Tim Stanley, Author at Catholic Herald

Tim Stanley

Scorsese shows us how the Church should be

January 12, 2017

I cried three times when watching Silence at the Covent Garden Odeon. Which is surprising because it’s the least sentimental, most masculine movie you could imagine. It’s a model for the Church. This is how we should be. It begins with Jesuit Fathers Rodrigues and Garppe landing in 17th-century Japan like our boys on D-Day.

Television: The horror spoof that gave me nightmares

January 05, 2017

At Christmas we take a few days off work to spend time with the TV. This year I mostly watched Harry Potter grow old and stroppy. By the sixth or seventh film in the wizarding series – Harry Potter and the Galloping Hormones – he’s basically James Dean with a wand. Daniel Radcliffe is much

Television: The BBC’s oddly acerbic Christmas

December 22, 2016

A lot of people seem to be gay nowadays. Previewing the Christmas TV, I discovered that a lead character in Last Tango in Halifax is a lesbian. After that, I watched Two Doors Down, a Scottish comedy, which features a gay couple. Meanwhile, an interested party informs me that there are no fewer than three

Television: True evil is rarely a monster with fangs

December 15, 2016

Viewers complain that they can’t hear every word being said in Rillington Place (BBC One, Tuesdays, 9pm) because the actors mumble. That might be a blessing in disguise. After all, this is the story of Reg Christie, the softly spoken serial killer who murdered at least eight women in his London flat. Tim Roth does

Television: David Walliams should hire Jacob Rees-Mogg

December 08, 2016

Walliams and Friend (BBC One, Fridays, 9.30pm) was so unfunny that one person dubbed it Walliams and Viewer. You know a comedy show has failed when the reviews are more amusing than the script, though I refuse to join the haters. Walliams is a nice man, a huge talent. So what went wrong? It’s the

Television: An ingenious attempt to explain everything

December 02, 2016

Adam Curtis’s HyperNormalisation (available on BBC iPlayer) is an ingenious attempt to explain everything. From Damascus to Washington, via Brexit Britain, our world appears to be in chaos. That is because life is complicated and defies good management. But politicians try. They fail. And ultimately, says Curtis, the people have rejected them because the stories

Television: What robots have to fear from humans

November 24, 2016

Westworld (Sky Atlantic, Tuesdays, 9pm) was a movie before it was a television show, and the difference between the two illustrates how far we’ve come. The plots are essentially the same. A corporation opens a Western-themed amusement park staffed by robots, a place where ordinary human beings can live out their fantasies – violent, sexual,

Television: Sorry, Lord Sugar, but we’ll have to let you go

November 03, 2016

It’s time to fire The Apprentice (Thursdays, BBC One, 9pm). I still like the show, it still gets laughs – but it’s been going so long that the format has lost credibility. It no longer even tries to pretend to be a serious competition. It’s a sitcom. There’s Karthik Nagesan, this season’s face of capitalism

Television: Jude Law is brilliant – but he’s no pope

October 27, 2016

The Young Pope is one of those over-complex English-language TV shows that requires subtitles. It clearly contains deep, dark ruminations on faith and power – but it’s a struggle to understand what’s going on or what the characters are talking about. And at its heart is a character who doesn’t convince one bit. This show

Television: An innocent crucified by public opinion

October 20, 2016

I’m of an age when I can feel nostalgic about murder trials. I remember the Amanda Knox case vaguely. It was 2007 and I was finishing a PhD – and out of the corner of my eye was this story on TV of an American girl and her boyfriend facing life for the murder in

Television: The world’s most boring serial killer

October 13, 2016

We’ve stuck with The Fall (Thursdays, 9pm, BBC Two) through three long series with very little being revealed. We know that Paul Spector (Jamie Dornan) is a serial killer and that DSI Stella Gibson (Gillian Anderson) is the only one who can catch him. This scenario obviously doesn’t work as a whodunit – we see

Television: Abuse trial that puts us all in the dock

October 06, 2016

National Treasure (Channel 4, Tuesdays, 9pm) is one of the most Catholic dramas we’ve seen in a while. Robbie Coltrane plays Paul Finchley, a retired comedian accused of raping several women long ago – one of them an underage babysitter. Whether he did it is unclear. In a sense it doesn’t matter. Writer Jack Thorne

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