Shouting at the Telly’s Guide to Christmas TV

Christmas Eve

Victoria Wood’s Midlife Christmas (BBC1, 9pm)
My all-time favourite comedian is back with a one-off Christmas show. It’s fair to say that her work in the last twenty years hasn’t ever managed to recapture the inspired madness of the early days which culminated in the peerless Audience With, but even so there’s bound to be a few good laughs here, even if there will be too many celebrity cameos to digest.

The Hound of the Baskervilles (BBC2 9pm)
Obviously I am a big fan of the Tom Baker version, and this production goes head to head with the Guy Ritchie film which is released on Boxing Day. Richard Roxborough had his work cut out following the many greats who have played Holmes in the past, but it looks great, and was adapted for TV by my A Level drama teacher Allan Cubitt.

Christmas Day

Doctor Who (BBC1 6pm)
This is my highlight of the season. The best show of the decade heads for massive transformation, from mercurial Tennant and lovely RTD to untested Matt Smith and grizzly Moffatt. It’s got Oods, it’s got John Simm, it’s got Bernard Cribbins and best of all it’s got Catherine Tate (also appearing in Nan’s Christmas Carol at 10.30pm), the surprise of the series, and the best companion he’s had since the likes of Romana. I’ve deliberately avoided all spoilers but this promises to be the best thing on telly over the holiday.

On the Buses/Mutiny on the Buses/Holiday on the Buses (ITV3 5.25pm)
Forget Star Wars or The Godfather, this is the 70s movie trilogy. It tells you everything you need to know about how desperate and clapped out Britain was in the era of the 3 day week, strikes, inflation and oil crises. It features a casual full house of ‘isms’, where ugly men get laid by dolly birds while ugly women are a threat, most particularly as bus conductors. I would recommend you watch them as a piece of history, but they are unwatchable and seedy in a way that is too depressing even for Christmas.

Citizen Kane (BBC4 7pm), Appointment with Death (ITV 9pm), Grey Gardens (C4, 9pm)
Very spoiled by these three. A spectacular Syrian setting for Poirot gives a shot in the arm to this epic series of adaptations, and Citizen Kane is alright, I s’pose. Grey Gardens should be a real treat, a dramatised version of the celebrated 70s documentary (shown on C4 on 12.45am on Wednesday 30th) about a once glamorous mother and daughter trapped together in their house as it goes to ruin around them.

The Royle Family (9pm), Gavin and Stacey (10pm)
Two of the loveliest, warmest and funniest sitcoms of recent years. Caroline Aherne is the lost genius of British comedy, and it’s a treat to have her back on TV. And Smithy and Nessa are slowly taking over in G&S, and about time too.

Boxing Day

Harry Hill’s TV Burp Review of the Year (ITV 6.30pm), Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe (BBC4 10.30pm)
The two best shows about TV on TV are both doing their reviews of the year tonight. Which makes writing about them slightly redundant. So I won't.

You’ve Been Framed at Christmas (ITV 7pm)
No amount of studied comedy artistry, erudite wit or comic timing can get me in the same way at the moments of violent shock presented in You’ve Been Framed. A couple of Christmasses ago there was an amazing clip of a posh elderly woman in a huge kitchen with a canister of double cream which suddenly exploded all over her. Nothing has come near to making me laugh as much since.

The Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show (BBC2, 9.10pm)
Featuring Mr Andrew Preview. I've seen it forever, it will still crack me up.

The Third Man (BBC4 7.15pm)
The film that launched a thousand Portishead songs, and one of the most perfect thrillers ever made. Nothing better.

Sunday 27th

Home Alone 4 (ITV 12.10pm)
Is there actually a Home Alone 4? When did this happen? I thought there were two of the buggers. This is terrible news. I’m so sorry everyone.

The Greatest TV Shows of the Noughties (C4 9pm), The Big Fat Quiz of the Year 2006 (C4 10.35)
Mind you, it’s not as bad as C4 later, which has the worst evening of TV imaginable lined up – a clip show and then a repeat of an old quiz of the year. C4 is ending the decade in typically duff style. For the most part this channel has been the TV wing of New Labour in the noughties, with its glut of aspirational property, parenting and lifestyle shows. But behind that there’s also the lazy non-shows, the fillers of which tonight is a classic example.

Outnumbered – The Christmas Special (BBC1 10.30pm)
It’s up there with The Thick of It when it comes to modern sitcom genius, and a Christmas special is long overdue. Who thought BBC1 family sitcoms could still be good? It’s the females who make this so funny – Claire Skinner and Ramona Marquez as mother and daughter. Why it’s on so late rather than prime-time Christmas Day is beyond me.

Monday 28th

An Englishman in New York (ITV 9pm)
The Naked Civil Servant was a landmark, not just in TV but society in Britain in the mid-seventies. For its frank and flamboyant representation of Quentin Crisp’s life this was a remarkable achievement. And on ITV too! And so this long-awaited follow-up is bound to be an instant classic. Well, let’s hope.

The Day of the Triffids (BBC1 9pm)
I was in love with John Duttine when I was a kid, after seeing him in the 1980 version of this brilliant story. I hope Dougray Scott does him proud in the remake, which follows hot on the heels of the recent reinvention of Survivors, a similarly bleak and dystopian vision of a post-apocalyptic Britain.

Tuesday 29th

This is the day that schedulers forgot. There’s nothing to see here. Please move along.

Wednesday 30th

Piers Morgan’s Review of the Year (ITV 9pm)
Can you imagine what this will be like? Responsible for my least favourite TV moment of the year (making Ronnie Corbett cry, forchrissakes) everyone’s favourite anal fissure bounces over the events of the year on the space-hopper sized ego he uses for transit these days.

The Turn of the Screw (BBC1 9pm)
A dead cert, a classic ghost story for Christmas. One of the most dramatised novels of all time, it’s hard to know what a new production can do, but it does look like a goodie all the same.

633 Squadron (ITV4 8pm)
I love a good war film. Heroes of Telemark is also on over xmas, but this is probably my favourite. The music alone quickens the pulse, and all the battle scenes in those nippy mosquitos are fantastic. George Chakiris makes the swarthiest Norwegian going, making no effort to not appear as a groovy sixties beatnik. Worth watching it just for his hair.

New Year’s Eve

Always a low point in scheduling, this NYE is no different. Not a single stand-out show on any channel for the whole day. Go out, get drunk and snog a tramp.

New Year’s Day

Are You Being Served Night (BBC2 5pm)
Prepare for the history of the pussy joke and the limp wrist. Like Round the Horne before it, the camp innuendo and cast of 2D caricatures should be a nightmare but are actually an endless delight. With a documentary and a couple of episodes (including the pilot), this should be loads of fun.

EastEnders (BBC1 TWICE!)
It’s the culmination of the Syed and Christian love story, as it’s Syed’s wedding day. I’m in no way recommending this because of my love of Syed and all things Syed. No, it’s top drawer drama and no mistake. With Syed.

Doctor Who (BBC1 6.40pm), Gavin and Stacey (BBC1 9pm)
It’s the end of an era for both Tennant and Ruth Jones and James Corden tonight, so I’m expecting to be wrung out like a dishcloth by the end of the day. New year, new decade, who knows what delights it will bring? If it’s anything like as marvellous as either of these it’ll be a triumph.

Anti-omnishambles

This series of The Thick of It has been amazing. Way beyond what we have come to expect from a political comedy in the last twenty years. There are the beautiful characters and performances (Rebecca Front being mad and angry has been a revelation, Chris Addison's Ollie is a detailed study in annoying, James Smith plays Glenn Cullen with the battered dignity of a knackered old satchel and Joanna Scanlan is quietly worrying as disinterested Terri). The storylines are inspired (party conference speech ruined by loudmouthed grieving widow on Twitter, Radio 5 Live interviews derailed by phone-in revelations, etc) and each one showcases another desperately shallow and botched attempt at professional politics in Britain today.

Malcolm Tucker is the obvious giant of the show, a creature so monstrous and yet thoroughly understandable that you can't quite hate him. The amazing meltdown scene with Terri where she tells him he's wrong and he actually demonstrates some kind of self-knowledge, seeing himself for what he is to her shallow bafflement, is a truly standout scene, for my money the best in a wonderful series. We have been spoiled with eight weeks of artfully wrought political suicide and a portrait of life inside a dying government that in years to come will be taken as fact.

The insults are marvellous, my favourite being 'omnishambles' (almost as good as Tucker calling Toby in the film In the Loop 'Love Actually'). It's this level of inspired detail on top of the immense amount of research and across the board perfect performances that makes The Thick of It the best comedy on TV since Spaced. And we are living in an era of good sitcoms, it's a miracle. Outnumbered is a national treasure, The IT Crowd and The Inbetweeners are a new genre of nerdcom, people love Peep Show though I can't watch it because it makes my flesh crawl too much, and Gavin and Stacey is heartwarming and gorgeous in a way that old sitcoms used be – entirely because of the peripheral characters. Thank god the old cliche about Britain being shit at sitcoms has passed, and we can move on from Americanised trash like My Family. Watching something as good as The Thick of It makes you realise just how inspiring, truthful and funny a good comedy can be.

