“Not on my watch”: Doctor Who shows us how to really treat Remembrance Day

On the 11th of November, as we remember those who have died in wars past and present, it is important that we learn the lessons of our painful history, and say never again. While news and television coverage of Remembrance Day seems to have long forgotten this though, helping re-purpose a ceremony that now sees wreaths laid to sanctify war, rather than to end it – there was still someone who took a stand for peace. The Doctor.

An Inspector Calls: a snapshot of 1912 — and of 2015

Alex Hort-Francis reviews the BBC’s adaptation of An Inspector Calls, and considers why it is still “better to ask for the world than to take it”.

I first read JB Priestley’s play at school. Amongst the terribly tedious Austin novels and obscure poetry we were compelled to study, An Inspector Calls has always stuck in my memory. Its atmosphere sinks deep into your imagination – the dimly-lit cosiness of an upper class home saturated with delicacies, as if the finer things in life could pressurise the air against the collective anguish eager to seep in. Back then I was — as far as anyone can be — apolitical. Watching Sunday’s BBC adaptation, I’m struck by just how subversive a choice of reading material Priestley’s play was for a grammar school in Kent.