wed 16/07/2025

tv

Mental: A History of the Madhouse, BBC Four

Veronica Lee

Most people’s experience of the 120 or so Victorian asylums that littered the UK landscape for more than a century is, thankfully, oohing and aahing over the “sophisticated and sensitive” conversions they have become, providing “astonishing, unusual and stylish” apartments, as estate-agent-speak has it.

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Royal Wedding, BBC Two

Jasper Rees

Where were you? For those of us too young to experience Kennedy’s assassination, which realistically is anyone under the age of 55, the Royal Wedding is the next event along the chain of history that simultaneously impinged on much of the globe’s consciousness. In July 1981, I was on a French course in Clermont Ferrand and the whole group watched Lady Di get Prince Charles’s names in the wrong order on a TV in class. There must have been French commentary. Were you anywhere in particular?

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The Genius of Design: Designs for Living, BBC Two

Fisun Güner Are you sitting comfortably? A Bauhaus Marcel Breuer chair

Does form always have to follow function? Is ornamentation really such a heinous crime? Or is Modernism itself the enemy of the people? The second part of this excellent five-part series – fab archive footage, great interviews with designers young enough to no longer be beholden to the Modernist creed – focused on the founding of the Bauhaus and the Modernist aesthetic. And after juggling a lot of questions, it gently guided us towards more or less the same position as Tom Wolfe’s From...

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Justified, Five USA

Gerard Gilbert These boots were made for moseying: Timothy Olyphant puts his feet up in 'Justified'

Elmore Leonard’s authorial voice has proved elusive to those trying to replicate it on screen – not least to Leonard himself. Barry Sonnenfeld’s 1995 Get Shorty was an honourable exception, but mostly his deeply satisfying humour is lost in translation. Or it’s over-played. Not so with FX’s Justified (showing here on Five USA), which has been loosely adapted from three Leonard stories featuring US Marshal Raylan Givens. Leonard may be executive producer here, but he’s not one...

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Behind the Scenes at the Museum, BBC Four

Josh Spero Errol Simister from the British Commercial Vehicle Museum, Leyland, Lancashire

Television schedules are set months in advance – susceptible only to royal fatalities or political earthquakes (as would-be viewers of EastEnders found out the other night) – but the timing of Behind the Scenes at the Museum could not be more perfect.

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Wormwood Scrubs, ITV1

Jasper Rees 'It’s a thankless task cuffing and lugging miscreants from cell to cell'

Last night in Wormwood Scrubs a prisoner hanged himself. Successfully. A doctor confirmed “that life is now non-existent”. Later on the same wing it happened again, only this time the suicide attempt didn't come off. For many years it has felt as if the great tradition of television documentary is now non-existent. Programmes like this give you hope that, like that second man on a wire in D Wing, it might just pull through.

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Grumpy Guide to the Eighties, BBC Two

howard Male

“The Eighties – where do you bloody well start?” Geoffrey Palmer’s lugubrious voiceover seemed even more world-weary than usual as this hour-long special on the decade everyone loves to hate began. And I felt for him, I really did. Because I am, appropriately enough, the grumpy old hack who's not at all happy to be assigned the task of revisiting this decade in which, it has to said, just about everything was shite. But let’s get one thing clear. I hated this decade at the time,...

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Family Guy Weekend, BBC Three

Jasper Rees

Something decidedly odd happened at one of last year’s Proms. In a night celebrating the golden age of the MGM musicals, one of the performers was Seth MacFarlane. The average Prommer wouldn’t have known MacFarlane from a poached egg. And even his devotees wouldn’t necessarily be too familiar with the face. But when in the course of the evening he started singing in a voice for which he is better known, the picture became clear. To some of the audience, anyway: MacFarlane is the genius...

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Chris Ryan's Strike Back, Sky1

Gerard Gilbert

Chris Ryan and Andy McNab are the Pepsi and Coca Cola of gung-ho, modern SAS war fiction, a lucrative genre that these one-man brands have carved up so effectively between them that it would take a gate-crasher of Nick Clegg-like proportions to threaten their duopoly.

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Luther, BBC One

Adam Sweeting

Idris Elba’s screen career is going so swimmingly that you wonder what can have tempted him back to Blighty. Probably not the weather, since the former denizen of Canning Town now lives in Florida, and is in perpetual demand Stateside thanks to the extreme hotness engendered by his portrayal of Russell “Stringer” Bell in The Wire.

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