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The Mentalist, Season 1, Episode 5: “Redwood” Review – When Memory Becomes the Enemy

October 17, 2026 at 6:37 pm · Filed under Streaming, TV Shows ·Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

Warning Spoilers! This episode is particularly unsettling – a murder mystery in which the principal suspect cannot remember whether she committed the crime. Most detective dramas concern themselves with people who know the truth but are determined to conceal it. In “Redwood”, the fifth episode of the first season of The Mentalist, we are presented with something rather different. A young woman may hold the key to a murder investigation, but the truth appears to have disappeared from her own mind.

It is an intriguing premise, and one that allows the series to explore some interesting questions about memory, trauma, prejudice and the reliability of appearances. It also gives us another opportunity to understand Patrick Jane, a man whose remarkable ability to read other people is matched by his considerable difficulty in coming to terms with his own past.

Following the financial intrigue and calculated greed of the previous episode, “Ladies in Red”, we move into an altogether different setting. The wealthy homes and expensive possessions are replaced by the forests and isolated roads surrounding the small Californian community of Redwood Point. There is something almost Gothic about the location. The towering trees, remote buildings and enclosed spaces create an atmosphere in which danger seems to lurk just beyond the limits of visibility.

Two young women, Nicole Gilbert and Kara Palmer, have disappeared after leaving a party. Their abandoned car is discovered in woodland, and the California Bureau of Investigation is called in. Jane soon discovers Kara’s body beneath the vehicle. She has been stabbed to death. Nicole, meanwhile, is missing.

When Nicole eventually reappears, the circumstances could hardly be more incriminating. She is covered in blood, carrying a knife and behaving in a confused and distressed manner. Worse still, she cannot remember what happened.

For the local sheriff, the conclusion seems obvious. Nicole killed her friend and is either concealing the truth or conveniently unable to recall it.

Jane is far less certain.

This is where the episode becomes interesting, because it exposes the difference between conventional police thinking and Jane’s approach to investigation. The authorities see physical evidence pointing towards an obvious suspect. Jane looks at the suspect herself. Her behaviour, her fear, her reactions and, perhaps most importantly, the things she cannot explain.

He believes Nicole is innocent, not because he has discovered some overlooked forensic evidence, but because her distress appears genuine. Nicole’s conversations with Jane are among the episode’s most effective scenes because they reveal how uncertain she is about her own mind. She does not merely fear being accused of murder; she fears that the accusations might be true. Jane quickly recognises that distinction. Rather than treating her fragmented recollections as evidence, he treats them as signs of a trauma she cannot yet fully process. The tension comes from the possibility that both Nicole and the investigators may be drawing conclusions from memories neither fully understands.

Of course, this presents a problem. Genuine distress is not proof of innocence. Guilty people can be frightened, confused and remorseful. Jane’s confidence in his own judgement occasionally borders on arrogance, and the series is generally more entertaining when it allows us to recognise that uncomfortable truth.

Simon Baker is particularly effective in these quieter scenes. His Patrick Jane is often at his most amusing when exposing the pomposity of authority figures or effortlessly puncturing somebody’s elaborate deception. Here, however, we see another side of him.

He can be surprisingly gentle.

Jane recognises that Nicole is vulnerable and that simply treating her as a criminal will achieve very little. His attempts to recover her memories require a degree of sensitivity that we do not always associate with his character. Yet even here, his compassion is inseparable from his willingness to manipulate circumstances.

He is not above pushing people towards uncomfortable discoveries if he believes the result justifies it.

That raises one of the episode’s more interesting moral questions. How far should an investigator go in persuading a traumatised person to revisit an experience they may be psychologically unprepared to confront?

Jane believes that unlocking Nicole’s memory is essential to establishing the truth. Teresa Lisbon is understandably more cautious.

The relationship between Jane and Lisbon continues to develop nicely. Robin Tunney gives Lisbon an authority that feels entirely natural. She is neither an obstructive bureaucrat nor a conveniently gullible superior who exists merely to admire Jane’s brilliance. She recognises his extraordinary abilities, but she also knows that his methods can create serious difficulties.

Their exchanges provide some of the series’ most enjoyable moments because the tension between them is rooted in genuinely different approaches to justice.

Lisbon believes in procedures, evidence and responsibility. Jane believes in observation, intuition and the capacity to expose human weakness. Neither approach is sufficient on its own. Several moments in the investigation illustrate this contrast particularly well. Lisbon remains focused on evidence that could withstand scrutiny in court, while Jane is prepared to follow instincts that cannot easily be justified on paper. The episode never entirely endorses either position. Instead, it suggests that solving the case depends upon a balance between Lisbon’s caution and Jane’s willingness to question assumptions that everyone else has accepted.

In “Redwood”, their differences are particularly important because a young woman’s future depends upon getting things right.

There is also a question of social prejudice running through the investigation.

Nicole’s troubled family background and previous difficulties with the law make her an easy target for suspicion. The suspicion directed towards Nicole often seems to solidify before the evidence has been properly examined. Once she reappears covered in blood and unable to remember what happened, many characters treat the case as effectively solved. The episode’s criticism of that attitude is one of its strongest aspects, because the audience can see how quickly a person’s reputation can become more influential than the facts.

Kara, by contrast, comes from a more respectable and apparently stable home. There is an unspoken assumption that one young woman is more likely to have committed a violent crime than the other simply because of the circumstances of her upbringing.

It is hardly an unfamiliar phenomenon.

People are frequently judged not only by what they have done but by where they come from, the people they associate with and the reputation they have acquired. Once an individual has been labelled troublesome, subsequent events tend to be interpreted through that reputation.

The episode suggests that the investigation is in danger of becoming an exercise in confirming existing suspicions rather than examining all the possibilities.

Jane, for all his faults, is particularly good at recognising when people are seeing what they expect to see.

The apparent simplicity of Nicole and Kara’s friendship also begins to unravel. As the investigation progresses, we discover that the relationship was not quite as straightforward as it first appeared. Personal loyalties, romantic entanglements and betrayals complicate the picture.

This is familiar territory for crime drama, but it serves a useful purpose here. Young people can experience friendship and romantic disappointment with an intensity that adults sometimes dismiss. A betrayal that might seem relatively insignificant to an outsider can feel devastating to those involved.

Yet “Redwood” does not ultimately reduce its central crime to a straightforward tale of youthful jealousy. The personal tensions become part of a more disturbing story, one in which Nicole’s missing memories conceal a terrible experience.

The episode’s treatment of memory is perhaps its most fascinating feature, although it should be approached with a little scepticism.

Television dramas have long been attracted to the idea that the mind can protect itself from unbearable experiences by blocking access to traumatic memories. Such stories offer obvious dramatic possibilities. A forgotten event becomes a mystery within a mystery, waiting for the right sound, image or emotional stimulus to unlock it.

Here, Jane uses familiar surroundings and sensory associations to encourage Nicole to reconstruct the events of the night Kara was killed. These sequences are effective because they place the viewer in much the same position as Nicole herself. Each fragment of recollection appears to offer clarity only to raise further questions. Rather than relying solely on exposition, the episode allows the audience to experience some of the confusion and uncertainty created by memories that refuse to form a coherent narrative.

It makes for compelling television, but real memory is considerably less reliable than detective fiction sometimes suggests. Trauma can certainly disrupt memory, but recollection is not a perfect recording that can simply be replayed. Memory can be fragmented, altered and influenced by suggestion. Recovering an apparently forgotten experience does not necessarily guarantee its accuracy.

This is worth remembering because the methods employed by Jane, however successful within the fictional world of The Mentalist, would raise serious questions if used in a real criminal investigation.

There is a danger in confusing psychological insight with scientific certainty.

Nevertheless, the scenes in which Nicole struggles to remember are among the episode’s strongest. Shelby Fenner gives a convincing performance as a young woman caught between terror and uncertainty. Her character is not simply frightened of what somebody else may have done. She is frightened of what she herself might be capable of doing.

That is a particularly cruel position in which to find oneself.

The direction makes effective use of the woodland setting. The forests are beautiful, but they are also threatening. Their apparent tranquillity disguises the possibility of violence, and the isolation creates the uncomfortable feeling that help may be a very long way away.

John Behring keeps the story moving without allowing the atmospheric elements to overwhelm the investigation. The result is an episode that feels rather more ominous than some of its predecessors.

As the truth emerges, the narrative becomes more conventional, with the investigation leading towards a dangerous confrontation. Lisbon finds herself in considerable peril, providing a reminder that Jane’s cleverness does not remove the physical risks faced by the people around him.

