June has arrived, bringing with it that peculiar British certainty of unpredictable weather, the lingering smell of barbecue ash, and the yearly realisation that we’ve once again forgotten to book a summer holiday. Thankfully, the streaming platforms have decided to do the heavy lifting for us. This month’s slate is a curious, compelling mix of high-stakes psychological drama, nostalgic filler, and at least one documentary about a man who ate nothing but Pot Noodles for a year.
But leading the charge, and the one everyone will be talking about at the water cooler, is Channel 4’s nervy new thriller, The Invite.
Let’s get the big one out of the way first.
The Invite (Channel 4, begins 12th June)
If you’ve ever found yourself stuck at a suburban dinner party, silently begging the crème brûlée to arrive so you can make your excuses and go, then The Invite will feel less like entertainment and more like a PTSD trigger. The premise is deceptively simple, which is the hallmark of all great British paranoia thrillers. Rachel (played with a marvellously frayed edge by Line of Duty’s Anna Maxwell Martin) and her husband Paul (Rory Kinnear, doing his trademark thing of being quietly terrifying beneath a cardigan) are a solidly middle-class couple from Bristol. They are, by their own admission, boring. And they like it that way.
Then, an invitation arrives. Not an email, not a WhatsApp message, but a thick, cream-coloured card through the letterbox. It’s for a “Garden Party & Supper” at the new neighbours’ house – a vast, glass-and-steel monstrosity that has loomed over the end of their cul-de-sac for six months without a single light ever turning on. The new neighbours are a charismatic, impossibly handsome couple in their forties: Malik and Serena (played by Paapa Essiedu and a stunningly icy Jodie Turner-Smith). They are vegans who run a tech start-up, have perfect teeth, and use words like “intersectionality” without irony. In other words, they are Rachel’s worst nightmare.
What unfolds over four episodes is a masterclass in middle-class dread. The first episode is entirely about the anxiety of the RSVP. Do they go? What do they bring? Is a twenty-quid Malbec insulting? By episode two, they are at the party, and it is deeply, profoundly weird. The starter is a foam. The main course is an artichoke that takes forty minutes to eat. And the other guests are a rogue’s gallery of familiar types: the competitive mother, the washed-up radio DJ, the conspiracy theorist accountant.
But The Invite isn’t just satire, though it is scathing. It slowly reveals itself to be a thriller about data, consent, and the terrifying void behind the influencer aesthetic. Malik and Serena are not just odd; they are collecting something. Every conversation is recorded. Every off-colour joke is logged. The party games aren’t just cringey; they are psychological stress tests. By the end of episode three, you’ll be side-eyeing your own neighbours and checking your phone for hidden microphones. Anna Maxwell Martin is, as ever, the engine of the piece, her Rachel is a woman who knows something is wrong but has been conditioned by a lifetime of politeness not to make a fuss. It is that very British trait, the refusal to cause a scene, that the show weaponises. Essential viewing, but perhaps not on an empty stomach.
The Lazarus Protocol (Apple TV+, 16th June)
Switching gears entirely, Apple TV+ delivers what might be the sci-fi event of the summer. The Lazarus Protocol is a six-part series from the writer of Devs, Alex Garland, and it feels like a philosophical migraine in the best possible way. The plot follows a team of “biological archivists” in a near-future London where climate collapse has been (mostly) solved, but only by uploading 80% of the population’s consciousness into a green-energy server farm known as The Haven. The remaining 20%, the “Anchors”, live in a husk of a city, tending to the physical bodies of the uploaded.
The twist arrives when a glitch in The Haven starts deleting people. Not just their digital avatars, but their physical bodies, which begin to dissolve into a grey, scentless powder. Florence Pugh, who I’m convinced has signed a Faustian pact to be in every interesting project at once, plays Kaela, a cynical Anchor who is hired by the corporation running The Haven to find the “source code” of the deletion. The show is visually stunning, a kind of brutalist, wet London where it is always raining a strange bioluminescent drizzle. The first two episodes are heavy on exposition, but by episode three, when Kaela enters The Haven for the first time and discovers a digital afterlife that has turned into a recursive nightmare of bad weather and worse call centre hold music, the show finds its terrifying groove. It asks a deeply uncomfortable question: if you could live forever inside a perfect simulation, why would you choose to program misery? And if someone is deleting that misery, are they the hero or the villain? Bring a notepad. You’ll need it.
