Kind Hearts and Coronets and the James Bond Prom — three very different demonstrations of how much pleasure there is to be had when style and substance turn up together.

Selections and reviews by Pat Harrington

Permalink Leave a Comment

Culture Vulture: 22–28 August 2026

August 22, 2026 at 8:52 am · Filed under Culture Vulture, Film & DVD Reviews, TV Shows ·Tagged British TV review, film, TVGuide

My three highlights? The Third Man remains one of those films that deserves to be watched again even if you think you know every cobbled street and every note of Anton Karas’s zither. Channel 4’s investigation into the murder of journalist Lyra McKee has a significance far beyond the usual true-crime formula. And BBC Four’s Specials night should provide a suitably energetic end to the week.

There is plenty elsewhere to catch the eye. Michael Sheen continues his investigation into alleged chemical dumping in Wales, Dan Snow tackles the Great Wall of China, while PBS America continues Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland across several nights.

Selections and reviews are by Pat Harrington.

Saturday 22 August

10.15am, BBC Two — The Third Man (1949)

Carol Reed’s post‑war Vienna thriller remains magnificent. Joseph Cotten arrives in the divided city looking for his old friend Harry Lime, only to find that Lime is apparently dead. Then Orson Welles appears in a doorway. Graham Greene’s screenplay, Robert Krasker’s extraordinary photography and that famous Anton Karas score combine to produce something approaching perfection.

Revisiting it now, the film feels even more potent: a story built on shadows, half‑truths and the moral debris left behind when empires collapse. Cotten’s Holly Martins wanders through a city carved into zones of occupation, never quite understanding the rules, never quite seeing the danger until it’s too late. And Welles — appearing late, disappearing early — still manages to dominate the entire film. His Harry Lime is charm sharpened into a weapon, a man who smiles as he explains why human lives are just dots on a map.

The tilted camerawork, the damp cobblestones, the echoing footsteps in those sewers — it all adds up to a world where nothing is straight, nothing is safe, and everyone is compromised. The zither score shouldn’t work, but it does: jaunty, ironic, unforgettable, cutting against the darkness like a grin in a graveyard.

A masterpiece of atmosphere, moral ambiguity and cinematic craft. Still essential.

8.00pm, Channel 4 — Doctor Strange (2016)

Benedict Cumberbatch enters the Marvel universe as arrogant surgeon Stephen Strange, whose life takes a decidedly mystical turn after an accident destroys his career. One of Marvel’s more visually inventive outings.

9.00pm, Film4 — L.A. Confidential (1997)

Corruption, celebrity and murder in 1950s Los Angeles. Curtis Hanson’s adaptation of James Ellroy’s novel boasts Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce, Kevin Spacey and an Oscar‑winning Kim Basinger. It looks like an old‑fashioned noir but has a thoroughly modern nastiness underneath.

What makes it endure is the way Hanson and Ellroy’s worldview align: a city built on image, rot and the quiet understanding that everyone is lying about something. Crowe’s Bud White is all bruised instinct, Pearce’s Ed Exley is ambition wrapped in righteousness, and Spacey’s Jack Vincennes glides through the town like a man who knows the game is rigged but enjoys playing it anyway. Basinger’s Veronica Lake‑lookalike adds a cool, melancholy glamour that feels perfectly pitched rather than pastiche.

The film’s surface sheen — the sharp suits, the neon, the immaculate production design — is constantly undercut by the brutality beneath. Every revelation feels like a trapdoor opening. Every alliance is temporary. And when the violence comes, it’s sudden, ugly and decisive, a reminder that Hanson wasn’t simply reviving noir but interrogating it.

Still one of the great modern crime films: stylish, cynical and gripping from first frame to last.

9.00pm, Sky Arts — Paul Weller: May Love Travel with You

Weller performs at London’s Royal Festival Hall accompanied by an orchestra, moving through material from The Jam, The Style Council and his solo career.

9.30pm, Channel 5 — Nigel Farage: Where Does the Money Come From?

Whatever your view of Farage, questions about the financing and financial interests surrounding major political figures deserve scrutiny. One to watch for the politics rather than the personality.

10.00pm, Sky Arts — Angelheaded Hipster: The Songs of Marc Bolan & T. Rex

A documentary celebration of Bolan and T. Rex, mixing archive performances with contributions from admirers and contemporaries. An artist whose influence stretches far beyond the short years of his greatest fame.

11.15pm, Legend — Inside Man (2006)

Spike Lee takes on the bank‑heist movie, with Denzel Washington attempting to work out exactly what Clive Owen’s unusually methodical robber is really after. Jodie Foster adds another layer of intrigue.

What makes it such a satisfying late‑night watch is the precision of the whole thing. Owen’s Dalton Russell isn’t your usual shout‑and‑shoot criminal — he’s calm, articulate and unsettlingly in control from the first moment. Washington’s Detective Frazier, meanwhile, is trying to keep his footing in a case where every detail feels slightly off, every answer leads to another question, and every move the robbers make seems designed to mislead.

Lee brings his usual sharpness to the genre: the shifting timelines, the clipped interrogations, the way the hostages blur into the strategy of the heist. Foster’s fixer glides through the film like someone who knows exactly how power works in New York, and exactly how to bend it.

11.15pm, Sky Documentaries — When We Were Kings (1996)

The Oscar-winning documentary about Muhammad Ali and George Foreman’s 1974 “Rumble in the Jungle” in Zaire. It is ostensibly about boxing, but also about politics, race, celebrity and one of the most extraordinary personalities of the twentieth century.

Sunday 23 August

5.30pm, GREAT! tv — The Horse Whisperer (1998)

Robert Redford directs and stars in this expansive drama about a traumatised teenager, an injured horse and the man brought in to help both recover. Scarlett Johansson appears in one of her early major roles.

What gives the film its staying power is Redford’s unhurried, almost meditative approach. The opening accident is brutal enough to justify the emotional fallout that follows, but once the story moves to Montana the film settles into something gentler: wide skies, long silences and the slow, careful work of coaxing both girl and horse back from the edge. Redford plays the role with that familiar mix of steadiness and quiet authority, while Johansson — still young, still raw — brings a vulnerability that feels entirely unforced.

Kristin Scott Thomas adds a welcome sharpness as the mother trying to hold everything together, and the film’s emotional beats land because they’re never rushed. It’s a story about healing, but also about honesty, forgiveness and the difficult business of starting again.