Indeed, there is an interesting reversal here. Jane is usually the person who walks confidently into dangerous situations, apparently unconcerned by the consequences. In this case, Lisbon must confront the immediate threat while Jane contributes from a distance.

The sequence works because it gives Lisbon the opportunity to demonstrate that she is considerably more than Jane’s supervisor or occasional foil.

There is also something rather satisfying about seeing his psychological tricks applied in a situation where the stakes are genuinely high.

One criticism is that the eventual solution follows a familiar pattern. The episode is at its most original when examining Nicole’s uncertainty and the assumptions made about her guilt. Once the identity of the killer becomes clearer, some of that psychological complexity gives way to more conventional thriller mechanics.

The villain’s motivation is also less compelling than the circumstances surrounding the crime. We have become invested in Nicole’s psychological ordeal, and the explanation of the murder cannot quite match the disturbing possibilities raised by the opening.

But perhaps that is not the point.

What matters most is that the apparent murderer turns out to have been a victim, and that somebody whose background encouraged others to distrust her proves to have been judged unfairly.

There is a distinctly humane argument running beneath the entertainment. People are not necessarily what they appear to be, and those who are easiest to accuse are not always those who deserve suspicion.

It would be tempting to describe this episode as demonstrating Jane’s empathy, but that is only part of the story.

Jane is an interesting character precisely because his empathy is selective and complicated. He can show extraordinary understanding towards a frightened young woman while casually humiliating somebody he considers dishonest or foolish. He can recognise another person’s suffering yet remain remarkably insensitive to the discomfort caused by his own behaviour.

There is a contradiction at the heart of his personality.

His understanding of human emotions is both a gift and a weapon.

We also know that behind his apparently effortless confidence lies the terrible loss of his wife and daughter at the hands of Red John. Jane’s professional life is devoted to exposing other people’s secrets, but his own tragedy remains unresolved.

Perhaps this is why he responds so strongly to people who have suffered experiences beyond their control.

Helping Nicole recover some understanding of what happened cannot undo her ordeal, any more than Jane’s pursuit of criminals can restore his family. But it does offer a small opportunity to bring order to a world that has suddenly become terrifying and incomprehensible.

There is genuine poignancy in that.

“Redwood” is not a flawless episode. Its understanding of traumatic memory is more convenient for storytelling than entirely convincing as psychology, and the final resolution lacks some of the sophistication of its central premise.

Even so, it is among the more affecting early instalments of The Mentalist.

It demonstrates that the series is capable of more than ingenious revelations, amusing exchanges and the exposure of elaborate lies. It can also examine the consequences of violence for those left behind.

Most importantly, it gives Simon Baker the opportunity to broaden his portrayal of Patrick Jane. Beneath the showmanship, the mischievous smile and the sometimes insufferable certainty is a man who understands suffering rather better than he lets on.

We are beginning to see why Jane is such an appealing character. He is not necessarily a good man in the conventional sense. He is manipulative, frequently arrogant and perfectly willing to ignore rules he considers inconvenient.

Yet he has an instinctive sympathy for people who have been hurt, particularly when those in authority are too eager to condemn them.

That contradiction is central to the success of the series.

In “Redwood”, the most important mystery is not simply who killed Kara Palmer. It is whether Nicole Gilbert can trust her own mind, and whether those investigating the crime can look beyond the evidence that seems to condemn her.

The episode leaves us with a thought worth considering beyond the boundaries of detective fiction.

The truth is not always concealed by somebody telling lies. Sometimes it is obscured by fear, prejudice and the dangerous certainty of people who believe they already know the answer.

And Patrick Jane, of all people, understands the dangers of certainty.

An engaging, atmospheric and unexpectedly compassionate episode that deepens our understanding of Jane while asking some uncomfortable questions about guilt, memory and the ease with which suspicion becomes judgement.

By Chris Storton

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Culture Vulture: Best TV, Films and Streaming for 17–23 October 2026

October 16, 2026 at 4:27 pm · Filed under Culture Vulture, Film & DVD Reviews, Netflix, Radio, Streaming, TV Shows, Walter Presents ·Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

St Fagans National Museum of History , Cardiff ,Wales, UK 27 Oct 2024 : Visitor Message board to the Aberfan Disaster 1966

Sixty years ago, on the morning of 21 October 1966, disaster struck the Welsh mining village of Aberfan. A huge mass of coal waste, saturated by heavy rain, collapsed and surged down the mountainside, engulfing houses and Pantglas Junior School. By the time the rescue operations were over, 144 people had died, including 116 children.

It remains one of the most heartbreaking tragedies in modern British history. The children had barely begun their final day of school before the half-term holiday. Many never came home.

Yet what makes Aberfan particularly disturbing is that this was not simply an unavoidable natural disaster. The spoil tips above the village had been allowed to grow despite longstanding concerns about their stability. Watercourses beneath the waste made the location especially dangerous. The National Coal Board had failed in its responsibilities, and the subsequent tribunal exposed a catalogue of negligence.

The grief was compounded by what followed. Families who had suffered unimaginable losses found themselves confronting an establishment reluctant to accept responsibility and, at times, more concerned with protecting institutions than helping those they had failed. Even the question of removing the remaining dangerous tips became another battle.

This week’s television commemorations are particularly important. Aberfan: The Village That Fought Back (BBC Two, Monday, 9pm) examines the community’s fight for justice and the resistance it encountered. Meanwhile, Alex Jones: Un Diwrnod yn Aberfan (BBC iPlayer, from Sunday) offers another opportunity to remember the lives lost and the people left behind.

For me, Aberfan is also a story about class and power. It raises questions about whose warnings are heard, whose lives are valued and what happens when institutions become more concerned with defending themselves than acknowledging their mistakes. Those questions have certainly not disappeared in the intervening sixty years.

This is our principal recommendation of the week. These programmes deserve to be watched, discussed and remembered.

There are two other highlights I would particularly recommend.

The first is The Day the Earth Stood Still (Talking Pictures, Saturday, 4pm). This 1951 science-fiction classic is one of my favourite films. Its message about the dangers of militarism and humanity’s capacity for self-destruction is just as relevant now as it was during the early Cold War. There was a remake in 2008, which I actually rather like, but the original remains comfortably superior. Sometimes the simplest approach is also the most powerful.

Our third highlight is Thursday’s Mercury Prize: Album of the Year (BBC Four, 9.30pm). In an age dominated by streaming playlists and individual tracks, it might seem strange to celebrate the album as a distinct artistic achievement. Yet the album remains alive and well. It allows musicians to develop ideas, establish moods and tell stories in ways that individual songs often cannot. This year’s ceremony, featuring performances by some of the most interesting names in British music, promises to be more of a miniature festival than a conventional awards show.

Elsewhere, Stacey Dooley appears to be taking over the television schedules. Every time I look through the listings, there she is again. Fortunately, she’s very good at what she does, and her documentaries continue to investigate worthwhile and sometimes uncomfortable subjects.

We’re also particularly pleased to see another Storyville documentary. Regular readers will know how much we value this strand, which consistently introduces British audiences to films that might otherwise struggle to find a place on mainstream television.

Among the films, there’s everything from Hitchcock and Agnès Varda to Edgar Wright, a little political satire, some classic horror and several powerful examinations of injustice.

Plenty to enjoy, and plenty to think about.

Saturday 17 October

North by Northwest (1959) — BBC Two, 2.15pm

Alfred Hitchcock’s magnificent espionage thriller stars Cary Grant as Roger Thornhill, an advertising executive mistaken for a secret agent and pursued across America by people who want him dead.

The film combines mistaken identity, romantic intrigue and spectacular set pieces, including the famous crop-duster sequence and the climactic confrontation on Mount Rushmore.

Grant is perfectly cast as the sophisticated innocent whose comfortable existence is turned upside down. Eva Marie Saint provides an intriguing romantic foil, while James Mason is wonderfully sinister.

Hitchcock was a master of suspense, but what makes this film so enjoyable is its elegance and humour. More than sixty years later, it remains a model of popular filmmaking.

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) — Talking Pictures TV, 4pm

One of my favourite science-fiction films, and one whose message about peace seems especially appropriate for our troubled times.

Directed by Robert Wise, the story begins when a flying saucer lands in Washington and an extraterrestrial visitor, Klaatu, emerges accompanied by an imposing robot called Gort.

Klaatu has come with a warning. Humanity’s development of increasingly destructive weapons threatens not just Earth but potentially the wider universe. Unless human beings learn to control their aggression, consequences will follow.

Michael Rennie’s restrained performance gives Klaatu a quiet dignity. The film avoids the usual temptation to make aliens into monsters and instead invites us to look critically at ourselves.

