Drama

Creating impact, albeit not on the kind of international tabloid-baiting level as Susan Boyle, Torchwood: Children Of Earth was one of the year’s undoubted big hitters.  Losing the show’s previous juvenile snigger, this five-parter, stripped across a week was actually very close to being a remake of Nigel Kneale’s 1979 Quatermass, and was all the better for it. It was taut, philosophical, exciting and somehow managed to ram some of Torchwood‘s camper elements into plotting that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Troy Kennedy Martin’s best work.  It asked questions about exactly how far over the mark a government might go in order to protect itself, and if nothing else, you have to wonder  what other drama could have included the image of a Rachel Whiteread sculpture being dumped into a quarry, with its smashed concrete remains revealing a butt-naked John Barrowman…

All in all it was a pretty good year for telefantasy. BBC3′s Being Human somehow managed to synthesise the best elements of the Buffyverse then dilute it with a British sensibility rooted in Hammer Horror films and Channel 4 contemporary dramas.  Boy Meets Girl stretched the hoary old body swap plot idea across four episodes and tried to approach it with a modicum of realism, succeeding admirably, largely due to Rachael Stirling’s affecting performance as Martin Freeman trapped in a woman’s body.  This was a brave bit of programming for ITV1.

With Heroes dying a slow, convoluted death, it took Misfits on E4 late in the year, to do something new with the ordinary people who have extraordinary powers idea by giving those abilities to a group of repellent youngsters working community service.  Broadcast late, it scored by introducing bad language and sex into a genre usually barren of such things and underscored the post (new) Who shift towards adding comedic fantasy elements into series that might otherwise have become worthy explorations into the dark heart of society.

The second series of Ashes to Ashes continued this dark theme. The fuzzy 1980s nostalgia – although still present – was a less important part of the mix, while Philip Glenister had personally petitioned the show’s writers to make Gene Hunt less of a mythologised hero figure and more a real man. Keen to get to grips with the grittier side of ‘80s policing, it also addressed the first series’ ill-judged response to the Scarman Report (wherein Hunt rubbished the efforts to rout racist and crooked coppers) with a storyline about corruption in the Met.

ITV1 brought back Primeval for a third series, with Jason Flemyng taking over as the main male lead. Although the show enjoyed another successful run, it was subsequently cancelled, much to the annoyance of its fans. Surprisingly a co-production deal was later hammered out with one of the satellite channels for two extra series, with all of the current cast returning. Sadly, a similar fate was not to be on the cards for BBC1’s Robin Hood, which after three years at the heart of the Saturday evening schedule was cancelled. Robin actor Jonas Armstrong had been set to bow out, and a potential successor character named Archer had been introduced in the event of a fourth series… but it proved to be in vain. The BBC’s other would-be Doctor Who, Merlin, reappeared in September and plodded along as it had the first time around – until the final two episodes, when it suddenly burst into life and became the kind of series it should have been a year ago.

Doctor Who enjoyed a slightly wonky run this year, with the consensus being that ‘Planet of the Dead’ was disposable in an annoying way, while ‘The Waters of Mars’ was a brilliant example of pressure cooker drama. ‘The End of Time: Part One’ was quite simply all over the place, unfortunately hampered by the introduction of another group of human scientists working away in a lab – a set up that the series has yet to make look at all convincing.  John Simm’s Master was now some kind of Marvel Comics super villain, and his resurrection horribly reminiscent of the terrible 1989 Doctor Who adventure ‘Battlefield’.  Still, Bernard Cribbins and Timothy Dalton made up for a lot of the episode’s deficiencies.

Even at its worst, every other piece of telefantasy shown in 2009 was still miles better than Paradox – widely regarded as this year’s Bonekickers. Originally touted for a five-night-a-week stripped run, it was eventually shown across five weeks with audiences declining as it went along.  While innovative programming is always welcome and preferable to just another cop show, it has to be done well and Paradox came across as complete nonsense from start to finish.

Away from sci-fi, the trend in TV drama for resurrecting old concepts (that Only Fools prequel finally airs in 2010) continued with the most ill-conceived yet coming from Five. Minder featured Shane Richie and Lex Shrapnel in a low-powered crime comedy caper, with Richie as Archie Daley – hitherto unseen and never mentioned nephew of Arthur – and Shrapnel as his rough diamond associate, Jamie. The series was marketed as sporting the aesthetics of Lock, Stock – as if that franchise hadn’t long since become passé – and seemed woefully under-resourced on screen with long, static, sparsely populated scenes and zero charm or chemistry between the leads. The real beauty of the original Minder was in the casting, not the concept. This was never a show begging to be ‘re-imagined’. Malapropisms alone aren’t enough, and this time the lobster was well and truly off.

Far better was New Year’s Day’s long-awaited return of Jonathan Creek. The one-off special ‘The Grinning Man’ was directed by the notoriously hands-on David Renwick, and was a competent, if not breathtaking, addition to the canon.  Hustle also returned, bringing with it original cast member Adrian Lester (who’d taken the previous year off). The show had floundered a little in his absence, but although he was back, Jaimie Murray and Marc Warren were replaced by Matt Di Angelo and Kelly Adams. Like Creek, Hustle is on again in 2010, although filming of the show has shifted to Birmingham (part of the BBC’s policy of relocating drama production away from London).

Over the pond, the second series of lauded US drama Damages faltered badly. You couldn’t blame the show for playing all its cards first time around, but reassembling the deck for another hand made it seem horribly contrived. Meanwhile, Sky 1 brought us Jack Bauer’s latest ‘long day’ in the seventh series of 24. Here was some audacious, manic and beautifully plotted television. The return of Tony Almeida, which many feared as a shark-jumping innovation, instead proved a huge success.

However, FX’s Dexter is arguably the best drama currently coming out of America; a skewed serial killer saga which continued to delight and test its audience during its third series as the title character forged an unlikely relationship with an unhinged Assistant District Attorney (Jimmy Smits). The duo’s partnership went through many twists, often stretching credulity, but in each case the series would later revisit the more unlikely moments and present new evidence which wholly justified them. It also began a slow-burning storyline in which Dexter’s sister, Debs, slowly began to piece together the truth about him. It’s a plot strand that’s destined to unravel over the next two seasons (Dexter’s been commissioned up to series five).

For the very few still watching, Lost‘s penultimate series was brimming with confidence and the TV equivalent of watching Rolf Harris paint.  Suddenly, those seemingly random moments made at the very beginning of the process began to take shape, proving the show’s creators really did know what they were doing all along.

Law and Order: UK was an attempt to bring a US drama format over here.  Shown on ITV1 in February, this version transplanted the action to London and had former Torchwood boss Chris Chibnall on-board as show-runner. Bradley Walsh and Battlestar Galactica‘s Jamie Bamber were the two leads, and despite impressive performances from them, the series was chopped in half with the latter batch of episodes being held over for showing at a later date.

Perhaps the standout drama of the year, at least in terms of art direction was the adaptation of David Peace’s Red Riding by Channel 4. Heavily promoted and trumpeted as something rather special, the series came across as dark, bleak and impenetrable, yet there was something about its  grimy atmosphere and aesthetic that made it compelling television. David Morrissey, in particular, turned in a career best performance.

Soap operas gentle slide from a position of absolute ratings dominance continued throughout 2009.  The manner in which ITV1 shunted Coronation Street around the schedules didn’t help and instead annoyed the series’ loyal viewers by forcing them to search it out. It was moved from its traditional Wednesday slot for football, while its shift to Thursday was probably as good a solution as any, but this then meant there were three episodes in just over 24 hours, followed by very little for the rest of the week. Furthermore, the channel then continued to shove extra episodes on football-free Wednesdays anyway. It’s now almost impossible to answer the question, when is Coronation Street on?

For those who don’t tune into the soaps on a regular basis, it’s usually possible to keep up with major storylines through a kind of popular cultural osmosis, but in 2009 if you weren’t tuning into EastEnders there was very little chatter elsewhere in the media to appraise you of what had been going on.  Coronation Street appears to have the best year out of the big three, but the show’s recent predilection for crafting various stories in which Rosie Webster actress Helen Flanagan gets her kit off is a bit distasteful, and will surely only generate press interest from lads’ mags and The Star.

Game Shows

ITV1 opened the batting in the traditional game show stakes on New Year’s Day with a revival of The Krypton Factor – which had been off our screens for 14 years. Thankfully using the show’s traditional format rather than the bodged mid-90s reboot, it was at least faithful to the original, challenging its contestants mentally and physically. Similar mixed-discipline tests were found in the second series of Beat the Star, which ITV1 axed after this year’s run. Still on the channel, the Andrew Castle-fronted series Divided appeared to be two game shows in one: a fairly straightforward question-and-answer session requiring the contestants to work together to succeed, followed by a divisive and deliberately unfair division of spoils that encouraged everyone to bully and hector each other in order to claim the lion’s share of the loot. The fact the first show ended with a contestant in tears marked this out as truly questionable television.  Nonetheless, ITV1 has commissioned more of this, to replace Golden Balls. A far better experiment with the 5pm slot was The Chase, which sees contestants face off against quiz experts; however, this was clearly created as a spoiler to the BBC’s rival Eggheads.

The  BBC launched a couple of new afternoon quizzes in a hunt for successors to the aforementioned Eggheads and The Weakest Link. A Question of Genius was a fairly good show hobbled by a slightly too complex format.  Meanwhile the entertaining Pointless, ably helmed by Alexander Armstrong, inverted the classic ‘ranked lists’ notion by asking players to think of the least popular valid answers.  The series’ genius element was the inclusion of Armstrong’s “pointless friend” Richard Osman, who – as well as adjudging the players’ responses – totted up a running total of obscure possible answers. By the series’ end he was able to declare the Central African Republic as the world’s most “pointless” country, in that those surveyed about various geographical matters never thought to mention it.

Five, not previously having held much weight in the game show genre, taxed a troupe of contestants in the impressive Britain’s Best Brain, though much of the publicity was generated not by the show itself but its presenters – Zoe Ball and Jamie Theakston.  The reunification of the presenting duo perhaps shifted attention from the show’s bizarre end game, watching a giant inflatable get bigger and bigger.  What this had to do with brainpower was anyone’s guess.

Elsewhere, Nick Knowles returned with a new game in the National Lottery cycle, Guesstimation, which was a decent format nobbled by the fact it was designed as a “format to fit the purpose” (the purpose being in this case to plug Dream Number and the 2012 Olympics) rather than developed as a series in its own right.

Guesstimation may have completed its run, which is more than can be said for The Colour of Money. Clearly designed as a successor to the now ageing Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, it even shares that show’s presenter Chris Tarrant. While Millionaire became a global hit that made its creators into millionaires themselves, ITV actually saw little of the income, as the show was an independent production. It was presumably hoped The Colour of Money, an ITV-made show, would become a hit of similar scale. But it was riddled with flaws.  Here we witnessed contestants attempting to withdraw amounts of cash from different coloured machines, before the device reached its maximum pay-out.  In a pre-Millionaire era, the format would have been a tight, chirpy half-hour; instead, ITV1 loaded the show with unnecessary lard, most of the narrative coming from the players ‘rationalising’ which hued dispenser to go for (“As my husband’s in the forces, I’ll go for khaki”).  Unfortunately, the way the games themselves progressed didn’t provide enough variation, which meant if you saw one episode, you’d seen them all. The show was quickly axed, with the final edition held back until a mid-afternoon slot on December 29.

Still, it seemed in 2009 if you didn’t like a particular game show, another would be along in the minute.  This meant that as terrible as The Colour of Money was, there was always the chance something else would come along later in the year to supplant it as 2009′s game show nadir.  And so it was when Five’s Heads or Tails rolled up on our screens.  A naked attempt to cash in on Deal or No Deal, this was a terribly executed programme with meaningless contortions of the show’s format put in place to string the whole thing out to a desirable running time.  Worst still, the whole business of host Justin Lee Collins flipping the actual coin was poorly realised, and what should have been the programme’s iconic moment  just looked downmarket and naff.

So if Heads or Tails was the year’s worst new game show, what was its best?  Well the aforementioned Pointless was worthy of our esteem, as was ITV1′s The Cube.  This was a brilliantly judged Saturday night show, magnificently presented by Philip Schofield. Here the post production effects and bullet time camera work all coalesced into something that was genuinely gripping, even when the tasks (like walking in straight line while blindfolded) were mundane in the extreme.  If it’s going to return for a second series, our suggestion would be that the risk-to-reward ratio of each game would benefit from another look, but that aside here was the best new ITV1 game show since – probably - Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.

Away from the traditional game shows and into the kitchen, Marco Pierre White’s second stint at the helm of Hell’s Kitchen was pretty unmemorable.  The latest batch of celebrity chefs completed dinner service every night, while their boss seemed more concerned by conjuring up lazy bon mots. The Restaurant’s return  for a third series initially proved every bit as exciting as previous years – and that was despite the fact the show had clearly taken a huge budget cut (less episodes, less eateries opened). The first two episodes proved a complete joy, but come the time the contestants were ensconced in their establishments, it all fell apart. Seemingly in an effort to compensate for the cut in episodes, one challenge and one full service were leavened into every edition, meaning we never saw enough of either. Then, a series of staggeringly poor choices resulted in contestants JJ and James winning the show. That the ‘chef’ in the duo hadn’t cooked once over the series utterly undermined the whole concept. Perhaps the production team felt they were hooking in another charmingly chaotic double-act like last year’s Alistair and James. But no. A culinary clutz  going into business with Raymond Blanc? C’mon! We still like a smidgeon of reality in our reality TV.

