Barry Letts (right) with Jon Pertwee and Dalek

Like all major figures involved with Doctor Who, producer Barry Letts seemed to have his own personal anecdote about working on the show, one which  got endlessly trotted out to the benign bemusement of fans.

In his case, it was a bizarre story about recieving a letter containing a poem advising him of the proper pronounciation of ‘chitinous’. Yet that, and several other similarly prominent anecdotes about eyepatches and ‘Katy’s fella’, belied the fact he also had a great many fascinating stories to tell about the years he spent working on a fascinating programme, many of them relating to a pivotal moment in television history.

Originally an actor, Letts took a directing course in 1967, and one of his first professional engagements in this capacity was the Doctor Who story ‘The Enemy Of The World’. Two years later, he was offered the job of producer on the show, then in the throes of one of its many brushes with cancellation. Though it was in fact outgoing producer Derrick Sherwin who both devised a new format ( The Doctor attached to a military unit and battling Earthbound threats in the hope of countering the ratings slump) and had cast Jon Pertwee in the title role, it was Letts and his script editor Terrance Dicks who made it into such a huge success, even despite the additional headaches caused by the move to colour production.

And, if the various tales of strobing trousers and misjudging model sizes are anything to go by, they were headaches indeed.

The story of Letts’ hugely successful five-year stint on Doctor Who has been endlessly told elsewhere; suffice it to say that, with the arguable exception of the early ’60s  Dalekmania and the slightly later flirtation with Gothic Horror, the exploits of The Third Doctor, The Master (a character created by Letts and Dicks), UNIT and gaudy alien races like the Axons – famously forming part of a legendarily solid block of BBC scheduling – are the reason why Doctor Who has long been associated with Saturday evening thrills.

His skills as a producer, however, went way beyond creating ratings-grabbing edge-of-the-seat excitement; many stories had thought-provoking environmental themes, influenced by his own beliefs, and he was always ready to accept responsibility if it was thought the show had gone a little too far for younger viewers. He was also adept at creating headline-grabbing showpieces – such as negotiating the rights to use the Daleks after a five year absence, and coming up with the idea of combining all three Doctors to date for an anniversary special – without them ever seeming forced or contrived.

Most notably, all of these positives combined to impressive effect on ‘The Daemons’, a fondly-remembered tale that a far-sighted Letts specifically asked the BBC VT department not to erase; a plea, needless to say, that fell on unlistening ears.

In the early ’80s, he was again called on to oversee a reinvention of the show in the face of declining ratings, acting as Executive Producer while his younger counterpart John Nathan-Turner instigated an initially highly successful overhaul of the series as “intelligent sci-fi”. Right across his work on Doctor Who, it’s clear that Letts had a flair for combining action and imagination, which is perhaps why, by his own admission, his extra-curricular attempt at a realistic adult-orientated futuristic drama Moonbase 3 didn’t work quite so well.

After leaving Doctor Who, this flair was again exploited to its full potential as he spent over a decade at the helm – again with Terrance Dicks – of the BBC’s ‘Sunday Classics’ serials. Though seldom mentioned anywhere these days, it’s surprising how well-remembered many of these productions are, from countless Dickens and HG Wells adaptations to the award-winning Beau Geste, an infamous attempt at casting Tom Baker as Sherlock Holmes for The Hound of The Baskervilles, and a notorious re-imagining of Pinocchio with macabre overtones and a grotesque shrieking puppet interacting with live humans.

Though these productions were subject to much the same restrictions as Doctor Who, Letts would often use the limitations of studio space and primitive special effects as an advantage, taking the opportunity to create a deliberately unreal atmosphere or or stuffily claustrophobic historical world.

Though semi-retired by the late ’80s, Letts still occasionally undertook directing work (including a stint on EastEnders) and kept up his professional association with Doctor Who. The requests to give interviews and pen reminiscences gradually gave way to invitations to write new material, especially after the television show was cancelled in 1989, and Letts went on to write several radio plays and spin-off novels. While these latterday efforts didn’t always meet with a positive response, they were still a then-rare example of straightforward storytelling at a time dominated by fans turned writers gleefully breaking taboos.

That  he remained a well-regarded figure is testament to the fact he put a great deal of care and attention into his work on what could easily have been just another assignment. This was later repaid by similar attention from fans who appreciated his efforts; it’s rumoured he was recording DVD commentaries for old stories right up until weeks before his death. Quite simply he understood how to make an ambitious yet accessible family show more than most, and while that letter writer presumably had their reasons for wanting to ensure obscure scientific terms weren’t mispronounced in front of Saturday evening viewers, they were one of the few people who ever felt the need to correct him.

Not long ago, Stewart Lee was trading on the fact he hadn’t been on TV in a long time.

Though his double act with Richard Herring had a huge following both on television and radio, they disappeared from the nation’s screens at the end of the decade, for reasons that have never been clear – even to the duo themselves – but seemed to involve little more than the personal dislike of a single executive and subsequent reluctance of anyone else to take a chance on them. Indeed, Lee’s most recent live show hinged around the bitterly amusing story of how the cancellation of a planned BBC2 series left him short of work, out of pocket and performing material he wasn’t interested in to an audience who weren’t interested in him… while dressed as a giant insect.

Awning has spoken

"The sat-nav is off!"

Ironically, the success of that same show led to renewed interest from BBC2, resulting in a series that has actually made it to air. Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, rather like the BBC’s 1970s mainstay Dave Allen at Large, takes the form of lengthy and laconic ruminations on various subjects in front of a live comedy club audience, with short sketches (featuring longtime associates Paul Putner, Kevin Eldon, Michael Redmond and Simon Munnery) acting as surreal and frivolous punchlines.

From the opening sequence of Lee driving his ridiculous ‘Comedy Vehicle’ around in a pastiche of the titles of The Pink Panther Show set to shrill, jaunty music (South African kwela song Tom Hark, most famously a hit for ska band The Piranhas), it’s hard to shake the suspicion this show is a deliberate counterpoint to what has become the norm during his absence from the small screen. Television comedy has changed a good deal in the meantime, with taboo-breaking and an increasing reliance on cutting edge technology and interactivity – something Lee and Herring themselves did much to pioneer – seemingly considered as important as actual jokes.

This show is a step in the absolute opposite direction, albeit one robustly supported by a writer and performer with over two decades of experience and enough time spent away from television to tell what works and what doesn’t. It’s all the better for it.

