Five, four, three, two, numb

Well, five has released details of its 10th anniversary week schedules, and underwhelming reading it is. The channel is embracing the whole 10-year thing in the most uninteresting way possible, by sallying forth with a suite of shows all themed around that double-digit.

So, we’ve got Britain’s Extraordinary Ten-Year-Olds (“Three amazing children who’ve triumphed over adversity”); a special edition of The Wright Stuff celebrating the channel (that’s a bit more like it!); Gordon Brown Meets the Ten-Year-Olds (the Chancellor of the Exchequer quizzed by kids); The Ten Demandments (10-year-old Abby swaps places with her parents in a one-off reality-type thing) and I Blame the Spice Girls (Liza Tarbuck chairing a one-off comedy panel show, looking back over the last decade).

I’m not sure what’s happened to five, from the modern and mainstream, to the football and fucking, to awards at the Edinburgh Television Festival, to … irrelevance. In the last few years, it feels like the channel’s just given up, particularly now none of its programmes are aggressively promoted (even something like the Eddie Izzard drama Kitchen was allowed to slip quietly into the schedules). 

So, what would be the essential five programmes from its first decade? Family Affairs, The Mole, Bring Me The Head of Light Entertainment, How Not to Decorate, The House Doctor, Jail Break and, er, Touch the Truck. Am I missing anything?