Thankfully MasterChef, in all its variants, was superb and has long since felt like an unkillable format… despite the schedulers’ best attempts this year. The scheduling of MasterChef: The Professionals left many viewers perplexed. The series was originally commissioned for an early evening spot, but then moved into prime time at the eleventh hour, even though there wasn’t a regular gap available for it across the week. As a result, Monday and Tuesday editions felt like one-and-a-half episodes each, throwing the whole thing off kilter. Still, the initial rounds were greatly enhanced by the presence of Monica Galetti, who did her best to be completely annoyed just to be there, while Michel Roux Jr developed from his previously taciturn and scary persona into someone rather nice. With a new “regular” series due in January, a celebrity version currently being filmed and a “junior” offshoot in the works, here’s hoping the channel makes enough room in its schedules for all the franchises, perhaps saving some space by getting rid of the endless recaps that litter each show – after all we’re not that stupid, surely?

Stupid, however was at the very core of Total Wipeout, an It’s A Knockout for the 21st century. The cartoonish buffoonery was, on the face of it, inoffensive, but digging deeper behind the trowelled-on irony and lampoonery, the show contributed very little in terms of quality, and seemed to exist purely to provide extra employment for the popular Richard Hammond. The BBC’s baffling devotion to the format saw two full series in 2009, the first of which was needlessly repurposed mere weeks after its end to fill a half-hour Friday night slot. It could be argued this was to the programme’s detriment – it’s certainly highly entertaining for the first few outings (witness Ben Miller crying with laughter when reviewing the show on You Have Been Watching: “It may just be falling in the water but it’s every single kind of fall into the water you can think of!”) but, like Hole In The Wall, the relentless silliness works best in small doses.

Speaking of which, in 2009 there were two new TV quiz shows all about TV itself. As Seen On TV, helmed by Steve Jones (of T4, rather than Pyramid Game or Sex Pistols fame), provided a welcome return for the pre-watershed middleweight puzzler that the BBC had earlier decided to eradicate to save cash.  The concept of a light-hearted panel game is not a bad one at all and it’s something we should have more of, but As Seen On TV was hamstrung by its bizarre refusal to show anything from before the mid-90s, reaching a nadir with a round of questioning about 2008. If Harry Hill couldn’t think of anything funny to say about Wallander, what chance Fern Britton? It almost seemed to go out of its way to be unfunny by choosing ridiculously uninteresting clips. Meanwhile, Charlie Brooker built on his Screenwipe success by launching a new C4 series, the aforementioned You Have Been Watching.  This took the form of a panel game/discussion built around Brooker’s TV predilections. However, the game appeared rather tacked-on, and most Brooker followers would prefer to hear the journalist voice his views without appended frippery.

Factual

Celebrity travelogues continued to be a popular way for factual television to go during 2009.  Billy Connolly: Journey to the Edge of the World was the big ITV1 travel series of the winter, and featured the Big Yin in Canada, attempting to trace the north-west passage. Meanwhile, Last Chance to See saw Stephen Fry follow in the footstep of the late Douglas Adams as he and Mark Carwardine went to visit some of the planet’s most endangered animals. The Around the World in 80 Days format was revived in aid of Comic Relief on BBC1 in October, this time featuring a whole host of celebrities each taking on a leg of the journey rather than doing the whole lot themselves a la Michael Palin. While the show had its moments and undoubtedly raised a lot of money for charity, as a travel documentary it was nowhere near as interesting as the journey undertaken 20 years earlier. By Any Means returned for a second series, this time following Charley Boorman as he travelled from Sydney to Tokyo. While the first run seemed to have a clearly-defined aim the second series abandoned clocking up the number of different modes of transport used, and so it all became a little directionless.

James May proved yet again that of the Top Gear trio he is the one most able to go and make interesting spin-off projects. He followed up his Big Wine Adventure by taking to the road with Oz Clarke again, this time looking at a wider range of British booze in Oz and James Drink to Britain. The show provided an engaging snapshot of the UK’s past and present drinking habits, and showcased the people fighting to keep British brewing alive. May then piped up again at the end of the year with Toy Stories. Inspired by his Top Toys specials in past years, this engaging programme saw him corralling the public into assisting him in building giant projects based on playthings from the pre-Playstation era.  It was fun and pointless, rather like Top Gear without the testosterone, and so all the better for it.

The Hairy Bikers Food Tour of Britain commenced at the end of summer, with the pair embarking on a mammoth gastronomic journey around the country, with most – if not all – of the counties of the UK being represented. It was a huge undertaking, with five episodes shown a week at teatime. And while it was very interesting to see such an idea played out, the shows did seem to become very repetitive after a few weeks with the same format being employed in each and every edition (and even the same types of recipe being cooked from time to time). However, the Bikers returned for a Christmas special in December, based on the theme of The 12 Days of Christmas.

The Frankincense Trail covered Kate Humble’s journey across Arabia as she traced the route (or the bits that she could trace) of the Frankincense traders who would have taken the precious gift to Jesus in Bethlehem. Humble presented well and demonstrated she isn’t just somebody who is confined to countryside programming, even if she did come across as slightly over-enthusiastic at times.

But factual telly wasn’t all about travel.  BBC3 concocted a hybrid of Watchdog and The Real Hustle to create Don’t Get Screwed (piloted early in the year as Don’t Get Ripped Off).  The series attempted to use the techniques pioneered by The Real Hustle to illustrate to young adults how to cope with poor customer service.  Another attempt to attract the kids to a traditionally stuffy subject came with BBC1′s Bang Goes The Theory, a fast-moving concoction of scientific fact, stunts and fun; basically a more straight-faced take on Sky 1′s Brainiac.

The sentence “a fly-on-the-wall documentary about a former model named Katie” could be used to describe both one of the worst documentaries of the year and one of the best. ITV2 continued its baffling obsession with publicity-hungry “entrepreneur” Katie Price, with her split from Peter Andre allowing both members of the defunct partnership to feature in their very own series. A massively more worthwhile use of a TV hour, however, came in October when C4′s Cutting Edge strand screened Katie: My Beautiful Face. This excellent one-off followed model and digital TV presenter Katie Piper as she rebuilt her life after suffering a horrendous acid attack. The documentary traced Piper’s recovery in a dignified and heartening way. Viewers were able to cheer on the subject as she built up her confidence and returned to daily life. Katie Piper’s case has been heavily discussed and she has since been in receipt of huge amounts of support.  The film was also to become the most-watched Cutting Edge of 2009.

Newswipe with Charlie Brooker brought the critic’s sensibilities to current affairs and began with uncertain results, but improved immeasurably when focusing on how news was covered, rather than the news itself.  Highlights included an incisive commentary on the coverage of the G20 protests (which concentrated on the tiny pockets of violence rather than the vast majority of peaceful demonstrations) and the shift on television as to what constitutes current affairs (Jade Goody, instead of international matters with global implications).  In the autumn Brooker was back again, this time with the one-off video game focussed Gameswipe, a show that betrayed his obvious love and knowledge for the subject matter.  Affectionate and amusing, this was perhaps his best piece of telly to date.

Gameswipe was part of wider BBC4 season looking at all things digital.  The centrepiece was Electric Dreams. This three-part series took a modern family and had them live in a simulated 1970s home. Each day the calendar would click on a year and the accompanying technological breakthroughs were then introduced to the house. Yes, there was the obviously Proustian rush of Chopper bikes and microwaveable meals, but the show really got under the skin of how ordinary people lived. Seeing a chest freezer being tarted up with a wipe-clean wood veneer was almost poetic. There was also an oblique fascination to be had in the domestic habits of participants, who had designated the lounge as the “adults room”.  At the end of the three-week TV experiment, the family started an experiment of their own after deciding to open up the “adults room” to all of the clan.  Great stuff.

The arts got a reasonable inning this year.  Starting at the more populist end, BBC2′s Apprentice-style search for an artist, School of Saatchi made a reasonable fist out of trying to let the masses into the tightly sealed knot that is modern art grammar.  In this effort, Matthew Collings was surprisingly enlightening, and proved himself – contrary to all previous television evidence – to be a clear-thinking and erudite commentator.  Meanwhile, one of the most captivating televisual events of the year was happening over on Sky Arts.  Antony Gormley’s fourth plinth escapade “One and Other” attracted a couple of thousand volunteers to stand for an hour each, non-stop for three months on the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square and do what they liked.  A surprising number chose to do nothing but sit or stand and take in the atmosphere or a few photos, but the participants who attracted the most attention were inevitably the nudists, the karaoke singers, and those with a cause to promote.  Like Big Brother in its earliest days, viewers watching the live feed on the Sky Arts sponsored website didn’t initially know what to expect, but would then tune in precisely because they enjoyed that very element of the unexpected.

Baroque! From St Peter’s to St Paul’s in which a typically enthusiastic Waldemar Januszczak crystalised the artistic period and its implications, somehow managing to even find something new to say about St Peter’s in Rome, perhaps the most filmed church outside of The Vicar of Dibley.  The best sequence described the rebuilding of London’s churches by Christopher Wren and Nicholas Hawksmoor, which in illuminating the deliberate variety demonstrated the sullen boredom of most modern ecclesiastical construction.

Finally, the story of artist Kit Williams and his monstrously successful 1979 children’s book Masquerade, was sensitively retold in BBC4′s The Man Behind the Masquerade – possibly the best documentary of the year. Slightly daffy, like the book itself, it prompted viewers to examine Williams’ artwork. Granted, some of the dramatised scenes of naked women and lobsters felt a tad too self-conscious, but for 60 minutes viewers were placed fairly and squarely inside the painter’s mind. And it was a great place to be.

As ever, it was food continued to dominate this year. Feast With Heston Blumenthal represented the first fruits of the chef’s new contract with Channel 4, as every week he went to extraordinary lengths to lay on a sumptuous, often stupendous historical or literary-influenced banquet. While the series successfully counteracted Blumenthal’s slightly flat onscreen persona by busying him with a string of bizarre and fun tasks, it did fall down when representing the final results of his efforts. All food shows ultimately disappoint – we can’t taste the fare ourselves – but our representatives on screen (a group of celebrities invited to dine at C4’s expense) proved maddeningly inept at summing up the experience for our benefit. Comments were rarely more eloquent than: “Delicious”.

Less successful was Heston Blumenthal: Big Chef Takes on Little Chef, in which he attempted to turn round the fortunes of the ailing roadside café chain, while the programme makers and voiceover man did everything in their power to try and paint Little Chef boss Ian Pegler as obstructive and idiotic, even when he was very obviously giving Heston carte blanche to do whatever he wanted.  That said, Pegler’s patter seemed to come from the David Brent lexicon of business jargon. A one-off follow-up show was broadcast in October which updated viewers on how Little Chef had fared since Blumenthal’s involvement – and it appeared things have been going extremely well.

Jamie Oliver was at it too, with his worthy series which sought to improve the welfare of pigs in the British farming system. What the programmes ultimately showed was that Britain has some of the most stringent rules and procedures in place already compared to a lot of other places. Similarly, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall did his best to highlight the plight of chickens in Chickens, Hugh and Tesco Too, a worthwhile cause, but one that we’ve seen on our screens before, and not that long ago either.

Children’s

CBBC rocketed out of the blocks in 2009 with not one, but three, series that attempted to make facts fun. Ed & Oucho’s Excellent Inventions saw the popular CBBC linkman and his cactus chum mix scientific principles with stunts and songs to bring viewers’ creative ideas to life. Little Howard’s Big Question featured comic Howard Read and his cartoon companion taking on traditional theories in a quirky, interesting way. Top Gear‘s Richard Hammond sparked up a stunt-filled science gameshow, Blast Lab, which ran to two series in 2009 and trod similar ground to XperiMental from some years previously.

While CBBC marched gamely on, CITV was still in the doldrums, largely absent from ITV1 and with a digital channel heavily reliant on reruns and imports; though there were new episodes of the channel’s most popular fixture, Horrid Henry. CITV’s big new launch of 2009 was literature series Bookaboo, a Jackanory-like storytelling programme wherein a rather random assortment of celebrities pitched up to offer tales to the titular dog. This was, at least, quite well executed, with Bookaboo himself taking the role of an inquisitive youngster being read to, excitedly interjecting into the story.

Comedy for kids also continued, with a second run of the excellent Sorry I’ve Got No Head on CBBC proving that pre-watershed sketch comedy is more than possible and thoroughly enjoyable, and a Comic Relief one-off, Class, starring Sam and Mark as multiple characters in a school-based knockabout. Kids’ gameshows also enjoyed a renaissance, with excellent new programmes such as Keep Your Enemies Close and Wait For It... While a seasoned viewer would be able to pick out the bits cribbed from other shows (Wait For It…‘s “drop zone” into a gunge pit is lifted from Scratch & Sniff’s Den of Doom, and Keep Your Enemies Close ‘s pulling-poles-out-of-a-moving-box game is near-identical to one from last year’s Hot Rods), the shows were entertaining enough for the target audience to lap up.

