tue 08/07/2025

ITV

An Audience With Barry Manilow, ITV1

This wasn’t going to offer any surprises. Bernadette Nolan, Lulu and Stacey Solomon would deliver the questions they’d rehearsed. Manilow would respond, then deliver the relevant song. He’s a charmer, and you’d have to be made of lead not to be...

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Downton Abbey, ITV1/ Lulu - Something to Shout About, BBC Two

I suspect writer Julian Fellowes's guilty secret is that he has an attic stuffed with novels from Mills & Boon, such are the luridly romantic plotlines and cliché-flirting characters in Downton Abbey. If you think you can see it coming, then you...

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Downton Abbey, Series 2, ITV1

And now for that difficult second album. Downton Abbey’s stately progress last autumn revived in television audiences a taste thought long dead: for populist drama offering a sepia-tinted vision of the English class system in which the well-to-do...

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Little England, ITV1

Why did I dislike this programme so much? At first I put it down to the stinker of a hangover I found myself watching it through. Perhaps it was the thought that my hangover would have been easier to bear under a yolk-yellow Dordogne sun than under...

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Appropriate Adult, ITV1

Appropriate Adult began with a series of jumpy scenes mapping the bustling domestic landscape of trainee social worker Janet Leach. It was as though we were being offered one last hit of the oxygen of conventional family life (...

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The Jonathan Ross Show, ITV1

When Michael Parkinson voluntarily took his talk shows off-air, he stayed away for rather more than a decade. Eventually he returned from the wilderness to his natural home on Saturday night and was rightly greeted as the prodigal son of chat....

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Opinion: Is The X Factor back for good?

And so it begins again. Earlier this summer I attended what has become a regular British ritual, exactly like Wimbledon and Henley, the Chelsea Flower Show and Ascot, with only one or two small discrepancies. The forecourt in front of the O2 heaved...

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DVD: Dramarama - Spooky

'Dramarama - Spooky': it's been parodied by everyone from Victoria Wood to The League of Gentlemen

This series of supernatural dramas from the early 1980s is the sort of thing that could very easily be parodied – has been parodied, in fact, by everyone from Victoria Wood and French and Saunders to The League of Gentlemen and Garth Merenghi's...

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The Choir That Rocks, ITV1

Created in 2005 by its director Caroline Redman Lusher, the Rock Choir has become something of a populist phenomenon. It’s a “people’s choir”, which means the songbook leans more towards Robbie Williams than Vaughan Williams. Anyone is welcome to...

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Injustice, ITV1

Fantastic! A new drama series in which the hero isn't a detective. Instead, William Travers (James Purefoy) is a criminal barrister who (after some sort of traumatic, nervous-breakdown-provoking experience we don't know much about yet) has moved...

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Scott & Bailey, ITV1

We all enjoy the moment when the detective loses his rag and lunges across the desk to grab the suspect by the lapels, but such scenes are in short supply in this new female crime-fighters series. Instead, the interrogative approach of “the new...

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Prince Philip at 90, ITV1

David Frost and Richard Nixon. Melvyn Bragg and Dennis Potter. Parky and Ali. The list of seminal TV interviews is a relatively short one, and it's not about to get any longer. Alan Titchmarsh’s hopelessly mismatched bout with Prince Philip saw the...

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