Add The Celebrity Traitors to your watchlist I suspect eateries and pubs might be having an unseasonal downturn this month, particularly on Thursdays and Fridays. When The Celebrity Traitors kicked off on 1 October, nine million of us watched it. If it carries on like that all month, that’s a lot of people staying in every Thursday and Friday. It has proved a hit with all ages, including the tough younger age bracket with almost every person aged between 16 and 34 in the UK, who was watching TV at the time (83.5 per cent), tuned in. That’s 1.6 million young people engaging with BBC One. The person responsible for this juggernaut – as part of the wider team at Studio Lambert, he’s very keen to stress – is producer Stephen Lambert. And he’s pretty pleased with masterminding something so popular, thanks to a brilliant format and an inspired cast offering old school stars (Michael Sheen, Jerry Hall, Richard E Grant) alongside ones who are down with the kids (Myha’la, Maya Jama, Richard E Grant). …

Add War to your watchlist Nina Sosanya …plays Beatrice Ubosi Nina Sosanya as Beatrice Ubosi in War. Sky Following her breakthrough role in Teachers in 2001, Sosanya has appeared in comedies such as Nathan Barley and W1A and dramas including His Dark Materials, Killing Eve and Last Tango in Halifax. In War, she plays Beatrice Ubosi, aka “Queen Bea”, at the legal firm Cathcarts & Sons, who represent Dominic West’s tech billionaire Morgan Henderson. Who is “Queen Bea” and what is her role at Cathcarts & Sons? We’ve been called the baddies, but I dispute that. We just want to win and do our job. As for Bea, whatever she does in life, she wants to win. She wants to be good at what she does, and she wants to be recognised for being good at what she does. I like that in a female character. It’s often seen as a male trait and it isn’t. When you’re playing a character like Bea, is it an exercise in finding her humanity, or do you just revel …

Add The Reluctant Vampire to your watchlist Eric Morecambe was the man whose TV work brought sunshine to millions. But when he embarked on a late second career as a children’s writer, things took a more… nocturnal turn. “He’d always been fascinated by vampires,” recalls Eric’s son Gary, whose memory of his father from the time –bashing away at an old typewriter, pipe clamped between his teeth – is gratifyingly on-brand. “He loved Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee in the Dracula films, so that’s why he chose the subject.” Now, almost half a century on, the book wot Eric wrote – 1982’s The Reluctant Vampire – has been transformed into a sitcom, with fang-sharp scripts by Neil and Rob Gibbons (brothers best known for spending the past 16 years giving peevish voice to Alan Partridge). For executive producer and ex-BBC head of comedy Shane Allen, who first discovered Morecambe’s book as a child, it’s the culmination of a lifelong dream. “My main worry was, ‘You’ll never get a child actor to pull this off,’” Allen …

Add Marble Hall Murders to your watchlist It’s another warm day during our extraordinary summer as I sit down with Tim McMullan at his home in south-west London. We are enjoying his beautiful garden, crowned by a fig tree he tells me has produced more than 60 fruit this year. He promises to pick me one later. We’re here to talk about Marble Hall Murders, his third outing as Atticus Pünd, the post-war detective at the centre of Anthony Horowitz’s mystery-within-a-mystery series that began in 2022 with Magpie Murders, followed by Moonflower Murders two years later. The unassuming, all-seeing Pünd is McMullan’s first lead TV role, but it only came about after a bigger name had to depart the show. “Tim Spall was originally Atticus, but then he had some scheduling issues,” McMullan recalls. “I’d worked on Foyle’s War with Anthony and Jill [Green, the producer and Horowitz’s wife] and they thought of me. I’d just had a shower, came back to seven missed calls from my agent, and it was a case of, ‘How …