9.00pm, BBC Two — Why Sharks Attack

Dr Dean Grubbs tags sharks and studies their movements in an attempt to understand more clearly why encounters between sharks and humans sometimes turn deadly. Given what follows at 10pm, this is rather neatly scheduled.

9.00pm, Sky Arts — Bardot

A look at the life and career of Brigitte Bardot: actress, model, international sex symbol and, later, a controversial public figure. Few stars were more closely identified with a particular moment in European popular culture.

10.00pm, BBC Two — Jaws (1975)

Fifty‑one years on, Steven Spielberg’s shark still works. Perhaps the real achievement is that Jaws is not simply a monster film. Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss give it character, humour and tension long before the shark properly appears.

What always surprises, even after countless re‑watches, is how patient the film is. Spielberg builds the threat slowly: a fin here, a ripple there, a scream cutting across a sun‑struck beach. By the time the shark finally reveals itself, the audience has already been wound tight. Scheider’s Brody is the film’s moral centre — anxious, decent, out of his depth — while Dreyfuss brings a sharp, youthful energy and Shaw supplies one of cinema’s great performances, all salt, scars and fatalism.

The second half, set almost entirely on the Orca, remains a masterclass in tension. Three men, one boat, and a problem getting larger by the minute. Shaw’s Indianapolis speech still chills, the practical effects still convince, and John Williams’ score still does half the work before the shark even arrives.

A landmark thriller that hasn’t lost a scrap of its bite.

11.50pm, Sky Arts — Gimme Some Truth

John Lennon during the making of Imagine. For anyone interested in how records actually come together rather than simply hearing the finished product, studio footage of this kind is irresistible.

Monday 24 August

8.30pm, PBS America — The War Cabinet

Donald Trump presented himself as a peacemaker, yet his presidency has involved clashes with allies, the removal of foreign leaders and war with Iran. This examines those actions through interviews with allies, associates and critics.

9.00pm, BBC Two — Buried with Michael Sheen, 2 of 2

Actor and activist Michael Sheen continues his investigation into allegations surrounding the dumping of chemical waste. His search takes him to Ruabon in North Wales, where residents have raised concerns about what they believe to be unusually high levels of cancer in the community. Serious subject matter and potentially uncomfortable viewing.

9.00pm, Film4 — Public Enemies (2009)

Michael Mann directs Johnny Depp as Depression‑era bank robber John Dillinger, pursued by Christian Bale’s FBI agent Melvin Purvis. Mann brings his characteristic fascination with professionals, criminals and the people hunting them to the gangster film.

What makes it compelling is Mann’s refusal to treat Dillinger as a myth. Instead, he presents him as a man moving at speed through a country collapsing under its own economic weight — a celebrity outlaw whose fame is both armour and curse. Depp plays him with a cool, almost melancholy confidence, while Bale’s Purvis is the opposite: rigid, disciplined, and increasingly aware that the Bureau he serves is changing into something harder and more political.

The shootouts have Mann’s trademark clarity — loud, chaotic, but never confusing — and the digital cinematography gives the period setting an immediacy that feels strangely modern. Chicago alleys, rural hideouts, crowded banks: everything looks lived‑in rather than polished.

It’s a gangster film with a pulse, a sense of history, and a director who understands that the chase is often more interesting than the capture.

10.30pm, PBS America — Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland

Another chance to see this remarkable series built around first-person testimony from people whose lives were shaped by the Troubles.

11.10pm, BBC One — Emily (2022)

Frances O’Connor’s imaginative portrait of Emily Brontë, with Emma Mackey in the title role. It is not intended as a dutiful cradle‑to‑grave biography; instead it tries to imagine the emotional world from which Wuthering Heights might have emerged.

What O’Connor does so well is refuse the usual museum‑piece approach. This isn’t a polite literary biopic where the heroine gazes out of windows until inspiration strikes. Mackey’s Emily is restless, sharp, awkward, and full of a private intensity that feels truer to the author than any tidy historical reconstruction. The film leans into the idea that great art often comes from turbulence — emotional, familial, spiritual — and it lets that turbulence shape the story.

The Yorkshire landscape becomes part of her psychology: windswept, isolating, beautiful, and faintly threatening. The relationships with her siblings, especially Charlotte, are drawn with a brittle honesty, and Oliver Jackson‑Cohen’s role as the curate adds a charged, uneasy thread that pushes the film beyond standard period drama territory.

11.55pm, BBC Three — Monkey Man (2024)

Dev Patel directs and stars in a bruising revenge thriller set amid corruption, inequality and political power in India. Far more furious than the average late‑night action film.

What Patel brings — and what makes Monkey Man stand out — is a sense of rage that feels personal rather than performative. The fight scenes are tight, frantic and bruisingly physical, but the film’s real charge comes from the world around them: a society where the powerful operate without consequence and the vulnerable are expected to stay quiet. Patel’s character refuses to do either.

The neon‑lit streets, the underground clubs, the shifting alliances — all of it has a raw immediacy that pushes the film beyond standard revenge‑movie territory. Patel directs with real intent, folding folklore, politics and street‑level violence into something that feels both mythic and modern. By the time the final act arrives, the film has built up a momentum that’s hard to shake.

Tuesday 25 August

12.15am, Sky Arts — Tilda Swinton: The Wild Card

A portrait of an actor who has spent much of her career resisting easy classification, moving between experimental cinema, arthouse work and major Hollywood productions.

1.55am, Channel 4 — The Quiet Girl (2022)

A beautiful, restrained Irish‑language drama about a neglected young girl sent to stay with relatives for the summer. Very little is shouted and very little needs to be. One of the week’s best films, albeit hidden away at a fairly brutal hour.

What makes it so quietly devastating is its refusal to force emotion. Everything is done with small gestures — a glance, a pause, a hand placed gently on a shoulder. Catherine Clinch is extraordinary as Cáit, carrying the film with a stillness that never feels mannered; she simply is this child who has learned to take up as little space as possible. The couple who take her in offer a different kind of home: patient, warm, and shaped by their own grief, which the film reveals with the same delicacy it shows Cáit’s transformation.

The rural setting becomes part of the film’s emotional language — soft light, long silences, the sense of a world moving at a pace that finally allows Cáit to breathe. Colm Bairéad’s direction is precise and unfussy, letting the story unfold in a way that feels both intimate and universal.

A small masterpiece of empathy and understatement.

8.00pm, Sky Documentaries — Salt Path: A Very British Scandal

An examination of allegations concerning factual inaccuracies in Raynor Winn’s bestselling memoir The Salt Path. The controversy raises wider questions about memoir, publishing and what readers are entitled to expect when a story is sold as true.

