Loyalty, Hampstead Theatre

The wife of Blair’s chief of staff revisits the Iraq War, but her play is dramatically inert

Can journalists write good plays? Sarah Helm has been a Washington correspondent for The Independent during the first Gulf War in 1990, reported from Baghdad in the mid-1990s, and was based in Jerusalem for three years. So her debut play about the Iraq War, which stars Maxine Peake and opened last night, is grounded on a career of watching the Middle East.

DVD: Sweet Smell of Success

Mackendrick's timeless depiction of showbiz realpolitik is re-released

It’s difficult now to imagine Hollywood conceiving a one-two punch as ferocious as Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd and Alexander Mackendrick’s Sweet Smell of Success, which were released a month apart in the summer of 1957.  Their target was the absolute corruption of media figures who acquire untrammeled fame and power: Face’s coarse cracker-barrel philosopher “Lonesome” Rhodes (Andy Griffith), an ex-hobo who becomes a politically influential TV superstar; and Sweet Smell ’s monstrous Broadway gossip columnist J J Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) whose Stalinesque sway has senators quaking at his restaurant table.

Subs, Cock Tavern Theatre

Sad comedy about a men’s magazine fails to relaunch itself

The world of the media offers plenty of opportunities for satire, but the idea of a comedy about sub-editors at first glance seems odd. After all, the sub-editors, or subs, are hardly journalism’s most glamorous beings: these office-bound nerds spend their working days correcting the spellings of journalists and cutting their copy, while penning pun-heavy headlines and writing captions to pictures. Yet, as R J Purdey’s play - which was a sellout hit at this venue last year and now returns for another run - makes clear, there is some comic juice to be squeezed out of the dreams and tribulations of these worker ants.

I Can't Stop Stealing, BBC Three

Crass journalism interested only in pictures, not questions

As a journalist with a sense of pride about what we reptiles can achieve, sometimes I shudder at the awfulness of what passes for journalism. The licence fee in theory confers on the BBC some moral purpose higher than that of the base commercial stations, doesn’t it? (Given that it implies Commercial = Bad, Public Service = Good.) So a BBC Three documentary on shoplifting should probably be an example of higher journalism? Maybe something that rams home deeper truths either about the distinction between good and bad, or about disturbed individuals?

One Night in Turin

ONE NIGHT IN TURIN Will tonight's big game wipe away the tears?

Gazza Agonistes: Italia 90 explained on film

Why make a documentary about Italia 90? It’s just another tournament that England didn’t win, isn't it? If the World Cup hosted by Italy in 1990 deserves exhumation, it’s for its trickle-down impact on football as we live and breathe it now. Hence the subtitle that won't make it onto the billboard outside cinemas: The Inside Story of a World Cup that Changed Our Footballing Nation Forever.

Starsuckers, More4

Shock-horror expose of corner-cutting journalism

That fame, and the pursuit thereof, is hurtful to the soul is the unexceptional if, I suppose, ever invaluable message of Starsuckers, the Chris Atkins documentary given genuine ballast by the details it selects with which to argue its case. Though overlong for what it is, and often veering off on tangents worthy of separate movies in themselves, it makes you laugh and wince in equal measure. Anonymity has rarely seemed a healthier place to be.

Girls on the Frontline, BBC Three/ News at Ten, BBC One

Women soldiers get down to it in Helmand

Let’s be honest, you never expect much sense from BBC Three. You don’t count on it for, say, depth of perspective. The channel which each week spews fresh torrents of hectic DayGlo entertainment in the specific direction of a desensitised demographic tends to steer clear of the big subjects. War and such. Girls on the Frontline, therefore, did not inspire much hope. That title. On any other BBC channel, it would have been women, not girls. Still, a camera crew was allowed to follow several women on a six-month tour in Helmand province.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Ill-met sleuths in the first instalment of Stieg Larsson's cult Millennium trilogy

When roused, Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), the sullen, leather-clad, metal-pierced heroine ofThe Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, is as ferocious as the panther her physical presence evokes. Forced to perform oral sex on her legal guardian, then raped by him, she returns to his apartment, fells him with a stun gun, binds him naked, makes him scream with a dildo, plays him an incriminating  “candid camera” video of his attack on her, and tattoos “I am a sadist pig and a rapist” on his chest. Well, you may conclude, he had it coming.

On Expenses, BBC Four

Satirical drama about the Commons expenses scandal has Swiftian overtones

As one of the opening captions put it, "you couldn't make it up",  and this sprightly drama about the House of Commons expenses scandal duly tacked its way skilfully up the channel between satire and slapstick. Concluding correctly that wallowing in moral outrage was not the way to handle a subject whose full ramifications have yet to land on us (and them) with their full crushing force, writer Tony Saint instead deftly depicted the Commons as a kind of Swiftian monstrosity, ludicrous yet malevolent.
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