Category: TV

Bye bye Holby City

Last week the BBC announced that the long-running hospital drama Holby City is going to be terminated next March. The reason given was that the BBC was looking to produce dramas that “better reflect,...

Still from Holby City of Jac Naylor, a middle-aged white woman wearing no make-up and with blonde hair tied behind her head, wearing a hospital gown, standing in a darkened laboratory in front of a table with a desk lamp shining down and some test tubes in a rack.

Holby City: the Gaskill saga’s denouement

I’ve been a fan of the BBC dramas Casualty and Holby City since the 1980s, although I only started watching them on a regular basis again more recently (Casualty was a fixture when I...

Review: Silent Witness, “One Day”

Silent Witness is a series based on the work of police pathologists: the “witness” refers to the body of a murder victim. It’s been running since 1996 and the stories are always in two...

Anti-Catholic prejudice? Really?

400 years on from Guy Fawkes, Britain’s Catholics still face prejudice | Catherine Pepinster, the Guardian Currently on the BBC there’s a serial about the Gunpowder Plot, in which a group of Catholics in...

Who is really Undateable?

Channel 4 has been advertising a forthcoming TV show titled “The Undateables”, in which they try to hook up various people with disabilities and disfigurements which might have been getting in the way of...

RIP trolling isn’t the worst kind

On Tuesday night, the BBC broadcast two programmes about online bullying, one of them specifically dedicated to the phenomenon of “RIP trolling”, meaning the phenomenon of mindless idiots posting insulting messages, videos and doctored...

Social-worker bashers’ wilful blindness

On Monday night, BBC2 broadcast a documentary titled Protecting Our Children, the first of a series of three programmes which follows a social worker in Bristol as they deal with one of their child...

Is there money to burn in Basildon?

BBC iPlayer: The Big Gypsy Eviction This programme was on BBC1 last night (you can watch it until next Thursday, if you are in the UK) and is the result of six years of...

Minorities may die in Midsomer Massacres

The BBC doesn’t have a monopoly on ridiculous plotlines in its drama, despite the recent trends of Casualty, Holby City and EastEnders (not to mention the sappy ridiculousness of the school drama series, Waterloo...