Actor, who played campaigner Alan Bates in TV drama, calls Horizon scandal a ‘Hitchcockian nightmare’ at Hay festival
The post office operators prosecuted in the Post Office Horizon scandal have “extraordinary dignity” after living 20 years in a “Hitchcockian nightmare”, according to actor Toby Jones.
Jones played Alan Bates, a former post office operator and leading campaigner for justice for staff wrongly blamed for accounting shortfalls caused by faulty software, in the ITV drama that put the scandal back in the spotlight.
Russell T Davies channels Black Mirror in a story of AI, shallow social media, and posh white supremacy. But, naturally, with added slug monsters
“Oh my hopscotch!”, as Lindy Pepper-Bean might say. The on-screen lead for much of this episode, Callie Cooke, is surely one of the most dislikeable human characters Doctor Who has ever produced. She is vain, shallow, self-absorbed and manipulative, and not afraid to cause her idol, Ricky September (Tom Rhys Harries), to die, and then lie about it. Regardless of the presence of the slug monsters, she is undoubtedly the villain of the piece.
It was strikingly stylised, and unusual to see an episode of Doctor Who mostly colour-graded to be pastel pinks and blues until the final subterranean act. The obvious target was the vacuousness of much of social media, but writer Russell T Davies struck out at wider themes, including the idea that AI might come to hate humans, and the arrogant privilege that comes with being, as Ruby Sunday put it, the “rich kids”. The inhabitants of Finetime had been sent off to a posh offworld boarding school and apprentice scheme for the wealthy and conventionally attractive, where they mostly partied. “Some of us get eaten” was both factually true for the story, and a bleakly observant pun for the viewer. Some people do get Eton.
After massive TV success in the US, the creator of Gavin & Stacey is about to appear on the London stage. But why do British audiences find him so hard to love?
James Corden is back in the UK and characteristically busy. Last year, the 45-year-old left his job as Los Angeles-based chat show host of The Late Late Show on CBS. A Christmas special is planned for Gavin & Stacey, the acclaimed BBC sitcom he created with co-star Ruth Jones. There’s talk of reviving One Man, Two Guvnors, the National Theatre’s critically lauded hit comedy that transferred to Broadway, winning Corden a Tony award in 2012.
And later this month, Corden will appear at London’s Old Vic in a short run of Joe Penhall’s new play, The Constituent, helmed by the theatre’s artistic director, Matthew Warchus. Corden’s first stage role since One Man, Two Guvnors, it’s seen as something of a departure (a gamble) for Corden – a serious work about the escalating risks of public service in politics.
Actor, daughter of Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman, says she rejected path of ‘changing name and getting nose job’
The Stranger Things star Maya Hawke has said she is “comfortable with not deserving” the kind of life she has.
The American actor and singer, the daughter of Hollywood actors Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman, said her relationship with them was “positive”, which “supersedes anything anyone can say about it”.
The Most Haunted presenter on how Biddy Baxter, the tough children’s show producer, made her look after Bonnie the dog – but in doing so gave her a backbone
Born in Stockport in 1968, Yvette Fielding is a TV presenter and actor. Her career began on children’s comedy drama Seaview, before she was headhunted for Blue Peter, becoming the show’s youngest ever presenter at 18. With husband Karl Beattie, she founded Antix Productions, and created Most Haunted, a paranormal investigations show sold to more than 90 territories globally. An author of YA books and novels, her memoir, Scream Queen, is out now.
This was taken by the wardrobe lady on Seaview. My character, Sandy Shelton, was involved in a demonstration to save the seals on Blackpool beach, which explains the badges and sash. It was a very sunny day and I was having a little breather, looking at the donkeys in the distance. I would have been 13 at the time. With a perm.
This excruciatingly revealing reality show is so extreme it’s hard to believe that what you’re watching is the truth – and maybe you’re not
Hard to trust a standup comedian, isn’t it? Part of the job – the main part, really – is trying to convince people that you’re delivering your material spontaneously. Forget how meticulously scripted it is. Forget that it has been carefully crafted over a period of several months, and that it will be delivered word for word, night after night, for more months to come. An audience needs to think that you’re coming up with it in the moment or it’s over.
And very few standups are as skilled at this as Jerrod Carmichael. Always an eloquent and thoughtful performer, his 2022 special Rothaniel managed to change the way we talk about the entire form. In it, Carmichael came out as gay, and worried about how his mother would receive the news. Filmed in tight closeup, his routine appeared to dissolve completely as it went along. Vast, yawning pauses opened up between his words. A few members of the audience started offering encouragement to him, initiating a discussion that carried it along to its death.
George MacKay and Léa Seydoux star in a epoch-traversing sci-fi romance, while the latest Star Wars spin-off has a mystery-thriller twist
The Beast Out now
Léa Seydoux (Blue Is the Warmest Colour) and George MacKay (Femme) star as the couple at the heart of this arthouse sci-fi epic, loosely based on Henry James’s 1903 novella The Beast in the Jungle and spanning three time periods, from director Bertrand Bonello (House of Tolerance).
