thu 31/07/2025

tv

Mad Men: Series 4 Finale, BBC Four

Ismene Brown

And so Mad Men 4 rode into the sunset, Don perched on yet another horse (sorry, love interest), a fifth series in production, and it’s all become a soap opera rather than a drama series. It should be called Madly Men. Fast diminishing returns, one of them me, diminishing possibly to zero next time. I’d held hopes that series 4 would see Don come to the picturesque fall promised in the credit sequence, probably off a cliff far away in the wilderness where his body would lie...

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Frankie Boyle's Tramadol Nights/ The Morgana Show, Channel 4

Veronica Lee

Frankie Boyle’s Tramadol Nights is an interesting beast. A mix of stand-up, sketches and cartoons, it’s neither fish nor fowl, but many will certainly find it foul - with the comic’s penchant for sexually explicit material, unPC humour and determinedly bad-taste jokes, it’s bound to upset some viewers. But that’s why Channel 4 poached him from the BBC in the first place and have put his name in the title.

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Ian Hislop's Age of the Do-Gooders, BBC Two/ The Art of Germany, BBC Four

Fisun Güner

There is probably only one thing that Ann Widdecombe and I have ever agreed upon: we both think it might be a really good idea to stick William Wilberforce on the Fourth Plinth. Why not? It’s nice to have contemporary art in Trafalgar Square, of course, but surely there are few other reforming characters as worthy as the great abolitionist?

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Alan Bennett and The Habit of Art, More4

Matt Wolf

Few theatrical collaborations have been as successful as that achieved over five plays, two films, several decades, and numerous awards by the playwright Alan Bennett and the director Nicholas Hytner, who had jointly made a habit of art well before Bennett decided to write a play of that very name, premiered in November 2009 at the National Theatre. Now, More4 has come along with a documentary chronicling the two men's collaboration on a work that is itself about a collaboration. And if Adam...

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Peep Show, Series 7, Channel 4

Veronica Lee

What a pair of teases Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain are. The co-writers (and co-creators, with Andrew O’Connor) of Peep Show write only one short series of this sitcom each year but such is its pull that fans don't forget and move on to other offerings. No, we wait with mounting glee for the programme to return to our screens and, let joy be unconfined, the seventh series started last night.

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Fry and Laurie Reunited, Gold

howard Male

There’s a surreal sitcom waiting to be written about the often-told story of when Charlie Higson and Paul Whitehouse were Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie’s plasterers for a while in the early 1980s.

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Storyville: Mandelson - The Real PM?, BBC Four

Adam Sweeting Lord Mandelson of Foy gives a masterclass in political shoelace tying

The title could have used a bit more work, I'd have thought. No, Peter Mandelson was never "the real PM", and won't be now. As for the real Peter Mandelson, there is no evidence that any such mythical beast exists. And why hadn't Lord Mandelson become prime minister, film-maker Hannah Rothschild asked him in one of her deferential voices-off moments? Because Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had entered parliament in 1983, Peter explained with exaggerated patience, while he himself had only got...

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Any Human Heart, Channel 4

Adam Sweeting

Any period drama that crops up on Sunday nights is now automatically billed as a potential replacement for Downton Abbey. Any Human Heart has duly been described thus, but isn't.

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Leonard Cohen: Bird on a Wire, BBC Four

graeme Thomson

The renaissance enjoyed by Leonard Cohen over the past few years is not only thoroughly welcome and entirely justified, but also partly a testament to the strange and powerful alchemy that sometimes occurs when the defiantly high-brow is swallowed whole by popular culture.

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Lip Service: Series Finale, BBC Three

Veronica Lee

When The L Word, an American drama series following the interconnected lives of a group of lesbians in Los Angeles, first aired in 2004, much of the acres of coverage it attracted made disbelieving mention of the cast members’ attractiveness, which is an implicit suggestion that lesbians are more usually at the back of the queue when good looks are being given out. Rather irritatingly, Lip Service, a drama series following the interconnected lives etc etc...

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