Where many contributors nominating Top Tens for Sight & Sound's 2022 poll of the Greatest Films of All Time "put their thumb on the scales", as Paul Schrader put his - meaning worthy choices and worthier explanations (this was the 'Jeanne Dielman' poll) - not so Terence Davies.

His selections and accompanying rationales were the pithiest of punctures for po-faced polling - and the happiest of Saturday matinees with it. "Because Doris Day is in it!" for The Pajama Game; "Because…

Phylidia Barlow's Disrupter art show is currently on at Wolterton Hall, Norfolk. The notion being her rough-and-ready sculptures are not decorating the 18th Century mansion, but disrupting it: coarse plaster and cement somehow a challenge to classist marble and stone. But Barlow (a dame and great great-granddaughter of Charles Darwin), was part of the Establishment, not its interloper, and the exhibit just another iteration of the liberal game of paying lip service to class ideology immediately before paying table service to the…

In Arcadia eramus.

When British television was being deregulated in the early 1990s it was this production that was most often referenced as evidence of what could soon be lost. Appropriately enough for a serial concerned with decline-and-fall, it soon was. Brute market forces came to the ugly fore and public service broadcasting has been marginalised ever since.

It’s not about an extended duration or large budget—these things endure to this day—but a level of taste, trust and confidence in…

When Big Brother debuted on British TV, it featured psychologists 'analysing' the bad behaviour people wanted to see. A runaway success, future series had no need for the fig leaf of social experiment and the crassness ramped-up unencumbered by white coats.

The Exorcist pulled off a similar trick: its viscera initially excused by having three religious advisors, a medical doctor and a Jesuit priest in the cast. But the pulpy script is no more a meaningful response to theological mores than…