Released during the Cold War, it reflects contemporary anxieties about nuclear annihilation, but its underlying concerns have lost none of their force.

The 2008 remake starring Keanu Reeves is quite good and shifts the emphasis towards environmental destruction. Nevertheless, the original is much better. It trusts its ideas, its dialogue and its audience. There are lessons here that humanity has still not fully learned.

Talking Pictures: World Cinema Classics — BBC Four, 9pm

Celia Imrie guides viewers through some of the great achievements of international cinema, considering filmmakers including Akira Kurosawa, Agnès Varda, François Truffaut, Luis Buñuel and Ingmar Bergman.

It’s an impressive collection of directors whose approaches differ considerably but who share a determination to explore what cinema can achieve.

Kurosawa brought extraordinary visual power and moral complexity to Japanese cinema. Varda helped pioneer the French New Wave with her distinctive, humane approach. Truffaut examined childhood, love and the cinema itself. Buñuel used surrealism to attack conventional morality, while Bergman explored faith, death, relationships and the human condition.

An excellent introduction for newcomers and a welcome opportunity for established film enthusiasts to revisit familiar favourites.

American Star (2024) — Film4, 9pm

Ian McShane stars as Wilson, an ageing assassin who travels to Fuerteventura to carry out what should be a straightforward assignment.

Instead, he finds himself drawn into the rhythms of island life and begins forming relationships with people who know nothing of his violent profession.

The film takes an unusually reflective approach to the hitman thriller. Rather than relying upon constant action, it examines loneliness, mortality and the possibility of finding something meaningful in an otherwise bleak existence.

McShane’s commanding screen presence makes him ideally suited to the role. A thoughtful variation on familiar territory.

The Everly Brothers: Harmonies from Heaven — Sky Arts, 9pm; NOW catch-up

Don and Phil Everly possessed one of the most beautiful vocal blends in popular music.

Their harmonies influenced everyone from the Beatles to Simon & Garfunkel, while songs such as Bye Bye Love, Wake Up Little Susie and All I Have to Do Is Dream helped establish the sound of modern popular music.

This documentary explores their musical achievements, family background and frequently troubled relationship.

There’s something poignant about the contrast between those immaculate harmonies and the personal tensions that eventually drove the brothers apart.

A reminder that music can create an impression of perfect unity even when the musicians themselves are struggling to maintain it.

Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962) — BBC Four, 9.45pm

Agnès Varda’s celebrated French New Wave drama follows a young singer wandering through Paris while awaiting the results of a medical examination.

Corinne Marchand plays Cléo, whose apparent confidence gradually gives way to fear and self-examination.

Varda uses the streets, cafés and everyday encounters of Paris to explore mortality, femininity and the experience of being watched and judged.

The film’s treatment of time is particularly interesting. What begins as an ordinary afternoon becomes an intense examination of what it means to be alive.

Beautifully observed, humane and surprisingly accessible, this remains one of the outstanding achievements of French cinema.

Death Race 2000 (1975) — Great Action, 11.25pm

Paul Bartel’s outrageous dystopian action film takes place in a future America where a murderous cross-country motor race has become a major spectator sport.

Drivers score points by killing pedestrians, and the public treats the carnage as entertainment.

David Carradine stars as the mysterious Frankenstein, with Sylvester Stallone among his competitors.

The film is often remembered for its ludicrous violence, bizarre characters and low-budget exploitation thrills. What sometimes gets overlooked is the political satire.

Beneath the deliberately excessive action lies a savage attack on authoritarianism, sensationalist media, celebrity culture and the manipulation of public opinion.

Its vision of a society entertained by cruelty is uncomfortably recognisable. Sometimes satire has to be outrageous to make its point.

Saint Maud (2019) — Film4, 1.15am, early Sunday

Rose Glass’s unsettling psychological horror stars Morfydd Clark as Maud, a young private carer whose intense religious convictions become increasingly dangerous.

Caring for Amanda, a terminally ill former dancer played by Jennifer Ehle, Maud convinces herself that she has a divine mission to save her patient’s soul.

What makes the film so effective is its refusal to offer straightforward explanations. Is Maud experiencing religious revelation, psychological disturbance or some frightening combination of the two?

Clark’s performance is extraordinary, capturing both vulnerability and fanaticism.

This is an intelligent examination of religious obsession, loneliness and the frightening consequences of absolute certainty.

Sunday 18 October

The Addams Family (1991) — ITV2, 4pm

The gloriously macabre Addams family return in Barry Sonnenfeld’s film adaptation of Charles Addams’s famous creations.

Anjelica Huston and Raul Julia are wonderfully cast as Morticia and Gomez, while Christina Ricci almost steals the picture as the magnificently deadpan Wednesday.

The joke, of course, is that this supposedly monstrous family is often more affectionate and loyal than the respectable people surrounding them.

The film revels in gothic imagery, eccentric humour and cheerful disregard for conventional values.

A thoroughly enjoyable comedy that has lost little of its appeal.

The Balkans: Europe’s Forgotten Frontier — BBC Two, 8pm

BBC Europe editor Katya Adler travels through Croatia, Bosnia and Albania, exploring how the region has changed since the violent break-up of Yugoslavia and the wider upheavals of the 1990s.

The wars that followed Yugoslavia’s disintegration left deep political, social and psychological scars. Old tensions have not simply disappeared, while questions of national identity and European integration remain contentious.

Adler is a knowledgeable guide to a region often neglected in British coverage of European affairs.

The Balkans have repeatedly played an important part in European history. Understanding their present requires an appreciation of the complicated past that continues to shape everyday life.

Kevin McCloud’s Classic Car Road Trips — Channel 4, 8pm (1/6)

Kevin McCloud combines an enthusiasm for design with a journey through the history and culture of some of Europe’s most celebrated cars.

His opening trip takes him along the French Riviera, travelling from Cannes towards Monaco in a beautiful 1960s Citroën DS convertible.

The DS was one of the most remarkable cars ever produced. When introduced in 1955, its futuristic appearance and advanced engineering seemed to belong to another age.

Its hydropneumatic suspension and elegant styling helped establish it as an icon of French design.

There are worse ways to spend an hour than travelling through the Riviera in such a magnificent machine, particularly with McCloud explaining the design philosophy behind it.

Living (2022) — Film4, 9pm

Bill Nighy gives one of his finest performances in this deeply moving drama about an emotionally reserved civil servant who discovers that he has a terminal illness.

Set in 1950s London, the film follows a man who has spent much of his life observing routine and convention but now begins questioning what that life has amounted to.

Adapted by Kazuo Ishiguro from Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru, the film explores mortality, bureaucracy and the possibility of meaningful action.

Nighy brings an extraordinary restraint to the central performance.

It’s a gentle, thoughtful and ultimately uplifting film about the importance of making our limited time count.

Time — BBC One, 9pm (series finale; full series on iPlayer)

We’ve deliberately avoided saying too much about this latest series because we’ve been saving it up for a proper binge-watch.

David Tennant stars as prison officer Bobby Bailey, and Tennant’s involvement is reason enough to attract our attention. He’s one of those actors who can make even a quiet moment compelling.

The prison setting also promises an opportunity to explore questions of institutional power, punishment, responsibility and human vulnerability.

Rather than concentrate on the finale alone, our recommendation is to watch the series from the beginning on BBC iPlayer.

Some dramas are best experienced as a complete work, allowing their characters and tensions to develop without interruption. This looks like one of them.

French Connection II (1975) — Talking Pictures TV, 10.10pm

Gene Hackman returns as the obsessive New York detective Jimmy ‘Popeye’ Doyle in John Frankenheimer’s sequel to William Friedkin’s celebrated crime thriller.

This time Doyle travels to Marseille in pursuit of the heroin trafficker Alain Charnier, played once again by Fernando Rey.

The change of location gives the sequel a distinctive character, while Hackman delivers another uncompromising performance.

It’s a darker, sometimes more psychologically disturbing film than its predecessor, particularly in its treatment of Doyle’s vulnerability.

A worthy sequel to one of the defining American crime films of the 1970s.

Priscilla (2023) — BBC Two, 10.45pm

Sofia Coppola approaches the Elvis Presley story from an unusual perspective, concentrating on the experiences of Priscilla Beaulieu, who met the singer when she was still a teenager.

Cailee Spaeny plays Priscilla, while Jacob Elordi portrays Elvis.

Rather than presenting another celebration of the King’s musical genius, Coppola examines the imbalance of power within the relationship.

The glamour of Graceland gradually gives way to isolation, control and frustration.

It’s an intimate film about a young woman discovering that life alongside one of the world’s most famous entertainers can be deeply restrictive.