A gold star for effort must go to STV, who, having tired of the ITV network’s intermittent provision of children’s programming, put together it own weekend morning series, wknd@stv, made up of repeats and imports from the library. This did at least offer an opportunity to enjoy a number of series which hadn’t been seen for some years (and thus will be new to many kids) such as Captain Zed and the Zee Zone, Minty, Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century and Get Wet.

BBC2′s The Well was a short form horror series produced by BBC Switch, the slightly hazy department brought in when it was decided the BBC Childrens shouldn’t cater for anyone over the age of 12.  This fairly spooky haunted house story would probably have gone unnoticed to everyone outside its target audience had it not appeared to be the last work of new Doctor Who companion Karen Gillan before moving to Cardiff.  Gillan wasn’t given much to do but be a bit posh and offer scorn and exposition.

Predictably the kids’ telly highlight of the year remained The Sarah Jane Adventures, which continued to do some excellent work, it’s just a shame that its greatness is so clearly hewn from the telefantasy shows of the 1970s, rather than constructed from something of its own.  Still, that’s a minor grumble, particularly when it should be applauded for simply existing at all.

Comedy

In 2009, BBC1 trialled a new series from Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong, the writers behind Channel 4′s much-garlanded Peep Show (which itself launched its sixth run in 2009). The Old Guys was a passable half-hour starring Clive Swift and Roger Lloyd-Pack, but suffered from the general apathy toward traditional sitcoms both among the audience and within the BBC (which binned both Not Going Out and After You’ve Gone this year despite both shows having a relatively strong following, proven by the fact that the former received a last-minute reprieve).

The misfiring remake Reggie Perrin, starring Martin Clunes, shared little with its Leonard Rossiter-helmed precursor, bar the lead character’s name, and found itself caught between two stools; the show had to be retooled to suit modern times and tastes, but also had to include numerous throwbacks to the original to keep Perrin purists happy. Any attempt to trade off the goodwill of the older show was offset by the baggage of having to live up to the forebear. Though original writer David Nobbs was on board, the programme could quite easily have been made without him and with a different lead character. Whether it would have been, of course, is another story. The Amanda Holden-starring Big Top also proved a dire misfire. Commissioned, its rumoured, as “the new ‘Allo ‘Allo” this ensemble comedy boasted a great cast, but terrible scripts and flat, static action… curious considering the show’s circus setting.

Staying in sitcomland, the return of Red Dwarf was one of the more unlikely TV stories of the year – perhaps the decade. And yet, it proved to be exactly the right commission for Dave, part of UKTV’s portfolio of channels exploiting the BBC’s back catalogue of programming. Here, they took the strategy a step further, breathing new life into a much-loved but long dormant franchise, and were rewarded with stellar ratings as a result (over two million tuned in). The three-part story itself was patchy, although perhaps better than we could have reasonably expected. Co-creator Doug Naylor sensibly junked most of the innovations introduced during the show’s final series (the return of the Red Dwarf crew in particular), but over-reached himself in producing a hugely self-reflexive tale which felt more like a tribute to the show than a continuation of it. Many of the production team worked on the revival purely out of goodwill. Now it’s been recommissioned for a full run (sadly, rumours abound of a return for Duane Dibley) it would be interesting to know how those working relationships develop.

BBC2′s Psychoville was a new show from Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith, two of the creators of The League of Gentlemen. Dark, grisly and very funny it was certainly a worthy successor and was such a hit that it is coming back for both a one-off special and another full series. Krod Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire also appeared on BBC2, but was rather less impressive. An odd hybrid of British and American actors and a lack of real laugh-out-loud moment made for a poor piece of comedy.

As is now becoming familiar, Channel 4′s output in this genre was a complete waste of time. Two of the Comedy Showcase pilots from last time, Plus One and Free Agents, were spun off into series, but both suffered from utterly repellent characters in predicaments that were impossible to care about. Looking at the new run of Comedy Showcase, the idea of likeable leads seems to have gone out with analogue television, reaching a new low when two consecutive episodes – Camous and PhoneShop – featured unpleasant white men speaking in patois.

One of the stars of PhoneShop, Emma Fryer, also wrote and appeared in Home Time on BBC2, playing a virtually identical character – a dull, unpleasant and irritating individual. In 2009 Michael Palin argued that new talent no longer enjoys the kind of freedom bestowed back in the day on the Pythons, but watching the rise of both Fryer and Dan Clark, writer, star and director of the appalling How Not To Live Your Life, you could argue that the more people out there trying to stop them, the better.

Miranda was much better and served up a surprise smash hit for BBC2, pulling in around five million viewers a week over its two showings. This was a thoroughly likeable and endearing series that had nothing to do with real life and only existed to make people laugh – the “You Have Been Watching” sequence at the end summing up its unpretentious, old-fashioned approach. It’s questionable as to how long Miranda’s relentless cheerfulness can last before it grates, but this was perhaps the most impressive debut of the year.

ITV1 continued its more traditional approach to sit-com with Mumbai Calling. An awful comedy, it had apparently been made in 2007, but finally made its debut after being found down the back of a filing cabinet by somebody at ITV towers. Quite frankly they should have left if there.  Office-based sitcom Lunch Monkeys had its moments but suffered from – yes – unlikeable characters and inevitable comparison to similar shows set in a workplace environment, while Off The Hook was a poor BBC Switch-backed attempt to clone E4 hit The Inbetweeners (to the extent that it starred James Buckley, also one of The Inbetweeners‘ regular cast); but with its Saturday lunchtime replay in mind, Off The Hook was never able to capture the edgier end of the teen experience in the way E4′s post-watershed show could.

ITV2 followed 2008′s No Heroics by dusting off long-forgotten 2006 Channel 4 Comedy Lab one-off, FM, and turning it into a series. This radio-station sitcom – starring The IT Crowd‘s Kevin O’Dowd and current C4 golden boy Kevin Bishop – was able to use its setting as a basis to invite real-world pop and rock stars into the storyline. The show suffered, however, from poor visibility as the reality-led ITV2 is not seen by the audience as a key supplier of comedy output.

Moving away from sitcoms and onto sketch shows, The Impressions Show was a lively mainstream affair that featured more hits than misses, with Debra Stephenson proving a revelation. Channel 4′s patchy TNT Show did at least demonstrate the station was still willing to hand slots to largely untried talent.  However, the best sketch show by some distance in 2009 was BBC4′s Cowards.  Based on a Radio 4 series, it featured skits that sat just the right distance between “humorous” and “unusual”, with sketches diverse enough to be distinctive, but recognisable enough to be funny. More would be welcome.

Al Murray’s Multiple Personality Disorder was a spectacular misfire from the creator of the Pub Landlord. Despite trying to branch out with new characters, the series featured little in the way of humour and some dreadful characters, including a terrible camp Nazi.  Mathew Horne and James Corden’s reappearance on BBC3 (which had successfully incubated Gavin and Stacey) in the shape of sketch show Horne and Corden was a disaster on a similar scale. The duo received a hurricane of criticism, although much of it seemed to be because TV critics wanted to put the boot into James Corden for being boisterous at award ceremonies. Mathew Horne later said the criticism was unfair as the show was aimed at a specific youth audience and wasn’t supposed to be the new Gavin and Stacey, which was a fair point. What it didn’t excuse though, was the fact a lot of the material was massively underwritten and relied purely on Horne and Corden’s relentless mugging. The two are fine performers but they need other writers to provide more satisfying material.

But BBC3 wasn’t a complete laugh-free zone.  Two of its best shows of the year appeared solely as one-offs. Silent comedy Ketch! & HIRO-PON Get It On, screened in February, gave rare airtime to mime; while Vidiotic, one of a group of pilots shunted out silently and unpromoted in a middle-of-the-night slot around March (see also Brave Young Men) featured a mix of specially-filmed skits and repurposed archive content, blended together into a strange, surreal but enjoyable alternative view of the world.

2009 was a big year for stand up.  Stewart Lee’s long-awaited return to TV after staging Jerry Springer: The Opera came with a satirical new BBC series. Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle rolled in with some finely-formed barbs at modern life, delivered in a freeform style now rarely seen on TV (“I’m just going up the Zavvi, mum!”). However it was BBC1′s large arena stand up shows Michael MacIntyre’s Comedy Roadshow and Live At The Apollo that garnered the larger audiences, particularly when transmitted on Saturday nights, which was quite a novel move for the channel.

Transferring from Radio 4 to BBC4, I’ve Never Seen Star Wars was an unexpected pleasure as some of the Corporation’s talent establishment (and oddly David Davis) lined up to be taken through their cultural blind spots by Marcus Brigstocke.  Though none of them admitted to not having seen the film in the title, it was certainly entertaining to witness John Humphrey’s cooing over Michael Jackson’s Thriller, Esther Ranzen (returning from a spot on the radio version) discovering Alien, and the joy of watching Hugh Dennis nibble on road kill.  Unflappable through most of the series and on serious form when required, even Brigstocke seemed genuinely moved when he had to reveal that the legendary Nigel Havers had received a potentially career-changing tattoo for his little show; there were plenty of surprising moments on television this year but none of them were quite like Dr Tom Latimer revealing the silhouette of a scorpion permanently printed on his upper arm.

Also coming from radio, Dave Gorman transferred his quirky series Genius to BBC2, shot through with a genuinely entertaining and witty presentation (“…and here’s that address again in red”), the show encouraged creative thinking and good humour, and would therefore be very welcome back on our screens. We Need Answers was a transition from a stage show, but its quirky, witty, deliberately low-budget roustabout concept just about worked. It’s Only A Theory, meanwhile, used humour (from Andy Hamilton and Reginald D Hunter) to analyse a range of scientific and cultural theorems, some more serious than others.

Onto TV comedy’s seemingly most ubiquitous form – the panel show. QI returned, and with a vengeance: the sixth series, originally due for autumn 2008 transmission on BBC2/BBC4 was shunted into early 2009 to run on its new BBC1 home. The channel then began the seventh series at the end of the year, which due to its expanded length will spill into early 2010. Fry, Davies and guests continued to be interesting and entertaining throughout.

Dave continued its successful Argumental, a series which has clearly grown in confidence from the warm reception for the first run.  The show’s prominence was underlined late in 2009 when the BBC bought a clutch of episodes – a rare move for a UKTV commission (though not, as some reports had it, completely unprecedented).

The worst panel show of all though, remains Mock The Week. Sold as satire, it’s simply a bunch of people shouting abuse, with gifted comedians such as Frank Skinner and David Mitchell having their well-crafted gags interrupted by Andy Parsons and Russell Howard shouting out hackneyed old rubbish about Charles Kennedy being drunk and Gordon Brown having one eye. Most of the gags were so lazy and predictable it could have been filmed any week of the year. Sadly too, Frankie Boyle, the only regular participant who can actually craft and deliver a joke, had every gag followed by the rest of the panel expressing mock outrage, killing the humour stone dead, despite everyone else doing equally tasteless material, only with relentless mugging to ensure we like them.

Entertainment

One of the year’s heavily-promoted launches, the Graham Norton-fronted Totally Saturday, flopped massively on BBC1, making it the second such shiny-floor catastrophe in recent years (Johnny & Denise: Passport to Paradise being the other). Although Totally Saturday wasn’t the car crash some suggested – it was at least competently made – the obvious problem was most of the features were interchangable with those that turn up every week on Saturday Night Takeaway, just not as well produced. The item where members of the public had to dress up as giant Scrabble tiles was a case in point: Norton seemed embarrassed asking the contestants to do it, they were embarrassed at having to do it and hence it was embarrassing to watch. Despite attempts to recapture the success of Noel’s House Party, viewers no longer warm to this format. It would be a shame if Saturdays consisted solely of song-and-dance shows designed to fill the Cowell/Lloyd-Webber coffers, but ratings suggest this is what viewers currently want.

Jonathan Ross returned to our screens but, even if he had cut down on the swearing, the fact remained that Friday Night… was a bad show to begin with, and Ross is a poor interviewer. This was never better illustrated than during the interview with David Mitchell, in which our host had clearly only read one thing about him – a newspaper interview which emphasised his rather modest flat. Ross simply asked: “Have you got a telly? Have you got a computer? Have you got a mobile phone? Have you got an iPod?” for five painful minutes.

Justin Lee Collins and Alan Carr departed the Sunday Night Project and launched separate chat shows, C4′s Alan Carr: Chatty Man and ITV2′s Justin Lee Collins Show; however, neither is a Parkinson-level inquisitor, and it appears the serious talk show remains out of favour in preference for those where the host is able to spar with guests in a more sparky, sarky manner.

Piers Morgan did at least attempt to bring back to our screens a more conventional version of the format, but Piers Morgan’s Life Stories clearly suffered from a lack of decent guests – after all does a primetime audience really care about the life and times of Vinnie Jones?  Still, for Morgan it didn’t really matter if a particular series didn’t work as there would be another along in a minute, such was ITV1′s confidence in his pulling power, Morgan was all over the channel in 2009. This was, of course, thanks wholly to his involvement in Britain’s Got Talent, which along with The X Factor continue to pull in enormous ratings.  It was a particular surprise in relation to the latter show which seems to have been going through the motions for the last couple of years.  Certainly, the quality of the participants has, if anything, gone down and you have to assume that this year’s winner, Joe McElderry, is going to seriously struggle to sustain a long term career as a recording artiste.  David Sneddon, anyone?