This first edition tackles the subject of ‘toilet books’, with Lee examining several popular tomes he clearly would not have personally chosen to read, among them the works of Dan Brown and Chris Moyles. All of these are subjected to merciless scrutiny, albeit in a manner that seems more tongue-in-cheek than vindictive. Indeed, there is a fair smattering of inspired silliness throughout – notably a superb visual gag about former Grange Hill star Asher D conducting a drive-by sausage-on-forking – and it could be argued some of the more incisive gags (such as Moyles’ choice of the title The Difficult Second Book) had basically already written themselves.

Some will undoubtedly berate the show for an apparent tendency towards ‘predictable’ targets such as The Da Vinci Code, as recent reviews of his live shows have done with regard to sections on Stuart Maconie and Del Boy Falling Through The Bar. The important detail is Lee has plenty to say on these subjects – much of it both new and extremely funny – and any such criticism is doubtless founded more on a personal jadedness with the subject matter than with any problem with the actual material. Indeed, it’s quite refreshing to see such familiar subjects tackled with gags that batter their literary construction, factual veracity and underlying political leanings, rather than just scoffing at the number of people reading popular books in public places.

Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle is a much-needed breath of fresh air, presenting material that is both intellectually and ideologically challenging in an upbeat, laid back and easily accessible format. Lee himself has suggested the show was concieved as a ‘liberal’ mirror to Grumpy Old Men, using the same sort of observational approach to frame less reactionary material, and with a bit of luck it may prove just as popular as the rantings of Clarkson, Wakeman and company.

And who knows, maybe it’ll open then door for a couple of other sidelined ’1990s comedians’ who really ought to have been back on the small screen a long time ago…

Patrick McGoohan, 1928-2009

A man rows with someone very important-looking and storms out of an imposing building, but before he can even get home, unseen hands are setting the wheels in motion for his unplanned ‘retirement’. Easily summarised in one sentence, but perhaps the single most powerful and compelling sequence in television history, and capable of striking a chord with almost anyone anywhere in the world.

There’s no question that The Prisoner has overshadowed the rest of Patrick McGoohan’s long list of television credits (not to mention his extensive film work) – from, notably, his multi-award winning episodes of Columboto, somewhat less notably, interminable daytime drama serial Rafferty – and it will dominate this tribute too.

Few, though, could argue this overshadowing is anything but entirely reasonable. In a new medium that was still finding its feet, and was only a few years away from having been limited to live black and white studio-bound productions, The Prisoner was in many ways the first show to challenge both the audience and television itself.

Given that debates still rage over everything from the correct sequence of the episodes to the significance of a broken plate, it’s hardly surprising The Prisoner continues to be the subject of much discussion to this day. Few could have forseen it back in 1967, but one of the many ‘firsts’ of The Prisoner was that people just kept on wanting to see it, even in an age when much television was considered ephemeral and ‘repeats’ would have viewers moaning en masse. In a sense, it’s an archive show that’s always been around, with repeat runs seemingly cropping up somewhere every couple of years. Whether it was the ongoing relevance of its themes and obsessions, the continual puzzle over its meaning, or just that pesky broken plate, it has generated an interest and a following like few other television programmes before or since.

Though often labelled as ‘psychedelic’, The Prisoner was really more a product of the increasing adventurousness in all areas of arts and popular culture in the mid-’60s, it was simply that Patrick McGoohan was the first to really drag this openly experimental approach into primetime television drama. As his contemporary Gerry Anderson can wearily attest, ATV/ITC mainman Lew Grade was not an executive given to going out on an artistic limb, yet even so, when one of his biggest stars approached him with an idea for a series as cryptic, enigmatic and paranoid as it was action-packed and lavishly realised, he jumped at the chance and The Prisoner was pushed as one of the biggest television experiences of the year. It may have come to an abrupt end when McGoohan’s energy and Grade’s patience both began to wear thin, but not for lack of viewer interest. And it’s no surprise McGoohan wore himself out and exhausted his idea so quickly – everything about the series, from the original idea to a hefty amount of the scripting and directing, and even reportedly as far as making casting decisions and suggesting the tempo of the theme tune, and of course playing the lead role (twice over in one episode), was more or less down to him.

Throughout 17 episodes of traditional Saturday night action thrills combined with downright oddness (has anyone ever worked out out the rules of that insane game involving trampolines, boxing gloves and tanks of water?), The Prisoner broke all of the ‘rules’ of television drama by never promising answers at any point, and even when they finally did arrive, leaving it to the viewers to figure the meaning of the Beatle-soundtracked ape-masked big reveal for themselves. There was no great immediate change as a result of this, but it was a show that was talked about and remembered, and even in the decade or so that followed the goalposts shifted ever so slightly; would, say, Monty Python’s Flying Circus or Sapphire and Steel really have been realistic possibilities in an industry where The Prisoner had never happened?

You can see the clear influence of The Prisoner, whether in intentional homage or by subtle influence of its example, in the vast majority of today’s big television dramas, such as Lost, Heroes and Life On Mars and many more; all of them revealing surreal mysteries over the course of a rigidly-defined set of episodes. And even beyond that there’s so much else that took a substantial and enthusiastically acknowledged cue from the series – even just a handful of random examples would include Brazil, Watchmen, Jools Holland and Stephen Fry’s surprisingly well-remembered spoof The Laughing Prisoner, unhinged ITV children’s serial How To Be Cool and any number of music videos featuring post-punk acts running around in Portmerion – that in their own way have acquired similarly devoted and recurring followings.

“You, sir, are an example to us all” is one of the final lines spoken to Number 6 in the final episode of The Prisoner. Patrick McGoohan threw pretty much everything he could offer into the series, and while production may have been a fraught affair and didn’t even go remotely to plan, it more than paid off with the long-term popularity and without a word of exaggeration the quiet revolution it started off in the industry, by showing that you could go out on an artistic limb and still succeed. Patrick McGoohan was as much of an example to us all as his oddly-jacketed alter-ego, and long will he continue to be so.

Oliver Postgate, 1925-2008

It’s probably no exaggeration to say that for a generation, Oliver Postgate’s voice may well have been the first that they came to recognise after those of their immediate family. As creator, writer, narrator and director of some of the best loved and most regularly repeated children’s TV shows of all time – among them Bagpuss, The Clangers, Pogle’s Wood, Noggin The Nog and Ivor The Engine – he became one of the most instantly recognisable figures in television without ever really appearing in person.