Elocution, Elocution

Kirstie's Home Made Christmas has to be the most pointless programme I have ever seen. Yes, it's just another stage in the relentless poshing-up of Christmas by the likes of Nigella. But what's it for?! Surely no actual human will do any of the things she suggests in this show, other than make mince pies, which she did really badly. The spread at the end looked gaudy and horrible, and unlike the idea of it all looking homemade it in fact looked incredibly manufactured, because none of it had any charm. I actually like Kirstie and have been a fan of her massive buttons and weekly 'Phil tells me that size isn't everything' jokes on Location, Location, Location. But this is such a poor vehicle for her, such a desperate stab at getting her to do anything: 'Oooh, Kirstie and Christmas, that's a winner' says a commissioning editor, not caring what the programme will end up being – which is more of a dog's dinner than Christmas dinner.

She dipped her hand repeatedly in a saucepan of hot water and sprinkled 'edible' glitter on everything, so I can imagine hospitals all over the home counties will now be stuffed with posh people eating tinsel and sticking their hands in the kettle. But it was her comment about markets that really made me laugh: that market stall holders are experts who really know where things have come from. In the case of the markets round my way it's usually from a spate of local burglaries or a factory in Korea.

Still, I sat down and watched it while I had my tea, so the cynical commissioning editor won again.

Well, Did You Evah?

The Christmas ads are really slugging it out now, and it suddenly struck me the sheer genius of getting the slutty voice of M&S, Dervla Kirwan, to play the baddie on Christmas Day last year in Doctor Who. Personally, if being the voice of Christmas ads was the audition for being the Xmas baddie in Who, I'd have to choose the Sugababes as the stars for this year. After all, they've actually regenerated into a completely new band, their ubiquitous reality show montage song Here Come The Girls is a work of pure evil, and it would be interesting to explore quite how bad ver Babes would have to get before Boots would drop them from their now annual office party campaign. I'm thinking that even playing Nazi space paedos might not be enough to make Boots let them go. This Christmas campaign will be with us forever.

Yet it's the Iceland ads that are the real classics of the season this year. They're beyond parody, especially as they have chosen the sneering 'Well, Did You Evah' as their theme song, so that even the 'stars' themselves are taking the piss of the spread on show. Well done everyone.

Strange Phenomena

It's become depressingly clear that needy, high maintenance Chris Hollins will win Strictly and 'simpering blowjob smile'* Joe will win X-Factor. Proof that you can never be too pathetic for reality TV. Chris just strikes me as a nightmare, the kind of man who would be suffocating to go out with. He'd always be texting or phoning to guilt-trip you into dropping your friends so you could spend all your time with him to distract him from that void of insecurity he projects around himself. And Cheryl Cole's tedious one-trick 'oooh he's like mah little brootha ah loove 'im' bullshit routine about dull Joe has really run its course now. He's like a boring John Barrowman.

Most extraordinary performance of the week didn't come from either of them, it came from Dev on Corrie, whose scat-singing/human beatbox rendition of 'Save All Your Kisses For Me' by the Brotherhood of Man (as some kind of bizarre way to celebrate winning a round of golf) was 1 part Cleo Laine, 1 part Falco and absolutely no parts sane. This TV Burp clip from years back illustrates my point:



How other actors are supposed to continue performing in a naturalistic soap style when he's off freestyling like that is a total mystery. In fact, how he ever ended up as a soap actor is a mystery. The only possible explanation is he's a stray from Twin Peaks.

* (c) Bertie Fox

Anti-Kipper Ballistic Missile

During Corrie this evening imagine my delight to see one of my favourite ads ever unexpectedly repeated. Tommy Cooper + Lego = all time classic.

Vile bodies

Brilliant new low for Living TV: pointing the finger at ugly people and offering the hand of condescension.

The Price of Fame

Katie Price,
Katie Price,
Couldn't win a bowl of rice.
Those Aussie bugs just are not nice.
Shouldn't have gone in there twice,
Katie Price.

(Traditional)

Jordan: the Comedown

The twins have gone. Now Katie Price has gone, as her desire to get herself back into the good books of the British people has ended with them and her 'doing a Natalie Appleton' – us forcing her to undergo every task in a manner that could be construed as bullying if that wasn't the actual point of the show in the first place, and she flouncing out as she was about to embark on yet another Bushtucker Trial.

Her stated reason for going on the show in the first place - to achieve closure from her relationship with Peter Andre - was a bit like a serial killer claiming that they killed again to get over the trauma of the last one.

I have no idea why anyone would go on I'm a Celebrity... once let alone twice. It's the cruelest of these celebrity shows. In fact, having just seen Gladiator for the first time it is uncannily similar in terms of gruesomeness. It's not fun to watch, it just isn't. The trials are the most horrible things on TV, worse even than being stuck in a green room with the presenters of Top Gear. I couldn't ever put a giant spider in my mouth, for example. Why would people go on there to face that? Yet Sam Fox is coming out of this series beautifully. She's willing to muck in, is funny and pragmatic and deserves to win. And it's interesting to see a glamour model from a different age next to Jordan. It's like Terminator 2. This new, high-tech merciless version has suddenly made the original seem so much more human. Actually she's the T2 crossed with Glenn Close in Dangerous Liasons. Or something.

Meanwhile ITV execs hold their heads in their hands, within 12 hours their most hyped reality stars have all gone. And on the BBC my favourite Strictly contestant, Jade, has pulled out through injury. IT'S A SAD WAY FOR REALITY TV TO LIMP OFF THE END OF THE DECADE, that's all I can say.

It's a Steve Brookstein year alright

Ta-ta Jedward. See you on Hole in the Wall, I'm a Celebrity, Celebrity Family Fortunes and the rest forever and ever. Just not in the charts. It's Cheeky Girls time, not JLS.

Everyone I know seems to love Olly Murs, a man who looks like a chubby Matt Damon. Fatt Damon. And dances like Prince Charles did in that awful clip of him doing the Hot Stuff dance from The Full Monty. I guess he can't win now, as he's been in the bottom two, so that's a relief. But that really only leaves Stacey and Joe as the only plausible winners. Joe will be off in Joseph before the series has even ended, and Stacey will be working the cruise ships for the next sixty years. There's no Leona here, no Alexandra Burke. I bet Simon was willing the twins to win, even over his own singer, because that was money lies. The rest won't trouble the top 20 this time next year.

Dannii was left to kill the twins. She asked the other judges whether this was a singing competition A fair point. None of them are good enough for this to be a proper singing competition, that much was obvious when Susan Boyle came on and sang quite divinely, her vulnerability making the song almost embarrassingly touching, and her voice filling that stage without any of the strained flip-top head yelling of Danyl or backing overkill of Jedward. So, if it can't be a singing competition proper, what are they actually judging? Simon can't answer, because that level of honestly would dismantle the entire show and with it his precarious, ludicrous parasitic career.

One of the best sketches of all time

Facebook TV quiz...

Shouting at the Telly quiz on Facebook. More entertaining than Ian Beale, less entertaining than Calvin Harris's X-Factor stage invasion.

28 Days Water

The much-trailed penultimate David Tennant/Russell T Davis Doctor Who story, The Waters of Mars, was finally broadcast this evening, and reminded me of all of the reasons I've enjoyed RTD's reboot of the show.

There was a really gripping story, something Davies is repeatedly underestimated for considering his extensive plotting and rewriting of not just his but all the other writers stories bar Moffat's, emotional engagement in the form of Lindsay Duncan, some absolutely horrible monsters and a great psychological twist at the end - this time with the lonely Doctor (last of the Time Lords, travelling alone) going power mad, and prompting a bleak and abrupt suicide. Loved all the Logopolis (Tom Baker's brilliant final story)-style foreshadowing at the end too, with the Cloister Bell and the Ood watcher... One of the things I've liked most about RTD's tenure as chief writer has been his exploration of new angles on existing themes, and this story finally saw the dark underside of the almost religious and magical overtones he's given the Doctor in previous stories, especially The Sound of Drums. He's not seen individual stories as islands but has been happy to explore and review the human (and alien) consequences of moral choices made throughout the series. This was always the weakness of old Who. Much as individual stories were awesome, the resetting between stories was unnecessary and ultimately hindered audience connection with the characters.

Everyone is very excited about Moffat's reinvention of the franchise, but I'm a little worried. What RTD has done is broad brush humour, warmth, adventure and razzle-dazzle. Great as Moffat's stories have been they have been tonally very similar (dark, intense, complicated) and I doubt a whole run of stories like that would keep the audience the current series has gathered to it. I'm not a fan of the 'dark version', that film reboot style so popular with film-makers during the Bush era. I'm more a new Star Trek kinda guy - warm, witty reboots which capture the fun of a franchise and don't try to turn The Muppets into Hamlet. There's a place for the dark version, but not every Saturday teatime there ain't. Doctor Who is best when it's fun and scary, and The Waters of Mars was a great example of that. As soon as it gets a bit Christopher Nolan I'm outta here.

Piers Pressure

It's not a particularly original observation to point out what a revolting pissbrain Piers Morgan is, the man who was sacked for publishing faked army abuse photos in the Mirror and who has somehow kept his gollum-like talons on the throat of showbiz through various talent shows and now a chat show where he pedals a tabloid-inspired agenda to his guests.

