Category Archives: Television

‘They thought we were terrorists’: meet Joe Rush, the master of mutoid art and king of Glastonbury

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The punky master of outsider art was once a pariah, thrown out of Britain for his anarchist ways. Now, he’s a national treasure. Joe Rush relives 40 years of sticking it to the ‘straight world’

“They thought we were terrorists,” says Joe Rush, remembering the day not long after the fall of the Berlin Wall when he and a fellow anarchist took over a patch of no man’s land at the heart of the German capital. They filled it with military hardware: tanks and artillery and the like – along with a MiG-21 fighter jet that they pointed directly at the nearby Reichstag.

“The authorities were furious,” he says. And no wonder. The police feared that, just as the cold war was ending, another military face-off had begun. “They thought we were going to fire missiles into the Reichstag,” says Rush. “So we pointed the MiG into the ground to make it clear we weren’t.”

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Mischa Barton on success, paparazzi and survival: ‘I’m not broken’

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As party girl Marissa in The OC, Barton found fame at a time when young female stars were being hounded by the press. She talks about strength, resilience and her battle against revenge porn

For some actors, the roles they have played stick to them like shadows, long after they should have been left behind. Just ask Mischa Barton. It is 15 years since she starred as Marissa Cooper in the teen drama The OC, and yet still she can’t shake her off. When Barton appeared in the reality show The Hills in 2019 – inspired by The OC’s privileged young Californians but featuring real-life people – she was supposed to be herself, but the producers expected Cooper. “It is the constant mistake,” she says wryly. “They were even calling me by my character name. Seriously? Like, this far down the line they can’t get my name right?”

The parallels, though, are irresistible. Marissa was a troubled party girl with a love of fashion who met a tragic end. Mischa (even their names are similar) was also a troubled party girl with a love of fashion, whose life at times seemed out of control. There was the extreme fame, the breakdown, the reported threats of suicide, estrangement from her parents and a “revenge porn” court case. Barton has weathered it all with a sense of humour and now, at 35, a bit of perspective.

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John Oliver rips into US clean-energy loans: ‘This business model is fundamentally flawed’

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The Last Week Tonight host digs into a government program whose lack of oversight has left many risking their homes

John Oliver turned his attention this week to a public lending program called Pace, whose state-supported clean energy loans have stranded many vulnerable homeowners in overwhelming debt or at risk of losing their homes. The program, which stands for Property Assessed Clean Energy, “is a cautionary tale about how good intentions when not paired with careful, smart design, can end in disaster”, the Last Week Tonight host explained.

Through Pace, local governments borrow money at low rates made available to low-income borrowers for energy-saving home improvements, which are then paid back through increases to property taxes.

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Stanley Tucci: the flirty hero of foodie TV you need in your life

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The actor charms the pants off everyone he meets in his new culinary travelogue that will whet your appetite for a trip abroad when it’s finally allowed

You may not realise this at the moment, but your heart has been crying out for a series like Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy. If you saw last night’s first episode, tucked away on CNN International, you will already be aware of this. If you didn’t, stop what you’re doing and seek it out. It’s less a TV show and more an hour of full-body relaxation. By the time the episode ended, I felt as if my entire brain had been taken out and massaged in olive oil.

Although the title suggests a different series, in which a beloved actor receives a concussion then forlornly attempts to navigate Google Maps, this is actually a culinary travelogue. Tucci visits a different Italian region in every episode and contentedly samples its food. It is a formula you will have seen thousands of times before, albeit with a couple of key differences.

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‘I am very shy. It’s amazing I became a movie star’: Leslie Caron at 90 on love, art and addiction

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The legendary actor reflects on her riches-to-rags childhood, confronting depression and alcoholism – and dancing with Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire

Leslie Caron and her companion, Jack, greet me at the front of their apartment. They make a well-matched couple – slight, chic, immaculately coiffured. Caron, the legendary dancer and actor, is 90 in two weeks’ time. Jack, her beloved shih tzu, is about nine.