Working away in a small home studio fitted out with self-made equipment, Postgate and his longtime collaborator Peter Firmin were at odds with the typical approach to making television at the time, and in many ways were pioneers of independent production; indeed, theirs were among the very first externally made shows to appear on the BBC. Perhaps it was this independence and distance from the trends and pressures of the industry that allowed them to create such believeable and highly personal fantasy worlds, in settings ranging from dense woodland to alien planets, and of course a certain old-fashioned shop.

It wasn’t just the script and the visual style that created these worlds though; Postgate’s laid-back, expressive narration, inspired in no small part by Richard Burton’s seminal reading of Under Milk Wood, did so much to create and evoke atmosphere, from the mythical Norselands through a remote steam-age Welsh railway village to the icy wastes of outer space.

This is hardly surprising as Oliver Postgate was a born storyteller; not just in the medium he chose to work in, but also in his everyday life. So many anecdotes that he related in passing in rare interviews have become common knowledge simply because of the spellbinding way in which he related them, not just well-known incidents like the day that the surface of the Clangers’ planet caught fire, but even those about otherwise long-forgotten efforts such as early Smallfilms production Alexander The Mouse. Broadcast live using magnetically-controlled figures on painted backdrops, this show was prone to interruption when magnets were pointed the wrong way and characters ended up flipped upside down, with no other option than for Postgate to reach into shot and set them the right way up by hand. He concluded that particular anecdote by wryly musing that “…all in all, I’m not so sad that nothing exists of it any more”, though the fact that despite this lack of visual evidence you can pretty much picture how the show must have looked is testament to the unique style of Smallfilms’ productions.

Oliver Postgate’s narration, as well as his writing, direction and everything else, will of course live on, not just in the ever-welcome reappearances of Bagpuss, Noggin, Major Clanger and company, but for a lucky few in hazy memories of long-forgotten shows like Little Laura, The Seal of Neptune and the surreal cult favourite schools’ television show Sam On Boff’s Island.

It seems futile to try and come up with a ‘good’ ending when paying tribute to the man who came up with the spark of genius that was the closing sequence of Bagpuss, so instead here’s a conclusion that this writer came to when writing about Smallfilms for this very site a couple of years back, which seems even more pertinent today:

It was never disclosed whether any of the objects that found themselves in the window of Emily’s shop were ever reunited with their owners, but it is perhaps fitting that Bagpuss itself, once quietly shoved away into the televisual equivalent of a shop full of antiques, should have been rediscovered with such enthusiastic fondness. Oliver Postgate paid perhaps the most fitting tribute when he remarked that, “whenever I see the films again, I feel very happy”. There are a great many others who feel exactly the same way”.

Bob Spiers: 1945-2008

Owing to the sheer volume and quality of his work as a director and a producer, Bob Spiers was one of those people that you always pictured as being a lot older than they actually were. In a career that spanned four decades, he came in on one of the greats – Dad’s Army – and continued to produce popular and top rated shows throughout.

Having Bob Spiers on board was almost a guarantee of a hit show, with his credits ranging from the massively popular likes of Fawlty Towers, French & Saunders and Absolutely Fabulous (which, it’s easy to forget, all began as relatively small-scale shows on BBC2), to cult favourites like Joking Apart, A Bit of Fry and Laurie and Murder Most Horrid, to virtually forgotten but much-loved obscurities such as Lazarus & Dingwall and Up Line.

Flops were incredibly rare for Spiers, and that small amount of failures which did have his name attached to them – notably Agony Again and Days Like These – were almost invariably projects that were a bad idea to begin with and which he was rumoured to have been parachuted in to in the desperate hope of salvaging something out of them.

More than just a skilled producer, he also had the invaulable talent of being able to take a firm line with performers, production team members and TV executives alike – acting as middleman during what was arguably the most turbulent time for The Goodies; ensuring the early editions of The Comic Strip Presents… had their pretentions kept in check and that filmic ambitions or a bizarre Dawn French script about Iron Age rituals were always lined up behind the humour rather than being allowed to overshadow it; and perhaps most significantly of all, proving the faith that had been placed in untried writer Steven Moffat wasn’t misplaced, and translating his early scripts for Press Gang into one of the most memorable series of all time.

Similarly, one of his rare excursions onto the big screen, Spiceworld, could have ended up just another flimsy run of the mill cash-in effort designed to capitalise on the fleeting popularity of the latest pop sensation. Under his guidance, it became a lively and likeable production which ended up one of those rarest of pop music films – one that people actually remember – and in no small way may even have added to The Spice Girls’ staying power.

No doubt there’ll be plenty of articles over the next couple of days running something like: “You probably didn’t know the name, but he probably made you laugh hundreds of times”. This is of course true, but in light of recent stark reminders that strong talents need equally strong producers to harness them, perhaps his name should be known and celebrated just that little bit more.

In an age dominated by ever more “realistic” and for the most part ever more dreary comedy shows, any alternative with a traditional structure and actual proper jokes to the fore was always going to be a breath of fresh air. The IT Crowd was lucky enough to come bolstered by a talented scriptwriter with an impressive track record, a format that allowed it to effortlessly tap into shareable gags about modern office life (“Saw that one coming, mikey73!”), and a strong regular cast who didn’t seem to mind playing ridiculously exaggerated and overstated characters.

One acclaimed DVD release and surprisingly highly-rated repeat run later, the computer support-based comedy is back for a second series. Programmes that exceed all expectations of success can really pose a problem for their production teams when they reach that “difficult” second run. Away from the freedom and comparatively cosy circumstances the first batch was made in – and suddenly exposed to the glare of public expectation – they can come unstuck pretty easily. The history of the television sitcom in particular is littered with examples that suddenly fell apart just when people actually started watching them.

Graham Linehan, however, is a veteran of many previous ventures that never even got near that “difficult” second run in the first place, and probably has a better understanding of what makes such small-scale cult shows work than most. That knowledge has clearly been applied here, as on the basis of this first episode, The IT Crowd seems to have lost none of its infectious momentum.