However, it seems the sheer scale of The X Factor is enough to pull in the audience. Sadly, Strictly Come Dancing suffered from abysmal press this year, despite the fact that this so-called “ailing”, “disastrous” series was still pulling in over nine million viewers, putting it comfortably in the top 10 ratings every single week. The bad publicity generated regarding Strictly‘s scheduling clash with the aforementioned X Factor was absurd when, as the BBC pointed out, the two series had been shown simultaneously on 40 previous occasions.

The low point of the entire year was the Sunday Mirror‘s front page the day after the first show being devoted to the “news” that Alesha was a flop – based purely on the views of a dozen jealous teenage girls posting on DigitalSpy. The press are now swallowing the ITV1 press office’s stuff completely, hence the complete lack of coverage when the channel cynically scheduled Coronation Street against EastEnders in November. That said, the Strictly line-up this year was rather dull – weren’t we promised Richard and Judy?

Sport

Sky Sports has been the provider of Live England Cricket series in the UK for the last couple of years, and it was good to see in 2009 it hadn’t rested on its laurels. Bringing in Shane Warne as a guest commentator for The Ashes was a genius move – funny, astute and articulate, he provided an interesting foil to David “Bumble” Lloyd and company and enjoyed a great rapport with his co-commentators. The coverage was punctuated with some fabulous documentary sections during the intervals, which evocatively traced the history of the Ashes.

ITV1′s most public mistake this year was missing the winning goal in Everton versus Liverpool, which clearly wasn’t ITV Sport’s fault – it was an automation cock-up – but allowed everyone to criticise the company, especially as many still believed the FA should have awarded the FA Cup contract to the BBC anyway. In the event, the FA Cup proved to be a disappointment for the channel with a succession of low ratings. In addition, the station had been forced to give up the rights to covering F1 racing in order to afford the Champions League, only to be saddled with a dreadful contract with far fewer games and an obligation to show matches such as Panathinaikos vs Atletico Madrid on primetime ITV1, (resulting in one of the channel’s lowest ever audiences).

Setanta Sports closed down in 2009, but its demise was regarded a self-inflicted failure after the station’s desperate attempts to ape Sky and splash the cash on contracts of quantity, rather than quality. As they always had second choice in deals, they were never going to be able to compete. The arrival of ESPN has been rather quiet, emphasised by its FA deal, where the station haggled over the price for months, clearly preferring to get value ahead of huge slabs of content. ESPN’s undoubted big triumph though, is getting Sky on side, commissioning them to produce their programming and sell the channel, well aware most football fans have to purchase both anyway.

In conclusion…

So all in all, 2009 has been an unspectacular year for television, thanks in part to the impact of the recession on TV budgets.  Perhaps the worst channel of the year was Channel 4. Julian Bellamy, Head of Programming, complained their rivals were completely lacking in originality, while simultaneously poaching Ruth Watson and Heston Blumenthal to do exactly the same shows they were doing on other channels. It was good to see Wife Swap finally get the chop, about three years too late, but do we really have to see every single episode of Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares USA? One or two might be a novelty but an entire 16-part series is a waste of time.

Quite possibly one of the most surprising moves in television this year was the bizarre decision by ITV1 to axe established favourites such as Heartbeart, The Royal and Kingdom. Sunday night gentle family fare they may be, but all three shows pulled in huge numbers and were solid, dependable series. Officially Heartbeat and The Royal were said to be “on hiatus”, but the sets for the shows were destroyed and the cast moved on to other work. Meanwhile a more predictable, but no less disappointing announcement was the cancellation of The South Bank Show.

Craziest channel of the year was undoubtedly STV, which in 2009 jettisoned many of ITV1′s most popular programmes from its schedules (including The Bill), in favour of broadcasting extremely cheap, home grown fare.  Apparently it was all to do with economics.  Still, The Hour, a risible 60-minute daytime magazine show which looked like absolute rubbish was, by the end of the year, triumphantly winning its slot in Scotland, trouncing even the BBC’s powerhouse of daytime quizzes.

This year we lost – amongs others  – Jade Goody, Keith Floyd, Mollie Sugden, Wendy Richard, Maggie Jones and Troy Kennedy Martin.  A bizarre line up consisting of battle-axes, eccentrics, a 21st century celeb and a true TV giant.  If anything their collective obituaries speak to the continuing diversity and quality of television in this country.  Whether it be applauding at the hem of Susan Boyle, or tuning in to experience Waldemar Januszczak’s latest small screen essay, TV in 2009 could at least rightfully claim it featured something for everyone.

“This is the latest ridiculous decision by the BBC – proof that something is going wrong at the broadcaster”. Is it someone swearing again, or BBC Worldwide getting too involved in commercial activities? Of course not – it’s about Strictly vs X Factor.

What a pointless dicussion this has become, but Hunt isn’t the only one who’s been lured in to commenting on it (although he’s definitely the one who should be most ashamed of himself, as you’d think he had more important things to discuss). Here comes national speaker of common sense and, it appears, Controller of ITV Simon Cowell, who under the not-at-all-melodramatic headline ‘The BBC has let Britain down’ writes in The Sun to say, “I’m happy to chair a meeting with someone from the BBC and someone from ITV and I genuinely think we can solve this within twenty minutes.” Thank God Simon’s here to sort things out. And for shame, here’s Declan Donnelly, who you’d hope would have the wit and perspective not to treat some scheduling issue as the end of the BBC, making an almighty leap of logic by suggesting, “This whole  business is sickening… the BBC are supposed to be a public service broadcaster and I don’t see much of the public service going on at the moment, which is a real shame.” That’s exactly what it is, Dec. Because Strictly has replaced Panorama and all news bulletins and… oh, hang on. No it hasn’t.

What a shame Dec has fallen for some shameless ITV spinning. It looks like the BBC is being blamed for all of this, when nobody’s pointed out that in previous weeks, The X Factor has begun at 7pm. This week, it was abruptly moved to 8pm, where the clash with Strictly has therefore become more pronounced. This is, of course, the same ITV that’s so concerned about what’s best for the viewer that it spent much of the last two years scheduling Emmerdale up against EastEnders every single week.

The Beeb have rightly pointed out that the two shows have actually gone up against each other on forty previous occasions. Sadly, because they didn’t do it last year, ITV have now been able to get away with muder because they don’t think anyone’s boring and pedantic enough to remember this, let alone go through old listings and point this out. But there’s nobody more boring and pedantic than me, so let’s take a look at some Saturday nights from 2005…

Saturday 22nd October – Strictly 6.15pm, The X Factor 6.15pm

Saturday 29th October – Strictly 6.35pm, The X Factor 6.15pm

Saturday 5th November – Strictly 6.35pm, The X Factor 6.15pm

Saturday 11th November – Strictly 6.20pm, The X Factor 6.50pm

Then we can also look at 2006…

Saturday 14th October – Strictly 5.50pm, The X Factor 5.50pm

Saturday 21st october – Strictly 5.45pm, The X Factor 5.45pm

Saturday 28th October – Strictly 5.40pm, The X Factor 5.45pm

Saturday 4th November – Strictly 5.45pm, The X Factor 5.45pm

And just to really hammer the point home, in 2007…

Saturday 6th October – Strictly 6.15pm, The X Factor 6.45pm

Saturday 20th October – Strictly 5.45pm, The X Factor 5.45pm

Saturday 27th October – Strictly 5.45pm, The X Factor 5.45pm

Now I don’t recall a grandstanding publicity-hungry MP feeling moved to comment on any of those occasions, possibly because ITV weren’t quite so desperate for ratings and publicity and feeding the papers a load of rubbish about the Beeb.

Regardless, the general point is that Strictly remains by far the better programme than The X Factor. For all the idea that Strictly‘s audience is elderly and boring compared to the hip young gunslingers watching ITV, Strictly is way more daring and innovative in terms of musical choices – they danced to the Kings of Leon on Friday night, after The Gossip and The Killers have been on the soundtrack in previous series, while The X Factor won’t feature anything that’s not on heavy rotation on Smooth FM. And in Brucie, we’ve got the most compelling and anarchic presenter on telly – whether it’s egging on the audience in an impromptu Vera Lynn singalong or repeating jokes (and letting the running order go to pot) until they get the laugh he feels they deserve, you can’t take your eyes off him. He really doesn’t give a toss. And, of course, he’s been in this business long enough to know that this type of scheduling war is not a new thing – what about when his Big Night went up against the Generation Game in 1978?

Funnily enough, The X Factor managed to beat Strictly in the ratings, after all ITV’s bleating, so what’s the betting we’ll see these arguments about “serving the public” quietly fade away over the next few weeks, and Cowell stop being quite so concerned about his mum, who apparently loves both?

Regardless of all the arguments, though, one thing is for certain – Jeremy Hunt is a complete idiot who has got far too much time on his hands and had been taken in by some complete guff from the ITV press office. Do some bloody work, man!

We weren’t to know then that it was to collapse into financial disarray less than two years later, but tuning into ESPN’s coverage of Everton vs Arsenal on Saturday teatime, you may have wondered if it had ever gone away. Jon Champion was in the commentary box, Rebecca Lowe was interviewing anyone she could grab and even the anthropomorphic Bet 365 letters were still jumping around their cartoon stadium before the ad breaks (no surprise, given everything in football now appears to be sponsored by betting companies). Yet this was always going to be the case – ESPN only landed the rights a matter of weeks ago, which is not much time to create a production team from scratch, and obviously there was an entire Setanta crew sitting around doing nothing. Indeed, alongside Champion, Setanta refugees Steve Bower and Jim Proudfoot have already turned up on ESPN voicing European football.

However the channel simply couldn’t produce Son Of Setanta, so there were some obvious changes. The most notable was in the anchor’s chair, where we met Ray Stubbs. The affable Merseysider is not, perhaps, the first person you’d think of to launch a new enterprise, thanks to his two decades or so as the Beeb’s jack-of-all-trades, but he brings professionalism and a no-nonsense approach to the coverage, and from its first match it seems that this is something ESPN are emphasising. The most obvious change was that rather than lounging around in open-necked shirts in an executive box, Stubbs and his guests were behind a formidable desk in a studio and had donned smart suits and ties. That’s surprising as in recent years both the BBC and ITV have moved towards a more smart casual closing policy (as did Setanta), and only Sky continued to enforce a more formal dress code, but the outfits seemed to point out that ESPN were a serious and professional outfit. Given the disaster of Setanta, that’s presumably something ESPN (and the Premier League) want to emphasise – these people know what they’re doing.

One of the best things about ESPN’s Premiership coverage is what they’re not doing. Coverage of Setanta’s Saturday teatime matches always began at 4pm, over an hour before kick-off, with the first hour interspersing the build-up with a rolling scores service. This was the worst of both worlds, though, as it meant the build-up was constantly interrupted and more often than not goals and major incidents came in the middle of a feature so they were always late announcing them anyway. ESPN have rightly taken the view that everyone who’s interested in the scores is watching Soccer Saturday so they don’t start their coverage until 5pm and, apart from a quick rundown of the scores at the start, concentrate entirely on the match in hand.

ESPN’s concentration on experience has also manifested itself in its choice of pundits, with Peter Reid and Ian Wright in the studio (obviously Wright didn’t wear a tie, but he did don a restrained dark jacket and shirt) and the veteran Joe Royle replacing the perennially pissed-off Craig Burley as Champion’s co-commentator. However ESPN haven’t yet installed any permanent pundits and, to my mind, they needn’t bother. Setanta almost always used Steve McManaman, Tim Sherwood and Les Ferdinand on all their matches, and seeing the same faces say exactly the same things every time made for boring build-up. A rotating panel of pundits isn’t a bad move at all, at least it’ll be a bit more interesting.

Similarly, ESPN haven’t yet commissioned any support programming for their Premier League output – they simply show the live games and that’s it. This could well be a side-effect of their frantic rush to get on air but Setanta’s magazine shows were never that interesting and added very little to the channel. In many ways it was a question of timing – the Beeb and Sky have nabbed all the decent timeslots, with Andy Gray’s Last Word analysis on Sunday teatimes and Match of the Day 2 on Sunday nights. By Monday night, when Setanta finally had the chance to run through Saturday’s goals again, we’d already seen them umpteen times and all the papers had had their say, and Setanta’s pundits rarely had anything more illuminating to add.

ESPN’s first match certainly had a memorable result, but was the actual coverage memorable? Well, the level of coverage demanded by the Premier League ensures that every match on television is filmed to the highest standards (and ESPN, eager not to break the bank like Setanta did, have farmed out their actual match coverage to Sky Sports anyway, thus guaranteeing quality) so there’s no problem there. The subdued red and black colour scheme is a bit easier on the eye than Setanta’s revolting bright yellow. Jon Champion’s as good as he’s always been. Rebecca Lowe is bright and intelligent in her interviews. And all the familiar aspects of a live football match are present and correct – forthcoming attractions are plugged every twenty minutes, there are unenlightening vox pops with the fans in the build-up as if anyone cares, and an actor, in this case Steven Berkoff, has been hired to recite a supposedly “stirring” monologue to accompany the montage at the start of the show. ESPN may be making their first steps in British football but there’s no deviation here from the well-worn Premier League template.

