Chimpomatic

another decent year of pop culture for me, feels like there's been lots of good stuff to get into this year... TV The Wire (FX) - season five bowed out in great form. Still the greatest. Mad Men (BBC4) - convincing, slowburn drama, with fascinating take on early 60s life. Breaking Bad (FX) Engrossing suburban drug-dealing tension. Battles ....read more

Wallace and Gromit return in a "classic who-doughnut mystery" just in time for Christmas. If you're a fan of the Aardman pun-filled charm, there's plenty to enjoy in this half-hour outing, in which we find our cheese and tea-loving heroes running a bakery (Top Bun) with all their usual Heath Robinson-style robotic chaos.  Things are ....read more

"Ystad - the Texas of Sweden..." Kenneth Branagh stars in the first of three feature-length versions of Henning Mankell's best-selling detective novels. If (like us) you're not familiar with the series, then you're in something of a minority - well in the rest of Europe anyhow, where they've sold around 25 million copies. There's even a ....read more

Spooky atmospherics with Martin Shaw as a Catholic exorcist, fighting off a series of angry demons and the people they've possessed. The first episode crams in a visit to the Vatican, a repressed novice priest who was once cured of leprosy by Mother Theresa and a dad whose Satanic babbling isn't scoring him too many points on the parenting front.& ....read more

Excellent thriller running over five consecutive nights on BBC1 (Mon 30 Jun - Fri 4 Jul) that manages to combine elements of prison, police and the legal system to bring a 360 sense of what it's like to be thrust into a murder trial.  Ben Whishaw (Perfume, Nathan Barley) wakes up after a wild night to find there's blood on his hands (literall ....read more