Typically for the show, there isn’t much of a storyline to this episode. Luckless IT manager Jen manages to score a date with a man she half-suspects might be gay, ends up having to invite her insufferable co-workers Roy and Moss along, and some fairly surreal events ensue. Involved and complicated storylines aren’t really what matters here, though. The strength of The IT Crowd lies in the interaction between the characters, the recognisable nuances of their work environment and their blinkered world view, and most of all the escalatingly bizarre events that routinely unfold in front of their disbelieving but resignedly accepting eyes.

Some reviewers have seen fit to bash this episode for featuring what they consider a set of stereotyped and borderline offensive observations about gay culture. It is true there has recently been an apparent and worrying upsurge in the amount of bigotry and offensive caricature of all kinds contained in the average television comedy show, and with depressing inevitability some of the worst culprits have chosen to excuse and defend plainly inexcusable material by claiming that it was done in the name of “irony”, or worse still by waving away any criticism on the basis that it’s all a big joke and everyone’s fair game and we should all lighten up and see the funny side … and anyway some of their best friends are incontient old ladies.

It is about time the critics were seen to take a stand against this, but The IT Crowd – and this episode in particular – is a strange target for them to start with. Perhaps it could indeed be argued that to imply Heat is only read by gay men and women in their early 20s veers towards stereotyping, but Linehan is an old hand at tackling such contentious subject matter in an even-handed and well-judged manner – witness the excellent “racism” episode of Father Ted – and this observation is soon swamped by a far larger and more overblown parody of the almost self-parodic excesses of bona fide gay culture. After all, could a theatrical poster proclaiming “Gay! A Gay Musical” really be anything other than a deliberately overamped diversion into the realms of sheer surreal ridiculousness?

In any case, the gay stereotyping espoused by Jen comes back to haunt her when, as a direct result, she is accused of looking “a bit like a man”, and it’s Roy and Moss who are made to appear idiots when their prejudice causes them to recoil in indignance at the phrase “United Queendom”. In addition to this, Roy’s own selfish attitude towards the disabled results in him being forced by circumstance to spend the rest of the night posing as a wheelchair user, missing his chance with a much lusted-after actress, agreeing to come and see the show again the following night, and finally being driven all the way to Manchester in the back of a van accompanied by a band of over-enthusiastic “fans of musicals”. Meanwhile, Moss’ selfish attitude to staff toilets sees him forced by circumstance to work behind the bar for the rest of the evening – and bringing things full circle – a gay man’s patronising view of the “jolly” and simple-minded Irish results in him being humiliated in front of an entire room full of people after wresting a paraplegic to the floor.

Alright, so that particular plot point may take some explaining. But what doesn’t need explaining is there’s no way in which this show is mining cheap laughs from ridiculing minorities – the humour is too convoluted, too self-reflexive and simply too plain absurd for that. And also because, erm, it just doesn’t do it full-stop.

On a slightly less controversial point, it’s pleasing to see Noel Fielding as lurking goth network technician Richmond – a minor character from the first series who proved an unexpected hit with the audience and writer alike – is being used so effectively in his inevitable return. Rather than being overused at every opportunity to the point of tedium, as so many other equivalent characters in other series end up, here he makes a short and effective appearance to warn his workmates of the bad omens that surround their planned visit to the theatre. Apparently, it has something to do with him standing on some lego.

It remains to be seen how the series will fare without Chris Morris, who despite his rumoured reservations about appearing in such a show effortlessly stole it from under everyone else’s noses (Fielding included), but whatever he might be working on instead, he’s clearly going to be missing out on a lot of fun. The audience, meanwhile, aren’t. The IT Crowd has gone beyond the novelty value of being a breath of comedic fresh air, and is establishing itself – or in fact probably already has – as a great series in its own right.

Partly for contractual reasons, and partly because Oliver Postgate considers it below par, the one-off special hasn’t been seen since it was first aired in 1974. It’s being used in the documentary to illustrate a section on the increasing politicisation of children’s television during that decade, but although it will be nice to see some footage, it would be even better if BBC4 could see fit to give the entire show a long-overdue repeat.

By all means, we say, bring back The Generation Game, if only to erase the legacy of Jim Davidson; just don’t pretend Graham Norton’s Generation Fame is the best you can do. Yes, we’re willing to give Wogan another go, if only to tarnish the self-upholstered reputation of Parkinson; just don’t pretend Wogan: Now and Then is the real thing. And of course, we’re more than happy to see Esther Rantzen and Lynn Faulds-Wood getting their feet trapped in yet another jewel-encrusted stubble-shyster’s front door; just don’t presume Old Dogs, New Tricksis what either we, or they, deserve.

When Ricky Gervais co-starred and wrote an episode of The Simpsons this year, the accompanying promotion traded off the implication that his mere participation was more than enough reason to tune in. The same went for the casting of Davina McCall as a midweek chat show cuckold. In both cases the results were inversely proportional to the effort on a titanic scale, but the consequences – increasingly objectionable dotage for Gervais, near-universal mockery for McCall – served only to strengthen their respective vocations and apparent interest in doing more and more of the same. Extras and Big Brother generated the most original headlines but least original entertainment of 2006.

Perhaps there comes a point in everyone’s life, somewhere around the age of 30, when nothing seems new anymore, and anything that claims it is simply generates more cynicism than that which presumes to promise more of the same. This poses problems for our relationship with television, of which we expect a return on our formative years of emotional investment, but towards which we can’t help but exercise a somewhat tart maturity.

One consequence is that our appreciation of the magic of the small screen has to be won at a price. This could be on our fortitude; the forward march of celebrity television through 2006 was a potent example of this, the quality of some - Who Do You Think You Are?, Celebrity MasterChef, Strictly Come Dancing - being jeopardised by the sheer quantity of others -Soapstar Superstar, Dancing on Ice, The Games, Soccer Aid, Only Fools on Horses, Love Island, I’m A Celebrity … Get Me Out Of Here! - in a much lower league.

There are a finite number of hours in the day. There are not a finite number of celebrities who want to be on TV. And we’re unused to not having enough time in our lives to judge what is and isn’t decent television. Not yet, anyway; maybe what we shed in stamina as we grow older we gain in forbearing. George Galloway for one appears to swear by such an assumption, having graced Celebrity Big Brother with a lesson in how to discard reason and evidence when constructing an argument in favour of pulling out big words such as “plutocrat” in the hope of baffling the opposition.

