Judging by its early-evening slot and diddly-dee theme tune, Matt Lucas's latest project is aimed at family audiences – far removed from the wonderful ribaldry of Little Britain with his comedy partner David Walliams - something to stick the kids in front of while the adults snooze off their Sunday roast.Lucas (who directs and writes with four other credited writers) is Pompidou, an eccentric aristocrat, and Alex MacQueen (The Thick of It) is his faithful butler Hove. Pompidou has fallen on hard times and now no longer lives in the grand house at the top of the drive but in a dilapidated Read more ...

Wolf Hall divided viewers from the off. It mesmerised many and left a vocal minority cold, for whom apparently - mystifyingly - it has all been a bit dull. The dialogue was too elliptical, the politics tricksy and convoluted (who is this Holy Roman Emperor anyway?), there was a surfeit of men called Thomas and women stitching in bay windows and big dresses. And to cap it all director Peter Kosminsky, fetishising Mark Rylance’s inscrutable face, seemed to want every take to carry on into next week.In the end, the rewards for loyalty were rich, and never more than in the adaptation's final Read more ...

So, Picasso’s last words turned out not to be, “Drink to me. Drink to my health. You know I can’t drink anymore” – yes, those famous last words that inspired a Paul McCartney dirge – but were, according to this TV biography looking at Picasso’s women and how each significant relationship informed the direction of his work, “Get me some pencils”. A more prosaic request, certainly, but he died in bed, aged 93, his pencils delivered and drawing to the last. It was a good and fitting end.It was, however, an unpromising beginning, for when Picasso entered this world it was feared he was still born Read more ...

Going into this programme, it dawned on me that I knew next to nothing about Mark Rylance's background – where he came from, who his parents were, what he does in his personal life. Having reached the end credits I was little the wiser, other than having learned that he has a wife called Claire, since none of it fell within the purview of Melvyn Bragg's interviewing.But I suppose there's always Wikipedia for the other stuff, and Bragg's close focus on Rylance the actor and his main spheres of thespian activity paid its own dividends. It prised out revelations about his approach to his craft, Read more ...

Hostages certainly whips along. We’re straight into conflict from the very start of the first episode, except it soon transpires that the real action will be taking place elsewhere. And it’ll be tighter, more excruciating than the bash-down-the-door atmosphere of the opening scene, which serves to introduce us to Adam Rubin (Jonah Lotan), a top operator in Israeli counter-terrorism who’s on his last day of service and concluding his final mission successfully. We’ll be seeing more of Rubin later, or at least realising it’s him when he takes off his balaclava, having changed role from siege- Read more ...

It's the story they tried to ban! Reinventing the Royals was supposed to have been broadcast in January, but was yanked from the schedules when Prince Charles's staff at Clarence House withheld archive footage, apparently because of a behind-the-scenes battle between royal advisers.Anyway here it is now, and you can understand why Charles might have taken exception to how he's portrayed. For a start it's presented by Steve Hewlett, who was the editor of Panorama when it broadcast Princess Diana's confession of adultery in 1995. The smarmy-looking Hewlett (pictured below) now plies his trade Read more ...

When in Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies Thomas Cromwell exclaims in exasperation,  “to each monk, one bed; to each bed, one monk. Is that so hard for them?” he sums up the state of moral decay into which the monasteries had apparently lapsed by the time of their dissolution. They had, we are told, become dens of iniquity, the monks indulging in every vice and pleasure they were supposed to abstain from, and in command of such monstrous power and wealth that it is hard not to feel that maybe Henry VIII had a point.Much as we tend to think of the monasteries as essentially medieval, Read more ...

The Romanians Are Coming was the immigration story from the other side. Bustling along with the wry, sometimes desperate comedy (and themed music) of a Balkan film, its characters said things about themselves that others would hardly get away with. “I’m going to tell you the stories of some of the arseholes like me who came to take your jobs,” said narrator Alex Fechete Petru at the beginning of James Bluemel’s revealing three-parter. It showed both the lives of three hapless characters as they sought work, or just survival, in the UK, and their homes in the desolate location of Baia More Read more ...

As worst-case scenarios go, the prospect of a UKIP government in a little under three months’ time is a frightening but unlikely one – isn’t it? That they have only two MPs, and leader Nigel Farage is yet to find a seat, has done nothing to stop UKIP setting the political agenda, bulldozing its way to centre stage to demand a place in the forthcoming televised election debates. And while the pantomime buffoonery of Farage and Godfrey Bloom has provided endless scope for ridicule, the very existence of Channel 4’s fictional documentary, set in an imagined but uncomfortably near future, Read more ...

The broomsticks are back in the cupboard, wands are no longer at the ready, and no one is casting spells in cod Latin. JK Rowling’s first novel for adults has made its inevitable journey from page to screen. The first view of a picturesque Cotswolds village – a mannikin in erotic underwear provocatively on all fours in a shop window – says it succinctly: we’re not in Hogwarts any more.The setting of The Casual Vacancy is Pagford, a village in rural southern England where the haves and have-nots, the plummy toffs and the loamy yokels, co-exist cheek by jowl. That’s the way it always has been Read more ...

In the tradition of A Passage to India, The Jewel in the Crown and Staying On, Indian Summers is ambitious, a serious soap attempting to show the dying days of the Raj through a host of interwoven personal and political attachments. Passions run high in the foothills of the Himalayas, cool in the Indian summer, but X-rated for human relationships. This jumbo-sized opener (the first of 10 episodes) had a tangled web of plotlines woven round a variety of class and caste, racial, religious and sexual tensions, amid a potentially explosive political situation. It's all set in the gorgeous Read more ...

The BBC is keen to point out to anyone who'll listen that this new political satire is not, repeat not, about Julian Assange. They'll allow that it was in part inspired by the WikiLeaks founder's situation, but any similarity between him and Dan Hern, a preening egotist who leaked official documents and sought asylum in a South American embassy in central London, is purely coincidental.That's the legalities out of the way, so what of the programme? Co-created by Kayvan Novak (of Fonejacker fame) and producer Tom Thostrup, and written by newcomers Peter Bowden and Thom Phipps, Asylum (a three- Read more ...