April 2026 Cultural Highlights

May 5, 2026

Discover our strong April entertainment recommendations

April has been a particularly good month for entertainment, so we hope you will enjoy our recommendations as much as we have.

Television

The Other Bennet Sister BBC
★★★★

A quietly subversive reimagining of Pride and Prejudice that shifts the focus to Mary Bennet, long the overlooked sister. Played superbly by Ella Bruccoleri and supported by Ruth Jones as her mother and Richard E Grant as her father.

Played with understated charm, Mary is no longer a figure of mild ridicule but a young woman searching for purpose beyond the narrow expectations of Regency society. The series follows her tentative steps towards independence as she seeks to escape the scorn of her matchmaking mother.

It’s slower and more introspective than its source, and there’s something rather admirable in giving the least likely Bennet her moment in the spotlight.

Blanca Ch4
★★★★★

A crime drama with a neat twist: its central investigator, Blanca—played with quiet assurance by Maria Chiara Giannetta—is blind, relying on acute hearing and instinct to navigate both cases and colleagues.

Set in Genoa, the series follows her work with the police as she pieces together crimes others struggle to see—literally and metaphorically. There’s a strong procedural backbone, but it’s Blanca herself who holds the attention: perceptive, self-possessed and refreshingly unsentimental. A strong supporting cast underplays the narrative across the six episodes with flashbacks to when and how Blanca lost her sight.

This is a stylish and engaging variation with sufficient originality to differentiate from other crime dramas.

Secret Service ITV

★★★

Based on the novel by journalist and ITV News presenter, Tom Bradby, there’s nothing especially new about this five-part series.

The resignation on health grounds of the Prime Minister kickstarts a five-day campaign to find his successor. Gemma Arterton plays the head of MI6’s Russian desk convinced that one of the two candidates is a Russian asset. Her position is further complicated by her husband played by Rafe Spall is chief adviser to one of the candidates.

Suspicions swing from one character to another and there’s sufficient tension to make this a watchable drama with the prospect of another series to come.

Portillo in Japan BBC
★★★★

Michael Portillo takes his well-established railway format east and proves a surprisingly good fit for Japan’s blend of precision and tradition.

Travelling largely by train—as one rather has to—the series follows Portillo as he navigates cities, countryside and culture with his usual mixture of curiosity and faint bemusement. There are the expected encounters: meticulous craftspeople, carefully preserved customs, and the occasional moment where Portillo gamely throws himself into something just outside his comfort zone.

Portillo has done many railway journey programmes but this experience seems to have struck a particular chord with the former cabinet minister. He is particularly adept in this role and comes across with genuine warmth and curiosity and very easy to spend time with.

The House of the Spirits Amazon Prime
★★★★

Adapting Isabel Allende’s, The House of the Spirits is no small undertaking, and this series largely rises to the challenge with confidence and visual flair.

Spanning generations of the Trueba family, it weaves together politics, love and the supernatural, as personal lives become entangled with the shifting fortunes of a nation. The central performances—particularly the formidable patriarch and the quietly resilient women around him—anchor what might otherwise feel unwieldy.

A sweeping rewarding piece of television which is atmospheric and emotionally resonant. The author is one of our favourite novelists, so a television adaptation is always welcome.

Podcasts

Life Changing BBC Sounds
★★★★

There’s a quiet seriousness to Life Changing that feels almost out of step with the more sensational corners of podcasting—and all the better for it.

Presented by Sian Williams, each episode centres on a single individual recounting the moment that altered their life’s trajectory: bereavement, trauma, sudden illness, or an unexpected turning point that forces a complete reassessment of who they are.

Williams brings both journalistic rigour and therapeutic sensitivity, allowing stories to unfold with a measured, almost clinical calm. The result is often deeply affecting, though never manipulative—there’s no need, given the weight of what’s being shared.

These are not just stories of hardship, but of how people rebuild afterwards.

Books

London Falling – Patrick Radden Keefe
★★★★★

If you know some of the details of a true-crime story, there is less incentive to read 360 pages on the subject. But this is so well written and constructed it reads like a thriller..

The book centres on the 2019 death of 19-year-old Zac Brettler, who fell from a London apartment under circumstances the police ultimately deemed suicide. Keefe, however, is unconvinced, and retraces Zac’s final months—uncovering a teenage life built on elaborate lies, including a fabricated identity as the son of a Russian oligarch.

Those lies draw Zac into a murky world of money, status and dangerous men, and the book follows both the investigation and his parents’ attempt to understand how their son ended up there.

Keefe’s strength is in widening the lens: this becomes not just a mystery, but a portrait of a city shaped by wealth, illusion and the porous boundary between legitimate success and outright criminality.

Meticulous, unsettling and quietly devastating—a story less about how someone died than about the world that allowed it to happen.

Lázár – Nelio Biedermann
★★★★

A sweeping, faintly gothic family saga that follows the rise and slow unravelling of a Hungarian dynasty across the upheavals of the 20th century.

Beginning with the birth of Lajos von Lázár in a crumbling manor, the novel traces generations shaped—and ultimately undone—by war, politics and their own illusions of permanence.

It occasionally tips into melodrama, but there’s an assurance in how Biedermann balances the personal with the historical.

Rich, atmospheric, and an impressively confident debut by an author barely out of university. A family saga is always a good hook for attracting a reader.

Strange Sally Diamond – Liz Nugent
★★★★

A novel that opens with a shocking act and only grows darker from there.

Sally Diamond, socially isolated and painfully literal, follows her late father’s instructions in a way that draws attention—and begins to unearth a deeply disturbing past involving her childhood abduction. As she tentatively builds a life, the past refuses to stay buried.

Nugent engages fiercely with Sally’s mental illness. In fact, understanding it, and the trauma it grew out of, is at the centre of this story. Bleak, unsettling and threaded with dark humour, it’s anchored by a protagonist who is as compelling as she is damaged.

Disturbing, gripping and unexpectedly moving—one of those rare thrillers that lingers long after it ends.

It’s Not What You Think – Clare Mackintosh
★★★★

Nadeeka, a divorced mother of two, is convinced her partner Jamie is having an affair—hardly an unreasonable suspicion given her past. Determined to catch him out, she races home, only to find something rather more inconvenient: Jamie dead, her house a crime scene.

From there, the novel fractures into multiple perspectives—police, past events, and Jamie himself—each steadily dismantling what seemed like a straightforward case. The more Nadeeka insists she knows what’s going on, the clearer it becomes that she doesn’t.

Mackintosh’s familiar trick is to pull the narrative out from under you just as you think you’ve found your footing. Here, she does it repeatedly, sometimes to dazzling effect, occasionally with a faint sense of over-engineering.

For all our recommendations over the past year, visit our Culture Section