The latest spin-off features the return of Rick and lover Michonne – as well as some very overwrought plots. Although there is something totally new at one point: an actual joke
Like many, I had to remove myself from The Walking Dead’s viewership around the time Negan took his bat to the heads of two long-running characters whose identities and deaths had been relentlessly teased by producers all through the sixth series, and even slightly into the seventh. What had been increasingly obvious for a long time became unignorable: this was a show that had long ago abandoned any thematic interests or narrative purpose in favour of simply devising worse and worse ways for people to die. I almost came back to watch Carl’s death in season eight because, man, I hated that child, but that felt like it would lose me a lot of moral high ground, so I had to settle for merely knowing it was at last done.
The spin-offs began in 2015 with Fear the Walking Dead (which soon got chaotically boring, too). Many others, including anthology series and ones that focus on specific characters, have followed but none has quite caught fire. A lot of hopes have been pinned on the reanimating force of Andrew Lincoln (who starred as the franchise hero Rick Grimes until the ninth series of the original’s eleven) and Danai Gurira (as Michonne, the nonpareil of apocalyptic warriors and the love of Rick’s life) who combine to form the nucleus of The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live.
It was the latest example of journalists having to weigh the news value of a major political moment against the challenges of reporting on a candidate who regularly speaks in falsehoods.
Showrunner will let users generate episodes with prompts, which could be an alarming next step or a fleeting novelty
One of the key strategies of streaming services is to keep you in front of a screen for as long as possible. As soon as one episode of a show you’re watching ends, the next one pops up automatically. But this approach has its limits. After all, when a series ends, Netflix will try to autoplay another series that it thinks you’ll like, but it has a terrible success rate. Maybe the tone of the suggested show is wrong, or maybe it’s too exhausting to be dumped into the sea of exposition that a new show brings. Maybe it’s just too jarring to be pulled out of one world and dumped straight into another without any space to breathe.
You know what would fix that? If Netflix gave you the chance to automatically create a new episode of the show you were already watching. You’d stay there forever, wouldn’t you? It would be wonderful. Ladies and gentlemen, you will be thrilled to learn that this glorious technology now exists.
Her literary debut was a smash-hit tale of female self-discovery. As it gets its long-awaited television debut, the author talks breakups, Bridget Jones and why Ian McEwan gets an easier ride than she does
A few minutes into my chat with Candice Carty-Williams, she receives a text message. “It’s Emerald Fennell,” she says, stealing a glance at her phone and smiling. “She’s one of the new friends that I’ve made.”
Of course Carty-Williams’s friendship circle has expanded to include Oscar-winning writers. Since the 2019 publication of her debut novel, Queenie, the 34-year-old has become one of Britain’s buzziest new authors. The story of Queenie Jenkins, a 25-year-old Jamaican British woman who seeks comfort in all the wrong places following a messy breakup with her long-term, white boyfriend, was an overnight phenomenon. It won book of the year at the British Book awards (making Carty-Williams the first Black author to do so), while reviewers praised it as both a “smart and breezy comic debut” and “astutely political”. Writing in Time magazine, Afua Hirsch said Carty-Williams had “taken a black woman’s story and made it a story of the age”.
After a five year hiatus, Michonne is back along with Rick who is trying to escape the Civic Republic Military. Plus: will love blossom for the Nevermets? Here’s what to watch this evening
9pm, Sky Max Yet another spin-off from the zombie apocalypse franchise (six and counting), this one is set to be an, erm, “epic love story”, picking up five years after the conclusion of the original series. Andrew Lincoln and Danai Gurira reprise their roles as Rick Grimes and Michonne Hawthorne, with Rick trying to escape the Civic Republic Military. Hollie Richardson
It’s brimming with confidence, bursting with enthusiasm and totally anarchic. What other show could go from quoting Marxist Pakistani poets to covering nu-metallers Hoobastank?
In the three years since this all-female, all-Muslim punk-band sitcom first aired, We Are Lady Parts has very much lived up to the creative, reproductive connotations of that title. Writer-director Nida Manzoor has further spawned a well-received debut feature, the kung fu coming-of-ager Polite Society, and star Anjana Vasan’s fruitful career has produced the Bafta-winning Black Mirror episode Demon ’79, an Olivier-winning stage turn opposite Paul Mescal in A Streetcar Named Desire, and a starring role in Brit-com flick, Wicked Little Letters. These are busy women, but they’ve managed to get the band back together anyway, and Lady Parts are once more ready to rock your living room.
We find them in the tour van, rounding off “a magical summer of gigs” and planning to “lay down our legacy” by recording an album with legendary producer, Dirty Mahmood (Anil Desai). First, though, they’ve got to find the money for studio time and that won’t be easy, with band manager Momtaz (Lucie Shorthouse) struggling to book paying gigs and punk-purist Saira (Sarah Kameela Impey) determined not to sell out.
We Are Lady Parts series two aired on Channel 4 and is available online
Late-night host discussed end of Trump’s hush-money trial and public support from ex-president’s sons
Jimmy Kimmel took aim at Donald Trump and the end of his hush-money trial on last night’s edition of his late-night show.
On Jimmy Kimmel Live!, the host spoke about the former president’s New York City trial, where he faces multiple charges, which is coming to an end as the jury deliberates. Trump must stay in the courthouse to “sit there for hours farting next to the vending machine”.
The backlash to the Bridgerton star’s very normal-sized body is not just because she appears on screen – but because she dares to be desirable and sexual
Every so often a celebrity goes on a publicity tour that is so undeniably charming that it ends up all over the internet. Right now it is Nicola Coughlan, who is travelling around the world talking to people about her saucy starring role in the new season of Bridgerton.