At the moment, ESPN simply haven’t had the time to think about anything but getting on air, but it could be said that this has been to the company’s benefit. Setanta desperately wanted to be Sky Sports, splashing the cash on rights of questionable value, aping their formats and presentation style to the letter and pretending its rivals didn’t exist. ESPN know that about 90% of its audience will be watching both channels, because if you want to see all the Premier League matches, you have to. It may be that, in the future, ESPN will dominate the UK sports television market as they do in the USA, but for now, as the signing of the unassuming Stubbs proves, they know their place.

Since Britain’s Got Talent pulled in eighteen million viewers the other week, everyone seems to be biding their time until The X Factor comes back. The current tedium is best exhibited with Totally Saturday on BBC1, a programme that exhibits all the originality its title would suggest – that is, none at all.

Totally Saturday is a completely generic Saturday night show, where stuff happens, yes, but it’s rarely very interesting and never seems to have much of a point. Punters are pulled out of the audience, games are played, pop stars sing and none of it sticks in your mind. Everything you’ve come to expect from Saturday night telly is here, and that’s the problem – you know exactly what’s going to happen and it’s not good enough to disguise its by-the-numbers conception.

The big flaw, I’m suggesting, with Totally Saturday is its lack of confidence – it simply doesn’t believe in what it’s doing. One of the games involves members of the public having to dress up as giant Scrabble letters and rearrange themselves into the answers to questions. Silliness is something that certainly has its place on Saturday nights, and on something like Hole In The Wall or Total Wipeout it works because everyone knows the concept is ridiculous, they accept it, and they launch into it with gusto. On Totally Saturday, though, nobody’s heart seems in it – the punters seem embarrassed having to do it, Graham seems embarrassed asking them and, therefore, you can’t help but feel embarrassed for everyone while watching it. In an attempt to keep a bit of dignity, this half-arsed approach at wackiness just makes it come out even more undignified.

Like Passport to Paradise, a similarly iffy Saturday night show, you could probably stick any of the items on Saturday Night Takeaway and they wouldn’t seem out of place, but Ant and Dec, and the production itself, has an enthusiasm and energy which can prop up the flimsiest of features, and they believe in what they’re doing. I don’t think you get that with Graham Norton, much as you didn’t with Johnny Vaughan, so everything falls flat.

People say that Saturday night telly is on the up these days, but outside the big guns – The X Factor, Strictly, Doctor Who – what else is there? Not much. It looks like if it’s not a variation on one of these three (see The One and Only, my vote for the worst show on BBC1 last year), nobody can be bothered. That’s why I thought I’d take advantage of the comments boxes by asking you what sort of light entertainment you’d like to see on a Saturday night. Has anyone got a winning format?

I’ve been thinking about this, and one of the things I’ve enjoyed most on Saturday nights recently has been the bits in Ant vs Dec in Takeaway where the boys have to learn how to be weathermen, or write a song in a week and perform it live. This can often be extremely amusing and maybe there’s something to be said for a series where celebs are challenged to put on a show or learn new skills? I suppose a similar idea is behind last year’s flop, Thank God You’re Here, but I reckon that show didn’t really work thanks to its fixed, rigid and rather boring format. If you had something like that, but broadcast live, a much looser format and a greater sense of messing around, it could work, I reckon.

Not enough of a spectacle? I’ve always been impressed by the level of creativity shown by the contributors to Adam and Joe’s 6 Music show, creating songs and videos and so forth, so let’s put that on the telly. Let’s get members of the public to write songs, perfom comedy sketches and so on, and we can all vote for them. To make it 360 degrees as all new formats should be, let’s give viewers a challenge - make a comedy film or write a song based on a topical story or something – then get them to upload it to the website, let visitors rate them and invite the best to create something new live on air. Why not invite some celebrities to join the teams as well to bring their talents to the mix and put them in an unusual situation?

OK, so this format’ll need a bit of work, we can thrash out the specifics in development – but it’s coming up with something different and getting the public involved in a creative way. But has anyone got any other formats they’d like to see over the beans on toast? The comments boxes are all yours…

Well, unfortunately for ITV, most people would suggest Everton’s winner against Liverpool being replaced by a Tic-Tacs advert, the coverage of Histon vs Leeds looking more like a ninety-minute documentary about raindrops and Portsmouth’s defeat by Swansea being filmed from a mole’s eye view. Of course, none of these are the fault of ITV Sport – they were caused by an automation cock-up, freak weather conditions and a condemned gantry at Fratton Park – but it’s not been a great way to launch into the new contract.

Their broadcast partners Setanta Sports haven’t really enjoyed huge success either, but you’d question the value of a deal like this for a pay channel. You’d get pay TV for the Premier League as it’s the only way you could see live Premier League football, but unless your team’s playing in one of Setanta’s live games, most fans would be happy enough with the ITV live matches and highlights shows.

However, Setanta are really pushing the boat out with their coverage of the final, with programming beginning at 9am! The idea is to bring back the fun and excitement of Cup Final Day, back when it was more or less the only live match on TV, and to this end they’ve even hired Saint and Greavsie to take part in the coverage. Exactly who’s so nostalgic they’ll sit through the whole six hours build-up, I’m not sure, but at least they’re making the effort.

So far ITV’s not promised much for their Cup Final coverage, with a more conventional 1pm start time and presumably, lots and lots of Andy Townsend. I can’t bear Townsend, who blatantly exhibits more naked ambition than an Apprentice contestant, and it doesn’t help that ITV use him on 99% of their live matches. The man’s clearly desperate to be promoted to the anchor’s chair, talking longer and louder than everyone else, and a worrying development in recent months has been that he no longer sits with the rest of the pundits in live games, but on the other side of the table alongside Steve Rider.

In Townsend’s mind, at least, this seems to suggest he’s now the co-host, giving him scope to talk even more, now taking it upon himself to interview the other pundits. Well, I say “interview”, instead he just talks and invites the others to agree with him. In the build-up to a recent game when Teddy Sheringham was a guest, he reviewed some footage of the players and said “D’you remember this, Ted?” so often he sounded like he was talking an elderly relative through some cine films.

When you watch Townsend in action you sometimes pine for the days when footballers knew their place and were incredibly ill-at-ease in front of the camera, never trying to upstage their hosts. So it was a treat to see the performance of the former Arsenal and Liverpool star Michael Thomas in his role of pundit on Setanta’s coverage of the FA Youth Cup Final on Friday night. Here was the old “I kicked the ball and there it was in the back of the net” approach to football punditry back in full effect.

Thomas got off to a flying start when he advised viewers that the FA Youth Cup Final “is a massive game, because it’s like the FA Cup Final for the youth team”. It’s exactly like that, Michael. That’s why it’s called the FA Youth Cup Final. When asked if the match would be a chance for the managers to see if the young players could cope with the pressure, he said, “Yes, because it’s a pressure situation and some players can’t cope”. Later, too, he talked about some of the Arsenal players who had gone out on loan this season, “like Gibbs who went to Norwich and, er, um, er, um, the other one at Burnley”.

Still, at least Thomas was enthusiastic, and it was something of a treat to see a fomer player who clearly hadn’t bothered with the media training, someone completely inarticulate. For my money this was just as nostalgic as the return of Saint and Greavsie. It’s often said that there’s too much football on television, and if Thomas can get punditry work, it’s probably right.

Thomas’ fellow pundit was Jason McAteer, a man who, when he arrived at Liverpool, announced his nickname at his old club was “Trigger”, as his team mates decided he was about as intelligent as the fanously slow-witted Only Fools and Horses character of the same name. However, Liverpool already had a “Trigger” in Rob Jones, so McAteer announced that he now wanted to be known as “Double Trigger”. Remarkably, on Friday night, he finally found a double act where he was the brains of the operation.

There was some excitement the other day when it was revealed E4 sitcom The Inbetweeners had managed to beat The Graham Norton Show on BBC2 in the ratings. To be honest, it’s not that surprising – Norton’s show is vaguely amusing but it’s the same format as So Graham Norton a decade ago, the guests on that episode were dull and BBC2 aren’t helping scheduling it after serious documentaries that are hardly the most suitable lead-in. The big question, though, is that if E4 can pull in huge (for them) audiences for comedy, where the hell is the comedy on C4?

How many home-grown comedy shows are being screened on prime time C4 this week? The answer is… none. Unless you count Chris Moyles’ Quiz Night. Which we won’t. That’s even less than ITV1. In fact with three months of the year gone, I can only think of three they’ve screened – the Peep Show-by-numbers Plus One, the irritating and unfunny Free Agents and the millionth series of The Sunday Night Project.

That’s hopeless, especially as C4′s Friday night used to be the stuff of legend. A decade or so ago you’d see US behemoths like Friends and Frasier and top British series like Father Ted. Okay, so some of it didn’t work (and I recall, for all the acclaim Spaced received, it was beaten by Ruth Rendell repeats on Channel 5 at the time), but the point was they were committed to comedy. Now look at Friday nights – at 9pm there’s Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares USA. Okay, so Ramsay is a big name for C4, but do we have to see all 13 episodes of this? Surely it’s of little relevance to the British audience? Show a couple as a novelty, maybe, but not the whole thing. Then at 10pm it’s a series of crap films like Date Movie. It’s as if they’ve just given up.

In fact C4 comedy, and Friday nights in particular, have been very poor for a while now. Andrew Newman, C4′s Head of Comedy, has just announced the axing of Tonightly, and with good grace is blaming “bloggers” for its failure. Definitely not because it wasn’t any good and was just a dreadful piece of satire-by-numbers, oh no. But even if Tonightly had been a hit and encouraged new talent, what would the channel have done with it?

Last year on Friday nights, C4 ran a series called New Heroes of Comedy, which in itself shows how poor the evening has got if they can run clip shows there (and they had the cheek to bill them as “Original comedy sponsored by Grolsch”). The idea, presumably, was to illustrate how the huge comedy stars of today have C4 to thank for their big break, but it felt more like an admission they didn’t become properly famous until they switched channels. Lucas and Walliams, for example, did stuff for iffy sketch shows like Barking for C4 but owe almost all their success to the Beeb (and they were doing Sir Bernard’s Stately Homes on BBC2 in 1999, a demeted series that nobody else would have risked) while Ricky Gervais is an even clearer cut case. All C4 found for him was a crap spoof chat show, so he went to the Beeb and made The Office.

The same is true of the current breed of comedy stars. Simon Amstell was on C4 for five years on Popworld but, other than a few derisory efforts on T4, they didn’t sem very interested in finding him anything else. Instead he quit, went to the BBC and is now a big star. Then there’s Harry Hill, of course, flung out at 11pm on C4 and now a prime time staple on ITV.

You could argue, though, that C4 shouldn’t be so concerned about that as their remit is to always look for the next big thing. Yet if that’s the case, how come they’re still allowing Peter Kay the opportunity to churn out his self-indulgent stuff, including devoting an hour to the making of the Amarillo video… four years later? Which was for the BBC anyway. How does Kay’s stuff fit in with their desire to innovate? And how come their big comedy name at the moment appears to be Jason Manford – basically, Peter Kay II?

In 2002, TJ Worthingon reviewed the first two decades of C4′s comedy and suggested, “the channel has always undergone peaks and troughs in comedy, and while this trough is worryingly deeper than any that it has undergone previously, hopefully the next peak will be just around the corner”. Six and a half years on, we’re still waiting.

Last year, The Big Match Revisited was a hugely welcome romp through the archives, where each week the football highlights 25 years to the week were unspooled, with all the contemporary news (“The Football Association are considering a bid to host the 1986 World Cup!”) and views (“Keith Burkinshaw slams three points for a win!”) intact. It wasn’t just The Big Match itself that came under the spotlight either – we also got Granada’s Match Time and, brilliantly, TVS’s Saturday Match during the course of the series.

For the new run we’re going back 30 years, taking us from the despair and despondency of mid-’80s football to the glory days of the 1970s, and the series began on New Year’s Day with what’s considered to be one of the finest football matches ever played – Manchested United 3, West Bromwich Albion 5 from 30 December 1978. If this were covered by the BBC, it would probably be one of the most famous matches ever and as familiar as the 1966 World Cup Final in terms of repeats, but because ITV have never been very interested in exploiting their football archive, it remains a rare treat.

One of the few occasions it’s been dug out in the past was a decade ago when it was screened as part of the similiar Big Match Replayed that used to run in the middle of the night. Then, it was as edited highlights seen on LWT, but this time, ITV4 dug out the original Kick Off Match show from Granada with extended highlights. As well as commentating on the match (and his “Oooooh, what a goooooal!” for Albion’s fifth is one of the great commentary moments), Gerald Sinstadt also presented the show, in front of a brilliantly cheap set which looked like he was perched in a photo booth. His links were also accompanied by the sort of ambient noise which suggested it had been flung up in a corridor.

As usual, though, it wasn’t just the football action that entertained, but the detrius that surrounded it. Gerald apologised that because the main match was so fantastic, they could only show a few minutes of the other game. A brief two-minute summary of the action from Arsenal helped remind us, at a time when fans of Premiership clubs complain when their team is featured last on Match of the Day, there was an era when you’d be grateful to see any footage of your team at all.

