We now know that David Cameron's favourite album is Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, although there is a theory that he only picked it to avoid having to give the true answer, which is The Queen is Dead by The Smiths. Clearly this would have been a tactless selection in Diamond Jubilee year.But perhaps the smarter choice would have been 1975's Wish You Were Here, the follow-up to the monstrously successful but patchy Dark Side..., and the favourite Floyd album of band members David Gilmour and the late Rick Wright. Once again, Wish... was the product of a band caught in the steely grip of Read more ...

Serious programmes about classical music are now virtually invisible on the major channels. There’s always BBC Two’s Maestro at the Opera, I hear you shout. Or something with that nice Gareth Malone. A good selection of Proms will be shown live on BBC Four, but with luck will scrupulously avoid the witless interviews with celebs in lieu of proper interval talks. Enough ranting. As explained in John Bridcut’s impressively understated film, Delius was a curious figure; adored by many as an echt English composer, but one who spent most of his life abroad. He was buried in Surrey, at midnight, in Read more ...

It seems fitting that the final ever episode of a show that has revelled so gleefully in its main character’s willful refusal to change should pivot on the question of whether, finally, he can. This introspective swansong found our misanthropic medic in by far his direst straits yet – no small feat, when you consider that previous finales have seen him get shot, go clinically insane and, most recently, end up in prison.As we pick up, House’s (Hugh Laurie) best friend and lifeline Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard) had been given five months to live, and just as he'd begun to grapple with this Read more ...

Did Magda Goebbels do her children a favour by murdering all six of them in the bunker? Her rationale, as reported in the film Downfall, was the impossibility of imagining a life after Hitler for anyone called Goebbels.Most descendants of the Nazi top brass were not afforded this ghastly reprieve, and survived into a conflicted adulthood. Not long ago a son of Reinhard Heydrich offered to fund the restoration of the Prague castle, now ruined, from which his father terrorised the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. The city government was suspicious of his motives. It was his childhood home, Read more ...

Ooh look, she’s at it again. Fresh from hurling insults at David Starkey (well, he started it) and provoking the ire of historian Alison Light - who presumably didn’t make it through BBC casting - for daring to try on a bonnet on the box and thus “cheapening history”, Dr Lucy Worsley is back on our screens, doing ninja kicks in Puritan dress, trying Restoration gowns for size and shamelessly discussing Samuel Pepys’s “emissions”.Worsley, who is Chief Curator at the Historic Royal Palaces, is one of a number of increasingly visible female academics (see also Amanda Vickery, Bettany Hughes and Read more ...

It ended where it began, between Copenhagen and Malmö along the Öresund bridge. The journey back to square one took in issues of homelessness, mental health, immigration and child labour. Drug abuse, national identity, family break-up and the power of the media cropped up too. But none of these are what The Bridge hinged on. Without its main characters and measured pace, The Bridge could have been little more than a bleak trudge through society’s ills.The final episode was typically understated, revealing its layers and horrors gradually. Martin Rohde’s (Kim Bodnia) son had been abducted Read more ...

“It’s like Big Ben. It’s like the Houses of Parliament. It’s like St Paul’s,” observed Susan Hampshire, reflecting on the iconic properties of Television Centre, the BBC’s 52-year-old nerve centre. Steady on, Susan, you thought, let’s not overdo it. But that was before we’d seen some of its most long-serving and frankly terrifying employees, Paxman, Attenborough and Bakewell among them, getting all misty-eyed over this unprepossessing lump of concrete and glass, and mourning its imminent demise.The much-loved doughnut-shaped “TV factory” that gave us Morecambe and Wise, The Two Ronnies, The Read more ...

It's a truism of modern television that a programme rarely gets made without a celebrity being attached, but in this case there was a very good reason for Felicity Kendal being on board. Her parents, Laura and Geoffrey Kendal, founded Shakespeareana, a travelling theatre troupe that performed Shakespeare in India in the postwar decades; many will know their story from Merchant Ivory's 1965 film about the company, Shakespeare Wallah.Like her parents, Kendal has a deep love of both Shakespeare and India, and this programme was shot through with that genuine affection. She still speaks some Read more ...

How delightful to welcome the return of Peter Moffat's skilful legal series. Yes alright, sceptics may contend that the law firm drama has already been road-tested to destruction via the likes of Rumpole of the Bailey, Kavanagh QC and many more - indeed, Kavanagh veteran Nicholas Jones popped up in tonight's opener as Judge Goodbrand - but Silk boasts a superb cast and a thoughtfully-drawn set of characters, whose already fraught personal relationships are being given some cunning new twists.Series one focused on the rivalry between barristers Clive Reader (Rupert Penry-Jones) and Martha Read more ...

For most of us, life is what happens to you when you’re looking the other way. For the participants in 7 Up it’s what happens in seven-year segments between the visits of Michael Apted. First interviewed in 1964, they are all 56 now, and as usual the questions loom. Who is still turning up for these things? Who has thrown in the towel or, as will now become a more urgent issue, has anyone shuffled off their mortal coil?Television’s magnificent grand projet crops up every seven years to rebuke modern broadcasters with the accusation that they don't make documentaries the way they used to. The Read more ...