9.30pm, Film4 — Drive-Away Dolls (2024)

Ethan Coen, working without brother Joel, delivers a knowingly disreputable road movie involving two women, a mysterious suitcase and some extremely unpleasant criminals. Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan lead the cast.

Coen leans hard into the film’s scruffier instincts: a sun‑bleached, oddball caper full of bad decisions, worse luck and characters who seem permanently half a step behind the trouble they’ve stirred up. Qualley and Viswanathan make a terrific double act — one impulsive, one anxious, both swept into a plot that feels like it’s been stitched together from every misadventure the Coens ever enjoyed writing. The supporting cast, meanwhile, is a parade of eccentrics, thugs and bureaucrats who all seem to be operating in slightly different films, which is part of the fun.

The tone is breezy but pointed, with flashes of the old Coen bite: sudden violence, deadpan humour, and a sense that fate is laughing at everyone involved. It’s lighter than the brothers’ collaborations, but intentionally so — a shaggy, chaotic road trip that knows exactly how silly it is and leans into it with gusto.

10.45pm, PBS America — Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland: Do Paramilitaries Lie Awake at Night?

The series continues to explore the Troubles through those who were actually caught up in them, asking uncomfortable questions about violence, memory, guilt and justification.

Wednesday 26 August

9.00pm, Channel 4 — The Murder Detective

True-crime television is not normally high on my list, but this is different. It follows the investigation into the murder of journalist Lyra McKee, shot during rioting in Derry in 2019. The political and historical dimension takes it well beyond the usual true-crime formula.

9.00pm, Channel 5 — The Great Wall of China with Dan Snow

A new history series with Dan Snow taking on one of humanity’s most famous structures. The Wall is often talked about as though it were a single building project, when its history actually stretches across dynasties, centuries and radically different political circumstances.

11.30pm, BBC One — The Shallows (2016)

Blake Lively versus a great white shark. There is considerably more to it than that makes it sound, with director Jaume Collet‑Serra wringing a remarkable amount of suspense from a very simple premise. After Sunday’s Jaws, however, the shark has a hard act to follow.

What keeps the film gripping is its economy: one woman, one rock, one shark, and a steadily tightening sense of danger. Lively carries the whole thing with real grit, selling both the physical ordeal and the rising panic without ever tipping into melodrama. Collet‑Serra shoots the ocean as both sanctuary and threat — bright, inviting, and then suddenly, brutally hostile.

The set‑pieces are lean and tense, the geography always clear, and the film never overstays its welcome. It’s a sharp, efficient survival thriller that knows exactly what it’s doing, even if Spielberg’s classic casts a long shadow over any shark that dares show its fin.

Thursday 27 August

4.15p.m, Film4 — The Straight Story (1999)

David Lynch without nightmares, severed ears or mysterious red rooms. Richard Farnsworth plays Alvin Straight, who travels hundreds of miles on a lawnmower to see his brother.

What makes it so quietly extraordinary is its simplicity. Lynch strips away all the surrealism he’s known for and leans instead into something tender, humane and utterly direct. Farnsworth gives one of the great late‑career performances — gentle, stubborn, dignified — a man determined to make a journey that everyone else thinks is impossible, and doing it in the only way he can. The film moves at the pace of the machine he rides: slow, steady, unhurried, allowing the landscape and the people he meets to shape the story.

The encounters along the way — funny, sad, odd, generous — build a portrait of rural America that feels lived‑in rather than sentimental. Sissy Spacek adds quiet emotional weight as Alvin’s daughter, and the final scene between the two brothers is as moving as anything Lynch has ever filmed.

A small, sincere marvel: patient, warm and unexpectedly profound.

10.50pm, PBS America — Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland: The Dirty War

The series reaches some of the murkier territory of the conflict, where intelligence operations, paramilitary violence and allegations of collusion make simple moral narratives increasingly difficult to sustain.

11.00pm, BBC Four — Talking Pictures: Jaws

A look back at Steven Spielberg’s aquatic horror classic and the story behind a film whose troubled production somehow resulted in one of cinema’s great popular successes.

11.45pm, BBC Four — Jaws 2 (1978)

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water… Roy Scheider returns to Amity, where people have apparently learned surprisingly little from the events of the first film.

What Jaws 2 lacks in Spielbergian finesse it makes up for in sheer, earnest determination to keep the terror afloat. Scheider’s Brody is now a man permanently on edge — jumpy, suspicious, and painfully aware that the town’s leadership would rather ignore danger than confront it. The sequel leans more heavily into teen‑thriller territory, with a group of young sailors providing both the stakes and the chaos once the shark inevitably resurfaces.

Jeannot Szwarc’s direction is more straightforward than Spielberg’s, but the film still delivers a handful of genuinely tense sequences, especially once the kids’ boats start splintering and the open water becomes a trap. The shark itself is shown more often, which reduces the mystery but increases the pulp energy.

Not a masterpiece, but a solid, surprisingly atmospheric follow‑up — and Scheider’s weary determination remains its strongest anchor.

Friday 28 August

10.20pm, BBC Four — The Specials: 6 Music Sessions

BBC Four devotes much of the night to The Specials and Two Tone. A good choice. The music remains joyous, but the songs were never detached from unemployment, racism, urban decline and the tensions of the Britain that produced them.

10.45pm, PBS America — Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland: Who Wants to Live Like That?

Another instalment of a series which succeeds because it allows people to speak at length about choices that are often much easier to judge retrospectively than they were while the conflict was happening.

10.50pm, Film4 — Sexy Beast (2000)

Ray Winstone would quite like to enjoy his retirement in Spain. Ben Kingsley has other ideas. Kingsley’s Don Logan remains one of the most terrifying gangsters in British cinema precisely because there is something so unpredictable about him.

What still jolts, even after two decades, is the film’s sheer confidence. Jonathan Glazer takes a familiar setup — the retired criminal dragged back for “one last job” — and strips it down to something lean, abrasive and weirdly elegant. Winstone’s Gal is all sun‑soaked contentment, a man who has finally found peace and intends to keep it. Kingsley’s Don Logan is the opposite: a walking pressure cooker, every sentence a threat, every silence worse.

The tension comes not from gunfights or elaborate heists but from the awful inevitability of Logan’s presence. He’s a man who cannot be reasoned with, cannot be placated, and cannot be predicted. Kingsley plays him with such ferocity that the film feels like it tilts whenever he enters a room. When the story finally shifts back to London, Glazer keeps the mood taut and strange, with Ian McShane offering a beautifully icy counterpoint as the gang’s boss.