I (queer, fat, middle-aged, horny) am the exact demographic to receive this content. Her turn as straight-edged lesbian Clare in Derry Girls is an incredible component of one of my favourite comedies.
There’s nothing wrong with fat – it’s hardly a moral shortcoming – but a zest for equality and diversity (and in this case good acting) just isn’t enough to make a fat girl who wins the prince remotely plausible.
Her wildly successful sitcom about a Muslim punk band is back, better than before – and features the Nobel laureate in a Stetson. This time round, the writer-director is more confident than ever
When it came to penning the second series of We Are Lady Parts, Nida Manzoor started with a song. “All I knew was that it was going to be called Malala Made Me Do It,” she says. Next, she did what she has always done: she took it to her brother and sister, Shez and Sanya – who also co-wrote the songs for the first series of Manzoor’s gloriously idiosyncratic, spoof-laden sitcom about an all-female Muslim punk band – and told them she wanted it to be in the style of … a barn-stomping western. “I listened to Steven Spielberg on Desert Island Discs and he was talking about The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” she says, “and I became obsessed with that song. It’s so catchy, so full of storytelling. I thought I’d love to do this amazing hype track that all these western heroes get but do it about Malala Yousafzai. My siblings really ran with it.”
So much so that the finished song – Coen brothers-esque, extremely silly – features a cameo by Yousafzai as you’ve never seen her before. In a jewel-fringed white Stetson. On a horse. With an almost completely straight face. “I hadn’t thought I would actually get Malala,” Manzoor says, “but I saw her talking about her love of Fawlty Towers, which I didn’t expect. I guess I saw her as this very serious figure, but oh my gosh, she’s so funny.” Manzoor wrote Yousafzai a letter asking if she would come on board. “It’s very silly but she was so game and such a joy. She made everyone feel so comfortable on set. We had such a laugh.”
Pack One Bag Widely available, episodes weekly from 5 Jun
“If fascism takes over your country, do you stay or do you try to flee?” David Modigliani opens this beautiful podcast about his family history with the question his Italian grandfather Franco faced. Modigliani reads love letters between his nonna Serena and Franco, learning about their escape to the US, where Franco won a Nobel prize. Then, executive producer Stanley Tucci brings great-grandfather Giulio into the story. Hannah Verdier
The onscreen version of the bestselling YA novels loses absolutely none of the originals’ charm. It’s fresh, lively and energetic – with actors that channel the source material brilliantly
I approached the new Netflix adaptation of Holly Smale’s bestselling Geek Girl with no little trepidation. I love that book and the five that have succeeded it since it was published in 2013, despite it being aimed at a substantially younger reading demographic than I I belong to. And I feel deeply protective of its heroine, 15-year-old Harriet Manners, who is an absolutely captivating blend of exuberance and vulnerability that needs to be preserved at all costs – a tough one to capture for any actor young enough to play the part.
Harriet is a self-declared geek with a love of odd facts, logical argument and well-researched presentations. The finer points of social interaction elude her and she spends a lot of time falling over, but she has her best friend Nat and stalwart companion Toby to catch her before she does herself too much literal or metaphorical damage. Which is not to say she isn’t, in her glorious eccentricity, a person of interest to the mean girl clique at school – but Harriet is an indefatigable optimist and carries on ploughing her wonky furrow undeterred. It is as much of a surprise to her as it is to everyone else when she is scouted by an agency and finds herself becoming an increasingly successful model. If this has just made you roll your eyes in disappointment, please return them to their original positions. Yes, Harriet’s is in some ways a Cinderella story (plus romcom once she meets fellow model Nick) but not one that ever becomes vapid – or results in any change for the worse in our redoubtable heroine. The books have charm and strength and, in Harriet, a genuinely idiosyncratic female protagonist. Smale seemed to capture a very specific form of lightning in a bottle.
Lady Parts head for the recording studio – but new rivals are waiting in the wings. Plus: haunting memories resurface in The Tattooist of Auschwitz. Here’s what to watch this evening
10pm, Channel 4 Nida Manzoor’s rollicking comedy about an all-female Muslim punk band – complete with original bangers – is back for a second season, and Lady Parts have just finished a summer of touring. With a growing fanbase behind them, it’s time to put an album together, but the £200 profit they made won’t cover the studio time. However, bassist and newly qualified doctor Amina (Anjana Vasan) is in her “villain era” so can make anything happen. Then a rival band come to the fore with the undeniably cool name of Second Wife. Lady Parts, of course, support the sisterhood – and there’s room for more than one band of Muslim women in the industry … right? Great fun. Hollie Richardson
The Sherlock star is mesmerising as a grief-stricken dad whose son has gone missing – and keeps seeing a 7ft-tall Muppet. This bold, wide-ranging series aims extremely high
Eric is that rare sighting – a truly original Netflix Original. The six part series drama written by Abi Morgan (The Iron Lady, The Split) stars Benedict Cumberbatch as genius puppeteer Vincent, the creative force behind a Sesame Street-esque show called Good Day Sunshine. When his nine-year-old son Edgar (Ivan Morris Howe) goes missing on his way to school, Vincent becomes convinced that if he brings to life the new puppet Edgar had been inventing for the show, his son will come home. Enter into the proceedings a 7ft-tall Muppets-meets-Monsters Inc creation called Eric, invisible to others and voiced by Cumberbatch, who follows Vincent round as a manifestation of his hopes, fears, guilt and altogether crumbling mental health.