Yet last week his interview with Ronnie Corbett, one of my all-time favourite comedians, was a new low even by Morgan's standards. He spent a whole 15 minute section on one point: Corbett never says 'I love to' to his wife, and instead they display their affection through actions not words. It's clearly a very personal and special way of communicating, and it's not for the outside world to get involved in this private aspect of his life. However, Piers, being the cheap sentimental hack he is, asked the same questions over and over about it, and then demanded that Ronnie say 'I love you' on camera to his wife for the sake of his viewing figures. Ronnie was understandably reluctant - this was a private thing, this wasn't how they communicated, and it's not what he does. Still, Morgan wouldn't take no for an answer and in the end Ronnie gave up and told his wife he loved her, and promptly wept.

Morgan got exactly what he wanted, the money shot, through cajoling his guest into submission. It was interesting to watch – for much of the media this is how journalism works. But it's usually a hidden process. The journalist can recount the events without revealing the manipulative lengths they went to make their interviewee lose it in some way. Watching Piers do this in front of the cameras was revolting. The man has no shame, and no respect for his guests, just an eye for the mechanics of a popular story no matter the cost, and the tricks to make an unwary elderly performer break down in front of the camera for nothing more than a cheap thrill.

Chatting up a storm

Here's me on the Blackwell's podcast, doing a bit of shouting at the telly

Four Times Knightly

I was a bit surprised they were stringing out Emma over four episodes. Unlike the rumbustious plot of Pride and Prejudice the story of Emma is so slight. But the adaptation was wonderfully written, and has opened up the book rather than simplifying it as the terrible film version with Gwynnie did, which turned this nasty black comedy into a sunny bonnets and punnets romp.

Romola Garai was utterly beguiling as Emma Woodhouse, and brought a new interpretation to the role, making her motivation much more complex than I'd considered before – we see how lonely she is once her best friend is married off, and that means that her subsequent busy-bodying behaviour (which she transfers on to poor chattering self-confessed dullster Miss Bates, heartbreakingly performed by Tamsin Greig, especially in the famous picnic scene) all makes rather more sense. The production had a more melancholy undertone than previous ones. All to the good.

Some of it worked less well, though. Mr Elton wasn't anywhere near as much of a creep as required. And Mr Knightly, as portrayed by Jonny Lee Miller, was unrecognisable from the novel. Gone was the mysterious, shadowy, emotionally remote figure, barely described until Emma realises he is the object of her affection at the close of novel. Instead we have a wet weekend: a cuddly, ineffectual wimp whining and simpering around Emma like a fool. And this is a shame, as it unbalanced the adaptation, meaning that all of the feelings were blatant right from the off, which spoils the fun.

Clueless remains my favourite adaptation of Emma, coming closest to the outrageous spirit of the novel, but this has been a lovely, cosy Sunday night drama and I'll miss it now it's over, acting as it does as a perfect detox for the excesses of the X-Factor. Of course, I cried at the end (Michael Gambon having much the same effect on me as Bernard Cribbins had in Doctor Who), but then these days I well up if someone holds a door open for me.

The Crying Game

The X-Factor isn't really my cup of tea. I'm more of a Strictly man, mainly because SCD reminds me of celebs lumping around the Morecambe and Wise set and XF has all of the amateur charmlessness of Opportunity Knocks. I hate 'human interest' – I don't want to see 17 year olds weeping because Simon Cowell has said they aren't Celine Dion.

This series of XF is a two horse race (and I'm not talking about creepy John and Edward, and their incest-tastic version of Britney's Oops, I Did It Again) - Jamie, the cute guy with the highly rufflable afro and super-flexible voice, and Stacie, who is Catherine Tate doing an exaggerated impression of Peggy from Hi-De-Hi! when she talks, and is Jennifer Rush when she sings. The others are a bunch of feeble-voiced twits we have to slowly eliminate week on week, and patiently sit through them butchering Sinatra and ABBA. Poor Rachel, in the sing-off for the last two weeks isn't the weakest singer by any stretch, but she looks odd. uncomfortable up there – last week dressed as post-assault Rhianna, this week as Denise from Five Star.

It has completely put me off Cheryl Cole. Last series made her career as the woman that middle-class ladies the country over could claim was their 'girl crush' (a fucking annoying sentiment that inevitably leads to the let's-treat-gays-as-exotic-tourism of Katy Perry's truly appalling I Kissed a Girl and I Liked It). This series has undone it at a stroke. The papers might be out for Minogue after her Danyl that-came-out-wrong moment, but Cole's waterworks have been as tedious and stage-managed as Brendan Cole's insincere attempt at indignation on Strictly for his ancing partner Jo Wood being rightly criticised as shit.

Last week Robbie shouted his way through his new single and did his Freddie Starr dance. This week the newly-scary Whitney spent most of her song doing her dress back up and not singing. I've not properly adjusted from seeing her as the dull Cliff Richard of R&B, but these days she looks like a woman who could do anything, apart from behave well...

Micro wave

The BBC4 computer season's flagship comedy drama Micro Men was the latest in a long line of biopics of British cultural figures from Tony Hancock to Barbara Cartland that they've produced. Some have been terrible (the Mary Whitehouse one in particular was shameful, patronising it's odious subject matter as if no-one had learned anything from her reign of terror, and Lindsay Duncan's miscasting as Thatcher successfully scuppered that one) and others brilliant (Anne Reid was superb and unexpectedly moving as Barbara Cartland and Andrea Riseborough made a much better stab at Thatcher in The Long Walk to Finchley).

This one was a slightly odd comedy drama - odd in that it wasn't actually funny apart from a couple of scenes (the mafia-style oxtail soup in a transport caff scene being particularly hilarious) or all that dramatic. Alexander Armstrong was amusing but never very convincing as Clive Sinclair, his lousy rubber scalp and stick-on hair made him look like a bad comedy sketch character rather than the central figure in a film-length drama. Martin Freeman had the much easier job of being a bit Martin Freemanish. Rather as with the Whitehouse one I did wonder why this had to be a comedy - Sinclair is famously odd and the C5 is a great disaster, but I'm sure there was more going on with him than shouting and mispronouncing the word 'logo'. It was as if they had gone with the most superficial version of him and hadn't bothered burrowing beneath that.

That said, it was enjoyable and interesting, very funny in a couple of places and another successful BBC4 drama made on 50p. I hope they keep on making these, they'll never run out of subjects, and hit-or-miss as they are, they are always worth watching. I'd love to see one about Coe and Ovett next, but I'm guessing it's hard to re-stage two Olympics on a shoestring.

Modern love

EastEnders is on a roll at the moment in its ongoing project to make every conceivable disastrous permutation of modern love as unattractive as the next.

Being the fiancee of a single parent is tough. But when innuendos start flying amongst your own kids that you have killed your husband's ex-wife, that's just not going to help. Especially when he was the (acciental) killer all along.

And new relationships are tough. Your family seem jealous because you've found the perfect man, but then you have a big secret (your secret daughter was mowed down by the Square's resident angel of death a few months ago) that you can't bring yourself to tell him, but which they might blurt out to your perfect/dodgy fella at any moment.

And being the comedy support character having a mystery baby is tough. Especially because the whole storyline is a bizarre homage to Michelle's predicament when the show first started.

And being a gay muslim who's engaged to a woman while secretly being in love with the local stud is tough. But then what do you fucking expect?

Stacey's got the hardest acting job in the world at the moment, and she's managing her mental breakdown a whole lot more convincingly than Claire did on Corrie. I am, of course, totally in love with Syed, but then who wouldn't be with the mixed-up muppet. And the whole thing is still worth watching for Nina Wadia, who brings the kind of inspired comic timing to the show that it so often lacks with its reliance on medodrama.

The 2009 House

Florence and KanYe thought it would be fun living in The 2009 House, but they were shocked when their modern key worker podule was redecorated in traditional 2009 style - modelled on the Big Brother house. 'Look at all the mirrors!' shrieked Florence. 'And the en-suite's been turned into a diary room.' Florence has been given a typical 2009 job - she's a celebrity chef - and KanYe has given up his modern job of Alien Liason Officer to take up the traditional role of unemployed hedge fund broker. Their children Enid and Reginald have been taken out of their oxygen bubble in the OxBridge Dome and Enid has been given a eating disorder and breast implants and Reginald has been dressed as the dead Michael Jackson.

I really enjoyed Electric Dreams, but then ever since The 1900 House I've loved these time-warp documentaries. There's nothing I would like more than being forced to live in the seventies again – in fact, anyone who's been to my flat will confirm that I'm half way there. It's interesting that this series is focussing on the technological angle of the age, ticking its way through the decade via the introduction of various gadgets to the stranded family. The introduction of Pong to the family was a particular highlight. We never had Pong. We got a BBCB in 1984. But even the furnishings were overshadowed by the glamorous tech-support geek's gushing interview with Sir Clive Sinclair, a man so controlled and unimpressed by her admiration he may as well have pissed on her pocket calculator and laughed as it exploded.

The biggest revelations for me were that Cortinas didn't have wing mirrors and that these people didn't like their Soda Stream (philistines). And the most nostalgic moment was that recording of the show coincided with Snow Day earlier this year, and I found myself nostalgic for my childhood when the house was fucking freezing in the winter because we only had a gas fire in the living room. Next week in the eighties I suspect it's going to be uncannily like Adam and Joe.