Stylish, unsettling and brilliantly acted — one of the great modern British crime films.

10.55pm, BBC Four — Two Tone: The Sound of Coventry

The story of the musical movement that brought together ska, punk and reggae and produced The Specials, The Selecter and a cultural identity inseparable from late-1970s and early-1980s Britain.

11.05pm, BBC Two — Tuesday (2023)

Julia Louis‑Dreyfus takes an unusual dramatic role in a strange, intimate fantasy about a mother and daughter confronting death. Not exactly easy Friday‑night viewing, but certainly different.

What gives Tuesday its unsettling power is the way it treats the fantastical as something matter‑of‑fact. Death arrives not as a metaphor or a looming shadow but as a literal presence — a creature, a visitor, an inevitability that must be faced rather than avoided. Louis‑Dreyfus plays the mother with a brittle, frantic tenderness, a woman clinging so tightly to denial that it begins to warp the world around her. Lola Petticrew, as the daughter, brings a quiet, wounded clarity that grounds the film even when it drifts into the surreal.

Daina Oniunas‑Pusić’s direction is bold but delicate, mixing domestic realism with moments of odd, dreamlike beauty. The film’s emotional beats land because they’re never overstated; grief is shown as something messy, contradictory and often strangely calm. By the time the story reaches its final stretch, the fantasy elements feel less like embellishment and more like the only language capable of expressing what the characters are going through.

A small, distinctive piece of filmmaking — tender, eerie and genuinely memorable. Not light viewing, but rewarding if you’re in the right mood.

11.55pm, BBC Four — The Specials: Rock Goes to College

Archive Specials, when the urgency was still fresh and the band’s fusion of music and politics was hitting with full force.

12.10am, BBC One — Stan & Ollie (2018)

Steve Coogan and John C. Reilly are wonderfully affectionate without slipping into simple impersonation as Laurel and Hardy during their final British tour. Funny, melancholy and ultimately about friendship.

What lifts the film above the usual biographical tribute is its gentleness. Coogan and Reilly don’t chase perfect mimicry; they chase the emotional truth of two men who have spent a lifetime together, weathered fame, disappointment and changing tastes, and now find themselves performing in half‑filled theatres while still trying to summon the old magic. Their chemistry is effortless — warm, teasing, occasionally prickly — the kind of bond built through years of shared graft.

Jon S. Baird directs with a light touch, letting the humour emerge naturally from the pair’s rhythms rather than forcing nostalgia. The film’s sadness is equally understated: the creeping awareness of age, the strain of old wounds, the fear that the world has moved on. Yet it never becomes bleak. Instead, it finds something quietly heroic in their determination to keep going, to keep entertaining, to keep being Stan and Ollie even when the spotlight has dimmed.

12.45am, BBC Four — Arena

The Specials theme continues into the small hours.

1.15am, BBC Four — The Specials: 6 Music Sessions

A repeat of the programme shown at 10.20pm.

Streaming

There’s a bit of a Friday pile‑up among this week’s streaming releases, although Prime Video gets in first on Wednesday.

Wednesday 26 August — Prime Video: The Last Sunrise

Available to stream from Wednesday. A reflective, slow‑burn sci‑fi drama about a world facing a quiet, creeping catastrophe. More atmospheric than explosive, and aimed at viewers who like their science fiction thoughtful rather than frantic.

Friday 28 August — Netflix: All the Truth in My Lies

All five episodes available from Friday. A twist‑driven psychological thriller built around secrets, shifting narratives and domestic tension. Netflix’s latest Spanish import, with the kind of slow unravelling mystery it does well.

Friday 28 August — Netflix: The Whisper Man

Available from Friday. An adaptation of the bestselling crime novel, blending grief, small‑town unease and a series of unsettling disappearances. Expect a dark, atmospheric tone and a strong emotional core.

Friday 28 August — Apple TV+: Dark Matter, Season 2

New episodes released weekly. The multiverse thriller returns, expanding its premise and pushing deeper into the moral and existential consequences of slipping between realities. Sleek, ambitious and very Apple TV+.

Friday 28 August — Channel 4 Streaming / Walter Presents: No Time for Goodbye

All episodes available from Friday. A tense French thriller from Walter Presents. After sneaking out to see her boyfriend, teenage Sofia returns home to find her entire family missing. Twenty years later, still haunted by the disappearance, she receives a letter suggesting the past is not finished with her. A compact, unsettling mystery.

And that is Culture Vulture for another week: sharks, ska, spies, gangsters, political investigations and David Lynch’s lawnmower. You cannot say we lack variety.

Permalink Leave a Comment

Culture Vulture 15-21 August 2026

August 15, 2026 at 9:21 am · Filed under Film & DVD Reviews, TV Shows ·Tagged British TV review, TV, TV guide, tv highlights

There are weeks when putting Culture Vulture together involves a fair bit of rummaging around in the schedules looking for something worth rescuing. This is not one of them.

Film lovers are particularly well served. Breathless, The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde, The French Connection, The Deer Hunter and Heat amount to a formidable crash course in cinema across several decades. Throw in Top Hat at the other end of the emotional spectrum, Genevieve for a very British sort of pleasure and more recent fare including The Batman, The Beast and Monkey Man, and there is barely room to complain.

Television has a distinctly historical streak too. Kabul dramatises the extraordinary and frightening days surrounding the Taliban’s return to the Afghan capital in 2021. Franco gets two nights on PBS America. The 1918 influenza pandemic is revisited on Friday, while Concorde Crash takes us back to a disaster that effectively sounded the beginning of the end for the world’s most glamorous passenger aircraft.

I’m also intrigued by Buried with Michael Sheen. Chemical contamination is not the cheeriest subject for a Monday evening, admittedly, but Sheen has become increasingly willing to put his public profile behind questions of power, place and community. That makes this potentially much more than another celebrity-fronted documentary.

Then there is music. Beyoncé gets the BBC treatment, while Friday brings Miles Davis at the Proms. Two rather different definitions of star power.

Here are my picks – Pat Harrington

SATURDAY 15 AUGUST

8.00pm – Skyfall (2012), ITV1

Daniel Craig’s third Bond film remains one of the strongest of his period. Sam Mendes gives the series visual grandeur while allowing Bond to seem unusually vulnerable. Javier Bardem’s Silva is a villain with personality, and the relationship between Bond and Judi Dench’s M gives the film its emotional centre.

