tue 29/07/2025

tv

Who Is America?, Channel 4 review - sudden return of Sacha Baron Cohen

Adam Sweeting

Cunningly kept under wraps until the last moment, Sacha Baron Coen’s new show is a timely reminder of his gift for trampling the boundaries of good taste and decorum.

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Unforgotten, Series 3, ITV review - death on the M1

Adam Sweeting

So it’s back to London’s Bishop Street police station for a third series of screenwriter Chris Lang’s cold case saga.

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Keeping Faith, BBC One review - this summer's watercooler drama

Owen Richards

How well do you know the person you love? Are they someone completely different when you’re not around? This is the central question Eve Myles (main picture) has to answer in the BBC’s latest mystery drama.

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Picnic at Hanging Rock, BBC One review - camp girls' school gothic

Jasper Rees

How many people were watching Picnic at Hanging Rock as it took its bow on BBC One? This opening episode happened to be preceded by a rival attraction on ITV.

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Sharp Objects, Sky Atlantic review - Amy Adams battles her demons

Adam Sweeting

Based on the novel by Gillian Flynn (author of Gone Girl) and directed by Jean-Marc Valleé (who helmed last year’s award-winning Big Little Lies), HBO’s Sharp Objects arrives trailing a cloud of great expectations.

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Eric Clapton: A Life in 12 Bars, BBC Two review - blues, booze and dues

Adam Sweeting

There’s undoubtedly a memorable film to be crafted from the life of guitar legend and grand old survivor Eric Clapton – for instance, Melvyn Bragg made a very good South Bank Show about him in 1987 – but the longer this one goes on, the less it has to say. Nor is it obvious why it has been made now.

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Duran Duran: There's Something You Should Know / A Night In, BBC Four, review - chaps on film

Jasper Rees

Forty years on. You could have got attractive odds on Duran Duran still being here when, on a yacht carving the seas off Antigua, a cream-suited Simon Le Bon mimed “Rio” astride an unapologetically phallic bowsprit. “A ripple in a stagnant pool,” sniffed the NME upon first catching them live.

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Reporting Trump's First Year: the Fourth Estate, BBC Two review - all hands on deck at the Gray Lady

Adam Sweeting

The cataclysm of Donald Trump’s election was like a second 9/11 for the East Coast elite (and not just them, obviously). It was a world turned upside down, the centre couldn’t hold, and, worst of all, why did nobody see it coming?

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Natural World: The Super Squirrels, BBC Two review - silliness and facts

Katherine Waters

Squirrels are a breed as diverse as they are ubiquitous: they inhabit environments as extreme as desert and tundra, and all the lush greenery, rainforest and urban jungle imaginable between. So bless the producers of The Super Squirrels who humorously avoid a straight-down-the-line profile of the nearly 300 species around the world and instead showcase their not inconsiderable abilities through a series of gleeful reality TV piss-takes.

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Julius Caesar, BBC Four review - electrifying TV launch of all-women Shakespeare trilogy

David Nice

Who would have thought, when Phyllida Lloyd's Donmar Julius Caesar opened to justified fanfare, that two more Shakespeare masterpieces would be sustained no less powerfully within the women's-prison context over the following years?

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