James Walton

Together: One of the best Covid dramas so far

Sharon Horgan and James McAvoy played an unnamed couple (always a bit annoying for a reviewer but I won't let that affect my steely objectivity) who entered the first Covid lockdown convinced of the fact that they hated each other.

C4's Flowers is much more than just a 'dark comedy'

Flowers, which ran all week on Channel 4, was thrillingly good to watch -- but is, I now realise, extremely tricky to summarise.

Back: One of the best new shows of the autumn

What's Andrew up to? Is he just a chancer or is he much worse than that? Waiting to find out adds an intriguing, almost psychological-thriller element to what already looks like being one of the best new shows of the autumn.

Unprecedentedly odd: The Entire Universe reviewed

As you've probably noticed, TV critics spend a lot of their time trying to identify which other programmes the one they're reviewing most resembles. Sadly, in the case of BBC2's The Entire Universe, this noble quest proved futile.

The Undiscovered Peter Cook (BBC Four, Wednesday) was, among other things, a strong argument against the current fad for decluttering. When Cook died in 1995, his wife Lin locked up his Hampstead house just as it was, with a lifetime of memorabilia scattered about, and refused all requests to look inside. 'Until,' as the unseen presenter Victor Lewis-Smith inevitably put it, 'now.'

In fact, this thumping cliché pointed to the one disappointment about the programme: that the unruly talents of Lewis-Smith and Cook himself were combined to produce a documentary that not only observed TV conventions so scrupulously, but that also treated its subject with a most un-Cook-like reverence.

Happily, there was no denying the quality of the material that Lewis-Smith unearthed from various cardboard boxes, shelves and carpets. Home movies from the 1930s reminded us how posh Cook's upbringing was, by featuring garden parties and servants -- and by being home movies from the 1930s. We also got any number of never-before-seen clips, including from Cook's fabled 1971 chat show, originally planned to last 13 episodes, but pulled after three. (Left with a sudden gap in the schedules, the BBC hastily replaced Cook with a journalist called Michael Parkinson.)

Given the reverent tone -- which was presumably linked to Lin's involvement -- Cook's last years were duly treated with almost Jeeves-like discretion. Cook, Lewis-Smith told us, was by no means the 'tortured genius' of popular imagining, and had 'long periods off the booze', once 'even' giving up for seven months. Yet, despite such efforts, the final sections of this programme were distinctly melancholy too -- not least when Lin rather gave the game away by explaining that she once asked her husband why he drank so much. 'Despair, really,' Cook replied.

The set-up in The Aliens is that aliens crash-landed on Earth (or maybe just in Britain) 40 years ago -- and, despite looking human and speaking English, are regarded with such suspicion that they've never been allowed to take their place alongside the rest of us. Some do perform menial tasks in the outside world, but every night they're locked back into their own walled enclave, patrolled by border guards.

At this point, shrewder viewers might already have realised that one element of the show is an allegory about immigration. Luckily, on Tuesday that soon disappeared into the background to be replaced by a winningly unhinged plot based on the fact that, when burned in a pipe, the aliens' hair is a powerful recreational drug. This has, in turn, led to gang wars within the alien community -- into which a border guard called Lewis (Michael Socha, so great in the various This Is England series) is drawn when one of the gangs kidnaps his drug-dealing sister. Oh, yes, and Lewis has discovered that he is himself half-alien, and he's not too pleased about it. He's also formed an alliance with a gay alien who fancies him.

The result is a kind of mildly sci-fi version of BBC2's award-winning The Wrong Mans with two unlikely heroes, completely out of their depth, finding themselves at the centre of an increasingly twisting storyline that involves lots of baddies trying to kill them. True, The Aliens doesn't have the same level of ingenuity. Even so, it does manage to be a comedy thriller that's both quite funny and quite thrilling -- which definitely qualifies it as well worth a watch.

Fresh Meat (Monday, Channel 4), Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong's comedy drama about a group of Manchester students, is now back for its fourth and final series. Dennis Potter once said that you should regard your younger self with both tenderness and contempt, and this is a trick that Fresh Meat brilliantly pulls off with its own young characters, as, safe in the bosom of university, they try on various selves to see how well they fit. Like Bain and Armstrong's Peep Show, it's also packed with great jokes.

On Monday, with finals approaching, the students were increasingly mournful that their university days are coming to an end -- and many Fresh Meat fans, I suspect, will be feeling the same.

When I heard the premise of Detectorists (BBC Four, Thursday) -- middle-aged blokes potter about the countryside obsessively looking for buried treasure -- I presumed we were in for a spot of easy satire where the author's message would be something like 'Get a life, you losers.' In the event, this tender, kindly show has portrayed its characters as almost heroically indifferent to modern social fashions and demands. (And I bet there are far more of such people about than we generally see on television -- except of course on Only Connect.)

This perspective was duly reflected in the real author's message that came on Thursday when Andy (Mackenzie Crook) worried aloud that he wasn't ambitious enough. 'No shame in that,' his friend Lance (Toby Jones) reassured him. 'Ambition's overrated. All these people reaching for the stars and striving to be the best. It looks exhausting.' Not coincidentally, Crook, who wrote and directed Detectorists, turned down the chance to be in Pirates of the Caribbean 5 so that he could make the show.

ITV's Vicious reviewed

Imagine if Are You Being Served? had starred Laurence Olivier.

The satire is nicely even-handed, with the Brits as guilty of prissiness as the Americans are of shallowness -- and in both cases without ever seeming despicable, merely somewhere between ambitious and scared.

Add in a uniformly strong ensemble cast and Episodes should in theory be an impossible show for any one person to steal. In practice, Matt LeBlanc manages it effortlessly, playing a particularly unsparing version of himself as an amoral egotist struggling to hang on to his alpha-male status as his post-Friends career slides ever downwards. On Monday, for instance, he decided that if he got back with his ex-wife, he could renew his relationship with his sons -- and, better still, save a lot of money on alimony and child support. And all this, while remaining extremely charming.