8.00pm – Kabul: The Fall, BBC Four

The first episode of a six‑part drama inspired by the extraordinary events of August 2021. Rather than treating the collapse as geopolitics, it follows people caught inside it.

9.00pm – The Batman (2022), ITV2

Robert Pattinson dons the cape in Matt Reeves’s sombre, rain‑soaked Gotham, and the result is far closer to a serial‑killer thriller than any traditional superhero romp. Reeves leans into the city’s decay: flooded streets, corruption seeping through every institution, and a Batman who feels less like a mythic avenger and more like a grim, obsessive detective picking his way through a crime scene that never ends. Pattinson’s performance is deliberately inward — bruised, watchful, almost monastic — and the film’s long, oppressive mood gives Gotham a weight it hasn’t had in years. It’s not interested in quips or spectacle; it wants atmosphere, dread and the sense that justice here is always half a step behind the darkness.

9.50pm – Kabul: The Siege, BBC Four

The second part follows a family scattered as Kabul falls. A huge historical event made comprehensible through individual experience.

10.00pm – Concorde Crash: Days That Shocked the World, Channel 4

A revisit of the 2000 Air France disaster and the abrupt end of Concorde’s glamour. The documentary goes back to those unforgettable images outside Paris — the aircraft trailing fire moments after take‑off — and examines how a machine once sold as the future of aviation became a symbol of vulnerability instead. Concorde had represented technological confidence, speed, prestige and the idea that progress would always move forward. The crash punctured that myth in seconds. What the programme does well is show how the investigation unfolded, how a single strip of metal on a runway set off a chain of failures, and how the tragedy effectively closed the curtain on an era when flying could still feel extraordinary. It’s sobering, but it’s also a reminder of how quickly the story of modernity can change direction.

10.30pm – Beyoncé at the BBC, BBC Two

A trawl through the BBC archives celebrating Beyoncé’s career.

11.40pm – The Graduate (1967), BBC Two

A cultural touchstone whose melancholy is often forgotten beneath the comedy. The familiar images — Dustin Hoffman drifting in the swimming pool, Anne Bancroft’s Mrs Robinson framed in that doorway, Simon and Garfunkel on the soundtrack — have become so iconic that it’s easy to overlook how strange and uneasy the film really is. Beneath the wit and the immaculate surface lies a story about a young man paralysed by expectation, drifting through a world that seems to have been planned for him without ever asking what he wants. Hoffman’s Benjamin is funny, yes, but he’s also lost, bored, and quietly suffocating in the comfortable future laid out by his parents. The film’s final shot, often misread as triumphant, is one of the great cinematic reminders that escape and certainty are not the same thing. It’s a classic that still pricks at the nerves.

1.00am – Monos e.(2019), Channel 4

Teenage guerrillas, a hostage, beautiful landscapes and feral behaviour. Unsettling but memorable. Landes’s film drops you into an unnamed conflict where discipline, ideology and even basic sanity begin to erode almost immediately. The young fighters are barely more than children, yet they carry weapons, guard a captive and try to enforce rules they barely understand. What makes Monos so striking is the contrast between its setting and its story: vast, breathtaking mountains and cloud forests surrounding a group whose behaviour becomes increasingly chaotic and animalistic. It’s a film where the beauty of the world feels like a rebuke to the violence inside it.

SUNDAY 16 AUGUST

9.30am – Top Hat (1935), BBC Two

Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers and Irving Berlin. Hollywood escapism at its most elegant. Top Hat is one of those films where the plot barely matters — it’s simply the scaffolding on which Astaire and Rogers hang some of the most effortless screen chemistry ever captured. The dancing is immaculate, the humour feather‑light, and Berlin’s songs glide through the film with the kind of confidence only the 1930s studio system could muster. What always strikes me is how completely the film commits to its own fantasy: hotels that look like palaces, rainstorms that arrive on cue, and a world where misunderstandings are solved not by conversation but by dancing.

9.00pm – Road to Perdition (2002), GREAT! TV

Tom Hanks plays against type as a Depression‑era mob enforcer, and the change gives the film a quiet, unsettling power. He moves through the story like a man already half‑buried by the life he’s chosen — dutiful, efficient, and painfully aware that every action has a cost. Mendes shoots the world in rain and shadow, long stretches of silence broken by sudden violence, and the result feels less like a crime thriller and more like a slow, mournful elegy.

What begins as revenge becomes something more intimate: a father trying to shield his son from the very world that shaped him. Jude Law’s needle‑thin, corpse‑pale hitman stalks the edges of the film with a kind of sickly glee, while Paul Newman, in one of his final screen roles, brings a weary authority to the criminal empire Hanks serves. It’s a story about loyalty, guilt and the way violence echoes through generations — beautifully made, heavy with consequence, and still capable of catching you off guard.

9.55pm – Black Watch, BBC Four

Gregory Burke’s celebrated play about soldiers, loyalty, masculinity and fear.

10.00pm – The French Connection (1971), BBC Two

Gene Hackman’s Popeye Doyle prowls through Friedkin’s hard, dirty New York thriller, and the city is as much a character as any of the cops or criminals. Everything feels cold, scraped‑raw, lived‑in: bars with peeling paint, streets slick with winter grime, surveillance carried out in silence because there’s nothing glamorous about it. Hackman plays Doyle as a man driven more by instinct than procedure — abrasive, relentless, and not remotely comfortable company — which is precisely why the film still works.

The famous car‑and‑train chase remains astonishing, a burst of chaos in a world otherwise defined by tension and suspicion. But the real power lies in the atmosphere Friedkin builds: a city where compromise is routine, where the line between law and criminality blurs, and where obsession corrodes everything it touches.

11.30pm – Black Watch: A Soldier’s Story, BBC Four

A documentary companion to the play.

11.40pm – Bonnie and Clyde (1967), BBC Two

Romantic, violent, exhilarating — and a turning point in American cinema. Beatty and Dunaway glide through the early scenes with a kind of dangerous charm, two beautiful people discovering that crime feels like freedom, at least for a while. The film begins almost playfully, all flirtation and stolen cars, but the mood shifts in increments: a gunshot here, a panicked escape there, until the violence stops being theoretical and starts leaving marks.

What still astonishes is how boldly Arthur Penn mixes tones. Comedy bumps up against brutality; glamour sits beside fear; the lovers pose for photographs even as the world closes in around them. Hollywood had rarely allowed this kind of collision before, and audiences in 1967 weren’t quite prepared for it. The final sequence — balletic, horrifying, impossible to forget — announced that American cinema was entering a new era, one where the old rules no longer applied. It’s a film that still feels alive, still capable of surprising you, and still entirely deserving of its reputation.