Children of Men (2006) — BBC One, 11.40pm

Alfonso Cuarón’s extraordinary dystopian drama imagines a future in which humanity has become infertile and society is collapsing.

Clive Owen plays Theo, a disillusioned former activist drawn into a dangerous mission to protect a young refugee.

The film’s images of authoritarian government, desperate migration, social breakdown and institutional cruelty have acquired an unsettling contemporary relevance.

Cuarón’s direction is remarkable, particularly the extended action sequences that place viewers directly inside the chaos.

Yet beneath the violence lies a profoundly humane argument about compassion and hope.

One of the finest science-fiction films of the twenty-first century.

Ernest Cole: Lost and Found (2024) — Channel 4, midnight, early Monday

Raoul Peck’s documentary tells the story of Ernest Cole, the South African photographer whose images exposed the brutality of apartheid.

Cole documented the everyday humiliations, restrictions and injustices imposed upon Black South Africans by the racist state.

His work was both artistic achievement and political testimony. It made visible a system that depended partly upon controlling what outsiders could see.

His photographs contributed to his exile, and much of his later life was marked by hardship and displacement.

Peck uses Cole’s remarkable archive to explore racial oppression, memory and the terrible personal costs that can accompany the pursuit of truth.

An important documentary about a photographer whose work deserves to be much better known.

Monday 19 October

Aberfan: The Village That Fought Back — BBC Two, 9pm; repeated Tuesday, 11pm

Sixty years after the Aberfan disaster, this documentary examines the struggle that followed the deaths of 144 people, including 116 children.

For the families, the nightmare did not end when the rescue operation finished.

They faced official resistance, evasions and an extraordinary struggle to have the remaining dangerous coal tips removed from above their village.

The disaster tribunal placed responsibility upon the National Coal Board, but securing practical justice proved another matter.

Particularly shameful was the pressure placed upon the Aberfan Disaster Fund to contribute towards the removal of the remaining tips. Money donated in sympathy for bereaved families was treated as a potential source of funding for work that public authorities should have undertaken.

This is not simply a historical account of industrial negligence. It’s about the relationship between ordinary people and powerful institutions, and the lengths those institutions may go to in order to avoid accountability.

The villagers’ persistence deserves recognition alongside the suffering they endured.

Essential viewing, and our most important television recommendation of the week.

Selma (2014) — BBC Two, 11.05pm

Ava DuVernay’s absorbing historical drama examines the 1965 campaign for voting rights in Alabama, culminating in the famous marches from Selma to Montgomery.

David Oyelowo is outstanding as Dr Martin Luther King Jr, capturing both his charisma and the enormous pressures of leadership.

The film avoids presenting the civil rights movement as a simple procession of heroic speeches and inevitable victories.

Instead, it explores the difficult strategic decisions, internal disagreements, state violence and extraordinary courage involved in challenging segregation.

Its depiction of collective action is particularly powerful.

Progress did not arrive because powerful people suddenly became generous. It came because ordinary people organised, protested and refused to accept injustice.

Priyo Maloti (2024) — Channel 4, South Asian film season; time to be confirmed

This Bangladeshi drama, directed by Shankha Dasgupta, stars Mehazabien Chowdhury in her feature-film debut.

She plays Maloti, a young pregnant woman whose life is devastated when her husband dies in a catastrophic fire.

What follows is a struggle to survive financially and emotionally in circumstances where support cannot always be taken for granted.

The film examines grief, insecurity and the vulnerability of those suddenly left to confront hardship alone.

It’s a welcome selection from Channel 4’s South Asian film season, which provides an opportunity to discover cinema beyond the industries and countries that usually dominate British film schedules.

Tuesday 20 October

Hot Fuzz (2007) — Film4, 9pm

Edgar Wright’s wonderfully inventive action-comedy stars Simon Pegg as Nicholas Angel, a London police officer whose extraordinary efficiency embarrasses his colleagues.

Transferred to the apparently peaceful Gloucestershire village of Sandford, he discovers that beneath the picturesque surface something decidedly sinister is happening.

Nick Frost is excellent as his enthusiastic but less disciplined partner, Danny Butterman.

The film affectionately mocks the conventions of Hollywood action movies while delivering a wonderfully sharp satire of small-town respectability, authoritarianism and the desire to preserve appearances at any cost.

Its rapid editing, visual jokes and lovingly constructed action sequences reward repeated viewing.

One of the finest British comedies of its generation.

Stacey Dooley: Down the K-Hole — BBC Three, 9pm; BBC One, 10.40pm

Stacey Dooley at the National TV Awards 2019 at the O2 Arena, London.

Stacey Dooley investigates ketamine use and the growing concern surrounding the drug.

Originally developed as an anaesthetic and now also being researched and used in carefully controlled medical settings, ketamine has become increasingly prominent as a recreational substance.

Its effects can include dissociation and altered perception, while repeated heavy use can cause serious harm, particularly to the bladder and urinary system.

Dooley’s strength as a presenter is her willingness to speak to people without immediately passing judgement. That approach can be especially valuable when examining drug use, where moral condemnation often gets in the way of understanding.

An important subject deserving careful investigation.

Clickbait Clinic with Stacey Dooley: Can Blue Dye Make Me Smarter? — BBC One, 11.40pm

Stacey Dooley is certainly keeping herself busy.

Here she examines the growing enthusiasm for methylene blue, a substance with established medical uses that has also attracted attention for possible effects on brain function.

Some preliminary research has explored potential neurological applications, including areas relevant to Alzheimer’s disease, but that is a long way from demonstrating that healthy people can improve their intelligence by taking it.

The distinction between interesting scientific research and commercial exaggeration is crucial.

The programme should offer a useful examination of how tentative findings can become exaggerated promises in the world of online health trends.

Midnight Run (1988) — Film4, 11.25pm

Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin form one of cinema’s most enjoyable mismatched partnerships in this action-comedy directed by Martin Brest.

De Niro plays Jack Walsh, a bounty hunter tasked with bringing a former Mafia accountant across America.

Grodin plays the accountant, Jonathan Mardukas, whose apparently mild personality conceals a remarkable ability to frustrate his captor.

Their journey becomes increasingly chaotic as criminals, federal agents and competing bounty hunters join the pursuit.

The action is entertaining, but the real pleasure lies in the developing relationship between the two men.

A clever, funny film that knows exactly how to combine comedy with genuine character development.

Storyville: A Want in Her — BBC Four; time to be confirmed

Another documentary from the excellent Storyville strand, which has long been one of our favourites at Counter Culture.

This deeply personal film explores the complexities of caring for someone affected by mental illness and addiction.

Such relationships can involve extraordinary love and loyalty, but also exhaustion, resentment and an overwhelming sense of helplessness.

The challenge for documentary filmmaking is to acknowledge these difficult feelings without reducing the person experiencing illness or addiction to a problem that needs solving.

Storyville has built its reputation by presenting demanding subjects with intelligence, honesty and humanity.

Its documentaries regularly demonstrate why independent filmmaking remains so important.

Wednesday 21 October

Caligula’s Hidden Legacy — PBS America, 7.05pm (1/2)

The Roman emperor Caligula has entered popular imagination as the embodiment of cruelty, extravagance and madness.

But how much do we actually know about him?

Many of the surviving accounts were written by historians hostile to his rule, raising questions about the accuracy of the more sensational stories.

This documentary investigates the historical figure behind the notorious reputation.

Ancient Rome remains endlessly fascinating partly because its politics, ambitions and struggles for power can appear so familiar.

A useful opportunity to distinguish historical evidence from the legends accumulated over centuries.

The World’s End (2013) — Film4, 9pm

Edgar Wright reunites Simon Pegg and Nick Frost for the final instalment of the celebrated Cornetto trilogy.

Five former friends return to their hometown in an attempt to recreate a legendary pub crawl from their youth.

Their reunion is complicated by the behaviour of Gary King, played by Pegg, a man who has never properly accepted that his teenage years are over.

What begins as a comedy about ageing, friendship and nostalgia becomes something rather more extraordinary when the group discovers that the town has changed in unexpected ways.

The science-fiction elements are entertaining, but beneath them lies a surprisingly affecting exploration of disappointment and the difficulty of moving on.

Alongside Tuesday’s Hot Fuzz, this provides an enjoyable opportunity to revisit two very different Edgar Wright comedies.

The Experiment — Channel 4, 10pm

Matt Fraser and Sophie Morgan invite ordinary people to participate in a social experiment within a new care facility.

The programme examines attitudes, behaviour and the relationships that develop when people are placed in an unfamiliar institutional environment.

There’s an interesting parallel with Netflix’s new Stanford Prison Experiment, which also begins with participants placed into assigned roles within a controlled setting.