But another consequence of advancing time is an instinct to batten down the hatches. There were plenty of exemplary programmes this year which dared to do the opposite, searching over the horizon both literally - Equator, Tribe, Cooking in the Danger Zone, Springwatch - and philosophically - Simon Schama’s Power of Art, How to Start Your Own Country, The State Within - but none carried the demeanour of demanding to be watched.

The latter especially ran aground in spectacular fashion, almost beaten by a Monty Don gardening show upon its thrilling, explosive climax. Was it too complicated? Radio Times thought so, despite recommending it every week. Was it too intelligent? Waiting down that road lurk sore heads and sore losers. You want there to always be television that pitches itself just above the understanding of its audience. Yet The West Wing bowed out on More4 in July with 263,000 viewers. Even Russell Brand does better than that.

By contrast, those shows which poked their nose barely beyond the next street, or above the net curtains of their own front room, wore clothes to be noticed from the off. It meant the ambivalent quality of kitchen sink efforts like Waterloo Road, Sorted, The Family Man and The Street on the BBC, any number of Caroline Quentin runarounds on ITV1, plus warts-and-all Channel 4 business like Shameless and Goldplated, was all the more obvious. If they hadn’t aimed so high they wouldn’t have had so far to fall.

Those used to trading in affairs of the heart and the hearthrug, the soaps, did little better.EastEnders continued to cheat death, unlike some of its leading characters; Coronation Streetrevelled in death even though it didn’t need to, churning out the sort of fare which would merit a “good effort” from a school examiner. At least Emmerdale stretched its legs and showed off the fact it is physically able and willing to look beyond the next lamppost and shuttle ineffably between country house and village slum.

The one instance where both direction and ambition came together perfectly was in the best drama of the year: Life On Mars. A wonderful concept, brilliantly executed, the series had enough humour and action to appeal to everyone, not just readers of TV Zone. Only the pedestrian plotting let things down; with such an elegant premise, you felt inclined to expect rather more than storylines of the kind trotted out on Heartbeat.

In fact, not once in 2006 did a programme with a fantasy-based foundation consistently hit the mark. They either fell desperately short - Eleventh Hour, Afterlife, The Outsiders - or overreached expectation - Doctor Who, Torchwood, A for Andromeda.

A couple of things were happening here. One was the sheer ubiquity of science fiction. A TV trend has surely permeated its way through the schedules right down to the seabed when ITV1 jumps on the bandwagon, and this undoubtedly helped erase much of the novelty in seeing the genre back in primetime.

Second, none of these shows boasted an air of self-justification. Last year’s series of Doctor Who spent every minute of its life not taking its existence for granted. This year’s effort did anything but. There might have been a more substantial Doctor in the TARDIS, old faces to please old fans and new twists (kissing!) to satisfy the less old, but much else veered between the slight and the sleazy. Torchwood was over-hyped and suffered the curse of the one-sentence spin-off (“A supernatural investigation agency!”), yet it could have been so much better if someone had remembered to cast actors, hire writers and build more than one set. It was also responsible for the year’s worst line of screen dialogue: “A million shadows of human emotion; we’ve just got to live with them.”

Unlike the good Doctor, the most welcome old face to show up in 2006 was that belonging to Jane Tennison. The last ever Prime Suspect outclassed other instances of returning detectives - Cracker, Lewis, A Touch of Frost - by steering clear of grandstanding and instead embracing an agreeable element of back to basics. The resulting drama was superior by far not just compared to the endeavours of other old school sleuths but also the new kids on the beat (Mayo, Vincent).

An even older face took on his youngest guise to date in BBC1′s revival of Robin Hood: bold in ambition and intention, lacking in grit, grime and swashbuckling. Old tales given new adaptations performed better: Jane Eyre and The Virgin Queen were fresh and dignified. Neither quality, however, could be universally applied to the endless stream of historical dramatisations which meandered through 2006. Ancient Rome, Hannibal, Blackbeard, Krakatoa, Into the West - they all took twice as long as they needed to say anything half interesting.

Those concerned with more recent events - Death of a President, The Lavender List, Coup!,The Path to 9/11, Nuremburg, The Trial of Hermann Goering, Suez, The Chatterley Affair,Tsunami: The Aftermath - mostly let the story get in the way of some good facts. An exception was Longford, a powerful but unsensational piece posing fascinating questions about faith and forgiveness, yet all the while conscious of having to work hard by way of its subject matter (the Moors murders) to warrant its existence.

Here the window through which the viewer was being asked to gaze was a sympathetic one. By contrast, windows onto more accursed lifestyles recoiled and infected with equal intensity. Exclusive worlds racked with universal emotions prompted some of the most loyally-endorsed shows of 2006: 24, Lost, The Line of Beauty, The Apprentice, Dragon’s Den, Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, even children’s programme Beat the Boss. The latter saw ideas such as profitability, focus groups and marketing taken for granted as part and parcel of a young person’s character. This was enterprise culture of a like even Margaret Thatcher could not have conceived.

Ramsay’s star status, however, could be seen to work against him; many of this year’s subjects appeared primarily interested in boosting their profile simply by appearing on his programme. Cut from the same cloth but less ego-orientated was five’s The Hotel Inspector, where Ruth Watson, decked in voluminous coats and Spitfire-esque make-up, managed to patent a far more agreeable brand of profanity. Equally indomitable but far less likeable was Pete Owen Jones of BBC4′s The Lost Gospels, aimlessly drifting round Europe on a grand tour of religious supposition, poking his nose into salacious details without proving or disproving anything.

Where such shameless rabblerousing collided with rather shameful manifestations of real life – ie. us – there was precious chance of anyone, let alone the viewer, emerging with any distinction. This was as much true of the increasingly hysterical Deal or No Deal? as the relentlessly joyless Brat Camp and Wife Swap. Attempts to depict ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances rarely worked, be it the fly-on-the-wall fancies of The Armstrongs, the unsubtle stylings of Trinny and Susannah Undress or the boring noseyness of Richard Hammond’s 5 o’clock Show and The New Paul O’Grady Show. At least The ONE Showbenefited from the steady face of Adrian Chiles on its prow, though that wasn’t enough to disguise the lack of topical material and much in the way of any point.