Scream if you can't bear it any longer

Watch, the TV channel famous only for happily destroying Richard and Judy's career, announced a new game show today. Called Scream If You Know the Answer it's to be recorded at Thorpe Park and will include the usual desperate, damaged sellebities – Jordan, Heather Mills – attempting tasks while riding on various rollercoasters. It's a five minute insert on Jim'll Fix It turned into an entire series.

The Guardian reported today: UKTV's director of entertainment commissioning, Lisa Perrin, said: 'The thing I really love about Scream is that our celebrities get to ride too, so we can watch them and the contestants being pushed and pulled here, there and everywhere by huge G forces.'

So that's it. A commissioning director of a 'major' TV channel is quite happy to announce a show that is essentially poking animals with sticks and laughing at them as they flinch. Even Hole in the Wall doesn't rely entirely on involuntary muscle responses for its entertainment. This time next year they'll be announcing a show revolving entirely around feeding Jordan beans and listening to her farting.

It's yesterday once more

I love a good bit of glitzy light entertainment. It's so odd how it died in about 1981 and then took decades to recover. Like the Mini, Doctor Who and rampant global recession the return of this kind of cheesy Summertime Special type nonsense harks back to a comforting pre-home computer age where incongruous celebrities dance like it's the heyday of Morecambe and Wise.

Very odd that people are always saying Brucie's past it. He's over twice Tess Daly's age, but has twice her talent. Her attempts to be funny are truly shocking, like watching someone defecate on screen. Brucie has always been rather bumbling, it's been part of his stage persona since his Palladium days. But when he does great old-school jokes, like the hoary old complicated explanation of cricket, or calling Anton his love child, it brings back lovely memories of ham-fisted attempts at throwing pots or country dancing on the Generation Game.

Alesha, rather less ineffectual this week, gave quite an eye-opening insight into the celebrities' state pre-dancing: 'their hearts will be beating...' One would hope so. It is the very least we could expect. Natalie Cassidy was, as I'd hoped, was utterly gorgeous. 'If Vincent falls in love with me then that's something we'll have to face at the time', she said, before plunging into a particularly vampish tango by the end of which, never mind shouting at the telly, I was positively whooping.

The duffsters were queueing up to stumble round the dance floor like James Caan in Misery, not least terrible, bland Richard Dunwoody and the odious Phil Tufnell, who will more than likely win the show. 'People most remember me for being married to Ronnie Wood' said Jo Wood. I don't. In fact, I have absolutely no idea who she is. I can barely remember the names of the Rolling Stones, so far removed are they from my life, let alone their ex-wives. I also had no idea who Ricky Whittle was, though I suspect I may remember now. Laila is tremendous fun, camply competitive and utterly beautiful all togged up like a lovely Spanish lady. Anton even got to dance with his celebrity partner for once, rather than hauling them about like a Henry hoover into hard to reach corners. And he's so old-school, surely to be revealed as a BBC experiment locked in the Blue Peter time capsule in the Italian Sunken Garden since 1976 while teaching the Brotherhood of Man their winning dance for Save All Your Kisses For Me. Ask him about tamagotchis, Thatcher or Britpop and the poor bewildered mite will have no idea.

Strict Machine

Alesha told Rav that he gave the tango his hole, Tess Daly quoted T. S. Eliot, Bruce got everything wrong about It Takes Two, to an increasingly startled Claudia Winkleman. Yes, Strictly is back, and apart from the unwelcome loss of bossy dance legend Arlene Phillips it is a lot of fun.

Hilarious, brilliant Sonia from EastEnders, one of the best ever soap actresses, has already won it for me before the series had started. There's Joe Calzaghe, preposterously sexy beast, terrible dancer (poor Kristina...), to keep that bit of my brain and trousers occupied. And Lynda Bellingham, who's always been great value, even back in the soft porn films she made in the seventies, and was a total bloody treat this evening dancing her bonkers zombie tango.

There's reality TV slut Phil Tufnell, who we're all supposed to love because he's hilariously off his tits all the livelong day. I hate him, the drooling cretin. And there's also a whole load of people I have never heard of and will not remember when it's over: some sports presenter who looks like Ricky Gervais, and half the people who did the group dance, who could have been anybody.

But all the attention was on the judges. Alesha is a pointless, waffling addition as she has no expertise. Why didn't they ditch stupid Bruno if they wanted to bring in a new judge? No-one likes him and his shouting you are a beautiful swan at any woman who even steps on the floor. Oh, and Tess Daly, fuck off you talentless, witless stick insect. I cringe every time you attempt a joke, and even walking and smiling seems to test you to the very limits of your being.

That's my Saturdays (and the odd Friday) solved for the rest of the year. Cosy nights in with a packet of biscuits, licking the screen every time Joe pops up (don't get voted off you idiot). Lovely.

Lancelot's balls

Teeny tiny Derren Brown jumps on a small podium to meet his adoring audience at eye height. He predicted the lottree earlier this week, clever wee thing, and now he's explaining how.

A woman from the audience who doesn't like mice has to put her hand in boxes which may contain a mouse to show fear heightening predictability. The big reveal is that there is no mouse. Then, to up the non-existent stakes, a pre-recorded guy has to stamp on polystyrene cups which may contain an upturned knife. Clever little Derren correctly predicts the cups the guy will not stamp on, and good job because the last cup is hiding a mouse. Applause all round.

Splendidly, though he demonstrates these theories, he doesn't explain them in any depth. It's the most delicious bit of showmanship. I love a bit of devious psychology. But then he opens up a bit more. Some 'deep maths' (whatever that is) in a heads and tails experiment. And then, mirroring a classic guess the weight of the ox county fair competition, he applies the wisdom of crowds to the lottery. A group of people are asked to predict the next balls in a lottery sequence, which he then averages out. With this strategy he got as far as predicting three of the numbers. Woo.

Then he's onto automatic writing, the old spiritualist trick, with his panel. Four numbers correct. And the day of the lottery draw dawns and his team are off again, automatic writing. Numbers correct as we knew, and the group are ecstatic. But then he offers an alternative solution to the doubters, smuggling weighted balls into the machine, which he strenuously denies.

I am utterly credulous. I uncritically believe anything magicians or showmen like tiny DB say. So seeing someone so fundamentally untrustworthy demonstrate the different theories with such scant and partial explations was never really going to be very much help. Especially as he wants to continue his career and use similar techniques over and over.

He's funny, he's smart, he's devious, he's a nightmare. Derren is a Bond villain, Rasputin and every boyfriend I've ever had. This show was the obvious anticlimax it was set up to be after his audacious stunt. But I don't want to see how he does it really. Perhaps I'm naive or lack curiosity, but the amazing thig is he did it. And, tiny and annoying as he is, he's done something none of us will ever do - not choose the right numbers for the lottery but explode the dreams of a greedy nation that these things are easy.

Cod Creole

The Crow Road. It's being repeated as part of BBC4's excellent Scottish season. I absolutely adore this series, and the book from whence it came. It's a wonderful and beguiling meditation on death, with philosophy student Prentice trying to understand the disappearance of his uncle Rory, his grandmother's death and his friend's suicide. Is it a conspiracy, is it god's plan, or is it all just random chance? His father (played to perfection by Bill Patterson in what is possibly my favourite TV character of all time) tells tall tales for a living - 'it's a father's privilege to fill his child's head with nonsense', and his uncle has created his own crackpot religion. They're all leading him nowhere but confusion and angst. Prentice's stubbornness, nostalgia and desire to see patterns in things that aren't there are all things I see strongly in myself, it was revelatory when I saw the series the first time (I read the book later, and wonder how I'd have felt about it if it had been the other way round).

I'll say it. Joe McFadden, who plays Prentice in his grunge-era get-up, is the most beautiful creature who ever lived. I served him once in a bookshop just after this was broadcast and was left with the feeling that I would never again interact with anyone quite so astonishingly stunning. Prentice's revoltingly successful stand-up brother, a young Dougray Scott, is a study in smarm. Peter Capaldi, as the ever-present ghost of Rory, adds a spooky and unsettling dimension to the drama. And his friend, Ashley, played by a smoudering Valerie Edmond, is so gloriously sexy, like all of Elastica crossed with Anna from This Life, that she is the most unbelievable left-on-the-shelf character since Kirsten Scott Thomas's in Four Weddings.

The whole production is gorgeous. From the opening green-screen WordPerfect typing and the haunting, evocative music that always makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck, this is four weeks of glorious TV - period drama now! - that I have watched so many times I can join in with many of the scenes, and I notice have adopted many of the phrases as my own figures of speech without even realising. Roll on episode two, and that familar feeling of being pulled back in time and into a delicious, thought-provoking and enigmatic story the kind of drama we don't really see being made any more.

Wood Torched

I stopped watching Torchwood at the end of the first season, after my toes couldn't take the curling any more. Their stupid, kid's TV set base, their sudden showy bouts of alien sex for no reason, the archly constructed set of characters, and more than anything, the terrible stories – especially the fucking cyberwoman in her fucking cyberbra – took away so much from the newly revived and wonderful Doctor Who that it was better to pretend it wasn't there than engage with it and have it undermine the fun of my favourite TV show. Instead I discovered the joys of The Sarah Jane Adventures, which instead of attempting to make Buffy in Holby was a really great homage to old Doctor Who - quirky, shambolic and occasionally bloody scary, with the odd classic story to warm the cockles.