The situations are different, but both invite us to consider how surroundings, expectations and power structures can influence behaviour.

The crucial question is whether people simply adapt to the roles given to them or retain the ability to challenge the assumptions underlying those roles.

Alison Steadman Remembers The Singing Detective — BBC Four, 10pm

Alison Steadman looks back at Dennis Potter’s extraordinary 1986 television drama, one of the most ambitious works ever produced for British television.

Potter combined psychological investigation, musical fantasy, detective fiction and autobiography to create something genuinely original.

Michael Gambon played Philip Marlow, a writer hospitalised with a debilitating skin condition whose memories and imagination become increasingly entangled.

The drama remains a testament to an era when British television was willing to take enormous creative risks.

The Singing Detective: Lovely Days, Stroke Clues — BBC Four, 10.15pm

An opportunity to revisit Potter’s masterpiece immediately after Alison Steadman’s introduction.

The series moves between Marlow’s hospital experiences, childhood memories and the imaginary detective story he has created.

Popular songs become part of an elaborate psychological landscape, while apparently unrelated incidents gradually reveal deeper connections.

Potter’s work demands attention, but the rewards are considerable.

Few television writers have explored the relationship between memory, illness, guilt and imagination with comparable originality.

Night of the Demon (1957) — Talking Pictures TV, 9.10pm

Jacques Tourneur’s classic supernatural horror follows an American psychologist investigating a mysterious cult led by the sinister Dr Julian Karswell.

Dana Andrews plays the sceptical investigator, while Niall MacGinnis gives a wonderfully unsettling performance as Karswell.

Based on M. R. James’s Casting the Runes, the film creates an atmosphere of growing dread.

Much of its effectiveness comes from the tension between rational explanation and the possibility that supernatural forces really do exist.

There has long been debate about the decision to show the demon itself, rather than leaving everything to the viewer’s imagination.

Whatever one’s view, the film remains one of the finest examples of British supernatural cinema.

Stacey Dooley: Rape on Trial — BBC Three, 11pm (1/2) and 11.50pm (2/2)

Stacey Dooley follows women who have reported being raped by men they know, examining the difficult and often lengthy journey towards trial.

The first programme introduces the women’s experiences and the challenges involved in pursuing their cases.

The second considers the approach of the trials, particularly the way complainants’ credibility may be scrutinised during proceedings.

These are sensitive and difficult subjects. The criminal justice system must protect the rights of defendants while also ensuring that complainants are treated fairly and respectfully.

The programme raises important questions about evidence, credibility, trauma and confidence in the justice process.

Another demanding assignment for Dooley, whose documentary work continues to cover an impressive range of subjects.

Thursday 22 October

Mercury Prize: Album of the Year — BBC Four, 9.30pm

The Mercury Prize returns to Newcastle, celebrating outstanding albums by British and Irish musicians.

Lauren Laverne hosts an evening featuring live performances from Florence + The Machine, Nia Archives, Kojey Radical, Olivia Dean, RAYE, Suede, JADE, Dove Ellis, Knats and Pulp, with the latter representing the charity album HELP(2).

This year’s shortlist also includes Paul McCartney’s The Boys of Dungeon Lane, Olivia Dean’s The Art of Loving and RAYE’s THIS MUSIC MAY CONTAIN HOPE.

Last year’s winner was Sam Fender, another artist with strong connections to the North East.

There’s something pleasing about the continued importance of the album in a musical world increasingly dominated by individual tracks, algorithms and streaming playlists.

Albums allow musicians to develop themes and create a sustained artistic experience. They can be ambitious, personal, experimental and occasionally difficult. That’s part of their appeal.

The Mercury Prize has often helped introduce audiences to performers they might otherwise have overlooked, while recognising established musicians who continue to take risks.

With so many acts performing live, the event promises to be much more than an awards ceremony. It’s effectively a miniature festival celebrating the continuing vitality of contemporary music.

Sweat (2020) — Film4, 1.40am, early Friday

Directed by Magnus von Horn, this Polish-Swedish drama follows Sylwia, a successful fitness instructor and social media influencer.

She has hundreds of thousands of followers, a carefully constructed public image and apparently everything needed for a glamorous modern life.

Yet behind the motivational videos and polished appearances lies a woman experiencing profound loneliness.

Magdalena Koleśnik gives an absorbing performance as Sylwia, whose online confidence conceals insecurity and emotional vulnerability.

The film examines the strange contradictions of social media celebrity, where the appearance of intimacy can coexist with a lack of meaningful personal relationships.

It’s an intelligent and uncomfortable portrait of a world in which being constantly visible does not necessarily mean being understood.

Friday 23 October

Sicily: The Conquered Isle — PBS America, 7.10pm and 8.30pm

Two programmes explore the remarkable history of Sicily, an island whose strategic position in the Mediterranean has made it a crossroads of civilisations.

The first, Crossroads of the Mediterranean, examines its ancient past and the succession of peoples who fought to control it.

Greeks, Romans, Arabs and Normans all left their mark, creating a distinctive cultural inheritance visible in the island’s architecture, traditions and historical monuments.

The second programme, Borderlands, explores Sicily’s role in the nineteenth-century unification of Italy.

The island’s history demonstrates how geography can shape politics and culture over thousands of years.

For anyone interested in European history, this should be rewarding viewing.

Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (2016) — Great Action, 9pm

Ang Lee’s drama follows a young American soldier who returns temporarily from Iraq after an act of battlefield heroism makes him a national celebrity.

Joe Alwyn plays Billy Lynn, whose experiences of combat contrast sharply with the patriotic spectacle organised around him.

The film examines the way soldiers are transformed into symbols and used to promote reassuring narratives about war.

Behind the ceremonies, applause and carefully staged celebrations lies a young man struggling with memories of violence and the reality of returning to combat.

Its anti-war message emerges from the gulf between public mythology and personal experience.

An interesting and thoughtful film about the exploitation of military heroism.

Disco Night — BBC Four, from 9.45pm; BBC iPlayer

BBC Four devotes the evening to disco, a musical movement that transformed popular culture.

For some, disco still conjures up images of mirror balls, extravagant clothing and dance-floor anthems. Yet its history is considerably more interesting than those familiar images suggest.

Emerging from Black, Latino and gay communities, particularly in American cities, disco became an expression of freedom, identity and collective enjoyment.

It also changed how records were produced, mixed and experienced.

The influence of disco can be heard throughout contemporary dance music, electronic pop and club culture.

A welcome opportunity to celebrate music that has sometimes been dismissed by critics who underestimated both its artistry and its cultural importance.

The Blackening (2022) — BBC Two, 11.30pm

This comedy horror follows a group of Black friends gathering at a remote woodland cabin to celebrate Juneteenth.

For British viewers unfamiliar with the occasion, Juneteenth commemorates 19 June 1865, when enslaved African Americans in Texas learned that emancipation was being enforced following the American Civil War. It has since become a major celebration of freedom and Black American history.

The film takes familiar horror conventions and turns them into a sharp comedy about race, stereotypes and representation.

One of its central jokes concerns the old horror-film convention in which Black characters are frequently among the first victims.

By placing an entirely Black group of friends at the centre of the story, the filmmakers gleefully undermine that convention.

The result is a mixture of horror, comedy and cultural satire.

Disco: Soundtrack of a Revolution — BBC Four, 12.15am, early Saturday

This documentary series explores disco’s origins, cultural significance and lasting influence.

Far from being merely a commercial musical craze, disco provided an important outlet for marginalised communities and helped create new spaces for social and personal expression.

Its history also involves the commercial music industry’s attempts to profit from an underground culture, and the backlash that followed its enormous success.

The opposition to disco sometimes carried racial and homophobic undertones, making its history inseparable from wider social struggles.

A valuable companion to BBC Four’s evening of disco celebrations.

I Was a Teenage Sex Pistol — Sky Arts, 1am, early Saturday

The emergence of the Sex Pistols in the mid-1970s helped transform British popular music and youth culture.

Their brief but explosive career challenged the musical establishment, attacked social conventions and gave expression to the anger and frustration of a generation.

Punk was never simply about musical ability or even musical style. It was also an attitude, a rejection of established hierarchies and an assertion that young people could create their own culture.

This documentary revisits that extraordinary moment and the personalities at its centre.

The Public Image Is Rotten — Sky Arts, 2.50am, early Saturday

John Lydon’s career did not end when the Sex Pistols disintegrated.

With Public Image Ltd, he moved into far more experimental musical territory, combining elements of post-punk, dub, electronic music and avant-garde experimentation.

This documentary examines the band’s turbulent history and Lydon’s determination to resist easy categorisation.

