Lazy and patronising

‘I want to be like Bill Nighy when I grow up’ (Telegraph review). I suppose I can see the appeal, but it’s a dangerous game – only marginally the right side of old fart swinging the lamp. My default reaction to Page Eight – twenty-minutes in – was to switch off. Hare’s production is hackneyed, out of date and clichéd in the extreme – anti-American, anti-Israel, rendition, torture... Grief, give it a rest. In the end I relented and watched the film on iPlayer. Very BBC – you just knew the £60k was going into a Waitrose bag and not one from Tesco. It wasn’t so much the cast of frighteningly needy and neurotic women, but more the stereotypical Johnny Worricker: that traditional English mixture of self-deprecation and vanity, dressed up as a pretentious jazz-loving art enthusiast who drinks whisky and drives an old Saab. Where haven’t I seen that before?