Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.The 1981 fantasy-adventure film Time Bandits concluded its rickety ride through history with a send-up of a consumerist culture obsessed with new-fangled gadgets. There is a certain irony, then, about the fact that a shiny series remake of the cult classic has been produced by Apple.If this sounds cynical then rest assured that this 10-part reboot not only still nods to the tech scepticism of the original movie, but largely retains its childlike sense of wonder and offbeat sense of humour. Where Terry Gilliam’s film felt like an unofficial Monty Python outing, here long-term comedy collaborators Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement, along with Iain Morris, draw on the winning blend of deadpan wit and surreal whimsy that defined the New Zealand duo’s hits like What We Do in the Shadows. How much enjoyment the average child will derive from this particular schtick is hard to say, but you suspect the show has been made with a viewer in mind who is not unlike its precocious hero. He is Kevin (Kal-El Tuck), a bookish 11-year-old whose much-derided enthusiasm for history is vindicated when he discovers that his bedroom in Bingley, West Yorkshire, is a portal to the past.Enter the titular Time Bandits, a quirky cadre of interdimensional petty thieves — no longer played by actors with dwarfism as in the original — who travel through time and space looting whatever they can find: Georgian spoons, Greek vases, Mayan avocados. Led by the capricious Penelope (the ever-kooky Lisa Kudrow), the group end up in the boy’s closet while trying to evade their old boss, the Supreme Being (Waititi), from whom they stole a blueprint to the universe. Soon enough, Evil himself (Clement) comes looking for the map leading the Bandits to flee through time with Kevin in tow.What follows is an era-of-the-week adventure yarn that takes us from ancient Troy to neolithic Britain, the Ice Age to the Harlem Renaissance. Each place is filled with amusing moments of anachronism and bathos whereby much-mythologised epochs and landmark events become the stuff of the everyday — or else the absurd.Occasionally the series feels like it’s going in circles while it moves forwards and backwards in time, with certain jokes, interactions and scenarios being repeated across too many overlong episodes. There are instances too when imagination tips over into wilful idiosyncrasy. But Time Bandits is sufficiently charming to make it that rarest of things — a remake that justifies its existence.★★★★☆First two episodes on Apple TV+ now. New episodes released weekly