Caron heads off to make the tea, with Sidney Bechet’s summery jazz playing in the background. I am left alone with Jack to explore the living room. It feels as if I am tunnelling through the history of 20th-century culture. Here is a photo of a pensive François Truffaut; below is a smirking Warren Beatty. The centrepiece on the wall is a huge watercolour of Caron’s great friend Christopher Isherwood, painted by his partner, Don Bachardy. To the left is Louis Armstrong, to the right Rudolf Nureyev, with whom she starred in 1977’s Valentino, and further along is Jean Renoir, who she says was like a father to her. And we have barely started.

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The Handmaid’s Tale season four review – hope at last in the most harrowing show on TV

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Elisabeth Moss has always made this impressive if horrifying TV. But as the new series turns June into queen of the rebels, it has a shot of new life

I am not sure if “enjoyment” is quite the right word in relation to watching The Handmaid’s Tale (Channel 4). It has been, at various points over the last three seasons, either a harrowing slog or an extremely harrowing slog. But at its best, it is impressive, inventive drama that pushes unfamiliar buttons with great skill. It had a magnificent, haunting first season, which largely stuck to the plot of Margaret Atwood’s classic novel, but afterwards it struggled under the weight of its own misery. June (Elisabeth Moss) escaped from Gilead, and was captured, ad infinitum, which made it feel like a gruesome hall of mirrors in which hope was pointless. It made me wonder whether continuing to watch was pointless, too. But a diversion into global politics gave it a shot of new life, and season four continues to explore new ground. It needed it, and it works.

The lengthy recap at the beginning is useful, given that the pandemic delayed production. According to its showrunner, Bruce Miller, the logistics of shooting in Canada also had a direct effect on shaping the story. June organised a cohort of rebels, pulling together an underground network of Marthas and Handmaids, to smuggle 86 children out of Gilead, saving them from life under a brutal regime. The Waterfords have been arrested by the Canadian government and are in captivity, but at the end of season three, it looked as though June may have run out of luck. Still, without her, this is Handmaids’ Tales, rather than The Handmaid’s Tale. If the question is, how much more can one woman endure, then the answer comes quickly: using no anaesthetic, Janine cauterises the shotgun wound in June’s abdomen with a red-hot poker. Welcome to season four.

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David Schwimmer: ‘I was a roller-skating waiter’

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The actor, 54, on childhood activism, studying drama at Oxford, bringing up his daughter and learning to fight the good fight

My parents are my heroes. I marvel how they were able to work as young lawyers while keeping family as a priority. They raised my sister and me with a hyper-awareness of justice, equality and gay rights. I have memories of protesting on picket lines. It really informed my worldview and perspective.

I wanted to be a surgeon. I was fascinated by the human body: I knew everything about the lymphatic, the vascular and the skeletal systems. I was a big science geek, but I found that I could talk to more girls in acting class than in the science lab. So that kind of derailed my medical career.

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‘Just don’t show her body!’ Netflix makes a true crime show with a difference

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A Murder in West Cork delves into the killing of Sophie Toscan du Plantier – but this doc makes her more than a victim. Its creators discuss how they fused intrigue with empathy

On the morning of 23 December 1996, Sophie Toscan du Plantier was found murdered in a lane near Schull, West Cork. She was 39 years old and a regular visitor to Ireland from Paris, where she lived with her husband, a celebrated film-maker, and 13-year-old son, Pierre Louis Baudey-Vignaud. Her death transfixed the media in both Ireland and Paris, partly because it was just so jarring. The murder rate in Ireland was so low that there was only one state pathologist, and it took him 28 hours to reach the scene.

It was close to Christmas. Sarah Lambert, the producer of Netflix’s new documentary, Sophie: A Murder in West Cork, struggles to underline how big a deal this was. “More so in Ireland than a lot of other countries, Christmas is such a family time. I know a lot of married couples that will separate and go back to their parents. People were flabbergasted that she, a mother, would be there by herself so late in December.” The location was so remote, the community so tight-knit, that such violence seemed incongruous. It was expected there would be a swift resolution. In a place where you couldn’t buy a new cardigan without everyone knowing about it, how would anyone get away with murder?

