Radiophonical

This is the first part of the BBC4 documentary on the BBC Radiophonic Workshop which I missed when it was on (links to the other 5 parts at the end). Magic.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

'Maybe he's dressed as Pat Phoenix and wanking into a desk tidy.'

Repeats of The Thick of It specials in the wake of the success of In the Loop have given me the opportunity to snigger all over again at the verbal extremities and staggeringly believable performances.

Best bit: terrifying Jamie locks himself in a stationery cupboard with potential leadership candidate Claire Ballantine and emerges moments later revealing that 'She's addicted to online poker', which leads to my favourite line from the entire series: 'You know what they're calling her already? Ugly Betty'.

Mike Leigh Night

Nuts in May. It has the same kind of merciless, appalling, flesh-creeping quality as a Martin Amis novel or The Office (especially when they reach for their guitars...). I find it quite hard to watch because it's so excruciatingly embarrassing in places (mostly when Keith is talking, which is the majority of the film).

I prefer Mike Leigh's middle period to his earlier or later stuff - especially High Hopes, Life is Sweet and Career Girls. They're a bit kinder to their characters than the early ones, and feel slightly more realistic than his later films. He's taken on 'big themes' more recently, with historical dramas like Vera Drake or rants like Naked. I remember an episode of A Bit of Fry and Laurie where Fry snarls 'Tonight's theme is: THEMES. WHAT GOOD ARE THEY?'. I feel a bit like that about Mike Leigh's stuff. When they wear their meaning lightly I think they work best.

Freak Paeans

I was going to write something about Freaky Eaters, and how I used to be a freaky eater and how it ruined my life for years, and about how the latest Freaky Eaters focussed on a gay couple showing that gays can be fucked up too, but then I realised I didn't really have anything else to say. But, as in Wendy Cope's Making Cocoa For Kingsley Amis, I liked the title.

I'm watching the excellent Adam Curtis's excellent short film on the excellent Newswipe. Brilliant little argument about 'ohdearism': how the news stopped reporting politics and focussed on emotive stories instead. I do hope he's got a new series coming up, The Power of Nightmares was a rough diamond among the polished turds of political programming on TV.

Brainwipe

Newswipe is a bit of a shock, isn't it? The news media is so absurd these days that you'd think it was beyond satire. But then Newswipe is beyond being satirical in the conventional John Stewart sense. Instead it's more despairing and philosophical. Yes, there's the odd montage of cheap jokes at the expense of animal-based news stories, etc., but the thing that makes it particularly good is that Charlie Brooker never takes the easy line on anything. He's quite happy to run long pieces which discuss serious and complex issues without cheapening them with gags and gimmicks. Which is more than you get on Newsnight these days.

His Jade Goody piece this evening was fantastic, highlighting the ugly spite and sycophancy which has come tumbling out on news reports and message boards throughout her career, and the difficulty of processing the story of her death amid the sheer overload of polarised information. I know that when people have asked me what I think about Jade I feel sad and then I feel confused. He captured that odd, conflicted feeling so well, when he needn't have bothered, because there was tons of more obvious jokes to be had about it if he'd wanted to do them. There's something much more humane going on here, and that seems to be the idea behind Newswipe, to contrast the hysterical stylised news agenda with real human thought and experience. And how wonderful and unexpected is that as a project?

His reminder that Gordon Brown only commented on the Jade Goody story because he was asked by journalists was the kind of thoughtful little aside that makes his analysis so interesting. The easy Have I Got News For You win would have been to slag Gordon – you can hear Ian Hislop trotting out his usual line in eye-rolling and sneering to much smug applause. It's so refreshing to have someone not do that, to point out the construction behind the soundbite and not just regurgitate a second hand news story as fact.

I'm really interested to see where this show goes. I reckon Brooker's going to end up as the new A. J. Ayer and Newswipe will be replaced with Brainwipe, where he deconstructs the very fabric of our being. Or maybe he'll just do some more jokes about Hole in the Wall.