Cumberbatch-meets-Muppet has, understandably, been the focus of most of the publicity. But in fact, Eric the puppet is a relatively small part of Eric the show, and not the most effective part at that. Cumberbatch, as you might expect, is mesmerising as the viciously narcissistic Vincent, pretty much drunk on his own talent long before he turns to the bottle to cope with Edgar’s disappearance, and psychologically unravelling in the wake of both. His already volatile and shaky marriage to Cassie (Gaby Hoffmann, doing much with a surprisingly thin part) fractures further under the strain and his colleagues begin to desert him too. He is already mostly estranged from his wealthy parents, to the – slightly unbelievable – extent of refusing their offer of reward money for Edgar’s safe return.
He’s been Lisa’s pal in The Simpsons, played the devil for Neil Gaiman and gone head-to-head with Miss Marple. But which of the actor’s performances is his finest?
Cumberfans assemble. After a five-year intermission, Benedict Timothy Carlton Cumberbatch is back on our TVs. Voice work aside, his blistering star turn in new Netflix drama Eric is his first proper small-screen role since 2019. But where does it figure in the Cumber canon? We count down his top 20 TV roles from worst to best (although let’s face it, he’s never actively bad). What will claim the top spot? You might be surprised …
Is it a religious organisation? A management company for dancers? A brainwashing sect? This fascinating, unusually sensitive Netflix documentary looks at a dark, sad tale
Dancing for the Devil: The 7M TikTok Cult has plenty of components that are lurid, brash and sensational. It’s about a loosely affiliated group of TikTok dancers in Los Angeles, who sign up to 7M, a management company that is also a private, invite-only church led by a pastor named Robert Shinn. Many of the dancers’ friends and family members now believe that they have joined a cult, and certainly the testimonies of ex-members suggest that they have strong reason to suspect that. But this takes its many stranger-than-fiction components and turns them into a story that is unusually sensitive, for Netflix at least, and also desperately sad.
The director Derek Doneen uses the Wilking sisters as his point of entry into what begins as a tale about the spectacle of social media and ambitious young people. Miranda and Melanie Wilking grew up in a working-class home in Detroit, and dreamed of becoming professional dancers. There are home movies of them as small children, dancing in front of the TV; later, as they pursue careers in the dance world, they realise that social media could help them to gain exposure. Eventually, together, they built up over 3.3m followers on TikTok.
Strap in for three hours of annoyingly vague celeb analyses of the London musical hotspot’s cultural significance – featuring no punks and almost no history. It’s downright cringeworthy
Close your eyes and think of Camden, the rowdy, gaudy north London neighbourhood known for its old-school boozers, perpetual congregation of punks and surplus of tourist-trap tat. Now, which musical artists can you hear amid the hubbub? Cheeky-chappy two-toners Madness, whose Dublin Castle residency made them synonymous with the area? Grotbag indie revivalists the Libertines, who staged notoriously raucous early gigs in their Camden basement flat? How about robotically slick, fiercely business-minded dance-pop doyenne Dua Lipa?
Presumably not the latter – but with her first foray into TV, Lipa is hoping to remedy that. Camden, a four-part documentary series about the area’s outsized musical influence, is co-produced by the pop star and enlists some big names (Noel Gallagher, Chuck D, Boy George) to reminisce about their Camden connections while folding Lipa’s own origin-story into the mix. It was while living there as a teenager that she began recording the YouTube covers that eventually got her noticed by the industry, a fact she relays with the slightly unsettling cheesy smile that accompanies all her contributions to this series. Admittedly, she wasn’t exactly enmeshed in the local scene, but she did draw inspiration from the “non-conforming energy” of the place, observing that “there is something in the air in Camden that gives you courage to give it a go”.
Is humour hardwired into us? This powerful documentary – about comic Mark O’Sullivan creating a TV show from his childhood trauma – makes you think it might be
The standup comedian and writer Mark O’Sullivan is looking at a picture of himself as a boy, on holiday in Norfolk. “I love it,” he says. “And it makes me really, really sad.” The image is from before “it happened” – before his sexual abuse by a member of his extended family began, when O’Sullivan was 11 or 12.
O’Sullivan’s father died when his son was 15 without ever knowing his secret. When O’Sullivan tried, a few years later, to tell his mother, she “shut down the conversation”. When O’Sullivan discovered in his 30s that he was not his abuser’s only victim, he went to the police; his visit initiated a court case in which O’Sullivan testified to his abuse by the man, who was convicted and imprisoned.
Audio reboots aren’t just fun and fast to make – they’re also a way to create the easiest naked scenes stars will ever record. For the stars of retro television hits, the future is audio
When Pippa Haywood was asked to reprise the role of Joanna in a revival of cult hospital comedy Green Wing, it was a no-brainer: “None of us quite knew what we were making during the original, but it was a special atmosphere, it was unique.” The twist that the series would return as a podcast, instead of on TV, sealed the deal: “You don’t have that awful thing of, ‘Who’s aged best?’ I could be butt-naked in a scene, and I wouldn’t even need to shave my legs – you don’t want to see 60-year-old Pippa stripping off.”
