A picture is worth more than a thousand words, never more so than with the photographs of Don McCullin. The octogenarian photographer’s black-and-white imagery made the Sunday Times colour supplement the talk of international media in the 1970s. McCullin, a North Londoner born and bred, travelled the world’s war zones before coming home 35 years ago to a Somerset world of landscapes and still-lifes, whilst still periodically going off to new conflicts, most recently to Syria and Yemen. With a major retrospective opening at Tate Britain this week, Adrian Sibley’s film followed him as he once Read more ...

It took the best part of six episodes, but we got there in the end: the reason David Oyelowo accepted the confusingly underwritten part of Inspector Javert in BBC One’s adaptation of Les Misérables was finally revealed. His pursuit of an ex-convict for the theft of a coin stretched across hours and years, and in the process became not so much a single-minded obsession as a kind of exoskeleton that held the character in place. The motive which guided him towards this destination was, alas and bafflingly, never explored.Before the big moment came, Javert spent some of the last two episodes Read more ...

When British sitcoms head west anything can happen. For every success – The Office had a happy second life with Steve Carell – there are half a dozen others that got lost in translation, including Coupling, Getting On, Gavin and Stacey, The It Crowd and The Vicar of Dibley. The UK version of Camping was broadcast for Sky Atlantic in 2016 and, while not as savage as her very darkest work, clearly bore the kitemark of Julie Davis, who doesn’t have the highest opinion of the middle classes. Lena Dunham, looking for something to do after Girls, has fallen on it and reincarnated it with regular co Read more ...

“No one wants a pervert for a daughter,” thinks Marnie (delightful TV newcomer Charly Clive), a 24-year-old from the Scottish Borders, who has intrusive thoughts. Don’t we all? But relentless graphic images about “fucked-up sex” have been messing with Marnie’s head since the age of 14, most recently featuring her mum (Arabella Weir) and dad, which rather puts her off her stride when she’s trying to give a nice speech at their anniversary party.It’s like The Sixth Sense, she says, but instead of seeing dead people she sees naked ones, usually having sex, occasionally involving animals. This Read more ...

When they were children the interviewees in this film – the last survivors – were taken away in incomprehensible circumstances, on their way to be murdered for who they were, in Germany and places further east. A handful of the few thousands who reached the UK after 1945, now octogenarians and nonagenarians, bore witness in this incredibly painful, profoundly necessary programme.In spite of the sheen of normality as we met these elderly people in their apparently comfortable homes, it was almost unbearable to watch. What some of the survivors asked even now was what could they do with their Read more ...

Apparently in Denmark they pronounce screenwriter Adam Price’s surname as “Preece”, but its English-looking spelling stems from the fact that his ancestors moved from London to Denmark in the 18th century. He came storming back into the British consciousness with the Copenhagen-based political drama Borgen, which happened to coincide with the “Nordic Noir” boom but managed to succeed without the latter’s obligatory diet of eccentric detectives and ghoulish serial killers. Instead, it wrought its ratings-winning magic from the professional machinations and private preoccupations of Danish Read more ...

How does an unassuming 36-year-old with a terrifyingly sensible haircut and a mildly flamboyant taste in jumpers become the political playwright par excellence of his generation? That’s the question that Alan Yentob sought to dissect in this first episode of a new series of Imagine, subtitled "In the Room Where It Happens", which deftly anatomised James Graham’s off-the-Richter-scale success in repeatedly making the political both profoundly and compellingly personal.Graham most recently made watercooler conversation sizzle with his Brexit: The Uncivil War, broadcast on Channel 4 earlier this Read more ...

Reckless, unstoppable, one step ahead of everyone else, a hell of a lot of fun, utterly charming, street smart – descriptions of the artist Sidney Nolan (1917-1992) poured out from colleagues, rivals, curators, art historians and dealers, not to mention friends and family, in this persuasive film. One remarked with rueful admiration that the painter’s acute survival instincts involved a little bit of clawing here and there. Even his appreciative grandchildren saw him as a vital force, with a sly Irish sense of humour.All agreed you could not compare this working-class original with anybody Read more ...

A bunch of young-ish people stuck in a rambling house in the middle of nowhere, a hatchet-faced senior citizen guarding a hoard of murky secrets, assorted missing persons, a derelict sanatorium, lots of creepy noises and no telephones… hang on, isn’t that exactly the same formula as in the first series of Black Lake? The sense of deja vu in this second season was further enhanced by the presence of Johan (Filip Berg), the arrogant young businessman who was planning to buy the haunted ski resort in series one.The reason Johan has managed to return from the dead is that this is a prequel, and Read more ...

The multi-costumed Lucy Worsley is television marmite, loved or loathed: her gesticulating enthusiasm can grate, as can her stream of bland platitudes. Typically the title is Worsley-twee, evoking fibs instead of lies and falsehoods; are we in the nursery, as smart Nanny Worsley seems to think?Ms Worsley’s thesis was that history is the knitting together of rival interpretations. But every assertion where the viewer might flinch was accompanied with startling facts, in a narration filled with enough surprises and new emphases to be worth your time. The underlying theme emerged at the climax, Read more ...

Perhaps inspired by the success of the revived Hawaii Five-O, CBS and Universal have gone back to the Eighties, and back to Hawaii, to see if the venerable Magnum P.I. could benefit from a similar overhaul. Early evidence suggests that as formulaic American dramas go, it’s… sort of business as usual.Tom Selleck, in Hawaiian shirt, tight jeans and a moustache crying out for a Flymo lawnmower, was the original freelance investigator, Thomas Magnum. The new guy is Jay Hernandez, last seen on the big screen in Suicide Squad and here looking very relaxed tooling around Hawaii’s mountain roads and Read more ...

How much more is there to say about the thrills and spills of midlife? Cold Feet made a surprisingly nimble return to ITV a couple of series ago after a long furlough. There was little evidence of stiff joints or saggy bottoms in Mike Bullen’s writing as he welcomed a gang of teens to the cast list. A second series of Cold Feet 2.0 wore the slightly botoxed rictus of a drama that was running out of new expressions and at that point it would have been no dishonour to call it a day.But no, ratings suggest there’s still a national appetite for this friendship group. The key to tolerating Cold Read more ...