Finally Gerald rounded up the highlights of 1978 on The Kick Off Match, with Everton beating Coventry on a pitch with the left side completely obliterated by snow (as if the groundsman couldn’t be bothered clearing it all and asked the teams to try and play down the right if they could), and Bolton’s manager looking shattered as his team went up. He stood in the dressing room next to a bloke making the tea wearing a tracksuit emblazoned with “CAMBRIAN SOFT DRINKS”. It’s ironic that while shirt sponsorship was a no-no on telly at the time, this guy got away with branding less subtle than anything you get now.

All topped off with the most demented theme tune you’ll ever hear, as ever this was ace from start to finish. The series should be continuing, hopefully continuing to cherry-pick across the regions, every Thursday lunchtime until the spring, and it’ll be absolutely fantastic.

Drama

As ever, but perhaps surprisingly this year given the hand of Michael Grade at the tiller, ITV1 enjoyed a mixed 12 months in drama. Its bold adaptation of He Kills Coppers back in Easter ended up as a fusion of The Long Firm and Our Friends in the North, with Rafe Spall excelling as ambitious police officer Frank Taylor. Meanwhile, The Children, by Lucy Gannon and starring Kevin Whately and Geraldine Somerville, superbly evoked the messiness of extended families – but lost points for bolting a superfluous murder story onto the plot.

Midnight Man was even less successful, an old school conspiracy thriller starring James Nesbitt as down-at-heel investigative journalist Max Raban, who suffered from a phobia of daylight… except when the plot required him not to. In a multi-layered tale, he stumbled upon a seemingly government-sponsored death squad taking out ‘undesirables’ – but, alas, the character archetypes offered up here were so hackneyed (grubby reporter; soulless millionaire – played by Alan Dale; aggrieved ex-wife etc) it was hard to get involved.

Things were even worse in Flood, a bland US co-production of the disaster porn variety, which depicted a deluged London. Of a slumming-it cast – including David Suchet, Robert Carlyle and Joanne Whalley – Sir Tom Courtenay stood out for his appallingly phoned-in performance. Bafflingly bad. On a descending scale, we then come to the aforementioned Rock Rivals, clearly fitted out by Shed Productions as a “guilty pleasure”, this dramatisation of an X-Factor-style competition did little favours for leads Michelle Collins and Sean Gallagher who seemed uncomfortable in their respective Sharon Osbourne and Simon Cowell roles. With neither character displaying an ounce of likeability, viewers voted to watch something else instead – however this same subject would prove more fertile ground for Peter Kay later in the year. 

Britannia High, a modern day reworking of Fame, was commendable in the scale of its ambition (a live finale, a spin-off album masterminded by Gary Barlow, an online radio station), but lamentable in terms of plot and characterisation – both horribly hackneyed and clichéd, and it too ultimately suffered at the hands of a viewer vote to watch anything else instead.

But these relative failures have nothing on Harley Street, another of ITV1′s vehicles for Suranne Jones, which saw the former Coronation Street star playing a dynamic private doctor, struggling with a cut-glass accent. The show, some sort of weird throwback to the ’80s avarice-dramas, seemed woefully out of step with its bland sorties into the world of the over-indulged. Even its efforts to intersperse some working-class grit into the mix were misguided: Dr Robert Fielding (Paul Nicholls) a northern lad who loves his parents, turns in night shifts at the local NHS hospital just so he’s keeping it ‘real’. Laughable. If ever a series was designed to be unloved, this was it. Although BBC execs were doubtlessly grateful it showed up on the tail of Bonekickers to take some of the heat off that stinker.

Of course, the BBC suffered its fair share of failures – with the aforementioned Bonekickers leading the pack. From the creative team who brought us Life on Mars, starting with the show’s name upwards, here was perhaps the most misconceived drama of the year. Presented as some kind of Time Team meets Indiana Jones in Bath, the series was forever battling with a remit to make archaeology sexy and essayed Scooby Doo plots, appallingly clichéd characterisation (Hugh Bonneville’s lascivious, eccentrically attired and textbook-spouting Prof ‘Dolly’ Parton being the worst offender) and some jaw dropping dialogue (“Identify yourself, creepy caller!”).  It’s little wonder the press gleefully bundled in to kick the whole concept to pieces, and unsurprisingly ratings sunk with each passing episode, rising only slightly for the final instalment.  The BBC and Kudos later announced Bonekickers won’t be excavated for a second series.

Thankfully, Matthew Graham and Ashley Pharoah’s Ashes to Ashes performed rather better, even though it had the unenviable – and some might say unwise – task of following on from Life on Mars. While the show’s creators insisted they wouldn’t have gone ahead with this sequel if a strong idea hadn’t presented itself, it’s kind of hard to know what that was, other than setting the drama in 1981 (and, interestingly, we’ll be shunting forwards a year for the second series). In truth, this felt like more of the same. 

Keeley Hawes as the central character of Alex Drake was unpopular with some, but perhaps this had more to do with the character, rather than Hawes’ performance.  A greater problem was the tension existing between the series’ core genres, cop show and fantasy, failed to cohere.  There were too many appearances from the clown and not enough clarity in the detective work.  These different strands rarely overlapped making it – at times – an irritating programme to watch as your attention was cast hither and thither. 

The first series concluded with an attempt to tinker with the show’s central premise by having Drake  recollect meeting Gene Hunt in “real life” when she was a child.  However, given we are being led to believe Alex has created the fictional world in which the drama takes place, isn’t the most likely explanation of her meet up with the Gene Genie simply to assume her imagination is retrofitting Hunt into her memory?  Regardless of this psychological conundrum, it seems clear Ashes to Ashes will never be a premier league proposition, but like stablemates Hustle (set to return in revamped form in January) and Spooks, it’s good, solid entertainment. 

Speaking of which, Spooks now on its seventh series, seemed to benefit from the real-life Litvinenko affair, with the Russians once again (alongside Muslim extremists), the enemies of freedom. The show even spawned a spin-off series that was broadcast on BBC3. Spooks: Code 9 was set in the near future following a nuclear attack that had wiped out the south of England, and was patently aimed at a much younger audience than its progenitor. Unfortunately like much of recent BBC sci-fi, it suffered from a premise that worked at the level of high concept, but fell apart when it hit the ground.

Other drama franchises proved to be in sound health. Doctor Who appeared for its fourth series, and the last one to feature David Tennant as the Doctor. This year’s episodes were a mixed bunch, with ‘Planet of the Ood’ and ‘The Doctor’s Daughter’ both betraying a sense of running low on fresh ideas.  Catherine Tate’s casting as the companion wasn’t particularly well received among fans but she seemed to win around a lot of people with her performance. The series is now well-placed for a major reboot come 2010, and hopefully a slight change of focus away from the Earth-bound stories and the family of the companion.

Who‘s spin-off show, The Sarah Jane Adventures returned for a 10-part series, and featured a change in the main cast with the departure of Maria. Anji Mohindra took the role of new kid Rani and was an immediate improvement on her predecessor. One of the best stories of the run was ‘The Day of the Clown’ which featured an superbly sinister performance by one-time light entertainment star Bradley Walsh. Conversely, one of the poorest stories this year was ‘Secrets of the Stars’ which featured a rotten turn by one-time light entertainment star Russ Abbott. 

Meanwhile Torchwood remained the Doctor Who spin-off that still doesn’t know what it wants to be. It’s clear there is a decent, entertaining series buried somewhere, but it is hidden beneath layers of silliness and crude sexual innuendo. Hopefully, the forthcoming third series (which will be stripped across a week early next year) can resolve some of these now longstanding problems.

Back to the parent show and while the finale to this year’s Doctor Who was over-laden with characters and under-endowed with plot, it achieved a first for the series by securing the number one position in the viewing charts for its week of transmission. Winter Saturday nights, meanwhile, were pepped up no end by Merlin a show that was obviously designed as a seat-warmer for the Time Lord, but was entertaining in a light and fluffy sort of way, even if things did get a bit samey with an evil sorcerer turning up at Camelot most weeks. The show would have benefited from taking the action away from the castle a little more often.

Starting in the winter, Survivors marked yet another sci-fi comeback, and remained entertaining viewing. The opening episode did a fairly good job of updating the premise for a modern audience, and the new characters seemed to fit in quite well. You could see the show owed a debit of inspiration to Spooks with the killing off of an apparently important player in the first episode. Our band of heroes are, in the main, engaging – Max Beesley particularly impressive as the amoral Tom Price. And come the series finale, was Paterson Joseph really being written out so he’d be free to take on the mantle in that other sci-fi comeback?

But there were some flaws. Insights into a secret government lab added little to the drama; wouldn’t it have been more exciting if their presence had only been signified by occasional sightings of the lone helicopter? Worse still, the issue of law and order (a highlight from the original series) was horribly fumbled. The idea of the group struggling to take communal responsibility for justice was simply swept aside when a government representative took the decision to enforce a death sentence upon a criminal. In this post apocalyptic world, we can still rely on the authorities to do our dirty work. And, dramatically, that’s a wasted opportunity

Remaining on a fantastical tip, Apparitions starred Martin Shaw as a zealous exorcist. A ratings failure, chances of the show’s resurrection look poor, and that’s a great shame. A fusion of mad plots (women possessed by the spirits of aborted babies, a sex offender battling the spirit of the patron saint of rape victims) and utmost seriousness, this was an unusually rich – and often times – shocking offering.

Another debuting series was the ambitious Echo Beach / Moving Wallpaper from ITV1. A clever idea in principle, the pair of series were set on opposite sites of a television production: one looking at the making of a soap, the other – the soap itself. Unfortunately for ITV1, and despite having some big names behind the two shows, the public never really took to the idea and the soapy half of the pair – Echo Beach – was axed. The characters from Moving Wallpaper are set to be retained, but this time there will be no companion show, just an ‘in-house’ zombie thriller featuring Kelly Brook.

The Royal Today was a much more successful product from ITV1. Running daily, this half-hour spin-off from The Royal capitalised on the success of the BBC’s Doctors. Other new series in 2008 included The Invisibles on BBC1 in May.  This was a drama starring Anthony Head and Warren Clarke as two burglars. It was as entertaining as you would expect of a show from the pen of William Ivory, but evidently ratings were not good enough, and so it was cancelled after a solitary run. 

Elsewhere, the Corporation attempted a couple of high concept thrillers. Neither proved terribly effective. The Last Enemy starred Benedict Cumberbatch as a researcher who returns to the UK to find a country cowed under the tyranny of excessive government surveillance. Ponderous and pretentious it may have been, but sporting a giant talking computer as a central macguffin, suddenly it all looked a bit silly. Meanwhile, Burn Up boasted Rupert Penry-Jones along with Bradley Whitford and Neve Campbell in a clunky eco-thriller which failed to convince in its tale of an oil magnate who suddenly develops a conscience. It didn’t help the script felt like it was written some time circa 1987.

But 2008 did give us some huge drama hits. As well as regulars such as Silent Witness (which had two series this year), Foyle’s War, Poirot and New Tricks, there were also a number of other popular series returning for second runs following successful launches last year. Kingdom, the Norfolk-set Stephen Fry television equivalent of Horlicks was back on ITV1, nestled snugly in the Sunday evening schedules. Inspector Morse spin-off Lewis was also back, with the promise of a further run for 2009.

Game shows

While the drama genre seemed to be in rude health (judging by the number of series broadcast if nothing else), 2008 was a quieter year for game shows.  Gladiators returned with much hoopla to the (newly rebranded) Sky1. Although this was an impressively confident production, it lacked the ‘ITV hysteria’ of the original run, depicting the Glads as characterless lunks in black. A second series, however, is on its way, so here’s hoping there’s a bit more comic book on offer.

Celebrity MasterChef and MasterChef: The Professionals proved that Shine’s TV cookery show could do just about anything. The former brought us one of the TV moments of the year, as Holby City‘s Mark Moraghan cracked under the oh-so pervasive pressure and told Marcus Wareing to “shove it up your fucking arse” before fleeing the kitchens of Petrus. The latter brought a formidable new presence to the world of the TV chef – Michel Roux Jr. In his first continuous onscreen role, he proved pleasingly taciturn, offering up mealy-mouthed compliments that somehow invigorated that blandest of all platitudes: Good. “I find the fish good” or “The flavours… are good.”

While Masterchef graduated from daytime to primetime, Channel 4′s culinary contest Come Dine With Me did likewise, but to less pleasing effect.  Somehow the format seemed perfect at five 30-minute episodes a week, and the shift to hour-long weekly shows (with the consequent reduction of dinner party hosts from five to four) stripped the programme of much of its indefinable sizzle. 

Far better was Argumental which was that rarest of things – a digital channel commission that actually felt like proper telly. This production for Dave not only had the good fortune to employ John Sergeant as host just as his Strictly storyline was coming to fruition, but in its debating format employed a simple structure that felt as though it had been around for years. Honestly, you could stick this on BBC2 and no-one would know…

Back at Channel 4 again, and if you’d been away from the UK for a decade and returned this summer, you would have been staggered to hear of the bitching and backstabbing behind the scenes on Countdown.  It seems ever since Richard Whiteley passed away, the series has been all at sea – which is amazing given that a large part of Whiteley’s appeal was his obvious inability to gain mastery over the format.  Meanwhile, erstwhile presenter Des Lynam’s performance on Sport Mastermind proved what a terrible quizmaster he is.  Seeing the man who was once the ultimate unflappable TV host stare at the camera like a rabbit in the headlights and stumble through his script was horrifying.