So, I didn't watch series two of Torchwood or their recent BBC1 mini-series Children of Earth. But it was only when people started to say the magic word Quatermass that I began to get interested in CoE. BBC3 have just repeated the five episodes, and I thought I'd give it a go. And I have to take my hat off to them, never have I seen a programme so improved. The story was brilliant – paedophile junkie aliens demand a tenth of the kids from the planet to incubate chemicals that feel good as the Barry White alien creature gasps orgasmically, and the government weasles its way from spin to Nazism over the curse of the tale (even with the wonderful Peter Capaldi doing a Goebbles and killing his own kids). All the moral dilemma stuff was pushed way beyond the usual TV or movie plots, with Jack topping and tailing the story by handing over a trial run of the kids in the sixties, and then blowing his own grandson up to stop them. The morality was quite revolting and brilliantly explored.

And along the way they've ditched the things that have held this series back. With boring Tosh and sleazy Owen already dispatched, this time it was the turn of Ianto, the man who put the wood into Torchwood, to cop it, and not before time. And they've blown their base up too. In fact, the series ends with the terrific Gwen Cooper beig the only surviving member of Torchwood left on Earth, after Jack understandably jets off for a bit of R&R among the stars.

Jack, of course, remains the weak link. A totally charming character when sweeping Rose Tyler off her feet in 1940s London, renegade Time Agent Jack Harkness has outstayed his welcome on an epic scale - across six series of two TV shows this character has roamed, getting progressively less interesting and sympathetic as each year passes. His costume is as irritating as Colin Baker's terrible outfit, and there's a heartbreaking moment in CoE when Jack has lost his clothes and is finally in civvies, and then stupid fucking Ianto goes and buys him another set of RAF surplus, which was the final nail in the Welshman's coffin for me. Throw the baby out with the bathwater, please!

Russell T. Davies has taken a stupid amount of stick from wanky 'fans' (ie, people who hate Doctor Who but know all about it) who don't seem to appreciate what he's done in bringing back a totally moribund format and making it viable and more popular than ever before. For me, Torchwood has been his big misfire, and The Sarah Jane Adventures his secret triumph. But CoE finally showed what this odd adult sci-fi show could be - not a slash porn version of Doctor Who but a show that takes the legacy of British sci-fi legends John Wyndham and Nigel Kneale and brings it up to date, as he had done in The Second Coming, which was probably the closest thing to CoE he has written thus far.

I didn't want to like it, but there we go, we can't always get what we want. Yes, it's still saddled with the ham, but at least the dead wood had gone, and it thoroughly deserved to be the massive ratings hit it was. I do hope they make some more in this vein, and wave goodbye to the gimmicks which had sat on the series and slowly killed it before our eyes.

Staring into the middle distance

The only sport I enjoy watching on TV is athletics - always have done, whether it's gripping 10,000 metre duels or mind-boggling feats of the jumpers and vaulters. This week has been a real treat. The World Championships in Berlin have been great and the BBC coverage is, as usual, terrific. Partcularly interesting coverage of 18 year old South African 800 metre runner and gold medalist Caster Semenya. The BBC have reported it as an ongoing story throughout these championships, as have all of the news channels that never touch athletics as a story. The difference is, the BBC coverage has been very thorough, fair and analytical - surprisingly so for sports coverage which isn't always the most subtle of beasts.

The BBC athletics panel have been quite brilliant, showing a measured and sympathetic side that pundits don't usually demonstrate. Denise Lewis has been a revelation, furious and compassionate in equal measure against the taxi-driving mentality of most sports coverage and officialdom and for the athlete whose reputation was unnecesarily thrown into dispute hour before she ran rather than out of competition when it would have been much easier for a teenager to deal with. 'In this case we have a girl who has possibly been born with a hormone imbalance, and it's not unheard of that girls of her age have have conflicting hormones. But this society is so lead by what is visually and aesthetically acceptable - stereotypes.' And Colin Jackson wanted to know, 'who's going to apologise to her for all of the rumour and speculation? I hope she just has the heart and desire to stay in this sport which has treated her so badly when she's been so successful.' This story has been a miserable episode in athletics mismanagement, but at least good people are covering this story amid the general media hysteria.

Maximum Power!

Last weekend I was cat-sitting for my middle brother and discovered he had three series of Blake's 7 hidden on his bookshelf. I had seen series 1 and 2 in the last five years, but hadn't seen series 3 since it was last repeated in the eighties, so I gave that a go. And I have to say, I still bloody loved it.

I wasn't so much of a fan of the original line-up. Flicky Jenna, boring Gan and vain thesp Blake were better off dead in my book. And one big criticism of series 3 by fans is that it had lost its sense of quest: Blake was always trying to ferment revolution in the first two, and Avon had gone Blake crazy by the 4th, but in the third our anti-heroes seemed happy to potter about playing board games and get tricked into handing the Liberator over to the federation every other story. The thing is, I always thought the quest was a bit boring. I prefered them when they were just arsing about being sneered at by Avon (Paul Darrow doing a similar trick to his peer Tom Baker of delivering his lines quickly and in a monotone so that you always felt you were watching someone a bit other-worldly).

The big treat this season was the arrival of Someone Who Could Really Act. Josette Simon's many glittering post-Blake credits attest to her versatility, but I'm glad the BBC got to her first. Dayna, introduced in the first story of the season, hiding out with her medallion-man dad on a rough old planet covered in horse-riding barbarians, is a deadly weapons expert. Well, she was in this and about two other of the stories this season when they remembered it. But no matter what she was given, Josette was as dignifed as it was possible to be when playing a harp in a dream sequence, arguing with Servalan about who looks best in an assymetric toga or snogging both Avon and Tarrant. Both Dayna and Josette's talents were squandered, but even so it was great having her being sarky and stunningly beautiful on the Liberator – especially when intelligent, strong black women characters were virtually unknown on British telly.

But the next story introduces us to Tarrant, Somone With A Silly Voice. That was Stephen Pacey's big problem, really. Introduced as an alpha-male Blake-a-like, seemingly a Federation trooper till revealed as a naughty bandit, Tarrant spoke like someone taking the piss out of macho men on television. But, unlike Dayna, he gets loads to do. He's always teleporting down and shooting stuff, or arguing with Avon. But he never does anything remotely interesting. Even when, in the penultimate episode of this season, he turns up in a wig as his own brother engaged in a duel to the death with an android, you end up caring more about the brother than you do about Tarrant.

Cally gets tons to do. Like Tarrant, haunted Jan Leeming-lookalike and telepath Cally gets to play her own sibling in a particularly dull story, and then gets possessed in a totally bonkers episode where she ends up dolled up like Florence and the Machine and gets the rest of the crew to do magic tricks and sing. And she also snogs Avon, who is doing rather well out of the ladies this series considering he looks like Blackadder II. Cally also seems to teleport down everywhere despite the fact she's rubbish while trained warrior Dayna is left behind to push buttons and invent bombs she hides in her own mouth (bizarrely).

Vila. Now there was a man after my own heart. Coward, joker, dreamer and utter failure, Vila didn't get to do much ths series other than moan at Orac and Zen, drink green liquid and - oh yes - become leader of the world in one of the best ever stories, City at the Edge of the World. That was the things about series 3 - there wasn't much point, but some of the stories were fantastic. It's tremendously good fun. Well, apart from Volcano, which makes absolutely no sense and has an overuse of terrible stock footage, and Moloch, which has such a spectacularly bad ending that you almost feel dirty for having watched it.

But Avon and Servalan really dominate the season. Avon is rather passive, considering the weakness of the Federation at the start of the season following the intergalactic war, so Servalan does all of the chasing. And she crops up in almost every story, slinking about in her ugly dead baby crocodile spaceship and trying to get her hands on the Liberator. And you can see why - it's bloody cool. Zen is up there with K9 for me as most lamented childhood loss. Considering she's so powerful, Servalan shows she's a very hands-on kinda manager. She's always hiding behind the next door or chained to the wall round the corner. But you get some sense of her importance in the brilliant Rumours of Death, set in a stately home on earth she's had reconstructed, where hoards of guards are protecting her from the rebels. Avon is understandably annoyed that the one woman he ever loved - Anna Grant - turned out to be the Federation's best agent. Still, they get to snog, and he also snogs Servalan twice, turning him into the unlikeliest sex object in the universe. Amazing what a bit of black leather will do.

The finale, Terminal, is bloody brilliant. Very subdued and atmospheric. Avon off on a mysterious mission, thinks he's found Blake, oops, no, it's Servalan again, natch. The Liberator takes a bath in some corrosive fungi which basically covers the whole ship with snot and kills it. And when Servalan finally gets her manicured nails on it the whole thing immediately blows up around her. What an ending! And what a fun series. I haven't even got round to the giant brain or the fetuses. This was made at the same time as Tom Baker was having a high old time with his Mrs, Lalla Ward, on the budget and strike-hit fag end of his residency in the Tardis, and it shows - there's the same degree of shambolic production values and plotting-by-numbers going on by both Douglas Adams at Doctor Who and Chris Boucher at Blake's 7. But in the end, both of them turned out some glorious stuff, hugely entertaining successes and failures that lit up my childhood and made me the nerdy telly addict I am today. Thank god my brother had the boxed set. Now I want season 4!