Emotional manipulation did give rise to one sure-fire hit: Derren Brown’s The Heist, perhaps the most intriguing of his “stunt” specials yet, as, under the aegis of a motivational seminar, he persuaded a group of business people to seemingly carry out an armed robbery. The complete opposite was The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive with Stephen Fry and a bunch of celebrity pals indulging the notion of the sufferer as the tortured genius and reducing the entire debate to the question of whether or not to take pills.

Where real people were allowed the space and the silence to speak on their own terms, flashes of brilliance emerged. ONE Life, Rain in my Heart, China and Bradford Riots were all documentary strands or one-offs that sparkled with honesty and therefore compassion. Forty Minutes On took this one step further by first replaying then revisiting the lives of various archiveForty Minutes subjects, compounding the original episodes’ luminosity with new shades of opinion.

Where real people were shoehorned into someone else’s grand design, however, you learned almost nothing and liked even less. Surviving Disaster, Lock Them Up or Let Them Out, That’ll Teach ‘Em: Boys Versus Girls and Terry Jones’s Barbarians were variously guilty of this, whileThe Plot Against Harold Wilson, Don’t Mess With Miss Beckles, The Miracles of Jesus andJamie’s Return to School Dinners decided the only way to keep folk watching was to talk at them rather than for them.

Poor scheduling thwarted real people’s chance to properly exploit and engage with that rare commodity, an original game show. Pokerface, apparently devised by its hosts Ant and Dec, was bundled out across one week. If it had aired every seven days there would have been more space for the public to discuss strategy, theorise on potential outcomes and quite possibly work up a word-of-mouth frenzy about the programme. Instead it blew up, blew over and blew out, failing to obey the first law of light entertainment: be as fleeting as you like, but always leave an impression.

In the same vein unfurled a paper chain of variety and fun during 2006, much of it operating on the assumption that, if little had successfully informed or educated the public during the year, there was no point labouring long to fashion fresh and dynamic entertainment. Strictly Dance Fever, How Do You Solve aProblem Like Maria? and The X Factor all plied a similar trade, your reaction to them conditioned by how tolerable you found the experience of seeing precisely the same ingredients (right down to the audience shrieking and endless blubbing) trotted out on cue every week.

Parlour games such as Balderdash and Piffle and Codex lifted the spirits as well as the mind;Never Mind the Full Stops achieved neither. The true significance of the end of Top of the Popsis the fact nobody really seems to miss it. Assuming the reins of Never Mind the Buzzcocks, Simon Amstell did his best to add a bit of life to a programme that had been getting increasingly tired and nasty. Meanwhile entertainment for, in that enduring phrase, both the young and the young at heart, took a battering all round. Da Bungalow was replaced with distinctly bland new series, Blue Peter lost its best presenter of modern times, and ITV spent 2006 trying to get rid of its kid output entirely.

If the sight of a once great fortress of children’s programming shutting up shop wasn’t enough to make you feel your age, then a surfeit of bad comedy almost certainly did the trick, especially the kind which tried to pretend it was new when all it did was wheel out the old. Especially the ultra-old.

Playground humour will always be funny except when it’s the subject of an entire clip show (The Law of the Playground) or dressed up as knowing sophistication (The Charlotte Church Show, Blunder, The Catherine Tate Show, Tittybangbang). Sixth form humour, by contrast, is only funny when you’re in the sixth form, regardless of protagonists the like of Armando Iannucci (Time Trumpet), Graham Linehan (The IT Crowd) and Jack Dee (Lead Balloon).

Steve Coogan’s Saxondale stood out from the rest solely by virtue of what it wasn’t. Eschewing the experimental, it was the most straightforward sitcom BBC2 had mustered for years, though part of the charm derived from seeing Coogan not playing the comic relief in a shit Hollywood film. How you felt about That Mitchell and Webb Look depended on how you felt about other more innovative literate double acts (Fry & Laurie, Lee & Herring, Adam & Joe) having their work so blatantly, if good-naturedly, hijacked. Charlie Brooker’s Screen Wipe merely underscored the continual absence of any kind of programme about television that doesn’t start out from the premise that all television is rubbish.

Once again, it was those shows that didn’t presume to be anything more than the sum of their own parts that triumphed. The Smith and Jones Sketchbook was a joy; The Story of Light Entertainment an inspiring parade of household heroes; Paul Merton’s Silent Clowns effusively reinvigorated old reputations; and The Royle Family scored by letting events run their natural course. The funniest shows were those free from all homegrown resonances old or new: imports, such as the still-superb Curb Your Enthusiasm and the final series of both Malcolm in the Middle and Arrested Development. ITV2 revealed Entourage to resemble the original run ofAuf Wiedersehen, Pet (a group of friends making their way in an alien environment) and The Office to far transcend its British antecedent.

To misquote a phrase, the young TV channel who has not wept is a savage, and the old TV channel who will not laugh is a fool. Our own nation’s deficit of programmes to make you either cry tears of deep sadness or unfettered joy is one thing that hurts more, not less, the older you get. Emotion becomes more personal with advancing years. It’s when you’re grown up that you most want to be moved and manipulated in ways that remind you of childhood, and TV can – should – do this like no other.

Instead, 2006 found a television industry sorely reluctant to return anything by way of emotional investment. Any sign of commitment on the part of the viewer, even a loose affiliation, to engage with programmes on their own terms rather than that of the programme maker was tested to the limit.

ITV was the principle offender here, but then again it did spend virtually the entire year doing the wrong thing. The station began 2006 by adopting new idents, supposedly to state its ambition and purpose, but which instead ended up featuring couples hugging trees and a middle-aged man admiring his gut in the mirror. BBC tried the same trick later in the year, but with the opposite effect: a fleet of sparkling, witty and imaginative idents establishing precisely the correct tone and temperament.

As 2006 unfolded, ITV proceeded to boast no comedy of note, no decent entertainment, no documentaries of significance and no worthwhile children’s shows (and pretty soon no children’s department). Shows were ditched halfway through their run. The same film was shown two Saturdays running. Supposed fixtures of the schedule like Parkinson and The X Factor started at different times every week. Philip Schofield had the humiliation of having a major new Saturday night show pulled after just one edition.

The most pathetic spoiler tactic in history was attempted when old episodes of The Paul O’Grady Show were aired up against the new version on Channel 4. Predictably they flopped, and were dropped after just three days. The second most pathetic spoiler tactic in history, running identikit cookery shows to the BBC on Saturday morning, also bombed. The station even managed to mess up the World Cup: the most lucrative sporting event on the planet, and from which it contrived to emerge financially worse off than before.

