tue 12/08/2025

tv

One Child, BBC Two

Jasper Rees

Last year China began formally to phase out the one-child policy which had been in place since 1979. So a drama called One Child arrives at the right time. It forms the least worshipful component of the BBC’s current China season, which mainly interests itself in food and history. Its focus is in fact not on the ruinous psychological and economic consequences for a nation of only children.

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Vinyl, Sky Atlantic

Barney Harsent

You can almost hear the words ringing out in the dramatic pauses. “We should call it Vinyl. Like, y’know... when you could hold music in your hand... touch it... FEEL it. When it was really WORTH something.

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The Renaissance Unchained, BBC Four

Marina Vaizey

Waldemar Januszczak always has a provoking agenda to shape his now nearly countless forays into television art history. In this four-part series he's out to challenge what he sees as the unthinking acceptance of the one-dimensional traditional and monopolistic version of the Renaissance.

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Deutschland 83, Series Finale, Channel 4

Tom Birchenough

Martin Rauch-stroke-Moritz Stamm, the reluctant spy who by the end of the final, double episode of this eight-parter had achieved more than most in that profession, managed the ultimate last night: he came in from the cold. In a series whose refrain could almost have been “You can’t go home again”, there he was back at the domestic hearth as if nothing had happened (except that his mother Ingrid was healed). Idyllic ending?

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The Easybeats to AC/DC: The Sound of Aussie Rock, BBC Four

Barney Harsent

Australia has long been a country shaped by its arrivals and, as this BBC4 documentary set out to show, so it was with rock music. Using the twin journeys of the Albert family from Switzerland and the Youngs from Scotland, it went on to map out the particular path that would eventually lead AC/DC on to global domination. The Youngs, you see, included guitarists Angus, Malcolm and George.

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Happy Valley, Series 2, BBC One

Jasper Rees

“It’s routine, it’s procedure.” “It’s wank, it’s toss.” As you can tell, Happy Valley is back. If Sally Wainwright made bespoke ironmongery or dry stone walls or exceedingly good cakes, her work would come by royal appointment.

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Horace and Pete

Barney Harsent

“Warning: this show is not a ‘comedy,’” wrote comedian Louis CK in an email alerting fans to the impending arrival of the second episode of his new show, Horace and Pete. “I dunno what it is. It can be funny. And also not. Both. I believe that ‘funny’ works best in its natural habitat. Right in the jungle along with ‘awful’, ‘sad’, ‘confusing’ and ‘nothing.’”

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The X-Files, Channel 5

Lisa-Marie Ferla

It’s 2016, and The X-Files is the most popular TV show in the world. The very idea that over 20 million people in the US would tune in to a new episode of the pioneering sci-fi drama 14 years after the last one might seem as preposterous as the conspiracy theories the show put forward in its later years, but it was probably more likely than fans in the UK hanging on for the fortnight it took for the new episodes to show up on Channel 5.

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War and Peace, Series Finale, BBC One

David Nice

At the end of Episode Five, Brian Cox's savvy old Field-Marshal Kutuzov gave the order to retreat and abandon Moscow, with hardly a hint of Tolstoy's council of war.

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Cats v Dogs, BBC Two

Marina Vaizey

This slightly ludicrous programme is really a chance to see a charming range of dogs and cats, based on an assumption that by comparing cats and dogs we humans can decide which species is best. But best for what? As pets, domestic companions, survivors in the human jungle?

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