Donatella like it is

Rupert Everett has decided to do the honourable public school gay thing, and pretend to be an expert about something. He's chosen Byron, mainly because it allows him to say 'fucking' a lot while wearing trackies on a gondola, much as his last subject, Sir Richard Burton, allowed him to do the same in bedouin tents.

Essentially, he's choosing subjects that allow him to talk about hedonistic sex ad nauseum. And the nausea does come, in this case while he's having a tenuously Byronic gonorrhea test. Still, he rolls out the experts: historians, fancy dress costumiers and Donatella Versace, who nods while Rupes drones on about Caroline Lamb and then asks whether Byron should have had therapy. Good point, Donzi.

This documentary is like a someone paraphrasing the vainglorious and innacurate Byron scholars in Stoppard's play Arcadia in the manner of Cher from Clueless. It would have been brilliant as a Kath and Kim-style comedy, but sadly he really meant all this stuff. Even the hideously patronising rent-a-camp ending in a bingo hall. Poor old Oscar is next, I fear.

Desperate, that's for sure...

Please welcome Guest Shouter Alex Young, whose marvellous blog I Shall Wear Purple is linked in the sidebar bit, you know, next to this piece, JUST SHUT UP AND GET ON WITH IT:

My favourite guilty pleasure at the moment has to be the BBC's attempt at reducing high art to the lowest common denominator with Desperate Romantics. Despite the fact that most people now view the Pre-Raphaelites as a big bunch of wets with a fondness for foliage and a giant thing for gingers, at the time, they were as scandalous as the YBAs, with saucy sex lives to match.

But of course today's audiences couldn't possibly be expected to find blokes opaquely challenging the morals of the day via the medium of lilies, irises and pansies at all intriguing. I suspect that the book this was based on was being read by a producer who was watching the DVD of David Tennant's Casanova at the same time. The result is a costume drama for the Facebook generation, involving good looking, kind of familiar actors, a lot of running around, rapid editing and bonkers music.

The soundtrack is the sort of hectic, hurdy-gurdy, twiddly, tinkly circus music that makes it feel as though the whole programme is winking at you like an epileptic with a tic for an hour. Rossetti seems to have unearthed Sylvester McCoy's entirely unlamented costume from his stint as Doctor Who in the 80s. Poor Aidan Turner (who's very good, and totally fanciable in Being Human), appears to have been told to play Dante Gabriel as if he were Robbie Williams in his Take That days: superficially good looking and charming, but increasingly riven with jealousy as he realises that his talent is a very mediocre one indeed when viewed along the same bit of wall as Millais' (the Pre-Raphs' equivalent of Gary Barlow). In short, he's a desperately irritating twat, who spends most of his time hanging out in suspiciously clean and smoke-free taverns, blagging booze off his hapless mate.

Naturally, Lizzie Siddal proves that the world of modelling hasn't changed much since the 1850s by promptly falling for him. Lizzie has been cast as the original supermodel, cannily refusing to get out of bed and back into a bath for less than £30. The girls' part in Desperate Romantics is largely to take part in top notch reality show The Victorians' Next Top Model. They valiantly hold chronically uncomfortable poses, are asked to convey a variety of conflicting emotions that would give ANTM's Mr Jay a run for his money, solely via the medium of their hair and an upturned gaze and prove that in order to create great art and lasting fame as a model you have to really suffer. I suspect Lizzie was less than thrilled to discover that the gig which was billed as 'frolicking around in a hot tub' actually translated into, 'pretending to drown in a bath heated by guttering candles for 10 days'.

She manages to go one better than Kate Moss, Claudia Schiffer and Linda Evangelista by nearly dying of pneumonia. This at least means that the RA snobs can stop thinking of her as one up from a prostitute for five minutes, while they ask her what she thinks of the resulting Ophelia. No such luck for Holman Hunt's model Annie Miller, who clearly is a whore because she's got really violently curly hair. Oh, and she's doing Holman Hunt and you'd have to be paid to do that. Even the BBC have painted him as a delusional, slack-jawed twonk.

I keep expecting Ruskin to end each episode faced with a brace of hopeful girls as he declares, 'I only have one portrait in my hands...'

The titian stunners will presumably soon have competition in the shape of gorgeous pouting brunette Jane Morris, and of course the Brotherhood will be racked by scandal when mild mannered Mr Millais does a bunk with desperate housewife Effie Ruskin. Was Ruskin really hiding in the closet with a pencil-drawn porn stash? It's as likely as the RA letting prostitutes stand proudly in front of the paintings they'd modelled for at private views, I suppose.

Still, I await next week's episode, complete with dream sequences, bonking and random casting (Mark Heap as Charles Dickens? I guess Simon Callow was too expensive or gave the script more than a cursory once over...) with eager anticipation. And I might do double culture this week by going to see the Waterhouse exhibition at the RA. I'll put some curlers in and see if any thrusting young artists want to depict me as an obscure Shakespearean heroine or a fallen woman. I don't get out of the bath for less than a tenner, mind. 

Needs to mature

Sarky cuties Sue Perkins and Giles Coren took a colourful gallop through medieval dining in the latest in their fun but slightly inchoherent series Supersizers. In the pointless medical at the beginning, moody Sue is diagnosed as melancholic, and famously easy to rile Giles is diagnosed as choleric. Sub-editors round the country may have high-fived at that point.

Still, no-one could accuse them of not getting stuck in. Sue munches on a whole lemon. They try falconry. Sue's sugary pilchards end up in the fire, she decides that all of the food has made her sad and has to brush her teeth with a twig. Sue whips Giles's knackers with a leather strap while he's praying. Martin, the chef, has to try all their food before they eat it ('Martin, are you dead yet?' asks Sue), before doing a cut and shut with a piglet and a cockerel to create a cockatrice, a mythical beast I was obsessed with as a kid.

Lots of interesting facts and mangled history: animals have anglo saxon names, and meat has norman names because after the invasion anglo saxons couldn't afford to eat it. Sue goes in search of the truth behind the damsel in distress, but disappoints a Rapunzel-hunting Giles with her assymetric bob. Giles has a go at jousting despite being scared of horses, then goes on a crusade through the restaurants of the Edgware Road, where he gets his reward in pepper. They do the Canterbury Tales on a National Express coach.

The thing I'm never that fussed about in these shows is the food. I could watch Sue talk about more or less anything, she's fantastically entertaining. As a matter of fact I used to work with Sue in Sherratt and Hughes bookshop in Croydon Whitgift Centre in the late 80s, and she was absolutely as she appears on Supersizers - quick-witted, absurd and very dry. She's going to develop into a classic English eccentric. And Giles, well, he's so pretty I could watch him do anything and quietly swoon. His dad was ace, and let's hope Coren junior follows in his footsteps and blossoms into a wizened old wit. They're pretty wee things now, but I have a feeling that it's not till they're old that they're going to really make sense.

Balls on Sunday

BBC1 on a Sunday. Hope Springs followed by Casualty 1909. One is a hilarious and far-fetched comedy drama with some of the funniest performances on television, and the other is a disturbing look into the primitive dilemmas of an almost unrecognisable age. Sadly they're not the way round the makers would have wanted.

Hope Springs thinks it's an outrageously funny and twisty-turny contemporary comedy thriller, but is in fact a pointless mess wasting the talents of a great cast playing characters who are utterly unlike real people. I really wanted to like it, because the idea of a prime-time comedy thriller in the tradition of Hamish Macbeth starring Jamie from The Thick of It really appealed, but there's no tension and none of it is remotely believable. It's like a League of Gentlemen side project remade by Hollyoaks.

Casualty 1909 returns the serve of ITVs The Royal Today, only to watch it fly screaming over the heads of the crowd due to the hilarious histrionics of the actors and the clunking schools television issues and lessons of the ridiculous script. Every effort has been made to represent 1909 as exactly the same as 2009 but with cholera and pillbox hats. The female characters are so absurdly modern that you can't imagine suffrage or feminism were ever necessary, so equal are they to the men in the hospital. Mr Dean, the coke-addled evil head doctor, is just absurd: he's part Johnny Depp in From Hell, part Paul Whitehouse in the Fast Show saying 'me, in a hospital full of nurses, with my reputation?'. This week the coked up young ham manages to turn a simple testicular operation into a gangrenous amputation thanks to the use of a now-banned anaesthetic called stovane. Good subject for drama, but sadly in context of this show the lesson felt as easy to take as the dangerous anesthetic. How We Used To Live, the brilliant schools history programme that ran for over decade, was much creakier – I cannot fault the production values of Casualty 1909, which go a long way to hide its many faults – but then HWYTL was made at a fraction of the cost and the cynicism.

Stop me if you think you've heard this one before

Chris Packham: not just the Billy Idol-haired dreamboat of my youth, not just Bill Oddie's eminently superior replacement on Springwatch, but evidently a man of great wit, ingenuity and guile. Fifteen minutes with him, I wouldn't say no.