Only on a channel as dreadful as ITV1 could a crisis where ratings were plummeting be addressed by spending less money on programmes. Replacing expensive drama with cheaper factual programmes turned out to be a daft idea given none of the factual shows were in any way distinctive. Driving Mum and Dad Mad was typical: a series indistinguishable from any number of parenting programmes on BBC3 or Channel 4, so why bother?

What drama remained was pitifully poor. During August, outside of soaps the channel had three dramas running: Where the Heart Is and Bad Girls, both of which were in terminal decline and then axed, and Jane Hall, which had been on the shelf for two years. The BBC has now totally taken over the mantle from ITV in both popular and quality drama; not something you would have expected to see even five years ago.

But the very fact that ITV had such a poor 2006, and did so in such a public fashion, in turn helped distract attention from how none of the other stations had a particularly great year either. Or so it felt.

Radio Times ran an extraordinary procession of covers in the autumn, beginning with Extrasand continuing, sequentially, with Jamie’s Return to School Dinners, Jane Eyre, Cracker,Robin Hood, Prime Suspect and Torchwood. All were flagship productions, all more than justified their front cover status, and all appeared emblematic of a TV culture in rude health.

On closer inspection, however, they weren’t merely the cream of the crop, they were the entire harvest. Moreover, not all turned out to embody the cream of British television (other than by dint of being rich and thick). Old wine in new bottles only went so far in 2006 by way of quenching your thirst for genuinely rewarding and personable entertainment. Appearance won out over reality all too often this year. Time and again what was promised with one hand was quickly snatched away from under our nose by the other.

Maybe there’s the danger of presuming too much. Just because you’re older and (theoretically) wiser than this point 12 months ago, it doesn’t follow television should be the same. In an ideal world what all of us put in by way of hours spent happily in front of the box should be returned to us from round about the time we started having to pay for our own TV licence.

But should TV owe us a living? In the words of Bart Simpson, “They’re giving you thousands of hours of entertainment for free. What could they possibly owe you? If anything, you owe them.” In other words: sit down, shut up and enjoy yourself.

And even if it doesn’t owe us anything, it can at least give us the benefit of its advanced years. BBC Television clocked up its seventh decade in 2006. To misquote another phrase, being over 70 is like being engaged in a war: all your friends are going or gone and you survive amongst the dead and the dying on the battlefield. The Corporation lost its commander-in-chief in November, when Michael Grade slipped the leash and “went home” to run ITV: proof that, no matter how old you are, or how old the organisation you work for, the shock of surprise is still just as great as the shock of the new.

You hope Grade will do some good at ITV. He can hardly do any worse than those he has inherited as his troops. It’s to the BBC, however, that you can’t help but look with hope and expectation of a more consistent, more sure-footed, more unpredictable 2007. Surprise, after all, is the one element which keeps us all on the edge of our seats, no matter how many minutes it is to midnight. And the thought that TV – like life – could be better is something that, regardless of age, remains woven indelibly into our hearts.

It’s amazing how a little bit of adversity can bring out the best in some people. Only a short while ago, largely thanks to his internet-based TV listings spoof TV Go Home, Charlie Brooker was the subject of widespread media attention and tipped for great things. Things have moved on since then; there are other newer talents for the industry to fawn over, and Brooker – his reputation tied to five-years-out-of-date “cutting edge” technology and a string of television shows that were full of good ideas badly resolved – has been shunted into the sidelines.

Fortunately, the “sidelines” in this instance are represented by BBC4, where it is still just about possible to get away with resolving your own good ideas without the pressure of hype or the need to appeal to some imaginary trendy audience. Charlie Brooker’s Screen Wipe sees the titular presenter – whose career as a television critic predates his involvement with comedy – take that time-honoured “caustic” look at the small screen. It’s a format that has been tried many times before and often to no great effect, but Brooker – doubtlessly fuelled by his own bitter programme-making experiences – has aimed towards something more substantial than just laughing at hairstyles in archive clips.

Charlie Brooker’s Screen Wipe started out with a short pilot run earlier in the year, which was watchable but somewhat confused. In particular, it contained too many concessions to the sneering clip show mentality it should have been dismissing, and wasted too much time on “ironic” choices from fellow media types’ video collections. Thankfully this seems to have been treated exactly as a pilot run should be, and between that and the more recent five-week series many of the earlier problems have clearly been addressed and largely ironed out.

The reinvented Screen Wipe has proved to be an entertaining look beneath the surface of the television industry, exposing hypocrisy and stupidity while celebrating the worthwhile and rubbishing the – well – rubbish, acting as a more cerebral counterpart to the fantastic Harry Hill’s TV Burp. Its one weak spot is that it seems to skirt around some obvious and deserving targets and lacks the confidence to really go to town on them (including some that Harry Hill seems to have no hesitation in savaging), but maybe that’s down to the incestuous nature of the modern day broadcast industry, where everybody owns shares in everybody else and even minor boat-rocking can have career-threatening ramifications.

This was less of an issue with Screen Wipe USA, a double-length special that concluded the series, and it showed. Examining the relationship between American and British television, and in particular the culture of imports and remakes, it had positive words and harsh facts to relate about both parties. Where certain other critics have recently been making absolute idiots of themselves in their rush to proclaim American television superior to its laughable homegrown counterpart – and Brooker’s own columns in The Guardian have not been immune to this in the past – Screen Wipe USA suggested that both models have their strengths and weaknesses and to judge either solely by their best or worst excesses is pointless.

To illustrate this, two wildly contrasting American shows were examined in some detail – The Wire, a crime drama played out with a subtlety and complexity that was apparent even from the short extracts that were shown, and To Catch a Predator, a prurient and morally dubious reality show that aimed to trap adults “grooming” children in online chatrooms and showed the results of their operations in lurid detail. Elsewhere, a group of Stateside viewers were shown extracts from a number of popular British shows including Bullseye, The Bill and Rail Cops and asked for their opinions, which proved to be rather revealing. While they were impressed by the superior acting and lack of glamour displayed by the residents of Albert Square, they also considered Bill Oddie’s family friendly and sports commentator-like enthusiasm over live wildlife coverage to be “patronizing”, scoffed at the idea of a game show where the contestant’s skills are considered more important than flashy computer graphics and financial acquisition, and implied that the tameness of fly-on-the-wall shows about the British police when compared to their own diet of car chases and shootouts caught on security camera indicated a lack of entertainment value rather than, perhaps, an important sociocultural difference.