MONDAY 17 AUGUST

12.25am – Breathless (1960), Talking Pictures TV

Godard’s jump‑cutting, attitude‑laden revolution in cinema. Breathless still feels like a film that woke up one morning and decided the rules were optional. Jean‑Paul Belmondo drifts through Paris with a cigarette, a stolen car and a borrowed sense of swagger, modelling himself on Bogart while never quite managing the same composure. Jean Seberg, effortlessly cooler than everyone around her, gives the film its strange centre of gravity — calm, curious, and entirely unpredictable.

What Godard does here isn’t simply stylistic mischief. The jump cuts, the looseness, the sudden shifts in tone — they create a world that feels improvised, restless, alive. You can almost see cinema discovering that it doesn’t have to behave itself, that it can be messy and direct and full of attitude. Whole generations of filmmakers took notes. Watching it now, in the small hours, you feel the shock of the new all over again.

8.00pm – Panorama: Child Maintenance – Parents Under Pressure, BBC One

A look at whether the current system serves parents or children.

8.35pm – Franco: The Last Inquisitor – In the Name of Christ and the Empire, PBS America

Part one of a study of Franco’s dictatorship.

9.00pm – Disclosure: Welcome to Glasgow, BBC One

Investigating claims of “no‑go zones” in Scotland’s largest city.

9.00pm – Buried with Michael Sheen, BBC Two

Chemical dumping, contamination and the long shadow of industrial decisions. Sheen approaches the subject with a seriousness that never feels performative; he’s not here to emote for the camera but to ask why communities in Wales and England are still living with the consequences of choices made decades ago. The programme moves slowly, deliberately, letting residents describe what it means to discover that the ground beneath your feet may not be as safe as you assumed.

What gives the documentary its weight is the sense of history looping back on itself. Industrial waste was meant to stay buried, forgotten, sealed away in the past — yet here it is, resurfacing in soil samples, in water tests, in the stories of people who have spent years trying to be heard. Sheen’s presence helps connect the personal to the political: how responsibility is assigned, how institutions respond, and how long communities are expected to wait for answers. It’s not cheerful viewing, but it is quietly compelling, and it asks questions that won’t disappear simply because they make everyone uncomfortable.

9.50pm – The Truth About Franco: Spain’s Forgotten Dictatorship,

PBS America More on Franco and the difficulty of confronting history.

TUESDAY 18 AUGUST

8.30pm – Franco: The Last Inquisitor – The Manipulator, PBS America

Franco as survivor and political chameleon.

10.40pm – The Untouchables (1987), BBC One

De Palma turns the pursuit of Al Capone into grand, almost operatic entertainment. Kevin Costner’s Eliot Ness arrives in Chicago with the clean‑cut certainty of a man who still believes institutions work the way they’re supposed to, and the city promptly disabuses him of the notion. Sean Connery, grizzled and amused, gives Ness the education he didn’t know he needed — how to survive, how to fight, and how far you have to go when the other side has already abandoned the rulebook.

The film moves with a kind of muscular elegance: wide‑shouldered set‑pieces, slow‑burn tension, sudden eruptions of violence. De Palma isn’t chasing historical precision; he’s building a myth, and he knows exactly how to frame it. Robert De Niro’s Capone, all theatrical menace and controlled fury, completes the triangle. What you get is a story about righteousness pushed to its limits, told with style, swagger and a willingness to lean into its own legend. Historically loose, cinematically terrific — and still enormous fun.

1.35am – The Deer Hunter (1978), Legend

Cimino’s epic of steelworkers and Vietnam, anchored by performances of enormous power. The film begins slowly, almost deceptively so: a wedding, a hunting trip, friends teasing one another in a Pennsylvania town that feels ordinary, familiar, lived‑in. Cimino takes his time because he wants you to understand the community before the war tears into it. When the story shifts to Vietnam, the change is brutal — sudden violence, chaos, and the infamous Russian roulette sequences that have sparked argument ever since.

What carries the film is the cast. De Niro’s quiet intensity, Walken’s gradual unravelling, Meryl Streep’s gentleness in the margins — each performance adds another layer to a story about trauma, loyalty and the impossibility of returning unchanged. The final act is heavy, mournful, and strangely tender, a reminder that the real cost of war is paid long after the fighting stops.

WEDNESDAY 19 AUGUST

7.35pm – Genevieve (1953), Talking Pictures TV

Two couples, two cars, and a charming London‑to‑Brighton run. On paper it sounds almost too slight to endure, yet Genevieve remains one of those films whose appeal sneaks up on you. The veteran cars provide the excuse, but the real pleasure lies in watching Kenneth More, Dinah Sheridan, John Gregson and Kay Kendall needle one another with the kind of competitive irritation that never quite tips into malice.

There’s a breeziness to the whole thing — a sense that the film knows exactly how modest its ambitions are and leans into them with confidence. The humour comes from personality rather than contrivance, and Larry Adler’s harmonica score gives the story a jaunty rhythm that keeps everything moving. It’s civilised, good‑natured, and unmistakably British in the best sense: a comedy built not on chaos, but on the small, recognisable ways people try to outdo one another while pretending they aren’t keeping score.

8.00pm – Simon Sebag Montefiore Remembers: Rome, BBC Four

A revisit of the Eternal City and its endless historical echoes.

11.40pm – The Beast (2023), Film4

Bonello’s strange, ambitious meditation on love, fear and identity. It’s a film that refuses to sit still, slipping between eras and realities as if time were simply another mood to be rearranged. Léa Seydoux moves through these shifting worlds with a kind of haunted composure, as though she’s carrying memories that don’t quite belong to her; George MacKay, brittle and intense, mirrors her unease in ways that become increasingly unsettling.

Bonello isn’t interested in clarity. He’s chasing something more elusive — the way technology reshapes emotion, the way fear can echo across decades, the way identity can fracture without ever fully breaking. Some scenes feel dreamlike, others clinical, and the film’s tone changes with the same quiet confidence as its settings. It’s not designed to make life easy for the viewer, but that’s part of the appeal. The Beast lingers, not because it explains itself, but because it leaves you turning its ideas over long after the credits fade.

THURSDAY 20 AUGUST

8.00pm – Lion, National Geographic

Young lion Kio dreams of becoming king. Real drama without human embellishment.

9.00pm – Heat (1995), Film4 Michael Mann’s masterpiece. Pacino and De Niro in one of cinema’s great duels.