Green Wing: Resuscitated was made by the show’s creator, Victoria Pile, along with the original writers and cast (including Olivia Colman, Stephen Mangan and Tamsin Greig). Its release marks 20 years since the offbeat sitcom first aired, and picks up 16 years after the final episode in 2007. Guy (Mangan) is now a TV doctor, Harriet (Colman) is, somehow, head of HR, and Joanna (Haywood) is in prison after her killing spree.
From jobbing workers to familiar names, legions of entertainers are working well into their 70s and 80s. Why? Our writer uncovers an alarming story of shrinking budgets, axed royalties, misguided mortgages and paltry pensions
‘The budgets were fantastic,” says Alexei Sayle, remembering making shows with the BBC in the 1980s and 90s. “We’d always go over budget and they’d just say, ‘Oh well.’ Since then, there’s been a rerouting of funds away from the talent. It doesn’t affect the superstars but it certainly affects the foot soldiers. It’s a lot harder to make a living now.”
At the age of 71, the comedian, writer and actor is still working. He feels “the drive” to create and perform, rather than financial pressure, but does notice major changes. “If you made your money in the 70s and 80s, you’ve got a better chance of being well off,” he says. Terms then were “much fairer”, with artists benefiting from residuals rather than just one-off payments.
It's as weird as it sounds: a young Jeff Jarrett and Dirty Dutch Mantell battle it out in the ring while in the background Walter Mays conducts a live orchestra performing his original composition, "War Games for Ten Percussionists and Two Wrestlers, " for broadcast on PBS of all channels. The actual match is pretty basic with a standard "heel dominates, babyface gets some hope spots, and finally makes a comeback" format - at one point Mantell attacks a plant in the orchestra after trying to take a drum; otherwise it's pretty by-the-numbers - which was probably a wise choice to give an audience likely largely composed of non-wrestling fans something easy to follow. (In a then-rare kayfabe-breaking moment, the extra Mantell attacks - played by Memphis wrestler Marc "The Beast" Guleen - is listed as a third wrestler in the program's end credits.) It's interesting to see this sort of high-concept wrestling content as early as 1989, as this seems more like something you'd see tried nowadays - and maybe somebody should try doing it again. While the in-ring action is simply adequate, the idea behind it gets it an extra point for creativity in my book.
New Netflix docuseries Dancing for the Devil details strange story of young dancers enrolled in a mysterious religious organisation with allegations of abuse
Since they were young girls, Miranda and Melanie Wilking danced together. The sisters, two years apart, grew up exceptionally close in suburban Detroit, dancing in their basement, in competitions and eventually in pursuit of a professional career. When Miranda graduated high school and moved to Los Angeles to chase the dream, Melanie followed as soon as she could. The duo, who looked nearly identical – long brown hair, bright blue eyes, sharp features, deep tans and lithe physiques – found modest work auditioning together, but greater success online. By this point, in the late 2010s, TikTok was on the rise; short, peppy dance videos to a front-facing camera were the fastest avenue to a following, and thus a living, via sponsorships. Miranda and Melanie started an account together as the Wilking Sisters; by 2020, they had over 3 million followers on the platform.
But in 2021, the sisters suddenly stopped posting new videos together, as things fell apart behind the scenes. Through her boyfriend James “BDash” Derrick, a dancer well-known for the LA-based street-style krump, Miranda and several dancer friends had joined a management company called 7M as well as its affiliate Christian church, Shekinah, both run by a man named Robert Shinn. Melanie always followed her older sister, but was put off by Shinn’s “weird” messianic vibe and the pressure to attend services. Soon Miranda began acting strangely, distancing herself from her formerly close family and anyone not associated with 7M. She chopped her hair short, dyed it blonde, and started new social channels, posting dance videos that followed a distinct 7M template: punchy, polished, slightly hypnotic, with aspirational backdrops – expansive patios, mansions, Hollywood landmarks. By January 2021, she cut off contact with her family entirely. Though Miranda was posting frequently to social media, to those that knew her, she wasn’t Miranda any more. “I literally feel like my sister died. She’s everywhere, but nowhere,” Melanie explains in the new Netflix docu-series Dancing for the Devil: The 7M TikTok Cult.
This powerful documentary shows how he used comedy to help cope with trauma. Plus: gymnastics thriller The Gathering somersaults into its finale. Here’s what to watch this evening
10pm, Channel 4 “Let’s make magic happen!” That’s comedian Mark O’Sullivan getting to work on his autobiographical sitcom about being sexually abused by an extended family member. In this powerful documentary, he takes us through his complicated journey of using comedy to cope and making the show itself. The sitcom is available on Channel 4’s streaming platform afterwards. Hollie Richardson
Made by 12 Palestinian film-makers who risked their lives to depict the ongoing assault, this documentary confronts us with the loss and suffering of people whose gaze we have met
Citizens of the world have not needed regular broadcast media to show them the horror of Israel’s seven-month assault on Gaza. Social media has delivered a stream of clips, almost in real time, each video seemingly more shocking than the last. As if to provide a macabre illustration of the point that traditional television has not kept up, the broadcast on Channel 4 of the Dispatches documentary Kill Zone: Inside Gaza arrived the day after smartphones lit up with footage of an attack on a refugee camp in Rafah, and a picture that might define this shameful episode in human history: against a background of tents on fire, a man holds up the body of an infant, perhaps one or two years old, perhaps younger. It is hard to tell the child’s exact age, since they have no head.
