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.

YesterDay Today

It's wonderful that Chris Morris has returned to our screens creating the brilliant parody history doc, History of Now: The Story of the Noughties. With a nosebleed of flashy graphics which interrupt the flow of the talking heads with a splat of neon jargon wobbling over the shoulder of a few dodgy professors and pundits, this is a great spoof of BBC3 documentaries and online web tutorials.

The obvious heir to The Day Today, this hilarious mockumentary series imagines a cultural doc directed by Nathan Barley, where the big issues of the decade are boiled down into meaningless soundbites about football, stag nights and the O2. Getting clueless celebs such as Andrew Marr and Will Self to earnestly contribute, as Paul Daniels and Noel Edmonds did to Brass Eye, made it look for all the world like a serious attempt to debate the history of the last decade, but the hilariously superficial angles the series has taken, debating such burning issues as second homes in Dubai, posh bakers and eastern European nannies, utterly undermines them.

Getting witless comedyslut Robert Webb to do his curlingly contemptuous and patronising narration added the final flourish to this outrageous spoof. His sneering, voice-of-cunt commentary was designed to tell us what we'd thought and how things were, but warped out of shape to such an outrageous extent that the last decade is rendered utterly unrecognisable, in the same way that government PR represents reality through a trail of surreal falsehoods and mangled statistics.

Cracking comedy start to the year, possibly a bit broad and unrealistic, but funny all the same, if cringingly embarrassing at times. Of course, there's no mention of Morris in the credits, and it's been trailed and put out as a completely straight doc, but we can all see it for what it is. Can't we?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.