9.00pm – The French Connection (1971), BBC Four

Another chance to see Friedkin’s classic.

10.40pm – The Poughkeepsie Shuffle: Tracing The French Connection, BBC Four

Mark Kermode on the making of Friedkin’s classic — and few people are better suited to the job. Kermode has that rare combination of scholarship and enthusiasm: he can talk about camera placement, production politics and editing rhythms, yet still make you feel the thrill of seeing a great film for the first time. I rate him enormously as a critic; he’s one of the few who can explain why a film works without flattening its mystery.

Here he digs into the creation of The French Connection: the bruised, hard‑edged New York locations; the tension between documentary grit and operatic set‑pieces; the way Friedkin pushed his cast and crew to capture a city on the brink. Kermode traces the production with clarity and affection, showing how a film that looked chaotic on the surface was built with absolute precision underneath. It’s a smart, engaging piece — part history lesson, part love letter to a thriller that changed the temperature of American cinema.

11.35pm – The Graduate (1967), BBC Four

A second chance to see this classic film.

12.05am – Tár (2022), BBC Two

Blanchett is formidable as Lydia Tár — brilliant, intimidating, and increasingly undone by the pressures she’s spent years pretending she can rise above. The film moves with a slow, deliberate pulse, letting you sit inside her world: rehearsal rooms humming with tension, boardrooms thick with politics, and the quiet, private spaces where her certainty begins to crack. Blanchett doesn’t play the role so much as inhabit it, giving Tár a kind of electric stillness that makes every shift in mood feel seismic.

Field’s direction is cool and controlled, almost clinical at times, which only heightens the unease. The film isn’t interested in easy answers or tidy moral lessons; it’s more concerned with power — how it’s wielded, how it corrodes, and how quickly it can slip away. By the time the story reaches its final, strange movement, you realise you’ve watched a character study of rare precision. It’s demanding, unsettling, and quietly astonishing.

12.20am Chopper (2000), Film4

Eric Bana’s extraordinary performance as Mark “Chopper” Read — funny, frightening and impossible to look away from. The film doesn’t bother with the usual biopic structure; instead it drops you straight into Chopper’s world, where violence arrives without warning and self‑mythology is a full‑time occupation. Bana plays him with a kind of manic elasticity, switching from charm to menace in the space of a breath, as though even he isn’t sure which version of himself will surface next.

What makes the film work is its refusal to tidy anything up. Andrew Dominik shoots the story with a grimy, off‑kilter energy, letting the humour bleed into the horror and the horror bleed back into the humour. You’re never quite sure whether Chopper is telling the truth, exaggerating for effect, or inventing entire chapters of his life on the spot — and that ambiguity becomes the point. It’s a portrait of a man who understands that notoriety is a performance, and Bana delivers it with astonishing precision.

FRIDAY 21 AUGUST

3.25pm – River of No Return (1954), Film4

A pairing that shouldn’t work but absolutely does. Mitchum brings that unshakeable, laconic presence — a man who seems carved out of something tougher than the landscape around him — while Monroe offers a warmth and vulnerability that complicates every scene she’s in. Put together, they create a strange, compelling balance: his stillness against her radiance, his dry humour against her emotional openness.

Technicolor does the rest. The colours are lush, almost too vivid, giving the film a dreamlike sheen that sits just slightly at odds with the grit of the story. It’s one of those mid‑century Hollywood productions where the visuals feel almost indulgent, yet the performances keep everything grounded. Mitchum’s restraint and Monroe’s glow — two very different energies, meeting in a film that knows exactly how to showcase both.

8.00pm – Surgery Secrets of the Super Rich, Channel 4

Cosmetic transformation and the modern collision of wealth and dissatisfaction.

8.00pm – Miles Davis: A Celebration at the Proms, BBC Four

Musicians engaging with Davis’s endlessly influential body of work.

8.20pm – The Flu That Killed 50 Million, PBS America

A study of the 1918 influenza pandemic.

9.00pm – As Good as It Gets (1997), GREAT! TV

Nicholson and Hunt are excellent in a story of difficult human progress. Nicholson gives one of his sharpest late‑career performances: a man whose routines have hardened into armour, whose cruelty is often just fear in disguise. Helen Hunt counters him with warmth and a kind of exhausted resilience, refusing to let the film slip into sentimentality.

What makes it work is the rhythm of their interactions — prickly, funny, occasionally painful — and the way the film allows change to arrive in small, uneven steps rather than grand revelations. Greg Kinnear adds another layer of gentleness and hurt, reminding you that everyone in this story is carrying something heavy. It’s a comedy, yes, but one built on the slow, awkward business of becoming slightly better than you were yesterday. Not perfect, not transformed — just better. And sometimes that’s enough.

11.05pm – Silent Roar (2023), BBC Two

A Scottish coming‑of‑age drama set on the Isle of Lewis. It’s a film steeped in place — the sea, the sky, the long stretches of quiet that shape island life — and director Johnny Barrington uses that landscape not as decoration but as emotional terrain. The story follows a young man trying to make sense of grief, faith and desire, all while living in a community where silence often speaks louder than confession.

There’s humour in it, and strangeness, and a kind of off‑beat charm that feels distinctly Hebridean. The performances are gentle but sharp, capturing the awkwardness of adolescence without sanding down its intensity. What lingers is the mood: windswept, melancholy, occasionally surreal, and always rooted in the idea that growing up is less about revelation and more about learning to live with the things you can’t quite explain.

11.30pm – Monkey Man (2024), BBC One

Dev Patel’s furious, physical revenge thriller. Patel directs with the kind of intensity most actors never attempt, and then throws himself into the centre of the storm — bruised, relentless, and moving with a precision that feels almost ritualistic. The film’s world is neon‑lit and corrupt, a place where violence isn’t just spectacle but language, and Patel speaks it fluently.

What gives Monkey Man its charge is the blend of myth and grit: echoes of folklore running beneath bone‑crunching action, a sense that the character is fighting not just men but the systems that shaped them. The set‑pieces are tight, inventive, and shot with a confidence that marks Patel as a director to take seriously. It’s angry, stylish, and driven by a performance that refuses to soften its edges.

STREAMING

WEDNESDAY 19 AUGUST

Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing – Netflix Corporate accountability and the human consequences of aerospace failures.

THURSDAY 20 AUGUST

Novak Djokovic: The Wolf in Winter – Prime Video A portrait of Djokovic in the late phase of his career, where intelligence must compensate for time.