The inspirational teacher

Some people are lucky enough to have had an inspirational teacher at school. Mine was Carol Kay. She was my English teacher for my O levels, and introduced me to the works of Oscar Wilde, the First World War poets, Jane Austen and Shakespeare. At Addington High, a very rough comprehensive (second worst in Croydon, I think it's being closed now for failing) there weren't many kids who were interested in learning, but I was the swot of all swots, encouraged by the miraculous English department to care about books and words rather than football and knives. We remained really good friends after I left: I exceeded expectations by not getting anyone pregnant by the age of 14 or ending up driving a white van and she went on to run a few big schools and set up a massive education business alliance scheme in Southwark. When she died last year Gordon Brown wrote a tribute to her work which was read out at her funeral. Carol Kay was pretty damned extraordinary.

Mary Portas reminds me of Carol Kay. She sounds a lot like her, she shares the same dry wit and blunt ability to say anything to anyone without fear. When I hear Mary Portas wander into some terrible boutique in Doncaster and berate the manager with a gesticulatory 'And I looked in the window and I thought, this is bloody rubbish' I can hear Carol talking about teachers who get up there and 'do a Shirley Bassey: they do the teaching but no-one cares if anyone's doing any learning'. Mary Portas is inspirational. Unlike those empty experts like billionairess Kirsty Allsopp or disgustingly cynical George Clarke who waft in and out with no hard nosed sense of the realities of life, Mary Portas gets people to make difficult decisions, doesn't soft soap them and isn't all about the cheesy 'Kevin McCloud moment' (you know, that excruciating bit at the end where he comes out of a house he's slagged off from beginning to end and starts eulogising like he's turned into Dylan Thomas).

This series has taken her out of her comfort zone of hard-nosed business and had dumped her into the woolly world of the charity shop: Save the Children in Orpington to be precise. The big problem Mary Portas seems to be having with charity shops is that people apparently don't go into them because they're untrendy. I don't understand this. I love charity shops, half of the stuff in my flat is second hand, but then I'm a mid-century modernist and if it's got sputnik legs or leather elbow patches then I want it and I WILL HAVE IT. And I'm constantly lugging carrier bags of books down to my local Red Cross shop. What kind of nutter doesn't love a good rummage in a charity shop?

There's some cracking moments. On a training day, Lila, the shop's resident joker takes to the stage to sell the features and benefits of, well, no-one was quite sure what it was. 'What is it? It looks like a dildo. You know, I've always wanted one of these. I've wanted one for twelve long years...' A room full of elderly ladies are crying with laughter into their winter knitwear.

Mild mannered Graham, who hasn't worked since being made redundant as a football coach two years before has applied for the shop manager position, but he takes 'hands off' to a whole new level. Mary goes at him as if he's a top flight manager over a rather poor Christmas window display, and before she knows it the area manager has come down on her like a ton of bricks. She's pitched it all wrong, he's upset, she's upset, the whole thing's a fuck-up. But she doesn't give up, though god knows she must be tempted.

The design consultant from Conran in her cape showing the extremely old ladies of Orpington Save the Children refit mood boards of 'drama and colours' was one of the funniest things I've seen on TV for ages. But then it all falls apart again. Old ladies understandably start resigning over the cost of the refit, and when it's done they find the shop cold, dark and drab. Brenda hates the orange shelves. Mary is depressed that she hasn't brought the staff with her. And head office expect big numbers back. Then they make a grand in two hours. Maybe this superbusinessbrain is on to something...

In a nearby shop she chats to another manager who, after saying she never has anything designer to sell came across a £1000 Jimmy Choo bag in her stockroom, and sold it for £200 to a woman who 'just had to have it' (oh god, it's me a with a £10 melamine coffee table), which leads Mary to declare, 'I hate saying I'm right, but I so often am.' And you know what, she is. This is the best business programme on telly since John Harvey Jones created the genre. Looking at the state of the cabinet and the inability of anyone to make decisions it's inspiring to see Mary passionately arguing about a nearly bankrupt country and business in crisis. At least she seems to care. It's a shame she's taken on charity shops where her energy and passion a little misplaced. She should be in Westminster. Fuck Gordon Brown, it should have been Carol Kay for PM, but I'd settle for Mary Portas.

How To Look Bad Naked

Oh, Embarrassing Bodies. Feels like I'm having fifties gay aversion therapy: shots of studly Christian intercut with pus, eczema and surgery. Might as well show me pictures of him stripping and then give me electric shocks to my ... nether regions ...

Then we're watching him sleep. Aw. A test for sleep apnea apparently. I worry about that as I have snoring that could weaken the foundation of a house, and unlike Dr C I am not some super fit stud-muffin. I fit the sleep apnea target market of male, over forty and overweight (well, just).

My heart reaches out to the people on Embarrassing Bodies. Hilda, with psoriasis on her poor feet, is a case in point. It looked incredibly painful but her steroid cream did the trick – which is more than it ever did with my Dad, who was plagued with the psoriasis of almost Singing Detective proportions for much of his life.

What really annoys me though, despite my fondness for Dr Christian's perfect form, is that the doctors are all so attractive. Some poor guy turns up with pus oozing from his scalp, or a hairy woman with a polycystic ovary plonks herself down on the plastic chair, and there before them is an outrageously groomed and glossy doctor to make them feel much more self-conscious about their problem. Still, I guess it takes a certain kind of exhibitionist to show their prolapse on prime time. After all, the subtext is How To Look Bad Naked.

Nooooo!!!

Margaret can't quit! She just can't!

Oh, she has.

Off to study ancient papyrus. Obviously. Maybe I'll hang about in the British Museum in the hope I bump into her in the Egyptian room.

I love BBC4

But then I'm exactly the kind of arty, pretentious bumboy it's aimed at.

Tonight it had the most brilliant documentary, Meet the British, entirely constructed from archive footage of public information films from the fifties to the eighties, many aimed at educating those tricky foreigners in the ways of the British. From shots of London Airport crawling with little state of the art propeller planes where soon Concorde would be roaring to outrageously sexist shots of wives being stupid in jazzy prints this was compelling and beautiful stuff, a really terrific bit of research by Jeff Simpson, who, best of all, forbade the usual smug, cliche-ridden voice over that ruins all of these sorts of things (cf that recent gardening documentary on BBC2, How Britain Got the Gardening Bug). I hope there's more of these lined up, I could watch this sort of sad, absurd, faded film all day.

And it was followed by We Need Answers, the new Shooting Stars-esque game show awkwardly hosted by the usually adorable but somewhat out of his depth Mark Watson, pitting two celebrity experts against each-other with surreal audience questions on their specialist subjects. It was a shambles and fell to bits a bit at several points, but the low-fi Open University nature of the show allowed that as part of the format. There was an overuse of music and singing, but I still rather liked it, especially Tim Key's pompous turn as the question-master in his remote controlled armchair, looking like a cross between the Buggles and Cyril Fletcher, and a deadpan Alex Horne's rubbish powerpoint clunking along amusingly in the background.

Now there's Murray being particularly brilliant in Flight of the Conchords, with his worrying friendship obsession ('we could hang out like friends in that programme Friends about friends'), and crazed Mel's song about her even more worrying dreams. [YELLOW PAGES VOICE] Good old BBC4...

Masonic handshakes

They were at it in Ashes to Ashes the other week. And now in Inspector George Gently, George's trusty young assistant John Bacchus has signed up for the Freemasons. I work pretty close to Mason HQ in Great Queen Street in Holborn, ugly great thing it is, always full of short fat old men in blazers going in and out. Shiny brass buttons, you get the idea. It's like a Rotary Club version of Angels and Demons. In Ashes, Gene Hunt faces Alex Drake's withering scorn when she assumes (along with the audience) that he's gone over to the junior Illuminati, only to reveal how he'd played the system to get a result.

In Gently, Bacchus is more conflicted, going all the way with the trouser-rolling, while still trying to do his job as a copper, which leads his long-suffering wife to suspect he's getting his leg over on the side. It's a beautifully made series, very low key period detail unlike the Rock and Roll Years soundtracks of Ashes to Ashes or Heartbeat. But it has one very central flaw: Martin Shaw, doing the sort of stupid forced gravelly voice rivalled only by whinging primadonna Christian Bale as Batman.

I can't get beyond Martin Shaw being the unsexy one from The Professionals, an uppity genre telly ac-TOR in the mould of Leonard Nimoy, and a new age religious nut to rival Sting. And his absurd performance as George Gently isn't helping, frankly. A perfectly good detective series spoiled by this over-strained old ham. The seeming popularity of Shaw and his telly peer Robert Lindsay are mysteries to me. Surely people can't seriously enjoy watching them parade their questionable egos all over the BBC? You only have to watch Philip Glenister, effortlessly splendid even in the terrible Demons, to know that some actors deserve to feel confident about their skill. But Martin Shaw? I don't get it. And I even watched Rhodes. You can't say I haven't given him a chance.