Murder, They Hope: Brighton (Gold, 1st June)
For those who find the above a bit too heavy, Gold’s annual Murder, They Hope special arrives on the first of the month, and it is a warm hug in the shape of a crime caper. Johnny Vegas and Sian Gibson return as the bumbling, accident-prone coaches of the “Knight to Remember” tour company. This time, they’ve been hired to run a true-crime tour of Brighton, only to accidentally stumble upon an actual murder during the “Re-enactment of the Death of the Pinstripe Poisoner” on the West Pier.
It is, predictably, silly. The jokes are dad-jokes. The plot is a clothesline on which to hang misunderstandings, mistaken identities, and at least one scene involving a mobility scooter chase along the seafront. But there is a genuine affection between Vegas and Gibson that lifts the material. This isn’t cynical television; it’s the telly equivalent of a packet of cheese and onion crisps and a half-shandy on a sunny afternoon. Guest stars this year include a wonderfully game Joanna Lumley as a retired drag artist who “saw everything from the ladies’ loo,” and a cameo from the ghost of Max Miller, which is either a clever hologram or Vegas having a heatstroke. It’s nonsense, but it’s our nonsense.
The Last Gardener (BBC Two, 9th June)
Now for something completely different, and arguably the most British thing on the list. The Last Gardener is not a comedy. It is not a thriller. It is a three-part documentary series following 78-year-old Gwen, the sole remaining allotment holder on a patch of land in Dagenham that has been sold to a logistics firm. She has six weeks to harvest her rhubarb, dig up her prize-winning leeks, and vacate the land she has tended for fifty-one years.
Narrated by Olivia Colman with her trademark blend of warmth and melancholy, this is slow TV in the best sense. The first episode is just Gwen digging. For forty minutes. And it is mesmerising. We learn her husband built the shed. We learn the apple tree was a cutting from her mother’s garden in County Cork. We learn the names of every bird that visits. There is no villain here beyond the abstract concept of progress. The logistics firm isn’t evil; it’s just efficient. The council isn’t corrupt; it’s just broke. The documentary lets the tragedy of the everyday accumulate like soil under fingernails. By the end of episode two, when Gwen’s fellow allotmenteers have all moved their sheds onto flatbed trucks and driven away, you will be crying into your cup of Earl Grey. By the end of episode three, when she saves a single seed from her grandfather’s rose bush, you will be a wreck. Essential, quiet, devastating.
Quick Bites: What else is on?
– The Sleeper (Netflix, 25th June): A sharp, angry four-part drama about the 197s IRA bombings in Birmingham, told from the perspective of the forensic accountant who tracked the money. Less about explosions, more about ledgers. Stars an unrecognisable Stephen Graham as a man whose only weapon is a calculator.
– Love Island: The Reject Files (ITVX, 8th June): A deeply cynical but utterly compelling spin-off where former contestants who were dumped on day one are sent back into a luxury villa… in Stoke-on-Trent. The twist? They have to do their own laundry and cook their own chips. It is a study in crushed egos and wet hair. Guilty pleasure of the month.
– Secrets of the London Underground (Yesterday, every Sunday): Tim Dunn and Siddy Holloway return to explore disused stations. The episode on Down Street (the wartime bunker) is genuinely chilling, especially when they play the recording of Churchill’s breathing in the map room. Pure ASMR for transport nerds.
The Verdict
So, what to actually watch? If you have the stomach for social anxiety, clear your schedule for The Invite. It is the sort of sharp, uncomfortable, brilliantly acted drama that British television still does better than anyone else. It will make you want to cancel all your social plans for the rest of the summer, which, given the price of a pint these days, is probably a financial blessing in disguise.
For the sci-fi fans, The Lazarus Protocol is a grower, not a shower, stick with it through the dense first hour. And for everyone else, save The Last Gardener for a rainy Sunday afternoon when you need a good, cathartic cry. June on the box is not about blockbusters. It’s about unease, nostalgia, and the quiet horror of a dinner party that won’t end. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go and check my own letterbox. Just in case.
by PAT MORISSON