It is precisely a year since my last blog post, which I guess makes this both my first and last blog of 2024. It’s not a year I will regret seeing the back of. I spent the first three months of the year caring for my wife, Dejanka, as the lung cancer which we thought she had beaten metastasised to her brain in such a virulent form that her decline was rapid and she passed away in our local hospice in April. Thankfully, our learning-disabled daughter, Hanna, was away in college at the time, but she finished her course in July and I spent the following months caring for her while arranging for her to move into supported living, which happened towards the end of September.

As a result of all this, I watched very little TV in the first two thirds of the year. It was not just that I had so much to do in terms of the administrative fallout from my wife’s death and the requirements of securing Hanna’s future (as well as the ongoing responsibility for my 98 year-old mother), but my heart was just not in it. I tended to catch just what I knew would particularly interest or distract me, while also seeking refuge in music.

However, now that I am alone and a lot of the things I had to do have been done, I have more recently returned to filling my time (and distracting myself from grief) with reading, working my way through my extensive DVD and blu-ray collections, attending concerts, theatre and football matches and, of course, watching TV and catching up on some of the things which had passed me by earlier in the year. And now I have finally returned to the blogging keypad, just in time for an end-of-year summary and list.

My lists of recent years had already been (as I have admitted) somewhat incomplete, due to the fact that there is just too much to watch and I do not subscribe to a number of streaming platforms, so this year’s is particularly sketchy. To tell the truth, I had already begun to wonder whether my selections of current TV were of any interest anymore and was on the verge of giving them up and concentrating on TV and films from the past as I go through it and re-introduce myself to much of it. I was certainly getting the feeling that I was becoming more and more out of touch with changing styles and concerns and that, while I could still recognise innovation, I was often simply not getting the references that have been so vital to understanding the subtleties of the greatest work. I have never been one to believe that things were better in the “good old days”. Things do not get either better or worse in pretty much any aspect of life, they just get different and there comes a time when it is best to recognise the fading of one’s ability (or desire) to keep up.

However, one of the books I read in the course of the year had an impact on my thinking in this regard. Peter Biskind’s Pandora’s Box: the Greed, Lust, and Lies that Broke Television (Allen Lane, 2023) is a good survey of the changes in TV styles (at least in terms of US drama) in this century, driven by the expansion of subscription services. Towards the end of the book, his narrative seemed to be running out of steam as he described the current ongoing situation without an apparent resolution but his final section, entitled Back to the Future, posited the idea that TV, including the streaming services, is returning to more linear and family-friendly programming such as the old networks used to provide. He cites shows such as Ted Lasso and the re-appearance of old-style “mystery of the week” dramas. I read this chapter just as the entertaining Ludwig arrived on BBC1, so it certainly seemed to me to be a possibility. It also fits with my own outmoded preference, to which I stubbornly adhere, for watching episodes of series at the time they are scheduled each week (or catching up on them retrospectively), rather than binging them in advance if they are made available on i-Player or whatever.  

So, I’ll see how things develop over the next year and work out as I go when I want to comment on current output, while at the same time looking back and compiling the inevitable lists. In the meantime, let’s look back on the departing year and give you a tentative list of my ten favourite things, rather than a ten “best”.

I certainly watched a number of second series of things I had previously praised highly with great anticipation and found them worth watching, though not as impactful as the original. Blue Lights (BBC1) put me off from the start by (yet again!) presenting a perilous police situation which turned out to be an exercise (yawn!). It was an engaging watch, but not up to the previous series. The same went for Sherwood (BBC1), which worked as a terrific thriller, but was not as wonderfully grounded in social comment as before (as I had feared would happen when, in my previous blog on the show, I had hoped there would not be a second series because it could only lessen the impact of the original). The best thing about the second series was Monica Dolan, who had begun the year as the most sympathetic victim of the Post Office scandal and then transformed herself into an ice-cold killer. In reality TV, my favourite was still The Piano (Channel 4), which contained more moving characters and stories but nothing quite as remarkable as Lucy. 

The second series of Colin from Accounts (BBC2), on the other hand, was just as wonderful as the first and then along came Wolf Hall (BBC1), undoubtedly my most anticipated thing of this (and many another) year. Picking up where it left off almost a decade ago, it was always going to be my top pick of the year however long we had waited. Was there ever any doubt that the second panel of the diptych would be the magnificent equal of the first? It’s arguably the BBC’s finest contribution to drama this century and the Corporation showed its respect for this status by granting it the rare honour of not interrupting the closing credits of the final episode (though, of course, you could only appreciate this moment if you watched the scheduled transmission).

So, my top ten favourites for 2024 are as follows:

In drama, I have already signalled Wolf Hall: the Mirror and the Light (BBC1) as my top pick. Going back to the very first week of the year, before things started to get difficult, Mr Bates vs the Post Office (ITV) provided the year’s most discussed and impactful piece. I caught up with the gripping Baby Reindeer (Netflix) much later than everybody else, while I was hooked to The Day of the Jackal (Sky Atlantic) as soon as it went out. Created and written by Ronan Bennett, who gave us Top Boy, The Day of the Jackal had all of that series’ tension, action sequences, depth and moral ambiguity.

My favourite documentaries of the year were D-Day: The Unheard Tapes (BBC2), which used archived audio interviews of participants to great effect and The Zelensky Story (BBC2), which contained a wealth of fascinating and surprising visual resources as well as the key interviewees.

The second series of Colin from Accounts (BBC2) lived up to the promise of the first and will hopefully continue to keep us coming back for more in future years.

Finally, three of my very favourite series managed to wrap up their runs with wonderful final seasons, all culminating in unmissable, perfectly judged and brilliantly self-referential finales: Inside No.9 (series 9, of course: BBC2), Curb Your Enthusiasm (series 12!: HBO, Sky Comedy) and How To With John Wilson (series 3, the perfect number: HBO, BBC2).

So, that just leaves me to say Happy New Year to everybody and heartfelt thanks to those whose kindness and support saw me though this most difficult of years.