Roald Dahl

David Baddiel: Roald Dahl was a witty, charming genius - and a monster

David Baddiel watches a new play that finally confronts the beloved author's antisemitism - and asks why it took us so long.

Acaster, Adefope and Ranganathan to narrate Roald Dahl audiobooks

James Acaster, Romesh Ranganathan and Lolly Adefope are to narrate three audio editions of Roald Dahl's James And The Giant Peach, George's Marvellous Medicine and The Witches for Puffin.

Alex Brooker critical of The Witches limb impairments

A new film version of Roald Dahl's novel The Witches has been criticised for its depictions of limb difference. The film, which stars Anne Hathaway, features evil characters who have distinct hand and feet impairments. Alex Brooker, who has hand and arm impairments, told the BBC that the images "jarred quite a lot" and could "add to the stigma" around disability.

Flowers, which ran through the week on Channel 4, was a true hen's teeth rarity: we were witnessing, I think, the invention of a new genre. I'm just not sure quite what it was. Thorny, yes, prickly and awkward. Bleakly black too. Resoundingly human and truly funny. Above all, the singular vision of show runner (and writer and director and co-star) Will Sharpe, an Anglo-Japanese former Footlights president. What I do know is that I could have watched it all year long.

There were elements of Roald Dahl and Japanese anime, of Black Mirror and of Alan Ayckbourn, of fairytales for children who drink. Essentially the tale of a depressed writer and his savagely dysfunctional family, as the week wore on it became more forgiving. It's a sign of good drama when there's strength in depth of casting, and there were relishably chunky cameos for Angus Wright and Anna Chancellor as the true grotesques of the piece. But the family itself, the Flowers, survived near fatalities and worse to emerge, if not triumphant, then hugely and recognisably normal.

Olivia Colman, now forgiven the occasional misstep in The Night Manager, was back to all her charm and glory. We have grown used to seeing Colman in full-teeth mode, but she'd obviously been hiding a seventh set: no one else can hiss the accusatory "blabbermouth" while still blinding the world with a smile so wide nor so full of brittle self-doubt. Then there was Daniel Rigby as the son who bores everything but the pants off women, and Sophia Di Martino as sis Amy, the tender fulcrum around which much revolves. Above all, Julian Barratt as father Maurice, who conjures worlds of depression from just a pocketful of mumbles. The sadly salient point came on Thursday, when Deborah (Colman) attempted to reach the heart of Maurice's depression: we can fight it, she says, fight the monster together, maybe just with love. A shaggy shake of a sorrowful head. "No. Love just makes it worse." Truthfully, a week-long gem.

The BBC once again adapts a David Walliams novel for the festive season. Walliams owes a great deal to Roald Dahl, and this is another tale of a forlorn child in a world of cruel and stupid adults. Elliot Sprakes stars as Joe, whose factory worker dad Len (John Thomson) becomes a billionaire after inventing a new type of toilet roll. But as his dad embraces the bling and a glamorous girlfriend (Catherine Tate), Joe yearns for a normal life and friends. Reliable family fun, with Walliams himself co-starring as a dinner lady.

Roald Dahl Funny Prize comes to an end

The Roald Dahl estate has confirmed that the Roald Dahl Funny Prize for humorous children's books, the awards it launched with the then children's laureate Michael Rosen and Book Trust, has come to an end.

Geoff Rodkey: why UK comedy is better than US comedy

The American writer of Daddy Day Care, who also happens to have written two funny books for children, on why British humour always trumps American - from Roald Dahl to Monty Python.

Inside No 9 was a perfect little half-hour of claustrophobic grand guignol, and Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton are the bastard love-children of Alfred Hitchcock and Roald Dahl. A Eurostar six-berth couchette from Paris to Bourg-St-Maurice, a scarily thin, scarily ambitious doctor, a fat farting Kraut, a northern top-bunk couple anticipating their mad daughter's wedding, Jack Whitehall as a spoilt-posh delivering seriously undeliverable lines with entirely believable gusto, an unnerving twist in the tail. Beautifully, beautifully dark, and guiltily funny, and nobody now does it better.

Dustin Hoffman and Judi Dench acted together, and wonderfully, in Esio Trot, an essentially children's book brought to the screen. Roald Dahl's tale of late-blooming love, revolving around a tortoise (spell it backwards), with its incremental-growth trick giving me goosepimples for the sublime The Twits, was undermined by the inclusion of actor James Corden and writer Richard Curtis, but not much: Dahl's intention survived, just. He was a wonderfully dark man.