There’s an interesting contrast with BBC Four’s disco celebrations. Disco and punk were often treated as opposing movements, yet both challenged musical conventions and created new cultural possibilities.

Lydon has remained an abrasive and unpredictable figure, but Public Image Ltd’s contribution to the development of post-punk deserves recognition.

A suitably unconventional conclusion to the week’s musical television.

Streaming

Netflix

Fading Grandeur — All six episodes available Friday 23 October

This Spanish comedy drama explores the tensions between appearance and reality, drawing upon the familiar attractions of family relationships, social embarrassment and personal ambition.

Spanish television has developed an impressive reputation for combining comedy and drama, often finding humour in situations that are far from comfortable.

A six-part series should provide enough room to develop its characters without unnecessarily stretching the story.

The New Stanford Prison Experiment — All six episodes available Wednesday 21 October

Does power corrupt?

That is the central question behind this new Netflix social experiment, which places thirty participants inside a real prison and randomly assigns them the roles of guards or prisoners.

The programme deliberately recalls the notorious Stanford Prison Experiment conducted in California in 1971.

Psychologist Philip Zimbardo and his colleagues recruited male college students and placed them in a simulated prison environment. Some were assigned the role of guards, others prisoners.

The study was supposed to last up to two weeks but was abandoned after just six days amid disturbing behaviour and psychological distress.

For many years, it was presented as evidence that ordinary people could rapidly become abusive when placed in positions of unchecked authority.

However, the original experiment has subsequently faced serious criticism. Researchers have questioned the way participants were instructed, the influence of expectations upon their behaviour and the validity of the conclusions drawn from the results.

The new Netflix programme uses a real prison setting, a mixed-gender group of participants and additional ethical safeguards.

It will be interesting to compare the findings with the original study, while remembering that this is also a television production intended to entertain.

Power certainly influences behaviour, but the relationship between authority, obedience and individual responsibility is more complicated than the old Stanford experiment sometimes suggested.

One of the week’s most intriguing streaming choices.

Judge John Deed — All 29 episodes available Saturday 17 October

Martin Shaw stars as Sir John Deed, a High Court judge whose determination to follow his conscience regularly brings him into conflict with the judicial establishment and political authorities.

Originally broadcast by the BBC between 2001 and 2007, the drama combines courtroom cases with political intrigue and personal complications.

Shaw brings considerable authority to the central role, making Deed an engaging if occasionally exasperating character.

The series is also interesting for its depiction of tensions between law, justice and institutional pressure.

Legal professionals may sometimes find themselves questioning the dramatic liberties taken with courtroom procedure, but the programme remains entertaining and frequently thought-provoking.

Channel 4 Streaming

Walter Presents: When the Night Comes — All six episodes available Friday 23 October

In an apparently idyllic seaside town, Stephanie wakes to the horrifying realisation that she has been raped in her own home.

The crime shatters her sense of security and exposes tensions beneath the community’s peaceful exterior.

The six-part drama explores the consequences of sexual violence, the search for truth and the difficulties faced by those attempting to rebuild their lives.

The Walter Presents collection continues to provide British viewers with access to international drama that might otherwise remain relatively unknown.

Its willingness to tackle demanding subjects has made it one of the most worthwhile streaming collections available.

Prime Video

The Last Viking — Available now

Anders Thomas Jensen directs this Danish black comedy starring Nikolaj Lie Kaas and Mads Mikkelsen.

Kaas plays Anker, a bank robber who entrusts stolen money to his brother Manfred before serving fifteen years in prison.

When Anker is finally released, he discovers that Manfred has developed serious psychiatric difficulties, believes himself to be John Lennon and no longer remembers where the money was hidden.

What follows is an increasingly bizarre attempt to recover the missing fortune.

Jensen has a gift for combining dark humour with damaged characters and unexpected emotional depth.

Mikkelsen is particularly well suited to this kind of material, bringing both intensity and comic unpredictability to his performances.

An unusual mixture of crime story, family drama and eccentric comedy.

BBC iPlayer

Smiley’s People — Available now

Sir Alec Guinness returns as George Smiley in this acclaimed BBC adaptation of John le Carré’s Cold War thriller, first broadcast in 1982.

Following the success of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the series once again immerses viewers in a world of espionage, deception, old loyalties and deeply compromised individuals.

Guinness’s performance is a masterclass in restraint. His Smiley is outwardly unremarkable, but beneath the quiet manner lies an extraordinary intelligence and a formidable capacity for investigation.

Unlike the glamorous spies of popular adventure fiction, le Carré’s characters inhabit a morally ambiguous world in which personal betrayal and political calculation are inseparable.

One of the finest achievements of British television drama, and a perfect companion to this week’s Radio 4 Extra adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

Alex Jones: Un Diwrnod yn Aberfan (One Day in Aberfan) — Available Sunday 18 October

This Welsh-language programme forms part of the commemorations marking sixty years since the Aberfan disaster.

On 21 October 1966, a collapsing colliery spoil tip engulfed Pantglas Junior School and surrounding houses, killing 144 people, including 116 children.

The tragedy remains a defining moment in the history of Welsh mining communities.

Commemorative programmes such as this are particularly important because they preserve personal memories and ensure that the experiences of those affected are not reduced to statistics.

The disaster also raises enduring questions about industrial responsibility, the treatment of working-class communities and the failure of powerful institutions to listen to warnings.

An essential companion to Monday’s BBC Two documentary, Aberfan: The Village That Fought Back.

Paramount+

Treasure Island — Episode 2 available Monday 19 October

The latest adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic adventure features David Oyelowo as Long John Silver.

The original novel remains one of the defining works of adventure fiction, introducing generations of readers to pirates, buried treasure, betrayal and the dangerous attraction of the high seas.

Long John Silver is the story’s great achievement: charismatic, resourceful, manipulative and morally ambiguous.

A successful adaptation needs to capture both his charm and the threat concealed beneath it.

Oyelowo is an interesting choice for the role, and the series offers an opportunity to introduce Stevenson’s enduring characters to another generation.

HBO Max

The Narco Hack — All three episodes available Friday 23 October

This three-part documentary tells the extraordinary story of Sky ECC, an encrypted messaging service that became popular among organised crime networks.

The attraction was simple. Subscribers believed that their communications were protected by encryption powerful enough to prevent the authorities from reading their messages.

For criminal organisations, that apparent security made it possible to conduct business with a confidence that would otherwise have been impossible.

In 2021, however, investigators led by French authorities succeeded in compromising the system, exposing communications that provided unprecedented insights into criminal networks.

The documentary examines the technological operation and its consequences.

It’s a fascinating illustration of the increasingly sophisticated struggle between organised crime and law enforcement, as well as the wider questions raised by encrypted communications, privacy and surveillance.

Radio

Sunday 18 October

Childline — BBC Radio 4, 1.30pm

Forty years after Esther Rantzen launched Childline in 1986, this programme examines the organisation’s remarkable history.

Childline was founded upon a simple but enormously important principle: children experiencing abuse, distress or fear needed somewhere they could turn for confidential support.

In the decades that followed, the service helped countless young people who might otherwise have remained unheard.

The programme has acquired additional poignancy following Rantzen’s death in September.

She was an influential broadcaster, but her work establishing Childline may prove to be her most enduring achievement.

It’s a reminder that the value of a public life is not simply measured by celebrity or professional success, but by the practical difference someone makes to others.

A fitting tribute to an important legacy.

The Mysterious Case of Annie Elizabeth — BBC Radio 4, 7.15pm

For history enthusiasts, this intriguing programme investigates the story behind Annie Elizabeth, a variety of apple with an unusually personal name.

Who was Annie Elizabeth, and why did an apple come to bear her name?

It’s the kind of apparently obscure historical question that can lead to unexpected discoveries about the people and communities of the past.

There is something rather appealing about the way ordinary objects can preserve human stories long after the people involved have disappeared.

A gentle but potentially fascinating piece of historical detective work.

Monday 19 October

Book of the Week: Stalin’s Apostles — BBC Radio 4, 11.45am; late repeat 12.30am

An adaptation of Antonia Senior’s book about the Cambridge Five spy ring.

Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross became Soviet agents despite occupying positions of considerable privilege within British society.

Their activities exposed the vulnerability of an establishment that relied heavily upon personal connections, class background and assumptions about loyalty.

The story remains fascinating because it involves conflicting allegiances, ideological conviction, personal ambition and extraordinary betrayal.

It also provides an interesting historical companion to our television and streaming selections featuring John le Carré’s fictional world of espionage.