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My husband’s death inspired It’s a Sin scene, says Russell T Davies

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In new Guardian podcast, TV dramatist tells Grace Dent about writing Colin’s final hours

Russell T Davies, the writer of It’s a Sin, the Channel 4 drama about the HIV/Aids epidemic in the late 1980s, has revealed that the death of Colin, one of show’s characters, was partly based on the death of his partner.

Speaking to the food writer Grace Dent on a new Guardian podcast, Comfort Eating, which launches on Tuesday, Davies said he had drawn on the experience of watching his husband, Andrew Smith, die from brain cancer in 2018 to write the scenes featuring Colin’s death.

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Bake Off to Inside No 9: what to watch instead of the Euros

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A football-free cultural guide to the week ahead, from comedy podcasts to Sean Bean dramas

Listen, I’m with you. I have no interest in Euro 2020 either. But luckily, over the years I’ve perfected the art of finding other things to do. Here’s a day-by-day alternative viewing guide for the first week of the tournament (after that, you’re on your own).

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‘It made my walk a little taller’: the inspiring LGBTQ legacy of Pose

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As the groundbreaking show ends its award-winning three season run, those involved with the show talk about its importance for trans and queer people of color

Gold crowns inset with emeralds, fur-trimmed capes and gowns embellished with glittering diamonds and pearls clothed The House of Abundance as they made their last-minute entrance into a New York City ballroom and their first entrance on to our TV screens in the premiere episode of Pose in June 2018, which aired its final episode on Sunday.

Related: 'I binged Six Feet Under just for the gayness of it': LGBT celebs on their favourite queer TV

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Smother review – Maeve Binchy-esque thriller is entirely addictive

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This new Irish drama expertly manages a large cast of characters, with seeds of suspicion, red herrings – and a monstrous patriarch left for dead

Smother (Alibi), a new County Clare-set thriller by novelist and television writer Kate O’Riordan, reminds me – and I have few higher compliments – of the work of Maeve Binchy, if she had ever turned her hand to whodunnits. It has a seemingly effortless mastery of a large cast of characters, warm intelligence pervading everything, and promotes the gorgeous general sense of being held for the duration in a very safe pair of hands indeed. Like Binchy, it is also entirely addictive.

It opens with an altercation on a clifftop that ends with a man dead on the beach below. Then, as is currently TV fashion, we spool back to earlier that night, as successful businessman Denis (Stuart Graham) hosts his wife Val’s (Dervla Kirwan) 50th birthday party. Their three daughters are there – Jenny (Niamh Walsh), a heavily pregnant single doctor who works eternally for Daddy’s approval, Anna (Gemma-Leah Devereux), who is in the final stages of a custody battle with her husband Rory’s ex-wife for the latter’s two sons, and Grace (Seána Kerslake), the fragile youngest, struggling with mental illness and currently off her medication.

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Bob Odenkirk: ‘Soon people won’t remember Breaking Bad’

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He charmed as slimeball lawyer Saul in the drugs drama and its spinoff – but now Bob Odenkirk has gone badass in action thriller Nobody. Has he left his comedy days behind?

On the surface, Bob Odenkirk’s new film is entirely preposterous. As the story of a man who goes on a murder spree after his house is broken into, Nobody is an all-out, full-throated action movie. In one scene, 58-year-old Odenkirk tears a handrail off the inside of a bus and beats a man senseless with it.

However, as he explains, the story stems from something much more personal. “My family had two break-ins,” he reveals from his home in LA, where he’s sitting beneath a vast Chinatown poster. “It was very damaging.”