However, 2008 was perhaps the first year in a while in which a game show failed to really grip the public imagination. Deal or No Deal is still trundling along nicely for C4, while BBC1′s National Lottery: Who Dares Wins returned for a second run and consolidated itself as the show with a format so good even Nick Knowles couldn’t ruin it.  BBC4 again attempted a highbrow quiz, but where previous entrants had failed because they were just too smug, Only Connect worked pretty well (although we could without the self-consciously cerebral music stings next series please).

Factual

2008 for some reason seemed to be the year of the television travelogue. Louis Theroux appeared in a couple more specials in which he set out to seek out oddballs in Louis Theroux: Behind Bars and Louis Theroux’s African Hunting Holiday. He also reappeared in November and December with a double bill on law and order in Philadelphia and Johannesburg. Joanna Lumley got to fulfil a childhood ambition and went to see the Northern Lights. We also had an intriguing series in which Jonathan Dimbleby travelled across Russia in… Jonathan Dimbleby’s Russia. Until now he has never really come across as being the most personable of chaps, but his sojourn across this vast nation was fascinating and presented him in quite a different light.

Charley Boorman’s made his third big journey in By Any Means for BBC2 in September. In contrast to the previous series, this time it all felt very rushed, with a number of places covered only briefly as Charley, his producer and cameraman attempted to journey from Ireland to Australia using as many different modes of transport as possible.

Over on Five, Paul Merton was off to India, and while this is the sort of programme the channel should make more of, it was difficult to escape the feeling it all felt a little familiar. Merton does make for an affable host, and it is to be hoped he can continue his association with Five. Meanwhile, fellow comic Stephen Fry’s sojourn across America was a worthwhile attempt to cover the whole country in a single series. Unfortunately, while Fry was as good as ever, the problem with this series was that it was just too short. Covering 50 states in six shows was a massive task.

Animal and human welfare was also on the TV menu this year. Jamie Oliver’s latest crusades covered both chickens and people, with Jamie’s Fowl Dinners and Jamie’s Ministry of Food. In the former Oliver attempted to bring to attention the plight of the nation’s battery hens, while, in the latter, he tried to educate people who can’t or won’t cook. Laudable as his attempts were, he attracted considerable flack from the press for seemingly targeting working-class people and portraying them as lazy uneducated slobs. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall also studied the battery hen problem in Hugh’s Chicken Run (appearing in the same month as Jamie’s Fowl Dinners), and despite seemingly managing to convert some to the joys of free-range, its hard to escape the feeling most have probably already reverted to buying the cheaper supermarket product and TV dinners.

Fearnley-Whittingstall popped up again in River Cottage Spring and River Cottage Autumn. Also cooking on the television this year was Delia Smith with her series Cooking for Cheats, in which we could all learn how to prepare tinned mince.  Meanwhile, Stefan Gates took another tour of the world’s most dangerous spots in Cooking in the Danger Zone, while The Supersizers Go… saw Sue Perkins and Giles Coren experience food from a variety of historical periods. Meanwhile Gordon Ramsay at last found himself a half-decent magazine show format with Gordon Ramsay: Cookalong Live.  Not great, but a million miles better than The F Word.

Away from the hotplate, this was the year Ruth Watson checked out of her Kitchen Nightmares inspired series on Five, The Hotel Inspector, to helm a, er, Kitchen Nightmares inspired series on C4 – Country House Rescue (fact fans might like to note Ramsay’s show bore the working title Restaurant Rescue). Essentially more of the same, Watson continued to prove she was the quintessence of “redoubtable”, gleefully effing and jeffing when property owners failed to take her advice on board. Meanwhile, back on Five, firebrand Alex Polizzi proved a more than adequate successor, as The Hotel Inspector continued journeying around Britain’s most horrible hostelries.

A surprise pleasure this year was BBC2′s variously scheduled Return to… documentaries, which revisited the Corporation’s slew of docu-soaps from the turn of the century. Celebrating the likes of Castaway, Vets in Practise, The Cruise and – surely the most forgotten of the lot – Lakesiders, this was a good humoured exercise, surprisingly candid at times as various proponents admitted to manipulating either the programme-makers, or the subjects to their own ends.

Other standout factual programmes of the year included Life in Cold Blood - David Attenborough’s last natural history series for the BBC; Channel 4′s Can’t Read, Can’t Write  - in which award-winning educator Phil Beadle attempted to teach adults basic literacy; Griff Rhys Jones on Anger, which saw a seemingly mild-mannered comedian-cum-presenter demonstrating he can blow his stack as easily as the rest of us; and Ian Hislop Goes off the Rails – a programme examining the impact of Doctor Beeching’s railway reforms. Hislop also helmed a documentary exploring the role of conscientious objectors during the World War I.

Sticking with the theme of war, Laurence Rees returned with another excellent series covering the events from the 1930s to the 1940s in World War II: Behind Closed Doors. Worth a look too was a show tucked away on Five featuring a celebrity who seemed to be everywhere just a couple of years ago: Dom Joly’s The Complainers. Here, Joly looked at the trials and tribulations of modern life and set out to investigate just why so few people are prepared to complain when they have suffered an injustice. It wasn’t all serious though, as was witnessed by his encounter with an irate man in a café who he had spoken of as a “beardy-weirdy lesbian type”  in a segment showing how annoying mobile phones can be.

As already pointed out by Charlie Brooker, 2008 was the year of the personality documentary and Dawn Goes Lesbian was perhaps the absolute personification of this trend.  Journalist Dawn Porter made a series of programmes for the constantly struggling BBC3 in which she tried out an alternative lifestyle.  This was essentially Bruce Parry’s Tribe for the Hampstead set, with London’s gay scene instead of the Babongo.  Over the course of an hour we watched Porter become the very best of friends with a Fenella Woolgar look-a-like who she ultimately spent the night with, afterwards stressing both parties kept their pyjamas on.  Much of the programme was issue-led (there’s abuse in lesbian relationships too etc), but at times Porter seemed not quite up to the task of taking on the issues.  This became more apparent in her C4 documentary on mail order brides.  Here, instead of trying to get to grips with the subject in hand, she spent more time letting the viewer know which of the men smelt the worst.

Far, far better programming came in the form of BBC4′s Pop, What Is It Good For?  Paul Morley offered up a list of his favourite songs of all time, explaining why and interviewing the people who made them.  Although he can come across as a rather cynical figure, faced with his heroes, you really saw Morley’s passion and the esteem in which he holds their music. 

Comedy

Things started badly for TV comedy in 2008, with ITV1′s Paul Merton-fronted series Thank God You’re Here. Based on an Australian show, it involved celebrities having to improvise their way around a comedic scenario that would always begin with the eponymous phrase. Merton seemed slightly out of place here and the standard of humour frankly wasn’t that high.

Far better from ITV1 was TV Burp, which enjoyed two series in 2008, one starting in January and a mammoth 25-part run that commenced in October. TV Burp has long been the most entertaining thing on the box, but you have to wonder how they are going to maintain the quality and laughs in the show over a six-month span. Too much burping could well result in viewers feeling sick.

The Kevin Bishop Show appeared on Channel 4 in July and was faster than The Fast Show in its presentation of sketches. Some of Bishop’s impressions were perhaps less than perfect, but he displayed enough promise to probably guarantee a further series, even though he was guilty (as is much of recent television comedy aimed at “the kids”) of taking unchecked juvenilia too far.  It might be amusing to refer to “Wanking The Dead” in a pub chat about telly, but surely in the process of making Bishop up as Trevor Eve and finding a corpse for him to masturbate, the ‘joke’ starts to pall.

Old-timers Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse were back on BBC1 this year with another batch of shows. Ruddy Hell, It’s Harry and Paul was distinctly patchy, but the re-titled Harry and Paul showcased some of the best stuff the pair has done for years. Little Britain USA, on the other hand presented a series that looked increasingly tired and past its sell-by date. 

February brought us another run of That Mitchell and Webb Look that followed on more or less from where it had left off. Also returning for the umpteenth time was Mock the Week, a show that looks like it might be good but is always unfailingly disappointing.  Meanwhile, 8 Out Of 10 Cats always feels like it’s going to be terrible – awful set, appalling title sequence, a guest booking policy that seems to be no more sophisticated than get who was funny on Buzzcocks last week, appalling editing that renders half the show inaudible – but it always turns out to be good fun, thanks no doubt to Sean Lock, the best panel game participant in Britain. Nobody, even Paul Merton in his prime, is as good at going off on tangents and gently mocking the sheer pointlessness of news-based satire.

In sitcoms, Sunshine was a three-part BBC series from the pen of Craig Cash and Phil Mealey, starring Steve Coogan. Never quite sure what it wanted to be, the show was diverting enough, but had a tendency at times to be overly mawkish and sickeningly sweet. An unexpected and largely unnoticed sitcom was far better. Tucked away on E4 was The Inbetweeners – a series about a group of sixth formers in a comprehensive school married filthy humour with four excellent leads. Pleasingly, there is going to be a second term.

As good as The Inbetweeners was, perhaps the best sitcom of the year was Gavin and Stacey. As Henry Normal pointed out – there are loads of scenes when everyone’s laughing but nobody’s the butt of the joke – a refreshing approach. The sequence where the entire family got fantastically over-excited over Gavin’s dad’s (three-second) appearance on the news was probably the best portrayal of family life on TV since the early days of The Royle Family. We’ll put aside memories of that horribly disappointing Christmas special, though, and hope for the best when the recently announced third series rolls around.

Conversely, quite possibly the least funny sitcom that has ever been broadcast appeared in March, and it starred Adrian Edmonson. Teenage Kicks – which had been sat on ITV1′s shelves for several months – featured the former Young One as a father who had been forced to move in with his two kids. It was appalling. This was a show that made jokes about ‘comedy’ Chinese accents. Better from the channel was the second series of Benidorm which featured a terrific performance from cast newcomer Geoffrey Hutchings as the perma-tanned tanning salon king Mel. A third run has been commissioned for 2009.

In the main though, there were too many sitcoms in 2008 that dispensed with a laugh track and served up naturalism in place of jokes. Step forward both The Visit and The Cup, the latter being the third sitcom in a year to feature Steve Edge acting gormless. How many more times must people try and remake Phoenix Nights? Northern whimsy is not in itself hilarious – most of these were no more edgy than Last of the Summer Wine.

Of course, were Peter Kay to do anything as good as Phoenix Nights again we’d be happy. Sadly it was almost impossible to judge Britain’s Got the Pop Factor… with an open mind as the man hasn’t done anything for four years except mime to other people’s records and release the same DVD over and over again. The sheer scale of this one-off Channel 4 comedy spectacular was a big problem.  Running for two hours may have been accurate, but it meant jokes were stretched to breaking point. Once you’ve seen one inappropriate musical segue, you’ve seen them all. Plus, surely we have now bled dry that seam of comedy that sees celebrities sending themselves up? Here it was like one prolonged back slap, and while it may make sense of the plot to record a generic song for the winner, singing it three times on the programme and then releasing it is not comedy, it’s advertising.

Soaps

On paper there were two soap highlights this year, Dot’s monologue in EastEnders and the death of Vera Duckworth in Coronation Street.  Yet neither event plucked at the heart strings as quite they should.  In fact, given its rich and long history, the death of a beloved character on the Street should be a major event, however, Vera’s demise joins that of Mike Baldwin in somehow failing to be affecting at all – and all this from the same soap that was able to render us senseless with despair simply through Hilda Odgen fumbling with a pair of Stan Ogden’s specs. 

If they’ve lost the ability to do the quiet emotional moments well, 2008 was also the year in which soap set-pieces failed to feel extraordinary.  The early part of the year was punctuated in Coronation Street by David Platt continuing his reign of evil, at one point going on a violent rampage around the street before redeeming himself in the eyes of his mother and grandmother following a spell in a young offender’s institute. A long lost face from the past returned to the street when ’60s character Jed Stone found himself subject to the machinations of the show’s latest hate-figure Tony Gordon.

EastEnders’ big story was the return of Ricky and Bianca and the latter’s numerous offspring. It was also the year in which Frank Butcher passed away, albeit off-screen. Charlie Brooks returned in the role of Janine for the funeral, with a more permanent homecoming later in the year.  The Branning family were paid a visit by Jim too, following his stroke (and that of John Bardon who plays him). Bardon’s appearance was quite something, really, and considering he didn’t utter a line he still managed to convey every aspect of the script that had been written for him. Further turmoil came for Dot with the long-awaited return of her son Nick at the end of the year. It’ll be interesting to see how long he sticks around this time, and how his relationship with his mother will develop.

Elsewhere, the police force were abolished in Holby. Or rather, Holby/Blue was axed following a disappointing showing. Meanwhile, the BBC announced that as part of its regional strategy, Holby City hospital would in future be filmed in Cardiff rather than Bristol. Quite what the wisdom of this is was difficult to discern, given that Cardiff is only 49 miles down the road from Bristol.  It seems like a whole load of unnecessary fuss and trouble for little reward.