How Houdini Made Magic with Derren Brown — BBC Radio 4, Monday to Friday, 1.45pm

Derren Brown examines the life and extraordinary achievements of Harry Houdini, one of the most celebrated entertainers of the twentieth century.

Houdini became famous for his astonishing escapes from handcuffs, locked containers and seemingly impossible situations.

Yet his achievements were not simply physical feats. They also relied upon psychology, showmanship, misdirection and an understanding of audience expectations.

Perhaps most interestingly, Houdini later became a determined critic of fraudulent spiritualists, exposing techniques used to convince grieving people that mediums could communicate with the dead.

Brown is an ideal guide, possessing both practical knowledge of illusion and a fascination with the psychology of belief.

A promising series about entertainment, deception and the boundary between what we see and what we think we see.

The Essay: John Foxx — Key Moments — BBC Radio 3, 9.45pm

John Foxx, the original frontman of Ultravox, reflects upon five pianos that have played important roles in his life.

Foxx was a significant figure in the emergence of British electronic music, helping establish the foundations of what later became known as synth-pop and new wave.

After leaving Ultravox, he developed a distinctive solo career, combining electronic experimentation with atmospheric, often introspective songwriting.

His reflections upon the piano offer an interesting contrast with his reputation as an electronic music pioneer.

The relationship between traditional musical instruments and modern technology has always been more complicated than the familiar opposition between acoustic and electronic music suggests.

For those interested in the development of modern British popular music, this should be particularly rewarding.

Tuesday 20 October

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy — BBC Radio 4 Extra, 6am, 11am and 5pm

A radio adaptation of John le Carré’s 1974 Cold War thriller.

George Smiley is drawn out of retirement to investigate the possibility that a Soviet mole has infiltrated the highest levels of British intelligence.

The story is a masterpiece of deception, suspicion and psychological investigation.

Its world is far removed from the glamorous adventures of James Bond. Le Carré’s spies are frequently tired, disappointed and morally compromised individuals operating within bureaucratic institutions.

This adaptation was originally broadcast in 1988, nine years after the celebrated BBC television version starring Alec Guinness.

With Smiley’s People also available on BBC iPlayer this week, there is an opportunity to explore two of le Carré’s finest stories in different formats.

His novels remain among the most intelligent examinations of espionage, loyalty and betrayal ever written for a popular audience.

Final Thoughts

There is a particularly strong historical and political thread running through this week’s choices.

Aberfan reminds us of the terrible consequences of institutional negligence and the determination of ordinary people to secure justice. Selma examines the struggle for civil rights, while Ernest Cole: Lost and Found demonstrates the power of photography to expose oppression.

The Day the Earth Stood Still and Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk approach the subjects of war and peace from very different directions. Both invite us to question the comforting narratives that societies construct around violence.

Meanwhile, The New Stanford Prison Experiment and Channel 4’s The Experiment ask questions about power, authority and human behaviour.

Music is particularly well served, from the harmonies of the Everly Brothers to the experimental work of John Foxx, the Mercury Prize, disco and punk.

And there’s plenty of room for entertainment that makes fewer demands: Hitchcock’s magnificent North by Northwest, Edgar Wright’s comedies and the eccentric delights of The Addams Family.

That’s what makes a good week’s viewing. There should be opportunities to learn, to think, to be challenged and, occasionally, simply to enjoy ourselves.

Enjoy the week.

Selections and reviews by Pat Harrington

 

 

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Culture Vulture: 10–16 October 2026

October 9, 2026 at 11:06 am · Filed under Culture Vulture, Film & DVD Reviews, TV Shows ·Tagged , , , ,

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The Mentalist, Season 1 Episode 3: Red Tide Review

October 7, 2026 at 7:06 am · Filed under Streaming, TV Shows ·Tagged , , , , , , ,

Spoilers!

One of the smartest decisions The Mentalist makes early in its run is refusing to treat murder as a puzzle alone.

Many procedural dramas are ultimately interested in mechanics. A body appears. Clues are collected. Suspects are interviewed. A culprit is identified. Case closed.

Red Tide, the third episode of the series, understands that crime rarely begins with logic. More often, it begins with emotion.

Fear. Jealousy. Loneliness. Anger. The desperate need to belong.

Set against the sun-drenched backdrop of California’s surfing culture, Red Tide exchanges the vineyards and small-town politics of the previous episode for a world of teenagers, secrets and shifting loyalties. It is a quieter hour than the pilot or Red Hair and Silver Tape, lacking a larger-than-life antagonist or dramatic set pieces, but it compensates with atmosphere and emotional intelligence.

The result is one of the first episodes that reveals the real strength of The Mentalist: its understanding of people.

The case begins when the body of a teenage girl named Kelly is discovered washed up on a beach. The tragedy sends shockwaves through her close-knit surfing community, yet the response from her friends immediately feels unusual. There is grief, certainly, but also hesitation. Conversations end abruptly. Eyes shift nervously. Information is withheld.

Patrick Jane notices it immediately.

As always, Simon Baker makes observation feel more interesting than action. Jane arrives at a scene and sees patterns not in physical evidence but in behaviour. While others search for fingerprints and motives, he studies reactions. His attention drifts not to what people are saying but to what they are desperately trying not to say.

This approach is particularly effective among teenagers.

Adults, when they lie, often have a strategy. Teenagers rarely do.

Their lies emerge from panic. Embarrassment. Loyalty to friends. Fear of authority. Fear of exclusion.

Red Tide understands this distinction and builds its investigation around it.

Rather than treating the young suspects like criminals, Jane treats them like confused adolescents caught in circumstances beyond their control. It is one of the earliest examples of the show’s empathy, and one of the reasons Patrick Jane remains such an engaging character.

He never talks down to them.

He doesn’t try desperately to appear younger than he is. He doesn’t force trust. He simply listens.

There’s a natural ease to the way Jane moves through the surfing community. He sits with the teenagers, asks seemingly casual questions and quietly observes the social currents moving beneath every interaction.

Soon, a familiar pattern emerges.

There are leaders and followers.

There are insiders and outsiders.

There are those who are confident and those terrified of losing their place within the group. Like a detective mapping a crime scene, Jane maps relationships. The episode becomes less about solving a murder and more about understanding a community.

That community is beautifully realised. The surfers could easily have become stereotypes, but the writing gives them just enough depth to feel authentic. They are impulsive and emotional, but also vulnerable. Their friendships feel real. Their fears feel real. Even their silences reveal something important.

The beach setting helps enormously.

The California coastline has often been romanticised in film and television as a place of freedom, youth and possibility. Red Tide cleverly uses that imagery while revealing the tension lurking underneath. Beneath the open skies and crashing waves is a network of secrets held together by fragile trust.

The atmosphere is one of the episode’s greatest achievements.

There is a melancholy quality running through the story. The sea seems less a symbol of freedom than a reminder of uncertainty. Relationships drift. Reputations shift. Certainties disappear.

For a series best known for its wit, Red Tide is surprisingly thoughtful.

The episode also benefits from its portrayal of parents.

While the teenagers hide their fears from authority, the adults struggle with a different problem altogether: understanding the lives their children lead when nobody is watching.

Some parents are protective. Others appear distracted. Some are simply overwhelmed.

What unites them is a sense of helplessness.

The adults believe they know their children. The investigation gradually reveals how incomplete that understanding really is.

This tension between parents and children becomes one of the episode’s central themes. The emotional intensity of teenage life is frequently underestimated by adults. Relationships that seem trivial from the outside can feel all-consuming to the people experiencing them.

Jane recognises this.

Where others dismiss youthful feelings as melodrama, he treats them seriously.

That empathy becomes his greatest investigative tool.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Red Tide is how gentle Jane’s methods are compared with previous episodes. There are fewer elaborate psychological traps and fewer moments of public humiliation for suspects. Instead, he works quietly, creating opportunities for people to tell the truth.

A conversation on a beach.

A carefully timed question.

A moment of silence that encourages somebody to keep talking.

Jane understands that frightened people often reveal more when they feel safe than when they feel pressured.

It’s a subtle distinction, but an important one.

The episode effectively demonstrates that Patrick Jane’s gift is not manipulation alone. It is understanding.

Robin Tunney’s Teresa Lisbon continues to develop impressively alongside him.

In many episodes, Lisbon serves as the practical counterbalance to Jane’s instincts, but Red Tide highlights another side of her personality. She is deeply protective, particularly when dealing with young people. Her priority is not simply closing the case but ensuring vulnerable teenagers are treated fairly throughout the investigation.

Tunney brings warmth to moments that could easily feel procedural.

Lisbon recognises the emotional damage surrounding the case and responds with a level of compassion that distinguishes her from many television detectives. Her willingness to trust Jane’s methods while maintaining clear boundaries continues to define one of television’s most enjoyable partnerships.