Kill Zone is inevitably a harrowing, heartbreaking programme, made with skill and care by 12 Palestinian film-makers who must have been in grave peril throughout, filming over 200 days in the period following Hamas’s heinous attack on Israeli civilians on 7 October 2023. But what is its role, when pictures that would be deemed unbroadcastable on television are already imprinted on our brains, jabbing at our consciences, flaring in our nightmares?
This ambitious identity-and-imperialism saga sees the American actor take on several different roles – and demands your full attention
Robert Downey Jr really Robert Downey Jrs the hell out of The Sympathizer. He thunders around in a vast array of prosthetics, giving off that weird, intense aggro-magnetism, and it might be the sheer Robert Downey Jr-ness of him that explains why it took me until halfway through the second episode to realise that he wasn’t playing the same character in disguise, but several different characters, and that The Sympathizer is very much that kind of show. Still, given that it is an adaptation of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer prize-winning novel and has been directed by Park Chan-wook (Oldboy, The Handmaiden), it would have been foolish to turn up and expect its cerebral identity-and-imperialism saga to be handed to you in easily digestible chunks.
Naturally, it makes you work, demanding that you follow along as it peacocks and pirouettes around the plot and its themes, which is largely thrilling and occasionally a little wearying. The timeline jumps all over the place, but it begins roughly four days before, and four months after, the fall of Saigon. The anonymous Captain (Hoa Xuande) is a half-French, half-Vietnamese police chief and loyal enforcer of the Southern Vietnamese General (Toan Le), while also being mentored by CIA agent Claude (Downey Jr, in the first of his multiple roles), except that he is also, also, a spy for the Communist North, embedded deep in the regime that he opposes.
TV journalist and co-creator of Rough Justice, the BBC series that led to several wrongful convictions being overturned
Martin Young, who has died aged 76, spent much of the 1970s as one of the reporters bringing lighthearted news to the screen in the BBC programme Nationwide. However, his greatest contribution to television journalism came through creating, with its producer, Peter Hill, the series Rough Justice, revealing legal miscarriages.
Young and Hill, who had worked together on reports for Panorama and Newsnight, were told by Tom Sargant, the secretary of the law reform group Justice, that he knew of at least 250 cases of false imprisonment caused by shortcomings in the police and justice system.
The singer expresses pride in episode in which her music is prescribed as an alternative to weight loss drugs
Lizzo has expressed pride on seeing a South Park episode dedicated to her, saying: “I really showed the world how to love yourself.”
The singer filmed herself watching the episode of the long-running satirical comedy entitled The End of Obesity, which features a storyline in which listening to her music is prescribed as an alternative to expensive new weight-loss drugs such as Ozempic.
Sandra Oh is also among the cast of The Sympathizer, based on Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer-winning novel. Plus: D-Day 80: We Were There. Here’s what to watch this evening
9pm, Sky Atlantic Park Chan-wook’s adaptation of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer prize-winning novel follows a French Vietnamese communist spy, the Captain (Hoa Xuande). Held in a North Vietnamese re-education camp, he writes his story – from his time in the special police before the fall of Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) to being a refugee in the US, all while reporting to the people keeping him captive. It’s an ambitious production, which also stars Sandra Oh and Robert Downey Jr. Hollie Richardson
He starred in Peep Show, Green Wing and Wonka – and his first novel won an award. Now the star is making operas with 64 homeless people. Not bad going for someone who was written off by his teachers
Paterson Joseph is, by his own admission, an unlikely opera librettist. He had turned 50 by the time he got round to going to one, and only went because he was in it, as the “crazy” voice of God in Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. “It’s not my world,” says the actor. But therein lies part of his mission: as a black Londoner written off by the school system, his life was transformed by the goldmine he discovered while truanting down at his local library.
One of his discoveries, as “a melancholy teen”, was Pushkin’s verse novel Eugene Onegin. “I remember getting it out of the library,” he says, “just because it was a small book. And I started reading this poem out loud, at night in my bedroom. And I laughed – but I was also frightened and frustrated, weeping at the tragedy of it. When I closed the book, it was dawn.”
Co-writer with his brother of some of the great film musical songs including classics for Mary Poppins and The Jungle Book
Richard Sherman, who has died aged 95, often said that he never realised his youthful ambition to write “the great American symphony”. However, with his brother, Robert Sherman, he co-wrote songs that provided the soundtrack for a generation’s childhood – upbeat numbers with a homespun philosophy typified by lines such as “a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down”.
Those words were written for the brothers’ greatest triumph, the Oscar-winning Mary Poppins (1964), for which they created a score of staggering brilliance: haunting ballads, lilting lullabies, roistering marches, energetic dance numbers and knockabout vaudeville tunes. Half of the songs instantly became standards – not just the Oscar-winning Chim Chim Cher-ee but also A Spoonful of Sugar, Feed the Birds, Jolly Holiday and Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.
