The first rule of temptation is to yield to it slowly, says a sozzled roué surrounded by semi-clad lovelies, it’s much more fun that way… The Hour is back and, the silly conspiracy strand sewn up at the end of the first series, better than ever.The BBC’s Lime Grove studios were never going to be a match for Madison Avenue but television news with its endless deadlines is far more exciting than advertising. If Abi Morgan’s retro-soap can’t be Mad Men it doesn’t lack bad men: Hector Madden, the alcoholic news anchor (Dominic West oozing sleazy charm); Angus McCain, a shifty Whitehall mandarin ( Read more ...

There was a time when we’d have felt withdrawal symptoms over the absence of The West Wing or The Sopranos, or The Wire; invariably it was American television that had its hooks in us. Now it’s Danish. And it’s time for a fix. Cue The Killing, which returns to add its own particular chill to the winter.Saturday sees the start of the third, and final adventure for Sarah Lund, the detective whose instinctive brilliance is not matched by any sort of good fortune. In the ground-breaking season one, Lund was blamed for the death of her partner, and solved the murder of a young girl only for a Read more ...

The BBC has other things on its to-do list at the minute. However, once all the newly installed acting heads have been replaced by actual heads, and the matter of the ex-DG’s severance pay sufficiently chewed over by the Corporation’s bosom pals in the Fourth Estate and the Conservative Party, perhaps someone at TV Centre could get around to other business. The search, for example, for a costume drama capable of giving Downton Abbey a bloody nose.It’s not been a good period for period on the BBC. Since the ladies of Cranford hung up their bonnets, Upstairs Downtairs trailing oodles of Read more ...

There was a memorable, very French moment in a television series hosted by the great British wine writer, presenter and Master of Wine Jancis Robinson. A French winemaker, asked to taste an Australian wine, swills in disdain and pointedly walks outside, on camera, to spit it out. It’s not good enough even to slosh the floor of his traditional wineshed.That was just a few years ago. Chateau Chunder showed how Australian wine went in two generations from a joke and "plonk" fit only for the poor, the alcoholic and the desperate to some of the best wine in the world. It opened with the famous Read more ...

So, another programme about Hitler and the Nazis. They mock the Brits all over Europe for our obsession with this subject. During the summer, I worked on a project with Italian associates who found this intense interest roundly bemusing. They subscribed particularly to the old joke that to create the British market’s most successful ever book, it would need to include cats certainly but, most of all, Nazis. So is there anything left for historical writer and documentary maker Laurence Rees to say in his new three-part series?The answer is, “A little, yes”. Having created the gripping The Read more ...

The 12th series of the jungle fun is another gathering of micro-celebs, wannabes and has-beens, and a smattering of people you have never heard of - and indeed by the end of the series would still have difficulty identifying in a police line-up, so interchangeable and unremarkable are they.The 10 “celebrities” are the usual suspects: people you vaguely remember from a soap - Helen Flanagan (Coronation Street) and Charlie Brooks (EastEnders); a popster (ex-Pussycat Dolls' Ashley Roberts); and a couple of actors of a certain age - former Doctor Who Colin Baker and Linda Robson of Birds of a Read more ...

The one thing you can rely on when a programme is billed as "The Real" something-or-other is that that is exactly what you won't get. This film, commemorating the centenary of the birth of the great Hungarian conductor, did a thorough job of tracing his career through the great orchestras, concert halls and opera houses of the world, pulling in various stellar musical names and bags of excellent archive footage en route. But anybody already familiar with Sir Georg's life and works would not have come away a great deal wiser.Fortunately it's a great story, however you tell it. A gifted pianist Read more ...

The political thriller may be alive and well but in recent years it has been spending time abroad. Elements of government conspiracy are intense flavourings of, for example, The Killing and Homeland, while back in Blighty there has been little to trouble the scorers since Paul Abbott’s State of Play nearly a decade ago. Why? British drama has been too busy scoffing at Blair and Brown, Cameron and Clegg to worry itself with shady Whitehall cover-ups. So it’s not exactly a surprise that the crafty and pulsating Secret State harks back to the distant yesteryear of A Very British Coup.Chris Read more ...

Over the past couple of years, since my husband’s first book was accepted for publication, I have had the dubious privilege of becoming intimately acquainted with the behind the scenes day-to-day workings of the crime novelist. For that reason Miranda Harvey, the long-suffering wife of Ian Rankin, is now something of a hero of mine. As she tells Imagine’s Alan Yentob, she is now so used to her husband’s writing patterns she can predict the “pause” that will hit, around page 65, when the UK’s most successful crime writer has run out of notes and has no idea what to do next.As a documentary, Read more ...

No Dickens novel seems to come around the block more often than The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, possibly excepting Great Expectations, which is taking a bow on both big screen and small for the bicentenary year. Relatively recent assaults on the teeming 800-page doorstopper include adaptations by ITV, on the big screen, Radio 4 and Chichester Festival Theatre. That would surely count as enough Nicklebys already. But into this bustling crowd the BBC has thrust its own new version. Will it fight for its place in the world like the novel’s impetuous young hero, or be trampled Read more ...

Julian Fellowes has often seemed to treat Downton Abbey as a speed-writing contest, with momentous events and the tide of history whirling past like roof tiles in a typhoon. Happily, as series three has developed, the pace has evened out a bit, though Shirley MacLaine's Mrs Levinson barely lasted as long as the disfigured pretender to the Downton inheritance in series two, while the storyline in which Downton was financially ruined and then promptly saved by Matthew's convenient inheritance was straight from the Peter Pan book of screenwriting.It remains addictively watchable, and this season Read more ...

This factually-based saga of two feuding families in the woods and mountains of Kentucky and West Virginia might not look too prepossessing on paper, but two episodes in, Hatfields & McCoys is starting to grip like a knotted rope. The combination of powerful acting from all levels of the copious cast and the authentic-feeling depiction of primitive backwoods life in the bleak aftermath of the American Civil War isn't pretty, but it's morbidly compelling.If you're in a sceptical frame of mind, it is possible to categorise the series, as one American critic has, as "a bunch of bibulous Read more ...