This Morning

After 13 years on daytime television there wasn’t a black armband in sight. It didn’t feel right Richard and Judy taking their leave on a Thursday. It hasn’t felt right them skiving off each Friday, Chris Evans-style, for a long time. Read more

Crossroads

The telephone always rings in the foyer of the Crossroads Motel, er, Hotel, but as usual there are never any guests to be seen. “I took a phone message about your conference facilities!” barks a crumpled senior manager, eyes like daggers at a winsome junior trainee. There’s a moment’s pause to let the full impact of this horrific revelation sink in. Read more

World of Pub

Barry, Gary and Phil are sitting around in their quiet and empty pub, The Quiet and Empty. They bemoan the lack of custom and how the East End is in decline. “This town,” says Gary, “it’s coming like a ghost town.” Read more

Big Brother

Whilst Big Brother is running the risk of passing off with no real incident (certainly there has been nothing this year to match the “Nasty Nick” confrontation, nor the rampant shagging that seems to take place in most other country’s versions of the show), praise be for the E4 spin-off Big Brother’s Little Brother. Read more

Big Brother

The week began in a rather dull fashion with Josh complaining to Elizabeth that he felt the Big Brother experience wasn’t helping his personality to flourish in the house. After some shrewd prompting from The Patronising One, he revealed: “If I told two people in here what I really thought of them, I’d tell them to fuck off!” Read more

Big Brother Live

Hysteria in the tabloids, recriminations in the jacuzzi and nudity before the watershed – Big Brother 2 has pretty much picked up where the first series left off. But this time round there’s one key difference, because as everybody knows by now, you can follow the action round the clock on E4. Read more

Big Brother

Really it was inevitable that the merits of Big Brother 2 would be regarded with suspicion. It is a general rule of thumb in television that second series of programmes tend quite simply to not be as effective as the originals. Read more

Slap Bang with Ant and Dec

There’s no flop like a Saturday night flop. The archives are littered with the corpses of people who’ve attempted to succeed on a Saturday night and failed miserably (Lulu, Gaby Roslin, Shane Richie and so on). It’s odd as Saturdays haven’t been the big telly night of the week for ages – that honour passed on to Sundays years ago. Read more

Big Brother

So who did you vote for? That’s what Ian Jones asked you on these pages last time around, during Big Brother series one. This year, you could even be forgiven for thinking the same question was genuinely about politics. But, if it was, would you have a ready answer? Read more

It’ll Be Alright on Election Night

It used to be that when the voting closed on election night, not only would you get exit polls and swingometers into action, but also satirists coming on screen to glory in the freedom that no government for a night brings. Indeed, in 1997, BBC2 devoted almost four hours to comedy-related programming, including the mammoth Election Night Armistice offering instant piss-taking on the night’s events. Read more

Election coverage – week three

Ratings continue to tumble. Viewers are switching off their sets in protest at relentless footage of vain, bickering groups of people struggling to survive in increasingly hostile, desperate circumstances. Read more

Big Brother

And with these choice words – “Faarkin’ ‘ell!” – did the lukewarmly-anticipated sequel to Big Brother begin on Saturday. The apposite exclamation – which spoke for us all – came from Paul Ferguson, aka Bubble, first housemate through the door in a curiously staggered entry. He was as unprepared for the awfulness of the 2001 décor as we were. Read more

Election coverage – week two

When Baldrick stood for election in the constituency of Dunny-on-the-Wold, his campaign manager Edmund Blackadder proposed a strategy to win that focused wholly on “issues, rather than personalities”. It helped that the entire population of this rotten borough were three rather mangy cows, a dachshund named Colin and a small hen in its late 40s, but as Blackadder and a bewigged 18th century Vincent Hanna discovered, the strategy paid off. Read more

The Champion’s League Final

In the 10 years since the advent of Sky and their subsequent domination of domestic football coverage, much has changed in the football landscape. With Match of the Day going into effective, perhaps even permanent, cold storage, the onus is now on ITV to provide some form of resistance, however diluted, to the mighty Sky machine. Read more

People Like Us

How many new ways are there to satirise the suppressed longings and ritualised comforts of suburban or provincial lives? It’s a perennially popular target of television comedy but the profile of a vicar which opened John Morton’s People Like Us gained ample fresh mileage from well trodden territory. Read more

Election coverage – week one

It’s the end of the first full week of the TV election campaign. Read more

The 100 Greatest TV Characters

As a purveyor of fine TV criticism I felt duty bound to lend my watching support to Channel 4′s latest Bank Holiday compartmentalisation of popular culture. Read more

The Adam & Joe Show

The old showbiz saying goes you don’t mess with a winner. The only real difference between this new series of The Adam & Joe Show and programme’s early days is that the wily pair have got more money to play with – which simply means the good bits are extremely good, and the iffy bits almost unbearably bad, but we’re cleverly still left with fascinating, rewarding television. Read more

The West Wing

If anyone ever attempted a serious TV dramatisation of the day-to-day workings of our own British government, it’s likely a host of of obstacles would instantly confront them. Chiefly, the fact that no-one in this country really knows what the government does – in the sense of the real minutiae of office life, the routines and rituals of departments, and the colour of the office carpet. Read more

Dog Eat Dog

Saturday night might not be the ratings battleground of yore, but the age-old rules still seem to apply. Read more

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