Hyped!

Since we recorded, this diverse Regency romp has become Netflix's biggest series ever, downloaded over 80 million times in the 28 days after its release. Zoe and Tom find this fact both hilarious and terrifying. Join them as they dissect the series' appeal and above all its vision of the Regency court as a diverse utopia, in which present values very much dominate the picture of the past. And why...

The latest series of the Netflix smash hit is different: more recent, nastier, and closer to home. It covers a period within living memory of old millennials like Zoe and Tom, with one of the most painful marriages of the 20th century at its core. This season is the most controversial yet. Its treatment of the past has stirred high-level and intense controversy about whether it is obviously art or...

The Queen's Gambit (Oct 2020) fast became Netflix's most-downloaded scripted miniseries of all time. Join Zoe and Tom as they regroup to deconstruct this silky, sexy televisual creature. There is much to enjoy about the mid-century rise and rise of Beth Harmon (Anya Taylor-Joy) from tranqued-up Kentucky orphan to world chess champion... but as usual, Zoe and Tom have some reservations.

These days, it is a challenge to find someone who has not read Sapiens, Harari's astonishingly bold and popular global bestseller from 2014. Sapiens attempts to explain the whole history of mankind, from early versions of the species through to the globalised, gas-guzzling world of today, via the devising of agriculture, money, empire and industry. Yet is this honest history? Harari's story is a p...

The first non-English language film to win the Best Picture Oscar, Parasite lit not just the critics alight but punters too. Rarely has one film - a relatively low budget, highly culturally specific film at that - created such a global talking point. Who or what is to blame here? Is it capitalism? Class warfare? Morality gone awry? Wealth? Who is the real parasite, if there is one? What about the...

Michaela Coel's comedy drama about a woman trying to process a sexual assault offers TV unlike any most of us have ever seen before. Race, sex, consent, London, youth, social media, identity: it's all there, rendered with formal and intellectual iconoclasm. Zoe and Tom unpick its curious magic, and the fascination this unlikely piece of work has cast over the nation. 

A best-seller following publication in 2017, Eddo-Lodge's polemic lit up a whole conversation about race in Britain, prompting millions to think for the first time about the concepts of systemic racism and white privilege in relation to the UK. The conversation, if that's the word for what often feels like a perilous obstacle course at best and an antagonistic Manichean battle to the death at wors...

Stormzy is a British phenomenon. He is the man who made grime global, the first black British artist to headline Glastonbury and was dubbed 'poet laureate' in Parliament for his response to Grenfell. Stormzy is a chart-topper with political clout. We take a critical look at his 2019 platinum album Heavy is the Hype and dig below the hype to assess the content and appeal of this album, putting it i...

Time Out called 2019's The Souvenir 'the only film that matters' - this was enough to entice Zoe along to see it, while Tom has long been a fan of its director Joanna Hogg. In a departure from form, Tom and Zoe find the reasons reasons for its instant cult status justified, and discuss Hogg's special touch when it comes to class, art and all things visual. The mother-daughter acting from Tilda Swi...

Zoe and Tom consider the mania around Rooney's 2018 best-seller and 2020 TV adaptation, tempering their slight (in Zoe's case substantial) bewilderment with plenty of analysis of what Normal People seems to be saying about sex, class, family and youth. 

Zoe, a former dating columnist just like Dolly, and an author of books concerning dating, just like Dolly, certainly found herself faced with the work of a much more popular and successful - and younger - version of herself. But was it just sour grapes that made her gawp at this book's fantastic success? She likes to think it wasn't. Together with historian of France Tom, they unpack the book's th...

Join Zoe and Tom as they unpick the hype around Sir Tom Stoppard's most recent play, a chronicle of the tragedy of European Jews in the 20th century through the fate of one sprawling family. Zoe was very very unimpressed, and Tom just unimpressed. Why did critics go wild for it? What appetite among British audience goers did it serve? What was it trying to do and where did it go wrong - and in som...

Based on Deborah Feldman's best-selling memoir about leaving the Satmar ultra-orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn, New York, Unorthodox became a global phenomenon after it dropped on Netflix in March 2020 - just in time for lockdown. Zoe and Tom puzzle over themes of gender, female self-discovery, Yiddish, Judaism and place - setting the miniseries in the context of a new, broadening interest by...

1917, released in the UK in January 2020, was one of the most successful war movies of all time. Unlike its smash hit stablemates, though, it focussed on World War One instead of Two. We discuss the appetite for World War One narratives, how perceptions of the war have changed, and why.