Sharon Horgan’s new comedy about dating in later life 

Sharon Horgan’s sharp new comedy-drama “Youth” (HBO Max) “perfectly captures what it is to reach your 50s and find that it’s no walk in the park”, said Anita Singh in The Telegraph. 

Horgan plays Alex, a member of “the sandwich generation”, caught between the demands of being a parent and looking after her own ageing parents. She has a job as a literary agent, “where the lows include Damian Lewis (playing himself, perfectly deadpan) coming into the office and solemnly announcing that he has written a social satire called ‘Dog Meat’”. She is also divorced and tentatively stepping back into the dating scene, now that her son Ruarí (Aran Murphy) is leaving for university. If you’re in the market for comedies about women in their 50s, this one “rings hilariously, despairingly true”.

“Thank God for Sharon Horgan,” said Rhik Samadder in The Guardian, “chronicler of all our journeys.” The sex scenes here are “hilarious and penetratingly insightful”, while the show’s depictions of the “uninspiring, Sisyphean grind of caregiving” are good enough to carry the series alone. Murphy (son of Cillian), meanwhile, delivers a “beautifully unforced” performance as Ruarí.

Horgan has become “TV royalty”, said Nick Hilton in The Independent, with a “quartet of fine shows” – “Divorce”, “Motherland”, “Catastrophe” and “Bad Sisters” – to her name. She remains “charming company” on screen, but “Youth” is missing the “pathos” of “Catastrophe” and “the nastiness” of “Motherland”. Hogan’s writing is “as warm and human as ever”, but it lacks her trademark “spark”.

by Ben Macintyre

The acronym Mice (money, ideology, coercion, ego) is sometimes used to describe what motivates people to betray their countries, said Oliver Bullough in The Guardian. But in Ben Macintyre’s enthralling new “work of true-espionage”, a fresh motivation emerges: erectile dysfunction.

Vladimir Kuzichkin was a KGB agent stationed in Tehran in the aftermath of the 1979 revolution. With the West “on the back foot” there, the Soviets saw an “opportunity to spread their influence south, to a strategic and oil-rich country”.

Kuzichkin’s role was “to further this aim by distributing money, arms and encouragement” to Iran’s communist party. Yet it was a job he loathed. Stressed and under constant surveillance, he was also frustrated by the corruption and incompetence of his colleagues, who’d celebrate each tiny success with “vast quantities of vodka”. All this took a toll on his marriage, including on his performance in the bedroom.

Convinced that his problems were caused by an “overly tight foreskin”, Kuzichkin resolved to be circumcised, said Joseph Finder in The New York Times. But to prevent his “impairment” becoming known to his colleagues, he wanted the operation performed in the West.

And so, in October 1981, he entered the British Embassy in Tehran, and offered to “spy for Britain” – thus becoming, as Macintyre notes, the “first spy in history to demand, as the price of defection, the removal of his foreskin”.

Trivial though his motivations seemed, Kuzichkin’s actions had profound consequences, said James Owen in The Times. The Soviets were planning to foment a communist “coup against the ayatollahs, backed up by an armed invasion”; had this come to fruition, the US might have responded with tactical nuclear weapons.

The intelligence Kuzichkin provided alerted the UK and the US to the Soviets’ plan; MI6 informed the ayatollahs, who savagely clamped down on Iran’s communist party, ending any possibility of a coup.

The victory, however, was double-edged, said Clare Mulley in The Spectator. For in administering the “coup de grâce to Soviet aspirations”, MI6 “bolstered a murderous, fundamentalist regime” – with consequences that are still playing out today. 

Redwood – named after MI6’s inadvertently humorous codename for the tall Russian – is an “enjoyable caper”, full of “twists, turns, desires, betrayals and unexpected outcomes”. And it serves as a useful reminder that “history is not solely written by great powers”; in some cases, the “very personal choices, desires and decisions” of a flawed individual can be equally important.

Chicago-born critic who became a fixture on British TV

One of the UK’s leading cultural commentators, Bonnie Greer, who has died aged 77, had an unusual breadth of “technical experience” – across drama, fiction, biography and documentary, said Mark Lawson in The Guardian. She also brought an unusual perspective to the TV shows, such as “Late Review” and “Question Time”, on which she appeared regularly from the 1990s. As an American who had spent much of her adult life in England, she was well placed to “adjudicate” on the work of the many British filmmakers and writers who were focusing on America in that period – and to comment on the escalating Americanisation of British politics. Her celebrity was based on two elements: a critical mind that was sharp, curious and unpredictable; and a warm throaty laugh “that charmed those who were drawn to her, and disarmed the suspicious or the resistant”.

Her most notable TV encounter came in 2009, when she sat on a “Question Time” panel with the then BNP leader Nick Griffin, said The Telegraph. The far-right had never been represented on the programme before, and the BBC had faced intense criticism for inviting him. On air, Greer defended his appearance on free-speech grounds, adding there was no risk he’d win new converts, because “the British people have too much common sense”. She then proceeded to demolish his positions – calmly and with grace and wit. The most watched episode in show’s history, it was said to have ended Griffin’s political career. It inspired Greer to co-write an opera, staged at the Royal Opera House in 2011.

The eldest of seven children, she was born in Chicago in 1948. Prince Charles had been born two days earlier, and she was named after the “Bonnie Prince Charlie” headlines this had generated. Her father – a former sharecropper from Mississippi who worked in a canning factory – was an autodidact who brought home the Encyclopedia Britannica and continually urged her to expand her mind. Bonnie wrote her first play aged 10. She described herself as a “good Catholic girl” until her teens, when she drifted away from the Church and started to take an interest in civil rights. Having initially planned to study law, the better to fight the cause, she switched to a playwriting course, supervised by David Mamet. In 1978, she moved to New York, where she worked with Elia Kazan at the Actors Studio. She learnt, she said, “that theatre is supposed to slow the world down so it can be looked at, and the person who looks is not supposed to be the same when they walk out. Otherwise, there’s no f**king point. Art is not a leisure activity. It’s about engagement.”

In the early 1980s, the Aids epidemic ravaged the circles in which she moved. Having lost 35 friends, including her flatmate, she decided, in 1986, to move to the UK for a fresh start. Her father had been stationed in England before taking part in the D-Day landings. He had been amazed by the lack of overt discrimination there, and this sense of wonder had, she said, passed to her “by osmosis”. In London, she found a lively Black theatre scene, and a market for her work; by the 1990s, she was writing plays for the BBC. Her most successful stage play was “Marilyn and Ella” (2008), which explored the real-life friendship between Marilyn Monroe and Ella Fitzgerald. She also wrote novels, memoirs and works of non-fiction, and served on various boards, including that of the British Museum. She had thought she’d be too shy to appear on TV, but she found that she enjoyed it – because “I have a big mouth and opinions”. She had also been surprised when she fell in love with a white public school-educated solicitor named David Hutchins, whom she married in 1993. Her husband, who kept a low profile while supporting her career, survives her.