Perhaps the most significant event to happen in soapland, was scheduling, as Emmerdale and Coronation Street were moved off Sundays and into midweek slots. Their departure made Sundays, normally ITV1′s best night of the week, seem weak with mediocre light entertainment formats such as Beat the Star brought in as replacements. In addition, weeknights on ITV1 have become terribly crowded and monotonous. With The Bill and Tonight taking up space, the only primetime weekday slot left to try something new in is 9pm to 10pm.

2008 may be regarded in the future as something of watershed, as soaps could no longer rely on securing the number one slots in the ratings – Doctor Who, Britain’s Got Talent, The X-Factor, The Apprentice and even New Tricks topped the charts this year, while nobody seemed to care that EastEnders and Emmerdale now clash every week, thus halving their audience.  In fact, Emmerdale only pulls in a million more viewers than The One Show.

Entertainment

Family entertainment was the hot ticket for telly in 2008.  The X-Factor enjoyed a particularly strong series, despite its many devices to inject tension having now long passed into self-parody.  Similarly, John Sergeant and a last-minute vote pull ensured Strictly Come Dancing remained prominent in the public eye, which in this type of show is all for the good.  Britain’s Got Talent excelled earlier in the year, in no small part thanks to the excellence of Ant and Dec.  Unlike the aforementioned X-Factor and Strictly, Britain’s Got Talent‘s big problem is the acts featured seldom bare seeing more than once. As such brevity is the key here, and ITV1 wisely refused to turn the whole thing into a protracted series, instead bundling it out in late-spring so that we weren’t too bored of the finalists by the time the finale came around. 

While those established talent formats endured, 2008 demonstrated that any new talent shows are going to struggle.  In particular The One and Only typified everything wrong with current television, simply taking a well-worn format and trying to apply it to a new group of contestants, in this case tribute acts. Not only did this do nothing that Stars in their Eyes hadn’t already done with a great deal more humour, but it was also made by the people behind Fame Academy and followed that show’s (tedious) format to the letter, right down to the contestants voting each other off in the presence of Carrie and David Grant. It was also ridiculous to offer a residency in Las Vegas as a prize and then put a Robbie Williams tribute act in there, given the man is a complete unknown in America.  Last Choir Standing later on in the year at least gave us some nice music to listen to, but similarly failed to ignite widespread public interest. 

That show was co-presented by Nick Knowles and Myleene Klass, but seemingly every other series of this kind shown on the BBC in 2008 was presided over by Graham Norton. There are many things the man can do but unfortunately he remains completely useless at trying to sound sincere or reading from an autocue – the two basic requirements for a Saturday night light entertainment host. After The One and Only, he fronted I’d Do Anything, a slightly more entertaining outfit.  However, when you string all these shows together along with Strictly, it adds up to about nine months of the BBC1 Saturday schedule offering slight variations of the same format.

Amusement of a more traditional kind came in the form of For One Night Only, an ITV1 entertainment extravaganza, and probably the most explicit sign of the return of the aforementioned Michael Grade.   This was followed up at Christmas by one-off specials featuring Take That and Girls Aloud.  Both stuck rigidly to the chat and songs format established way back in the 1960s and ’70s when the likes of Cliff Richards and Lulu essayed similar fare across the screens, and both were far better for it.  Such throwaway extravaganzas are exactly the kind of programming ITV1 should be making.

Contrary to various reports, Big Brother didn’t flirt perilously with failure in 2008, rather it has now settled into a groove, and although its days of massive ratings and column inches may well be over, the latest series demonstrated there is still a sizeable core of viewers willing to tune in.  Of course it didn’t help it all ended with a massive anti-climax this year, with the victory of the deadly dull Rachel. Still the series as a whole was okay and far better than Big Brother: Celebrity Hijack.

I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! also felt a little less remarkable, although Ant and Dec’s chat is getting pleasingly ever more ribald.  Not a vintage outing, but plenty to warm the hearts of those who watched it (not least the friendship that developed between Joe Swash and George Takei – perhaps this year’s most heart-warming relationship).

In conclusion…

2008 has been a year of controversy, and no one generated more hot air than Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand for their now infamous radio broadcast.  In the resulting furore, Ross pulled out of presenting the British Comedy Awards and it’ll be interesting to see what form his chat show takes when it returns in the New Year.  Perhaps the most telling thing about this whole business for him is that it illustrated how absolutely desperate he is to hang around with any fashionable comedian going, a la Gervais. If he was still knocking about with Rowland Rivron none of this would have happened.

Of course we all remember the resultant media fallout, the low point of which was Emily Maitlis reading out Mock the Week jokes about the Queen’s pussy on Newsnight.  The papers were therefore bound to be on red alert for any future indiscretions and the ubiquitous John Barrowman provided them with some more fodder when he supposedly exposed himself while giving a BBC radio interview.

Happier times were remembered as Blue Peter celebrated its 50th Anniversary with a number of special programmes. Two new presenters were introduced at the same time, with the relatively new Andy finding himself as the senior face on the show. Hopefully the mooted move to Salford won’t be of detriment to the series, given that it seems to be finding its feet again following the slump it suffered in the wake of the Richard Marson resignation. Meanwhile in children’s telly Grange Hill fizzled out and came to an end after 30 years, the last episode featuring another return appearance from Todd Carty as Tucker.

On digital, the UKTV channels underwent the start of a rebranding process, with each of them getting bizarre new names, despite for the most part showing more or less the same sort of programmes they had transmitted 1000s of times over the years. UKTV Gold, once a mighty force in archive programming, was renamed GOLD (Go On Laugh Daily) and now concentrates on cycling through the same old comedy programmes on a permanent basis. UKTV Drama became Alibi, with a remit to screen crime-based drama, while Watch was the replacement for UKTV Gold+1. This is where the once-mighty Richard and Judy fetched up after leaving Channel 4, although their attempt to crack the evening schedules failed, when they realised they wouldn’t ever topple the soaps.

And it won’t stop there: in 2009, UKTV People becomes Blighty, UK History becomes Yesterday and UKTV Documentary will transform into Eden. Bizarre names all of them, but Dave somehow seems to have caught on in the minds of the public – whether you like it or not it is certainly more memorable than UKTV G2.

BBC4 remained the best channel on TV. The Pop on Trial series in January led to some fascinating roundtable debates chaired by Stuart Maconie, supplemented by wonderful archive programming including complete episodes of Top of the Pops. In fact, BBC4′s archive stuff was always entertaining, with the likes of The Rolf Harris Show getting an airing. But surely the biggest surprise was the rerun of Washes Whiter, the 1990 series on the history of advertising. This was a bizarre repeat run, as most of the theories had been long disproved and the general points it made are now extremely out of date.  Nonetheless, it was a treat to see it again.

Sad news came with the death of comedy legend Geoffrey Perkins in a car accident. He wasn’t a household name by any means, but was involved in some of the most famous television comedy since the 1980s, as well as appearing on screen in a number of series. It would have been easy for this news to have slipped under the radar, but BBC2 duly showed a special edition of Comedy Connections as a tribute. Emmerdale lost its longest-serving cast member this year with the death of Clive ‘Jack Sugden’ Hornby. His passing marks the real end of the Sugden family in the series, with only his daughter Victoria, his ex-wife and adopted son now remaining.  Meanwhile for fans of Saturday night telly, the death of Jeremy Beadle in January was particularly sad news.

Of course, television in 2008 hasn’t just been about what’s flitted across the cathode ray tube in the last 12 months.  Indeed CRT televisions are starting to look a bit quaint, and the sight of one in the background of an aspirational ITV1 drama is a sure sign you’re watching a repeat.  If 2008 on screen has been rather unremarkable, it will perhaps be remembered as the year in which the telly became less a piece of furniture situated in the corner of your living room, and more a concept.  Increasing numbers are viewing television via watch again mediums such as the BBC’s iPlayer.  That’s not to say the TV schedule is to become a thing consigned wholly to the past.  For those weary of proactively deciding what they want to watch, good old fashioned telly will always be there for you to flick on, demanding nothing more of you than your idle attention, and that’s perhaps why the medium is, and will remain, so enthralling and powerful – even when there’s nothing much on.

Roll out the big font for a last minute announcement

With The X Factor reaching its conclusion, the penultimate Strictly Come Dancing was rather less exciting, especially as I’m not really interested in any of the remaining contestants. Yet it managed to come up with the most bizarre piece of television this year (apart from when Brucie opened last week’s show by asking of the contestants, “Are they human, or are they dancers?”). That’s because after the phone lines were opened, it was spotted that there was a big problem.

After the judges’ scores, Lisa Snowdon and Rachel Stevens tied for first place, so got three points each, while Tom Chambers came second and got one point. This meant that it was impossible for Tom to avoid the dance-off, as no matter how many votes he got from the public, he’d still only end up with four points and would always be beaten by at least one of the other contestants. Hence it was a waste of time and money voting for him.

This all meant that 10 minutes before the scheduled end of the show, all gathered on the stage to learn that there would be no dance-off and all three would go through, and the show ended. Brilliantly, this meant that BBC1 had to fill ten minutes of prime time television with nothing but a stack of trailers, including some shown twice. Of course, the fact nobody had a clue what was going on was absolutely brilliant, the schedule just fell apart due to a complete cock-up.

However – and the comments box is there if I’m wrong – I think that even if it wasn’t a tie, Tom would always have been in the dance-off. The most he could have got was four points (one from the judges, three from the public). If Lisa came second and got the lowest number of votes, she’d have got three points (two from the judges, one for the public) but in this instance, Rachel would have had to have got five points (three from the judges, two from the public) and Tom would still have been in the dance-off. If the first-placed contestant had the lowest number of votes, however, it would have meant all the contestants tying with four points. There was no way Tom could have finished top of the leader board.

Clearly, with the low number of points floating around, there was always the chance there could have been such a deadlock. It would have made more sense to use the public votes alone in such a situation. Of course, in these days of transparency of television, it was probably the right decision to abandon the elimination, but it could have been avoided.

It’s great to see, though, that however slick and expensive telly gets, it can still go very wrong. Still, Brucie was having a whale of a time, and you’ve got to love a show where the presenter can read out the time next week’s show is on, and shout “Ooh, that’s a better time, isn’t it?”

Blue Peter: 50th Anniversary Book

Most people will probably only recognise Richard Marson’s name from the newspaper reports on his departure as Blue Peter editor. Yet Marson has been known in media circles for far longer than that as something of a TV expert, spending many years writing for Doctor Who Magazine in the 80s and penning the authoritative book on the history of Upstairs Downstairs.

Indeed, Marson’s knowledge and appreciation of classic TV ensured that Blue Peter flourished under his watch, being relevant and entertaining for today’s kids while constantly paying tribute to its past. There’s nobody better, then, to tell the full story of this venerable series on a momentous occasion.

It’s about time Blue Peter enjoyed this sort of treatment. Previously all we had to go on was Biddy Baxter’s Inside Story book, published for the 30th anniversary, but while it was an entertaining read, it played somewhat fast and loose with the facts, while “quotes” from presenters were more or less entirely recycled from past Blue Peter Books, mostly written by Biddy herself. Here Marson brings an objective eye to proceedings and speaks honestly about the programme’s development, but his obvious love for the series shines through so there’s no muck-raking here.

Marson spent many years as Blue Peter‘s de facto archivist, so there’s plenty of previously unseen and unheard information. It certainly looks beautiful, a proper gift book, with plenty of previously unpublished photographs. The history of the show is interspersed with full profiles of all the presenters and special sections on the pets, books and appeals. You can read it all the way through or just dive straight to the presenters you grew up with; the sort of varied structure that’s seen the show itself flourish for a half century.

What sets the book apart from the rest, however, is in its detail. On almost any page there’s some previously unknown fact or fascinating behind-the-scenes snippet. It was certainly news to me, for example, that Lesley Judd was almost dismissed in the mid-’70s thanks to tabloids sniffing around her messy divorce to Derek Fowlds, with Sally James standing by to replace her, or that, remarkably, Kevin Whateley was second choice for Peter Duncan’s job. It’s the little things that most amuse, though – Chris Wenner reveals that he was let go because Biddy Baxter thought he didn’t get enough votes in the Swap Shop awards (“She told me Blue Peter presenters should come first”).

Of course, Marson’s closeness to the programme in recent years means that the past decade gets perhaps a larger share of the book than many readers would expect, but in this writer’s opinion, the series was on fantastic form under the likes of Matt Baker and Simon Thomas, and it’s great to see it get the credit it deserves. This democratic approach is much more welcome than filling the entire book with John, Pete and Val and relegating everyone else – all of whom are surely fondly remembered by someone – to a mere footnote.

The book does end on something of a sour note with Marson, understandably, attempting to justify the phone-in scandal that cost him his job. Yet it couldn’t really be covered any other way, and the other “scandals” over the year – Bacon, Ellis and Sundin among them – are dealt with in a refreshingly frank manner.

Anyone who’s ever opened a Blue Peter book (never an annual, as Marson points out) on Christmas Day or collected something for an appeal will find something to enjoy here. It’s undoubtedly one of the most thoughtful and entertaining books on television history you’ll ever read. And don’t forget, if you can’t afford it, you could always ask at your local library… 

… or enter our competition to win a copy of Blue Peter: 50th Anniversary Book – The Story of Television’s Longest-running Children’s Programme by Richard Marson