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Lisey’s Story review – a swollen snoozefest from Stephen King

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Supernatural silliness, metaphorical monsters, and dread that doesn’t so much as build as never lets up ... not even Julianne Moore’s turn as a grieving wife can save this bloated bore

The advice that a writer should “kill all your darlings” has been variously attributed. William Faulkner, Allan Ginsberg, Oscar Wilde, GK Chesterton and Arthur Quiller-Couch all get a look-in. Stephen King approved the accepted wisdom in his book On Writing. “Kill your darlings, kill your darlings,” he said with the relish one would hope for from a master of horror. “Even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”

Related: Joan Allen: ‘Acting’s like tennis. You bring your game’

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Tongue-in-cheek tales from 19th-century India – podcasts of the week

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Meera Syal and Jennifer Saunders star in Audible’s new spoof, Raj! Plus: a tense history lesson in GunPlot, and Unearthed offers gripping plant-themed tales

Raj!
Meera Syal and Jennifer Saunders give standout performances in Audible’s new pod drama, spoofing life in British-controlled India. Ineffectual governor Henry arrives in a rural province, “allergic to emotions”, part of an unwieldy bureaucratic structure, and unwilling to acclimatise. As well as the lines you might see coming (“can’t imagine the British ever going for Indian food!”), there is plenty you might not, in this tale of blustering Brits, and Syal’s Rajmata side-eyeing and sticking it to the man.
Hannah J Davies

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Christina Hendricks: ‘We were critically acclaimed – and everyone wanted to ask me about my bra’

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The star of Good Girls discusses Mad Men, sexual harassment and squaring her glamorous reputation with her ‘weird, goofy’ personality

Christina Hendricks appears on our video call with the most dramatic backdrop. Art deco gold peacocks bedeck a black wall, making her look, as she has so often in her career, a bit too good to be human. Perfectly poised, perfectly framed, perfectly lit, she is more like a dreamy vision of what humans look like. “I, erm, like your wall,” I say, pointlessly. She flashes a smile, as if to say: “Obviously.”

We are here primarily to discuss the comedy-drama series Good Girls, the fourth season of which will resume in the US this month after a midseason break. The elevator pitch would be Breaking Bad for girls: three suburban women, each hovering on the edge of bankruptcy, unite to embark on a life of cack-handed crime, only to discover they are good at it. The ensemble – Hendricks, Mae Whitman, who plays her sister, and Retta, their friend – works strikingly well, their pacey comic rapport instilling a sense of perpetual motion. You just can’t imagine Good Girls ending. Every time a plot line seems to be reaching its climax, something worse – and funnier – happens.

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A banal, excruciating mess – you review Friends: the Reunion

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The show you’ve waited 17 years for aired at last – and could you BE any more emotional? But what did you rate and what did you hate? And why did Matt LeBlanc come out on top?

Friends was a huge part of my life. Growing up, and realising I was gay but having nobody to talk to, I felt very alone and very isolated. Watching Friends got me through some really dark moments.

I sat down to watch [the reunion], fully expecting to hate it, but was crying within minutes. All the feelings I had growing up came back. I loved seeing the cast get together and hearing how they felt on set and how they reacted when they arrived. The bond they all share is so clear and strong. I always felt as if I was a part of Friends, as silly as that may sound, but watching it definitely influenced my personality. I’m sarcastic like Chandler, a clean freak like Monica and a little bit different like Phoebe.

Seeing them all together again just reminds you that lifelong ‘Friends’ are achievable. I just wish I could let the cast and the writers know how much it means to me. Scott, 30, Essex

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Mare of Easttown finale review – Kate Winslet drama is a stunning, harrowing success

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The actor’s turn as a complex, fallible detective has been a privilege to witness, in a murder mystery that kept us guessing right to the profoundly moving end

In interviews, Kate Winslet always said it wasn’t a thriller. And she was right. Yes, Mare of Easttown (Sky Atlantic) began with a murder in a small, bleak Pennsylvania town and Winslet’s police detective Mare Sheehan being called upon to investigate. But it was almost immediately clear that the seven-part drama was setting up to be so much more – and even clearer soon after that it was likely to succeed in all its endeavours.

It was a character study, of how a woman ground down by life after the loss of a son to drugs and suicide, the consequent divorce from her husband and raising of her grandson in the face of a custody battle with his mother (her son’s former girlfriend, rehabbed but fragile) endures.

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