Permalink Leave a Comment

Chicago P.D.: The Grit, Heart, and Legacy of a Modern Police Drama

August 14, 2026 at 5:36 am · Filed under TV Shows ·Tagged Chicago PD, crime drama, Hank Voight, NBC, One Chicago, Police Drama, TV, TV reviews

When Chicago P.D. first hit screens in 2014, its tone was already carved from the granite of real‑world policing. Over the years, the show has grown into one of television’s most distinctive crime dramas — not because it shouts the loudest, but because it refuses to look away from the hard parts. Set within NBC’s sprawling One Chicago universe, the series follows the Intelligence Unit as they navigate the city’s most volatile cases. But the real draw isn’t the gunfire or the chase scenes; it’s the emotional weight behind every decision, every mistake, every victory.

More than a decade on, Chicago P.D. has built a fiercely loyal fan base — viewers who don’t just watch the show but invest in it, defend it, and dissect it. They come for the grit, but they stay for the humanity.

The Heart of the Show: Voight and His Unit

At the centre of Chicago P.D. stands the Intelligence Unit, a tight‑knit team led by Sergeant Hank Voight — one of television’s most complicated anti‑heroes. Voight is a man forged in trauma and loyalty, someone who believes in justice but doesn’t always trust the system designed to deliver it. He bends rules until they scream, breaks them when he thinks he must, and carries the consequences like a weight he’s long since accepted.

His leadership is messy, controversial, and often morally indefensible — but that’s precisely what gives the show its edge. Voight isn’t a symbol; he’s a man. And the series never lets you forget that.

Around him, the Intelligence Unit operates like a family that didn’t choose each other but learned to survive together. Jay Halstead’s steady moral compass, Hailey Upton’s fierce resilience, Adam Ruzek’s impulsive loyalty, Kim Burgess’s emotional strength, and Kevin Atwater’s quiet integrity all collide and complement each other. Their disagreements matter. Their trust matters even more.

The show thrives on these dynamics — the moments where the team fractures, the moments where it heals, and the moments where doing the right thing doesn’t look anything like justice.

A Gritty, Unvarnished Look at Policing

One of the reasons Chicago P.D. stands apart from other procedural dramas is its commitment to the uncomfortable truth. It doesn’t present policing as a neat moral equation. Instead, it leans into the grey areas — corruption, racial tension, gang violence, mental health, institutional pressure, and the fallout of split‑second decisions.

Episodes often feel ripped straight from the headlines, not in a sensational way but in a way that acknowledges the complexity of modern policing. Officers face internal investigations, public scrutiny, and the crushing weight of guilt. They make mistakes. They pay for them. They learn — sometimes slowly, sometimes painfully.

This realism is part of what keeps fans invested. The show doesn’t just entertain; it provokes. It asks questions about accountability, justice, and the human cost of wearing a badge.

Characters Who Grow, Break, and Rebuild

If Chicago P.D. has a secret weapon, it’s the long‑form character development that unfolds season after season. The show doesn’t rush its arcs; it lets characters evolve through trauma, relationships, and the relentless grind of the job.

Jay Halstead shifts from confident detective to thoughtful leader, shaped by military scars and emotional reckonings. Hailey Upton battles her past and her instincts, walking a tightrope between toughness and vulnerability. Kim Burgess becomes the emotional core of the series, enduring heartbreak, injury, and loss with a resilience that feels deeply human. Kevin Atwater carries the weight of racial realities within policing, delivering some of the show’s most powerful, socially resonant episodes. Adam Ruzek wrestles with loyalty, identity, and the consequences of acting before thinking — a struggle that makes him one of the show’s most unpredictable and compelling figures.

These characters resonate because they’re flawed. They stumble, they grow, and they face consequences. Fans don’t just watch them; they root for them, argue about them, and feel their losses like personal blows.

A Legacy Built on Realism and Humanity

After more than ten years, Chicago P.D. remains one of television’s most emotionally charged police dramas — a show that understands that justice is rarely clean, that people are rarely simple, and that the truth is often uncomfortable. Its legacy isn’t built on spectacle but on the humanity of its characters and the honesty of its storytelling.

It’s hard‑edged, . It’s raw. And it’s still one of the most compelling explorations of modern policing on television.

Reviewed by Chris Storton

Picture credit: By NBC – Screen grab, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41667053

Advert

Permalink Leave a Comment

Archive for TV Shows

Saturday 26 September

Sunday 27 September

Monday 28 September

Tuesday 29 September

Wednesday 30 September

Thursday 1 October

Friday 2 October

Streaming

Documentary: The Neo‑Nazi Who Lived a Secret Gay Life

Radio

Saturday 19 September

Sunday 20 September

Monday 21 September

Tuesday 22 September

Wednesday 23 September

Thursday 24 September

Friday 25 September

Streaming

Radio

Saturday 12 September

Sunday 13 September

Monday 14 September

Tuesday 15 September

Wednesday 16 September

Thursday 17 September

Friday 18 September

Streaming

Radio

A Homecoming That Shatters Everything

The Betrayal Ross Never Saw Coming

Francis: A Man Unravelling in Plain Sight

Elizabeth: The World Ross Lost

Demelza and the Courage to Stand Beside Him

The Mine That Makes Him Who He Is

The Night with Elizabeth: A Step Backward

Ross Finally Chooses Who He Wants to Be

Conclusion

Saturday 5 September

Sunday 6 September

Monday 7 September

Tuesday 8 September

Wednesday 9 September

Thursday 10 September

Friday 11 September

Radio

Monday 7 September

The Opening: A False Calm

The Case That Defines Him

Patrick Jane: The Broken Magician

The Ensemble: Friction and Balance

Craft and Direction

Themes That Haunt the Series

Why It Endures

Saturday 29 August

Sunday 30 August

Bank Holiday Monday 31 August

Tuesday 1 September

Wednesday 2 September

Thursday 3 September

Friday 4 September

Streaming

Netflix

Channel 4 Streaming / Walter Presents

Paramount+

Prime Video

Disney+

Radio

Sunday 30 August

7.15pm, BBC Radio 4 — Bouncing Off the Walls: A Prison Soundscape

Monday 31 August

6pm, Boom Rock — The Stiff Records Story

Tuesday 1 September

8.05am, 3.05pm and 10.05pm, BBC World Service — People Fixing the World

Wednesday 2 September

10am, 4pm and midnight, BBC Radio 4 Extra — Mercury

Friday 4 September

8.30pm, BBC World Service — CrowdScience

Saturday 22 August

Sunday 23 August

Patrick Jane: The Broken Magician