Life below stairs in the palaces and grand houses of Britain takes centre stage in a series of exhibitions
Bridget Holmes, the “necessary woman”, scrubbed royal chamber pots through the reign of five Stuart monarchs. As “keeper of ice and snow” at Hampton Court Palace, Frances Talbot hewed great blocks of ice with a 6ft-long saw so palace guests could enjoy fancy iced desserts and chilled champagne through the summer of 1775.
And William Hester, a Kensington Palace rat-killer in the 1690s, chased vermin in a crimson and blue coat embroidered with depictions of wheat sheaves and rats.
After the runaway success of Richard Gadd’s Baby Reindeer, fellow standup Mark O’Sullivan has a new sitcom about personal pain
Comedian Mark O’Sullivan was sexually assaulted by a member of his extended family when he was 12 years old. In his 30s, he reported the abuse to the police and, following a court case, the perpetrator was convicted and jailed.
Now 47, O’Sullivan is addressing this painful part of his past through his comedy. A documentary My Sexual Abuse: The Sitcom, will be screened on Channel 4, with the accompanying sitcom streaming online.
Rob and Rylan conclude their funny, tender and insightful grand tour. Plus, more angst for Martin Freeman’s embattled night cop in The Responder.
9pm, BBC Two It has been a total treat joining Rob Rinder and Rylan Clark on their cultural odyssey, which along the way has turned into a tender journey of soul-searching and friendship. They finish in Rome, where Rylan opens up about what it all means to “a ginger kid from a council flat in Stepney Green” who was expected to “stay in his lane”. There’s lots of fun on the agenda, too: dressing as a macaroni comes more easily to Rylan than Rob. Hollie Richardson
What did it look like when the allies pushed to take Europe back from the Nazis? We know thanks to this stunning footage from brave journalists and Hollywood directors who crossed the beaches with their cameras
We haven’t merely read and heard about the Normandy landings of 6 June 1944, when allied troops arrived on the coast of northern France to begin a push across occupied Europe that would help to defeat the Nazis. We can see exactly what that day looked like: the barges crammed with soldiers, the jagged log posts and asterisk-shaped steel barriers sticking out of the low-tide water, the men wading, stumbling and running up the beaches under heavy fire from the clifftops. The images are available, but somebody had to capture them. D-Day: Secrets of the Frontline Heroes, a straightforward but rewarding documentary about the American film-makers and photographers who sailed with the armed forces, tells us who to thank.
It follows four men. John Ford, the celebrated Hollywood film director (Stage Coach, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance), was employed by the Field Photographic Branch of the Office of Strategic Services, the intelligence-gathering forerunner of the CIA. George Stevens, who made pictures starring Fred Astaire and Cary Grant and who won Academy awards for best director twice in the 1950s – for Giant and A Place in the Sun – was with Gen Dwight D Eisenhower’s Special Coverage Unit. Jack Lieb was a photographer and reporter for newsreel company News of the Day. Sgt Richard Taylor was a combat photographer with the 165th Signal Photographic Company of the US army Signal Corps.
Millie Gibson takes centre stage as she lives out a life that is packed with the supernatural – but without the Doctor. It’s a stone-cold classic … until its final moments
After the suspense of last week’s Boom, the new Doctor Who season cranked up to full-on horror in 73 Yards, with an episode destined to be remembered as one of the all-time great companion performances.
Once the Doctor vanishes, it is left to Millie Gibson as Ruby Sunday to unravel the mystery that then stretches through the whole of her life, morphing from creeping dread in rural Wales to a political thriller split between London and Cardiff. Aneurin Barnard cut an impressive figure as the paranoid and controlling populist politician Roger ap Gwilliam, somewhat in the mould of Emma Thompson’s Vivienne Rook in Russell T Davies’ Years and Years.
Despite hopes he will improve ratings, the new Wimbledon commentator is so unappealing even male sports fans recoil
The BBC’s Lucy Williamson has done more than most to illustrate how much better the world would be without the contributions of Andrew Tate.
The misogynist influencer was under house arrest in his dingy Romanian man cave, awaiting trial on charges of rape, human trafficking and forming a criminal gang, when her 2023 interview indicated that his mastery over women is not as complete as advertised. He repeatedly failed – to a point that evidently upset some Tate worshippers – to frighten Williamson off.
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The actor on an electrifying production at the Old Vic, her favourite TV show since Succession and one of the best plates of spaghetti she’s ever had
Born in Chennai, India in 1987, Anjana Vasan grew up in Singapore before relocating to the UK to study drama. She has starred in films includingMogul Mowgliand Wicked Little Letters; her stage credits include Tanika Gupta’s production ofA Doll’s House (Lyric Hammersmith, 2019) and Rebecca Frecknall’s A Streetcar Named Desire(Almeida, 2022-23), for which she won an Olivier award and an Evening Standard theatre award. Vasan has been nominated for Baftas for her TV work in Black Mirror and Nida Manzoor’s comedyWe Are Lady Parts; series two returns to Channel 4 on 30 May.
The actor, 61, talks about growing up in the Cotswolds, combining kids and a career, getting the birdsong app and searching for the spark of the divine
I liked my own company as a child. I grew up in the Cotswolds – Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie is like a documentary of my childhood. I liked playing in the woods down by the stream. I would take a book with me. I’d dress up and pretend to be other people, do plays with other kids in front rooms. It started early.
