Somewhat late to the party, we've been watching the first series of Parlement, a comedy set in and around the European Parliament. Here's a trailer:

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It is the story of Samy (Xavier Lacaille), a naive young French chap, who comes to Brussels in early 2019 to work for Michel Specklin (Philippe Duquesne), a French MEP who has been successfully ( Read more... )

Much lighter than Picard, we also watched the six episodes of Staged, a comedy starring David Tennant and Michael Sheen as two actors called David Tennant and Michael Sheen, with their wives Georgia and Anna playing fictionalised versions of themselves, and writer/director Simon Evans and his sister Anna playing fictional versions of themselves too ( Read more... )

As the lockdown eased, we sat down and watched the ten episodes of Picard, the latest in the Star Trek franchise, with 79-year-old Sir Patrick Stewart returning to his most iconic role. In case you don't know much about it, here's the official trailer:

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I have actually seen only a very few episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, but it was ( Read more... )

The Beiderbecke Affair is the story of two middle-aged teachers in love, in Leeds, at the height of Thatcherism. If you don't know it, just go and get hold of it somehow. It will be five well-spent hours of your time. At present all six episodes are available on Dailymotion:

Episode 1: "What I don't understand is this..."
Episode 2: "Can anybody ( Read more... )

I've been writing this week about the lockdown TV that I have been enjoying - see notes on Derry Girls, Unorthodox and The Good Place. I'm still in the second series of Secret Army, but earlier in the week I finished Normal People, a twelve-part series based on the book by Sally Rooney which I really enjoyed earlier this yearThis is one of those ( Read more... )

So, we binged the NBC series The Good Place sedately over the last few weeks, at the rate of one or two episodes a night. I had already seen the episodes that ended up on the Hugo final ballot last year and the year before, two of which lost and two of which won. The two that lost, in my view, were rather difficult to understand if you saw them out ( Read more... )

I wrote yesterday about Derry Girls as one of the shows I have been enjoying during lockdown. Another, Unorthodox, is also a Netflix show: in an internal poll of my Brussels colleagues, it came out the clear winner, so we gave it a go, and we thoroughly enjoyed it ( Read more... )

This week I'm going to write about the media we've been watching during lockdown. First off, Derry Girls, whose two series so far are set in the early and mid 1990s, and feature five girls (one of whom is actually a boy) attending a Catholic school run by nuns in Derry, at the tail end of the Troubles. It hit home very hard for me. I went to a ( Read more... )

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Theresa May is right: if we let someone drop 'Easter' off an egg hunt, we may as well hand Britain to the jihadis
Glorious.
(tags: ukpolitics )

Latvia Mayor Upstaged by Cat in Interview
Yes.
(tags: latvia tv cats )

The Trump Lifestyle Is Bleeding the Secret Service Dry
Ostentation costs.
(tags: uspolitics )