Douglas Hodge

Scenes Of A Sexual Nature review

Ewan McGregor, Tom Hardy and Sophie Okonedo are big names doing small roles in this pleasant 2006 portmanteau film.

The tiniest bit of mid-season drift is remedied by a party episode filled with all the best minor characters: Fergal (Jonathan Forbes) is back to celebrate his 40th birthday, a fiasco that ends up looking rather like a Renaissance painting - featuring, unforgettably, Douglas Hodge on bass and drums.

TV preview: Catastrophe, C4

This is the third sitcom I've reviewed in two days and with the greatest respect to BBC Three's Cuckoo and BBC Two's Semi-Detached, which are both extremely watchable, Catastrophe is by far the best of the trio.

Catastrophe, Series 3, review - 'the end of the road?'

Good grief? Channel 4's marital sitcom turns deadly serious.

Review: Catastrophe, series 3, final episode

But the most powerful scenes for me were the very final ones.

A grand surprise arrived on Friday in the shape of Decline and Fall. It shouldn't, perhaps, have been that much of a surprise, given that the man responsible for adapting Evelyn Waugh's first published (and most splenetically Welsh-hating, liberal-baiting) novel was James Wood, also responsible for the ever-subtle Rev., and that the casting was able to plumb such glorious heights as Stephen Graham, Douglas Hodge, David Suchet and Eva Longoria.

For once, an adaptation caught Waugh's inner voice, that singular interwar fruity whine of pomp, self-pity and high intellect, the all leavened by an utterly redemptive sense of the absurdity of the human condition, particularly Waugh's own. Crucially, this was achieved without resort to the artifice of narrative voiceover, à la Brideshead. Wood just picked his quotes very cleverly. In episode one (of three), Jack Whitehall's beleaguered Everyman is sent down from Oxford (with an achingly unfair whiff of un-trouser-edness) and reduced to teaching in the boondocks, where every pupil is as damaged, yet at least 10 times as smart, as the masters. He soon alights on the ultimate piece of time-wasting for his spoilt charges, "an essay on self-indulgence. There will be points for the longest, irrespective of any possible merit."

There are the stock grotesques, yes - even Douglas Hodge, as the chief sot/pederast, doesn't get to chew the scenery with quite the liberated zest of David Suchet's headmaster, reacting to freedom from all those dreary Poirots as would a vampire released on virgin necks, toothily telling Whitehall's straight-bat ingenu that "we schoolmasters must temper discretion with... deceit" - but, by and large, this is happily grounded more in realism than caricature. What emerges is a true comic fantasy, yes, but also one which captures that dreadful damp twixt-war tristesse: a certain boredom with politics, a certain class obsession, an irresolute yet total anger at... something. An End of Days. This BBC production, in which all excel, is thrillingly timely, given our fractious nation's rude recent decision to Decline, and Flail, and also gives trembling hope that, finally, we might get a faithful rendition of the wisest funny novel of the 20th century, Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim.

Decline And Fall review

Imagine such a bygone world where someone would get a job they are ill-suited for, simply because they are posh. How foolish! Still, it will be interesting to see how George Osborne's London Evening Standard reviews the new BBC One adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's stinging social satire Decline And Fall.

TV preview: Decline And Fall, BBC1

Well we've gone back to the 1970s this week, we might as well go the whole hog and go back to the 1920s with this three-part television adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's classic novel. And talking of hogs, we've barely been a minute into the action when the chumps from Oxford's riotous Bollinger Club have lobbed a pig's head out of the window into the quad.

The fifth episode of the third series of the family comedy maintains the good form of last week's, fuelled by an early confrontation between Pete (Hugh Dennis) and Sue (Claire Skinner) and the typhoon-like arrival of Sue's sister Auntie Angela (Samantha Bond) and her ghastly American psychologist of a husband, Brick (Douglas Hodge). That's before an awkward restaurant meal dredges up Angela and Sue's acrimonious history. As usual, daughter Karen (Ramona Marquez) has her own opinion on the matter, deftly using her ingénue quips to throw a cold light on adult hypocrisy.

This is one of the funniest episodes to date. Last week, you may remember, Dad (Hugh Dennis) had woken up with a crippling hangover after a night out that involved green cocktails. It gets worse. It turns out that he danced with a woman called Mimi who kissed him - and he kissed her back - and now his wife (Claire Skinner) has found out. One way and another it could hardly be a worse time for the unspeakable sister (Samantha Bond) to arrive for a visit with her new boyfriend, an American therapist with a ponytail called Brick (Douglas Hodge). They all go out for a meal and the evening degenerates into a classic middle-class bloodbath, during which little Karen (Ramona Marquez) dissects the ponytail's psychobabble with lethal precision.