There is still friction between them.

There always will be.

Yet every episode strengthens the sense that they need one another. Jane supplies insight. Lisbon provides structure. Together they create a balance neither could achieve alone.

The eventual solution to the murder avoids sensationalism, which feels entirely appropriate.

This is not the story of a criminal mastermind or a calculated predator. Instead, it is a tragedy born from emotional instability, poor decisions and consequences that spiral beyond anyone’s control.

The revelation lands not because it is shocking but because it is sad.

That sadness lingers.

It reminds us that many crimes emerge not from evil but from ordinary human weakness.

By the time the credits roll, Red Tide has accomplished something deceptively difficult. It delivers a compelling mystery while deepening our understanding of Patrick Jane, Teresa Lisbon and the emotional foundations of the series itself.

The episode may not be among the most famous entries in The Mentalist’s seven-season run, but it remains one of its most quietly effective.

Atmospheric, compassionate and psychologically astute, Red Tide demonstrates that the series is at its best when it looks beyond the crime and focuses on the people left in its wake.

Sometimes solving a murder is the easy part.

Understanding why it happened is where the real story begins.

Reviewed by Chris Storton

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The Mentalist, Season 1 Episode 2: Red Hair and Silver Tape Review

October 5, 2026 at 8:23 am · Filed under Streaming, TV Shows ·Tagged , , , , , , ,

Spoliers!

There is always a moment when a television series stops introducing itself and starts showing you what it can do.

For The Mentalist, that moment arrives surprisingly early. The pilot episode had the difficult task of establishing Patrick Jane’s tragic history, introducing the California Bureau of Investigation, and planting the shadow of Red John over everything that followed. Red Hair and Silver Tape, however, serves a different purpose. Rather than relying on personal trauma or overarching mythology, it asks a simple question: can The Mentalist deliver a compelling murder mystery every week?

The answer is an emphatic yes.

The episode opens in California wine country, where the body of a young waitress named Kimberly has been discovered among the vineyards. On the surface, the case appears straightforward. A young woman, a boyfriend with motives for jealousy, and circumstances suggesting a romantic encounter that ended in violence. Local Sheriff Hardy is more than ready to close the book before it has truly been opened.

Patrick Jane, naturally, sees things differently.

What immediately becomes apparent is how much the series depends on Simon Baker’s performance. Jane is not a detective in any traditional sense. He gathers information not through forensic detail or procedural expertise but through observation. He studies people. He listens. He notices what others dismiss as irrelevant.

A glance that lasts too long.

A smile that arrives a fraction too late.

A story that sounds correct but somehow feels wrong.

Where most crime dramas begin with evidence, Jane begins with behaviour.

That distinction gives The Mentalist its unique identity.

The beauty of Red Hair and Silver Tape lies in its restraint. Modern crime dramas often feel compelled to raise the stakes with serial killers, conspiracies, or increasingly elaborate crimes. This episode remains refreshingly grounded. There is no grand villain lurking in the shadows and no world-changing revelation waiting around the corner. Instead, the mystery unfolds through ordinary human flaws: jealousy, deception, fear, insecurity, and selfishness.

The result is a story that feels more believable than many of its contemporaries.

A large part of the episode’s success comes from the ongoing friction between Jane and Sheriff Hardy. Hardy represents conventional law enforcement thinking. He values certainty, authority, and clear conclusions. Once he decides on a suspect, every piece of evidence is viewed through that lens.

Jane operates in exactly the opposite way.

He is suspicious of certainty. He questions assumptions. Most importantly, he refuses to let authority dictate truth.

Their conflict generates much of the episode’s humour. Hardy views Jane as an irritating outsider who undermines his investigation. Jane treats Hardy’s confidence with barely concealed amusement. Yet beneath the banter sits a larger theme running throughout the hour: the danger of believing what you want to believe.

Hardy’s greatest weakness is not incompetence.

It is pride.

Again and again, the episode demonstrates how ego can blind people to reality. By contrast, Jane’s strength comes from his willingness to admit that first impressions are often wrong.

That theme extends beyond Hardy and into the wider investigation.

As the team interviews suspects and witnesses, layers begin to peel away from Kimberly’s life. Friends hide details. Colleagues conceal uncomfortable truths. Romantic relationships prove more complicated than they first appear. Nobody is entirely honest, but neither is everybody malicious. The episode understands an important truth about human behaviour: people lie for many reasons.

Sometimes they lie to protect themselves.

Sometimes they lie to avoid embarrassment.

Sometimes they lie because the truth is simply too painful.

Jane navigates these deceptions with remarkable ease, not because he possesses supernatural abilities, but because he understands human nature better than most people understand themselves.

One of the show’s recurring pleasures is watching him construct psychological traps. Unlike detectives who corner suspects with evidence boards and interrogation rooms, Jane creates situations that encourage people to reveal themselves voluntarily. The guilty often expose themselves because they cannot resist reacting.

Simon Baker plays these moments beautifully. There is an effortless charm to Jane’s manipulations that makes them entertaining rather than sinister. He remains a difficult character to classify. At times he is a detective. At others he resembles a stage magician, a therapist, a conman, or an actor performing a role.

Often, he is all four simultaneously.

The episode also gives Grace Van Pelt one of her earliest opportunities to step forward.

Amanda Righetti’s character is still finding her place within the team, but Red Hair and Silver Tape establishes qualities that will become increasingly important throughout the season. When Jane proposes using her as bait to draw out the killer, the plan creates genuine tension. It is a risky strategy, and Lisbon is understandably uncomfortable with it.

Yet Van Pelt agrees.

The decision reveals courage, commitment, and confidence beneath her relatively inexperienced exterior. More importantly, it begins to establish trust between Van Pelt and Jane. She may not fully understand his methods, but she is beginning to appreciate the results.

The sequence itself is handled with impressive restraint. Rather than relying on action-movie theatrics, the tension emerges from uncertainty. The audience understands the danger lurking beneath the surface, making every moment feel slightly unpredictable.

Meanwhile, Robin Tunney continues to quietly define Teresa Lisbon.

If Baker is the show’s engine, Tunney is its stabilising force.

Lisbon occupies an unenviable position. She must manage Jane’s increasingly unconventional methods while maintaining professional credibility and ensuring the safety of her team. It would be easy for the character to become little more than an exasperated supervisor rolling her eyes at Jane’s antics, but the writing gives her greater depth than that.

What emerges is a leader capable of recognising brilliance while remaining aware of its consequences.

Her growing partnership with Jane remains one of the strongest aspects of the series. There is already an unmistakable chemistry between them, built not on romance but on mutual respect. Jane frustrates her endlessly. Lisbon questions his judgement. Yet she trusts him more than she would ever openly admit.

That relationship forms the emotional spine of the show.

What makes Red Hair and Silver Tape particularly significant is that it demonstrates how effectively The Mentalist can function without leaning on Red John. The series mythology adds depth and long-term intrigue, but this episode proves that the weekly mysteries are strong enough to stand on their own.

By the closing scenes, it is clear that the show has found its rhythm.

The mystery is clever without becoming convoluted. The characters continue to grow. The humour lands naturally. Most importantly, Patrick Jane remains endlessly fascinating to watch. Every investigation becomes less about discovering who committed the crime and more about seeing how Jane will uncover the truth.

That distinction elevates The Mentalist above many of its procedural contemporaries.

Red Hair and Silver Tape may not be the most famous episode of the series, but it is arguably one of the most important. It establishes the formula that would sustain the show for years while demonstrating why audiences were drawn to Patrick Jane in the first place.

Sharp, engaging and quietly intelligent, it confirms that the pilot was no fluke.

The game, as Jane might say, is officially underway.

Reviewed by Chris Storton

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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 , , , , , ,

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

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Culture Vulture: 19–25 September 2026

September 19, 2026 at 8:49 am · Filed under Culture Vulture, Film & DVD Reviews, Radio, TV Shows ·Tagged , , , , ,

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Culture Vulture 12–18 September 2026

September 11, 2026 at 11:23 am · Filed under BBC, Music, Netflix, Streaming, TV Shows, Walter Presents ·Tagged , , , , ,

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

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Betrayal, Class and the Making of Ross Poldark


	

	September 8, 2026 at 10:31 am	· Filed under BBC, Books, TV Shows	 ·Tagged , , , , , , , , , , 		


	

			






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






 









				


	

	
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Culture Vulture 5–11 September 2026


	

	September 5, 2026 at 8:17 am	· Filed under Culture Vulture, TV Shows	 ·Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , 		


	

			





				


	

	
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