There was always music at home. My mum was a teacher; my dad was an accountant. My dad played lots of instruments and the music would be classical – African, choral, modern. My grandmother in Ghana played guitar in a palm court orchestra in the 1920s. All I ever really wanted to be was a bass player in a punk band.
There were three black people in our village: me, my dad and my brother. I was the only girl of colour in a secondary school of over 1,000 kids. Children seize on your difference. But they also seize on your smartness and your comedy value. I could also fight – I learned very quickly that that was the way to say, “This far and no further.”
Where I grew up, nobody was an actress. I had the interview at Cambridge University to do law, but I flunked all my A-levels. That was around the time my parents were divorcing. Eventually, I started the law degree, but bailed after two years because I’d joined a black women’s group at Bristol Polytechnic and met a San Francisco woman called Deb’bora John-Wilson, who ran acting classes. She got funded to do a show in London and suggested I audition for it – I got the part. It was a time of great awakening.
My three years on Casualty taught me discipline. I worked with the great Derek Thompson [who played Nurse Charlie Fairhead]. He’d been in it from the get-go, but would come to work every day, infused with how we could make a scene more vibrant, more credible, give it extra swing. I took a lesson from that.
My first baby came along as my career started, so I’ve always had kids and worked. None of them are actors. They’re smart, funny and curious and I feel proud that my kids can be in any room with anyone and engage in conversation.
My husband [novelist Howard Cunnell] is my best pal. We met when I was running a fantasy football league at the Royal Court. I support Leeds and he supports Arsenal.
All those clichés about getting older are true. I have a birdsong app; I love gardening. You start to become consciously alert to things that are precious in your life: the people you love, the causes you support. You start to have a life that goes forwards and backwards. In my heart I’m still a 14-year-old punk rocker watching the Clash.
My faith is enormously important to me. I was born in a Christian household and I’ve searched for the spark of the divine. I’m a reader in the Church of England, which means I can preach, lead services and do funerals. I like to engage with people. Whether it’s up the front at church, doing a silly panto or being in telly programme, it’s all the same to me.
The state wasn’t the best place to get pregnant in the first place, with some of the highest maternal mortality rates in the US
Louisiana is not a great place to get pregnant. If you need an abortion, a near-total ban means it’s almost impossible to get one, even in cases of rape or incest – anyone who provides an abortion deemed illegal can go to jail for 15 years. And if you plan on having the baby, you have to deal with some of the highest maternal mortality rates in the US. Although, as Senator Bill Cassidy has helpfully noted, “if you correct our population for race, we’re not as much of an outlier as it’d otherwise appear”. In other words, if you ignore Black people (a third of his constituents), things look a little better. So that’s OK then!
Downey Jr dons bald caps and gnaws cigars to have the most fun imaginable in Park Chan-wook’s inspired espionage show. Believe the hype!
The problem with a hype show, of course, is the “getting excited about it” part. Oh, a big-budget HBO series based on the Pulitzer prize-winning novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen? A cleverly blank spy-with-a-brain-not-just-a-small-gun performance from Hoa Xuande and a knowing I’m-the-cheekiest-person-at-this-party turn from Sandra Oh? Robert Downey Jr, fresh from that impeccable Oscar acceptance speech, having the most fun possible with a host of increasingly extravagant characters? Directed with glee and style by Park Chan-wook? If life has taught me anything it is this: when something sounds too good to be true, it normally is. There is no way The Sympathizer can live up to that.
Except, well, hmm. I’m starting to suspect this might be one of those cosmic occurrences where TV just gets everything right. The Sympathizer (Monday, 9pm, Sky Atlantic) starts in Vietnam, and dips back there regularly – we follow Xuande’s anonymous Captain, both as he attempts to flee a collapsing Saigon and as he settles into a refugee community in Los Angeles (and as he tries to tell the story of what happened by scrawling it down in a prison cell), and the timeline jumps around a lot, and satisfyingly. There are a lot of little fold-out cameras in interior pockets, a lot of people on quiet car journeys revealing a dark long-held secret and looking into eyes for clues of disloyalty, a lot of coded messages daubed in invisible ink.
The Mad Max: Fury Road heroine gets an origin story, while Channel 4’s Muslim female punk band returns for a second gig
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga Out now One of the year’s most anticipated movies sees director George Miller return to the post-apocalyptic world he and Byron Kennedy first created in 1979 with Mad Max. Both spin-off and prequel to 2015’s Fury Road, this new adventure unveils the origins of Imperator Furiosa, with Anya Taylor-Joy in the title role.
Remarkable footage from the beaches of Normandy. Plus, folk horror creepiness and Scooby Doo stylings in Doctor Who. Here’s what to watch this evening
8.20pm, Channel 4 6 June 2024 marks 80 years since D-day, when 156,000 allied soldiers landed on the beaches of Normandy and embarked on a campaign that would herald the beginning of the end of the second world war in Europe. This documentary pays tribute to them with a focus on the photographers and film-makers who captured remarkable footage of the heroic efforts during the fateful summer days that followed. Hollie Richardson
Comedian, writer and actor Stephen Merchant on standup, fame and the pressures of cancel culture; testing the ‘world-leading science’ claims behind the Zoe nutrition app; and the point when writer Harriet Tyce realised she didn’t want to be remembered only as a drinker
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