thu 31/07/2025

tv

AIM Awards 2020, SBTV review - a game attempt to rewire awards ceremonies

joe Muggs

Music awards shows are a strange beast: part window display, part industry conference and part party. Especially if you don’t have Brit Awards or Mercury Prize budget to create a whizz-bang spectacle, the ceremonies can be an interminable pileup of attempts to earnestly celebrate both musicians and behind-the-scenes figures, in front of a room full of increasingly drunk and impatient people.

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Cuba: Castro vs the World, BBC Two - turbulent life and times of El Comandante

Adam Sweeting

During World War Two, President Franklin D Roosevelt described the USA as “the arsenal of democracy”. Only a couple of decades later, Fidel Castro was busily turning Cuba, only 100 miles from the US mainland, into the factory of revolution, exporting armed struggle around the world. It made his country a geopolitical player out of all proportion to its size, at the cost of violently antagonising the Americans.

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The Adulterer, Channel 4 review - atmospheric, addictive and bingeworthy

Sebastian Scotney

It has taken a good half decade for the Dutch series Overspel (The Adulterer) to make it on to TV screens in the UK. Its 32 episodes were made in 2011-2015, but the third and final series is only now being broadcast on Channel 4’s Walter Presents.

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Everything: The Real Thing Story, BBC Four review - brilliant but long overdue

joe Muggs

This documentary is bittersweet viewing on quite a number of levels.

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Imagine... My Name is Kwame, BBC One review - interesting but incomplete

Matt Wolf

Filmed, as one would, well, imagine, prior to lockdown, Imagine .... My Name is Kwame hearkens to what now seems a bygone era of full and buzzy playhouses and adventurous theatre-making that was about the live experience and not some facsimile online.

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The Deceived, Channel 5 review - who's fooling who?

Adam Sweeting

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again, except somebody had renamed it The House at Knockdara. This was the title of the first novel by Michael Callaghan, Cambridge literature don, aspiring writer and serial seducer of his female students. Played here by Emmett J Scanlan, in young-fogey tweeds and Ernest Hemingway beard, Callaghan had “F for Fake” running all the way through him.

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Little Birds, Sky Atlantic review - decadence and intrigue in 1950s Morocco

Adam Sweeting

Diarist, novelist and writer of erotica Anaïs Nin lived a brilliantly-coloured life littered with affairs with literary A-listers (Henry Miller, John Steinbeck, Lawrence Durrell et al).

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The Talk, Channel 4 review - coping with the legacy of racism

Adam Sweeting

Shall we talk about racism? Currently we seem to be talking about it all the time, and it’s the question non-white parents in Britain sooner or later find themselves pondering as they watch their children grow up in our increasingly confrontational society.

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Prodigal Son, Sky 1 review - meet Michael Sheen, psycho killer

Adam Sweeting

We knew that Michael Sheen was a skilful and versatile actor, but lately he’s been getting dangerously good. Last year he roared into the third season of The Good Fight as the outrageous drug-fuelled lawyer Roland Blum, like an explosive fusion of his fellow-Welshmen Richard Burton and Anthony Hopkins.

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Our Baby: A Modern Miracle, Channel 4 review - trailblazing couple's amazing journey

Adam Sweeting

On one level this documentary could be summed up as “parents have baby”, but since the parents in question are “Britain’s most prominent transgender couple”, it was a lot more complicated than that.

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