TV: The Walking Dead
Few shows benefit more from a mid-season break than The Walking Dead, with its annual hiatus allowing twice as many whizz-popping finales and premieres. It also gives the audience a welcome festive respite from the unremitting grimness of the whole enterprise. The first half of this season hasn’t seen Andrew Lincoln and co’s lot improve a great deal but it remains compelling, compulsive stuff, even if there’s a growing realisation that, if the show is to go on, it could do with a stronger through-narrative than “they go somewhere and meet some more bad people”. Catch season five part A over on Sky Go.
Sky Go
TV: Marco Polo
The second most expensive show around (after Game Of Thrones), Marco Polo is big by every measure: budget, scale, even the billowing robes worn by Polo’s master, Kublai Khan (Benedict Wong). Lorenzo Richelmy (pictured, above) plays the fledgling explorer, trying to keep his head in the court of the Mongolian emperor after being traded by his father. Violent, lusty and fun, it’s ideal for a Boxing Day binge, though it’s available from Friday if you’re not willing to wait that long.
Netflix
TV: Confessions Of…
Channel 4’s illuminating, and occasionally shocking, documentary strand concludes on Monday with the dark secrets of the teaching profession. Meanwhile, the rest of the series, in which police officers, doctors and secretaries reveal the sometimes sordid details of working practices in the “good old days”, is available to view on 4oD.
Radio: Raw Meat Radio
It’s so often the way: enfant terrible in your day, then a couple of decades later, once the dust has settled, in roll the weighty retrospectives. This time, it’s Chris Morris, he of The Day Today and Blue Jam, getting the respect he deserves for his radio career. The producers have worked with fan site Cookd And Bombd to track down rare clips, there’s commentary from Armando Iannucci and Matthew Bannister, and Mary Anne Hobbs – whose early noughties Radio 1 show The Breezebox featured Morris antics – presents.
Audio: Gilbert Gottfried’s Amazing Colossal Podcast!
When not treading the boards with his foul-mouthed stand-up, New Yorker Gottfried invites giants of the showbiz age to his apartment and gets them to talk about the old days. Frankie Avalon, Adam West, Dick Cavett, Bela Lugosi Jr: the names alone evoke memories of a bygone era. Plainly a movie geek, Gottfried is at his most well-behaved, coaxing out seldom-heard Tinseltown anecdotes with smart questions and the occasional explosive geyser of laughter.
iTunes