A talent for understatement

I've finally got round to watching Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy for the first time. Why on earth it has taken me for so long I have no idea – it was always going to be something I was going to love. I have an obsession with twentieth century history, and I recently read a wonderful account of le Carré's work in Dominic Sandbrook's postwar British history sequence, Never Had It So Good and White Heat. Sandbrook saw le Carré's writing as a reaction against the increasing glamourisation of spies in Cold War fiction, typified by James Bond's lavish lifestyle and gaudy exploits. Colour in le Carré's work, like fuss, is kept to a minimum. In the 1979 BBC dramatisation of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the most colourful things are Beryl Reid's force of nature performance as former head of research Connie, Warren Clarke's bizarre queeny cameo as doorman Alwyn and Bernard Hepton's shirts. Hepton was one of my Mum's many unlikely crushes, alongside Alice Cooper, David Bowie and BBC legal correspondent Joshua Rosenberg.

The series starts and ends with two of the most terrifyingly tense sequences I've ever seen – Ian Bannen's journey into Communist Brno and his inevitable ambush, and the interception and unmasking of the top-level Soviet spy by George Smiley, played with detatched amusement and controlled rage by Alec Guinness. But outside of those two moments of thrilling action it's the greyness of this world that is most fascinating – the drab files, nondescript offices, unremarkable public schoolboys in senior positions, petty politics and anonymous meeting points. It shares with Yes, Minister a thoroughly believable depiction of the upper echelons of British power in the 1970s, devoid of any of those cliched signifiers of the age, be they disco or glam, hippies or punks, studs or bitches. The skill here is the lack of ostentation, both in the operations of the world it represents and in the plotting and characterisation. Here you see a world that the British could really excel in – an industry of undemonstrative irony and banality. The public school subplot makes clear that they believed the Cold War would be won on the playing fields of Eton. A whole echelon of society is sketched out here.

The characters are studies in emotional unintelligence. And that is what makes the ending so shocking: not the unmasking of the traitor, but the revelatory performance of Sian Phillips as Smiley's oft-mentioned wife Ann, who hears of all of the regime-shattering revelations from her husband with the sort of amused tolerance of a mother listening as her child relates stories of his boarding-school adventures. George, this all-knowing collossus of British Intelligence, is left blinking in the sunlight as his wife mocks his uncomprehending response to her thoughts on love: 'poor George'. Here it is, the real face of what the British ruling classes deemed intelligence: a man so wedded to the subtle intricacies of the politics of his work that he can no longer understand his estranged wife's direct emotional response. Clever, subtle, beautiful stuff. And I stil have Smiley's People to go!

EDIT: Almost forgot to mention the names. Smiley, of course, is anything but. Toby Esterhase is a name that will buzz about in my head forever, it being so wonderful to say. But it is Control that captivates. Control. An actual character called Control, amidst all the banality of the Bill Haydens and Roy Blands. Is the name an indication of a more mysterious and professional past to the Intelligence Service? Is it a courtesy? A joke? Did he turn up at work one day and tell everyone, 'I want you to stop calling me Dennis Jones, from now on I want you to call me Control.'
'Is that Dennis Control or Control Jones?'
'No, just Control.'
'Well, that's going to mess up the phone list.'
Best of all, they don't call him 'Control'. They call him 'Controle'. Rhymes with Mole.

Hero Corner No.3: Dennis Potter

In honour of Cathode Ray Tube's splendid article on The Singing Detective here's my all-time favourite TV moment...



My mum was obsessed with Dennis Potter, and I think she saw a lot of herself in Marlowe's isolation, aloofness and frustration (as, increasingly, do I). There were uncanny echoes of the long spells she'd spent in hospital over the years and her escape into a fantasy dreamworld of old pop songs. For me, the brilliance of Potter's talent was being able to capture the bewildering complexity of real people in his work. His writing holds more profound truths than the kitchen sink naturalists he'd graduated alongside simply because he approached the way he communicated so differently. He used every facet of the medium to take those characters to their most wonderful or terrifying extremes. It might be a horribly ironic song and dance routine haunting the protagonist, adults playing children at their cruelest or an inversion of conventional morality, such as the devil raping a disabled girl back to health. There's echoes of that daring melding of character and style in Kaufman and Almodóvar films, but I can't think of another writer who managed that so successfully on TV.

The Bleedin' Obvious

Gosh. No. Really? I am surprised.

I can't abide Britain's Got Talent, a show for people who have never considered that singing or dancing isn't just the preserve of the cosmetically pimped. Or Parky, what a terrible chat show host he was for all but his own coterie of showbiz mates, a man who usually just asked the most obvious of questions to receive the dullest of replies. He'd been coasting on those Mohammed Ali and Billy Connolly interviews for a long time. Funny, he doesn't ever mention his Damned Utd stint at TVAM when he, Angela Rippon, Anna Ford and a couple of other charmless bores, a kind of even less successful SDP, were hastily vanquished by Frank Bough and efficiently replaced by Anne Diamond and a glove puppet.

Worst of all, Question Time. If I can't be bothered to watch members of the public teach their dog the rumba on BGT, I'm certainly not going to be gripped by the thought of watching angry teachers from Burton On Trent try to get one over on media trained fucktards trapped in an escalating spiral of hand-wringing me tooism. This week it should have been satisfying watching MPs squirm as they were resoundingly bollocked about their expenses, but Margaret Beckett and Ming Campbell have for many years been their parties fall guys, sent on to grovel in their own shit for the pleasure of Paxman or a Dimbleby. Seeing them at it again while all of those real bastards, the grey wardrobe-skinned nonentities we'd never heard of but were happy for us to pay for essential moat cleaning or porn, toughed it out in Westminster clubs, no doubt watching Ming and Margaret on a plasma screen through a haze of G&Ts as they struggled through their usual duet, Islands in the Shit Stream.

Interesting comment from soon to retire Tonight host Jay Leno: 'I like CSI and SVU and Law & Order, but there isn't any comedy. When I was a kid, you'd have a whole night of comedy. Now it's all very serious, it's all murder'. It's the legacy of George Bush, I guess, a fucked-up country gets fucked-up drama. This is also possibly why I've given up following American series, and why the new Star Trek film is so endearing: they've not done the now obligatory 'dark' reboot, but have instead made something lighter, funnier and more entertainng than the original. Now there's a thought.

'I even went to Margate and spoke to a gay person'

This week it's make or break time for me and The Apprentice. Although fun this series hasn't been a patch on the last couple. It does always warm up as it goes on, but there's no splendid Raefs or Badgers left to keep the momentum up.

This week is all about rebranding Margate. Ben's idea of a family holiday is the Seychelles, Mona can barely say the words gay and lesbian without choking, James is worried about suggestive licking, Nick's concerned about the gays looking stiff, Margaret's in fits of laughter watching the munting models strip off. And Lorraine has never seen text over a photo – one presumes she's never bought a book or has seen an advert.

Deborah bullies her team into submission, especially Howard, who tries (and fails) to instill some basic common sense into their poster campaign. Consequently their leaflet remains half-finished. Her team actually work very well together, but she manages to scupper that with a dismissive, aggressive arrogance only she can carry off. I wouldn't have done Howard's job of having to pitch that amateurish shit of a campaign for all the 99 flakes in Margate. In the boardroom Deborah sits there blinking like a big fat shiny clockwork owl, Mona twitters like a tiny sparrow, James puffs up like a nesting booby. Nothing much happens.

Not up to standard. Where's the fun? Sir Alan needs to work harder or this will be The Apprentice going into a deep depression.

TV loves itself

How Britain Got the Gardening Bug used some fantastic old film footage of gardens from the second half of the twentieth century. All those glorious, grainy shots of grow bags being hauled off the back of flat bed trucks, small villages in ludicrous bloom and people having sad little barbies in their back gardens really cheered me up. Shame that each decade was introduced with tedious cliched footage: the eighties filofax, champagne, red braces montage, for example, was so far removed from real life it undermined the rest of the documentary. Exactly how accurate were they being about garden history when they mangled social history so badly?

Slightly random collection of guests: Penelope Keith, Lawrence Llewelyn Bowen, Nigel Slater and Germaine Greer ('I would shoot down hanging baskets') and all the gardening establishment. The usual talking head bullshit: Did pampas grass mean you were swingers? No, shut up, James Double-Barrelled whatever your bloody name is. And shut up the woman who wanted to go at the lovely pampas grass with a pickaxe and bonfire. Gnomes. Topiary. Dwarf conifers. Yes, the weight of cliched soundbite snobbery came down heavily on all of them.

There was some gorgeous old 70s Gardeners' World, with giant vegetables and a couple of old blokes admiring the length and girth of the shaft of an engorged leek. As one of the old geezers said to the other as he handed him a trophy, 'that exhibit of celery I shall remember for the rest of my life'. But half way through the documentary it stopped being about real gardens and became a clip show of Don, Titchmarsh and Gavin.

Love Geoff Hamilton. But James Wanker-Cockspurt claimed that it is almost impossible to hate Alan Titchmarsh. The 'almost' is key here. Oh god, I fancied Dermot Gavin at one point. Now I'd happily feed him into a composter, the arrogant prick. But as the real garden footage disappeared from the documentary so did any of the non garden mafia talking talking heads and any reason to carry on watching. Such a shame. It was a good demonstration of how TV has stopped being the observer and has become the story, in the same way that viewers have become the stars in the last decade. There was a great little documentary trying to get out here, but by the end it was just another excuse for otherwise unemployable media types to namecheck each-other and smile ruefully at their badboy reputations. I'd have much rather seen interviews with some old geezers and their giant marrows.