Television

By the time of its fourth episode, the point at which this review was written, Taboo, which had occasionally teetered on the edge of greatness, had collapsed into rather grotesque pantomime. The aloofness of Tom Hardy’s performance, which in earlier episodes had given his character, James Delaney, a brooding malice, is petering out into ridiculousness, as he growls his way through a script peppered with faux-profound cliches (“There is business afoot tonight” he says, climbing into a carriage.) The dark Other of the colonial imaginary looms large in the world of Taboo: Delaney begins the show...

Daniel Randall reviews Taboo , currently airing on the BBC. By the time of its fourth episode, the point at which this review was written, Taboo , which had occasionally teetered on the edge of greatness, had collapsed into rather grotesque pantomime. The aloofness of Tom Hardy's performance, which in earlier episodes had given his character, James Delaney, a brooding malice, is petering out into ridiculousness, as he growls his way through a script peppered with faux-profound cliches ("There is business afoot tonight" he says, climbing into a carriage.) The dark Other of the colonial...

Since the death of John Berger on 2 January the bourgeois press has squirmed over the task of commemorating a major public figure who was also a lifelong Marxist. Some have responded by simply attacking him. In the Sunday Times (8 January 2017) Waldemar Januszczack made snide jokes about Berger’s speech impediment, deliberately misunderstood his refusal to fetishise art objects and pretended that his decision to give significant screen time to female commentators in a TV episode on art and gender was somehow a sign of his own chauvinism. Others have generally been milder in their criticisms...

The “scandal” over the activitiesof pro-Israel groups in the UK and their links with the Israeli embassy uncovered by Al Jazeera is largely manufactured. Al Jazeera’s story got blanket news coverage after the main protagonist in their undercover footage, Shai Masot, a minor Israeli Embassy official, resigned. Masot was caught on camera saying he would like to see Junior Foreign Minister Alan Duncan removed. The documentaries run to the best part of two hours, with a lot of repetition. You do not need to spend that time watching. It is hardly shocking that Israeli diplomats and embassy staff...

The “scandal” over the activities of pro-Israel groups in the UK and their links with the Israeli embassy uncovered by Al Jazeera (in ‘The Lobby’, a series of documentaries) is largely manufactured. Al Jazeera’s story got blanket news coverage after the main protagonist in their undercover footage, Shai Masot, a minor Israeli Embassy official, resigned. Masot was caught on camera saying he would like to see Junior Foreign Minister Alan Duncan removed. The documentaries run to the best part of two hours, with a lot of repetition. You do not need to spend that time watching. It is hardly...

Normally I wouldn’t have bothered with Sebag Montefiore’s three-part documentary on Vienna (broadcast December 2016). His approach to his topics is somewhat predictable and conservative. But when I lived in Hungary for nine years I tasted some of the splendours of the architecture and the cultural inheritance of the Hapsburgs, not to mention its many contradictions and unpleasantries, in Budapest, Pécs and elsewhere. I never visited Vienna. So, I looked forward to at least the visual aspects of Montefiore’s documentary. I wasn’t disappointed. Magnificent vistas followed one after the other...

Paul Mason was on the Daily Politics (BBC2 12 noon) today. He said, “I have never been to a Momentum meeting”. Then went on to have a lot to say about it. Specifically, “If Jill Mountford [National Committee member of Momentum] is not allowed into the Labour Party and I cannot see her being… and remains basically an expelled member of the Party and remains in Momentum I will not remain in Momentum.” What's he saying? Does Paul Mason think all expelled members of Labour should not be allowed in Momentum, (of which there are thousands as far as we know). Does he think Labour's Compliance Unit is...

The Algerian socialist-feminist Marieme Helie-Lucas responds to Deeya Khan's film Islam's Non-Believers , which was broadcast on ITV on 13 October. For the past three decades, we have been witnessing the implementation in politics of the concept of perversity in psychology. Truly, this is a case study. I first realised this during the “dark decade” in Algeria, in which around 200,000 people became victims, many of armed fundamentalist groups, with women constituting a large proportion. Following an inexorable process, these were the steps taken by the fundamentalists: targeted assassinations...

In the video above Sacha Ismail explains why he was secretly filmed by Dispatches, the politics behind the programme — distrust of socialist ideas, and what Workers' Liberty stand for. Channel Four's Dispatches programme ( The Battle for the Labour Party , shown Monday 19 September) was a pathetic, and fairly ineffective, attempt to scandal-monger. It's argument - that Momentum is an “entryist” organisation in Labour and that Workers' Liberty is an “entryist” group within Momentum — was an attempt to throw as much mud as they could at Corbyn and Momentum, to disorganise and destabilise, now...

On BBC Question Time (Labour leadership debate, 8 September) Owen Smith, in the stream-of-consciousness style that has come to typify Smith's approach to political debate, links the Alliance for Workers' Liberty (as part of the “hard left in our Party” “flooding into the Party”) to those on the left who “associate anti-Zionism, anti-imperialism”, “anti-Israel” perspectives (sic). That is, he implicitly called us anti-semitic. This incoherent tirade against the “hard left” was a disgraceful intervention into an important issue that deserves serious, well-informed debate. Smith's comments...