The unspoken implication of this is that in trying to gauge what might appeal to UK audiences, the US isn’t really the best place to look.

Meanwhile, veteran American comic Lewis Black ruminated on the relationship between broadcaster and audience and told a belief-beggaring story about being forced to audition to be himself in a TV show (and ultimately turned down in favour of someone else), while a television executive praised his British counterparts for their willingness to experiment with comedy formats, wearily recounting how the likes of Cheers and Seinfeld were rarities that had somehow survived unscathed in their torturous journey through production meetings. Brooker himself made the most salient point of the entire programme, pointing out that oddities like The Twilight Zone, Manimal and R Kelly’s insane music video/soap opera crossover Trapped in the Closet may have been bizarre but were not to be sneered at, as they were at least byproducts of an industry that was prepared to take a risk on off-the-wall formats rather than playing it safe and commissioning endless direct clones of Holby City.

Screen Wipe itself is a tried and trusted format, of course, but unlike numerous other floundering attempts at wringing comedy out of television, it benefits from having a presenter who finds humour in the medium itself rather than simply being hired to be funny about it. Brilliantly, the show opened with a pastiche of the opening titles of Entertainment USA, a show Brooker was keen to stress that regardless of the latterday notoriety of its presenter was actually quite good, and a reference point that – much like his likening of Glyn from Big Brother to “The Boy from Space” a couple of weeks earlier – will have been lost on a good deal of the audience, while delighting those that did get it.

Elsewhere came an explanation of the fact that it costs a good deal of money to show the copyrighted “Hollywood” sign (although calling the copyright owners “a bunch of money-grabbing bastards” costs nothing), a “pointless montage to show we’re in America”, and the suggestion that Belgian television involves little more than a man in a penguin suit wandering around in circles in a suburban living room.

The one real problem with Charlie Brooker’s Screen Wipe USA was that it didn’t draw any conclusions from its findings, which while not mandatory for a programme without a defined agenda, left it without a strong point to end on. Although maybe that’s something that can be worked on between series…

One of the great joys of BBC4 is that its schedulers and programme makers are never afraid to rummage around the dustier corners of the archives. While the terrestrial channels keep on recycling the same old clips and repeats again and again, chances are that the average BBC4 documentary or theme night will come bolstered by such unlikely long-forgotten gems as Ronnie Lane’s Slim Chance performing on The Basil Brush Show, or a frankly quite deranged animated blur of colour and percussion sounds aimed at increasing use of your local Post Office.

The recent BBC4 theme nights devoted to the sun and the moon had already been bolstered by a number of superb archive choices based on their respective themes, but the absolute high point was something that might on first glance have been considered throwaway filler. Time Shift: “Sun and Moon” was effectively 30 minutes worth of old sun-and-moon-related clips, but in selecting these took full advantage of the availability of countless thousands of hours worth of fascinating and little-seen footage.

During the course of this mesmerising programme, actual space missions and serious scientific analysis rubbed shoulders with a typically off-beam Tomorrow’s World explanation of how the sun “works”, using a hefty prop set of scales. The Doctor and Rose observing “The End of the World” was counterbalanced by clips from Moonbase 3, the serious-minded sci-fi drama made by the early 1970s Doctor Who production team, which revealed its dramatic Radiophonic Workshop-themed opening titles held a far greater promise of excitement than the programme itself could deliver. The Goodies poked fun at lunar modules, mission control and moonwalks, while the Blue Peter team somehow managed to make a bizarre yet purportedly scientifically realistic “moon creature” sound about as exciting as the usual historical subjects of their documentary features. Patrick Moore chatted to a vicar who refused to believe the sun is hot, Alan Whicker encountered some Europeans standing stock still in the midday sun, and Dougal arrived on the moon to find the other inhabitants of the Magic Garden had casually beaten him to it.

Punctuating all of this were almost subliminal clips from The Clangers, Tellytubbies, The Late Show‘s eight million decibel howling wolf, a young Ronnie Corbett in an ancient – and very funny – black and white sketch, and Dana (whose increasingly absurd appearances in such clip-driven programmes are coming to suggest her old TV shows are in fact some sort of lost surrealist weird-out) performing a rather forceful version of Dancing in the Moonlight.

The real find, however, was an animated version of the story of Daedalus and Icarus, made for the long-running BBC schools’ programme Watch in 1979. No doubt a great many viewers found their subconscious was jerked into recognition on seeing this once frequently-repeated sequence, but presented here in isolation it took on a very different sheen, coming across as somehow spartan and desolate. In fact, the whole programme was characterised by a unique and distinctive feel. The same thematic approach has been adopted by many past efforts, notably BBC2′s seminal Windmill, but Time Shift: “Sun and Moon” featured no presenters or linking material and simply flowed from extract to extract depending on mood – an approach which proved incredibly effective.

With only 30 minutes to fill, it was perhaps inevitable not everything viewers may have half-expected to see would appear. There was no sign, for example, of the Cybermen stomping across the lunar surface, Monty Python’s Flying Circus suddenly transforming into The Buzz Aldrin Show, or The Black and White Minstrel Show commemorating the achievements of the Apollo 11 crew with Dai Francis crooning a plaintive ballad at the controls of a spaceship. Similarly, from a slightly warmer perspective, there was no room for Peter Egan as a shape-shifting solar-powered centuries-old supervillain or, perhaps most surprisingly, the end of Disaster Area’s live set from The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Meanwhile, the most glaring omissions were not through choice; the BBC for reasons best known to itself failed to preserve any of the special programming detailing their coverage of the Moon landings, so nothing could be shown of Patrick Moore and James Burke’s studio presentation, or the Omnibus special “What if it’s Just Green Cheese?”, featuring contributions from artists as diverse as Judi Dench, Pink Floyd, Michael Hordern and The Dudley Moore Trio.

Thankfully, there was more than enough rare and unusual footage to compensate for any omissions, glaring or otherwise. This was a fantastic and hugely entertaining idea for a programme, and as convenient schedule-fillers go it’s certainly worth sticking around for after the “main feature”. Let’s hope the experiment is repeated for the next theme night.