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  THE YOUNG OFFENDERS, SERIES 5 The mingiest show to hit our TV screens since ' Shameless ' is back. But as they reach the milestone of a fifth series, what are Alex Murphy's Conor and Chris Walley's Jock up to  on the banks of their own lovely Lee ? Series Four of the Cork sitcom ' The Young Offenders ' saw Jock spend much of the series behind bars in a Colombian jail cell after getting involved in an ill advised drug smuggling venture that naturally went skewiff. Without his buddy, Conor palled around Cork instead with Shane Casey's psycho with a soft heart, Billy Murphy - getting into various scrapes. But without Jock, bar a few Facetimes from his Colombian prison cell, it felt Peter Foott's sitcom had lost its way. Walley's lanky goofiness was badly missed and while Casey could raise some laughs, the chemistry with Murphy just wasn't quite right. Episode One of Series Five of 'The Young Offenders' sets out to rectify all that. With Jo...

  PEELERS: THE PSNI FOR REAL Policing is a tough job - no matter where you are in the world. Officers are exposed to danger on a daily basis, to heartbreaking situations and they regularly see the worst excesses of society. How they react is carefully scrutinised and often critiqued. That's especially the case in Belfast - a city still dealing with the legacy of conflict and where a culture of mistrust of the police has been embedded in some communities. The challenge of policing a post conflict society is very much at the heart of Stephen Nolan's slick BBC Northern Ireland fly on the wall documentary series 'Peelers: The PSNI For Real'. Filmed over two years, the talk radio host and a cameraman ride in the back of police cars with a group of officers as they drive around the city on day and night shifts. Wearing a body cam, he observes how the officers handle volatile situations involving members of the public. This includes raids on drug dealers' apartments, car c...

  BAIT From Garry Shandling to Larry David, Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan to John Malkovich, there's always something fascinating about watching actors sending themselves up in movies or TV. Now we can add Riz Ahmed to the list as he plays a version of himself on the cusp of fame. 'Bait' is a comedy drama about a neurotic London born rapper and actor of Pakistani origin juggling career ambition with a chaotic family life. At the start of the six part show, Ahmed's Shah Latif is auditioning for the role of James Bond. Unfortunately the audition in front of Maxine Peake's director Helen doesn't go well. Hearing the paparazzi are camped outside the front of the building as he is being escorted out the back, Shah makes a shrewd move. Pretending he's left his phone charger behind, he engineers a departure instead in front of the photographers. The possibility of producers casting an Asian actor in the role of 007, generates a swell of excitement on social media and...

  SHRINKING, SEASON THREE Sometimes it takes a few seasons for a show to hit its stride - especially sitcoms. Before they do, you can see the potential but it requires patience - a quality most streaming service commissioners tend not to have. Fortunately for Bill Lawrence, Jason Segel and Brett Goldstein's 'Shrinking' is on AppleTV which has been given the sitcom time and space to find its top gear. Season One  of a show about the messy personal lives of three psychiatrists and their friends got off to a pretty strong start. Segel gave audiences a typically likable performance as the emotionally fragile, fortysomething, widowed father, Jimmy Laird. Jessica Williams was a ball of energy as his quick witted, fellow psychiatrist Gaby Evans. But it was Harrison Ford who stole the show as the wonderfully grumpy head of their practice, Paul Rhoades. And while the three principals shone, Lawrence, Segel and Goldstein were smart enough to assemble around them a delightful supporti...

  THE DRAMA We live in an age of outrage. Fuelled by social media, people are quick to lecture others about how they should live and how they should think. Some of the outrage  is performative. A lot of it is self serving and just plain attention seeking. Attempts at brutal takedowns online are what make X, Facebook and many other online platforms particularly insufferable - especially if you value reasoned debate. Politics has also been impacted, with  politicians chasing votes by creating rage bait. Rather than focus on fixing problems, populist leaders choose instead to harangue their rivals over how incompetent they are and even how evil. Against this backdrop, writer director Kristoffer Borgli has waded in with a new movie about cancel culture. Having tackled the subject before in his 2013 movie ' Dream Scenario ' with Nicolas Cage, he's back at it again with a new darkly comic parable 'The Drama'. A sort of anti-romcom, the movie starts with a " meet cute...

MIDWINTER BREAK Here's two stories about faltering marriages - both featuring Ciaran Hinds. First up is 'Midwinter Break,' Olivier award winning theatre director Polly Findlay's debut feature. An adaptation of Bernard MacLaverty's acclaimed. 2017 novel of the same name, it has been brought to the screen by the author and the Olivier and Tony Award nominated playwright Nick Payne. Lesley Manville and Hinds play Stella and Gerry, a couple entering the winter of a long marriage. Stella's a devout Catholic.  Gerry has lost his faith and is fond of music, art and a glass of whisky or three. Originally from Northern Ireland, they fled the Troubles in the 1970s with their infant son after a heavily pregnant Stella was wounded in an IRA gun attack on the British Army. Miraculously, the bullet passed through her belly but she and her son somehow survived. In the present day, Stella gives Gerry a Christmas present of a short break in Amsterdam - booking flights and a hote...