Auf Wiedersehen, Pet

The return of Auf Wiedersehen, Pet has been a long time coming. A long time in that, rumours of the new “Guten Tag, Pet” have been circulating for almost two years now, and – of course – the last series finished 16 years ago. Read more

Big Brother

Reaching around for the most unsuitable hook upon which to hang the launch of Big Brother 3, Channel 4 excelled itself by settling on a format that conveniently reminded viewers of all the worst aspects of the show’s history on British screens. Read more

The Edwardian Country House

In October last year Stuart Cosgrove lectured to a thin turn out of media students at Liverpool’s John Moores University. In his talk he signalled the death of “reality TV” and predicted the next big thing would be historical programming. Read more

24

Whilst the return of Auf Wiedersehen, Pet has confounded all expectations by being well acted, well produced (apart from some dodgy “high wire” special effects in the most recent episode), true to the characters, but ultimately listless and dull, immediately after on BBC2 comes the dramatic highlight of the TV week. Read more

The Experiment

Television has been nosing into alien worlds and minds since its birth, and quite rightly never deemed it necessary to apologise. Read more

A Tribute to the Likely Lads

Ant and Dec’s tribute to The Likely Lads caused much rumblings in advance of the programme’s transmission. Read more

Vote 2002

David Dimbleby was forlorn. “I always pronounce it wrongly but I try my best,” he spluttered sheepishly. His stumbling over the correct way to pronounce the borough of “Adur” could, however, be forgiven. Read more

Top Ten TV Bastards

Do you remember 2000? What a year it was – it was the year of the best nostalgia programmes of all time. I Love the Seventies was an entertaining, well-produced series. Better still, Channel 4′s Top Ten was one of the best programmes for years, by turns fascinating, informative, entertaining and laugh-out-loud funny. Unfortunately the thing about nostalgia is that by its very nature it can’t go on forever, and after I Love… dwindled into smug irrelevance, now Top Ten is a shadow of the excellent show it once was. Read more

RI:SE

With the weight of history hanging on his eyelids, the fact that Mark Durden-Smith had obviously enjoyed one hell of a good night’s sleep didn’t bode well. We first saw the louche, preening Son-of-Chalmers a couple of minutes before 7am. Read more

Teachers

Before disappearing to America ex-Channel 4 boss Michael Jackson specifically commended this drama as having “the right tone and attitude” for his station, conveniently omitting a qualifying sentence explaining just what were said “tone” and “attitude” and what was so amazing about them. Read more

Heroes of Comedy: Dick Emery

When the Heroes of Comedy series first began on Channel 4 it was something of a revelation. Here was a tribute programme that used “talking heads” to the best effect yet seen and dispensed with ponderous and hagiographic narrative. People who actually knew and worked with the subject talked and revealed a little of the subject that might otherwise have gone unknown to mortals such as I. Read more

The Falklands Play

There’s an adage when it comes to writing drama – don’t tell, show. Read more

That Tony Wilson

Given that Granada’s regional opt-out timeslots have so often been occupied by the works of Tony Wilson, it’s only fitting that they should use one of said timeslots to transmit a self-produced retrospective of his unique and truly individual career path. Read more

Snoddy

Remember these names – you may be tested later; Firstly, the debit column – and remember folks, this is the abridged version - A Kick Up the Eighties, Laugh? I Nearly Paid My Licence Fee, City Lights, Pulp Video, Naked Video, All Along the Watchtower,Caledonian MacBrains and Elaine. Now, to counterbalance that horrendous litany of disastrous failures with the credit column (in its complete entirety); The Vital Spark,Scotch and Wry and… er… actually, that’s it. Read more

Behind Bars

I’ll readily confess that my sole reason for viewing Behind Bars was the salient and not entirely inconsequential fact that I’m currently employed in a prison. Read more

Lenny Henry in Pieces/French & Saunders

It’s Friday night. It’s Good Friday. Common sense would dictate that BBC1 would be pulling out (almost) all the stops to satisfy a larger audience than usual. Yet mere words cannot adequately convey just how truly bad Lenny Henry in Pieces and French & Saunders were; this combination plumbed the depths of mediocrity to a degree never before witnessed on peak time television. This was a savage indictment of the BBC. In the company of three friends I sat mesmerised for just over an hour not laughing once. Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, it did. Again and again and again. Read more

The Big Breakfast

Of the many and rather pathetic parting twists of the knife Planet 24 seemed compelled to enact upon anyone they could think of this morning, most irritating of all was making sure the last ever Big Breakfast was one hour longer than usual. Read more

Gruth is Uachdar

The greatest tragedy of my television life in the last few years is discovering this show on the last of its run. Read more

Ali G Before He Was Massiv

Cheaply made unlicensed cash-in merchandise has existed pretty much since the dawn of celebrity, but the shoddy “100% Unauthorised” video is a more recent innovation. Read more

Scotland on Film

Seems such a simple equation doesn’t it? Take some black and white archive footage and throw in some old dears to wistfully reminisce on their childhood. Read more

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