The Late Show With David Letterman

While the scribbling of eulogies for ITV Digital gathers pace, over on ITV2 schedulers continue to squeeze apart repeats of Emmerdale and The Farmer Wants a Wife to make room for America’s most high-profile and expensive quintuple-bypass patient. Read more

When Louis Met… Keith Harris and Orville

Another week, another victim. Well, not so much a victim, more of a contented, co-operating dupe rather than the sacrificial lambs we’ve been presented with in the not so distant past. Read more

Tinsel Town

You have to hand it to BBC Scotland. Just when it seemed that they would let their public down by producing an interesting and experimental series in their current Gruth is Uachdar (a period drama adaptation in a mix of Gaelic and English, beautifully filmed in Harris) they reassert their place as the principal purveyors of awfulness to the people of Scotland by coming up with another series of Tinsel Town. Read more

2001 TV Moments

Celebrity audience. Two words guaranteed to strike fear and terror into the heart of this viewer. I break into a cold sweat at the thought of yet another self-indulgent love in featuring the luminaries of the small screen. Still, it was Saturday night and, with the liberal ingestion of copious amounts of alcohol, I had reduced my fear and loathing into a mild contempt. Read more

The Trench

The practice of dropping meticulously ordinary people into exaggeratedly extraordinary situations just doesn’t make good television anymore. Read more

When Louis Met… Chris

The current run of When Louis Met… whilst as entertaining as ever, has progressed into a mordant battle of wills between our erstwhile host, still deploying his bumbling sixth form shtick, and his increasingly media savvy guests. Read more

Strange

For me, Strange shoots itself in the foot from the off. Featuring a reclusive curly-haired investigator accompanied by a straight-talking female sidekick and coming from the pen of one half of Whoops Apocalypse‘s writing team this is so squarely positioned asJonathan Creek II that I’m forced to draw the comparison before the programme even starts. Unfortunately it’s a comparison that buries Strange. Read more

Friday Night With Jonathan Ross

Just when we most expected it Jonathan has returned with a second series of his BBC chat show. But there’s been no overture of publicity this time, and barely a mention on his companion Radio 2 show, other than to assure listeners it would be “fun”and “good”. A boldly noncommittal promise to be sure, but it was one that, if fulfilled, would at least have meant an advance on the sum of the first series. Read more

Jonathan Dimbleby

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a government minister with bad fortune must be in search of a scapegoat. But it was the good fortune yesterday of all those who chanced upon the Jonathan Dimbleby show to see the government minister in question searching for the scapegoat utterly humiliate himself, and betray any lingering doubts in the minds of even the most committed of New Labour apparatchiks and apologists that this governments raison d’être is based almost exclusively on the subtext of style over substance and presented in the language of spin over truth. Read more

The Brit Awards 2002

In the same way that Ian Hislop watches Have I Got News For You to see which of his bits have been cut out between recording and transmission, TV coverage of the Brit Awards invites viewing of a similar before-and-after mentality. Read more

Masters of Darkness: Rasputin, The Devil in the Flesh

Before I sat down to watch this Channel 4 documentary, my knowledge of Rasputin was scant. In fact, this is all I knew: he was “The Mad Monk”, he had a beard and – according to Boney M, always a reliable source – he was “Russia’s greatest love machine”. Read more

Pop Idol

A review of the final of Pop Idol somehow doesn’t seem appropriate. Better instead to bring together for a final time, the rumours and the trivia; and to confer once again on the relative merits of the contestants’ performances. Read more

Another Audience With Ken Dodd

Quite a few years ago now I saw Ken Dodd’s Laughter Show at the Pavilion Theatre in Glasgow and enjoyed it immensely. Then in 1995 I saw An Audience With Ken Doddon ITV and enjoyed that hugely too. So as I settled down to watch Another Audience With Ken Dodd last Saturday night I had high hopes. Happiness was on its way and a pleasant diversion from the incessant fixed grins of Gareth and Will and their pop pap. Unfortunately ’twas not to be. Read more

Smallpox 2002: Silent Weapon

In the months leading up to Christmas, I’d noticed some changes in the office. My colleagues in charge of opening the post were no longer there. As I ventured out during the morning coffee run, I would see them creeping furtively along the corridor wearing pairs of sinister rubber gloves. “What are those for?” I enquired. “Oh, Anthrax.” Read more

Eden

It’s unfortunate that Channel 4′s new “reality” show has turned up in the schedules so soon after its last one ended. Read more

Footballers’ Wives

That history can be rewritten is hardly news. After all, both recent Bloody Sunday dramatisations positively revelled in their obviously liberal agit-prop agendas. Hollywood also revels in rewriting history, whether it be America winning the war (any war) single-handedly or whole swathes of actuality being conveniently ignored. Read more

Conspiracy

One consequence of the recent resurgence in historical-based factual television has been the ubiquity of the dramatic reconstruction. Read more

SMTV:Live

It’s always tough trying to follow popular presenters on a TV series, as the producers ofThis Morning would no doubt tell you. How many chancers filled the gap between Chris Evans and Johnny Vaughan on The Big Breakfast? Who now remembers Emma Ledden and Steve Wilson’s brief stint on Live & Kicking? Why did anyone think Chris Wenner would be an equally adept follow-up for John Noakes on Blue Peter? Read more

Shoestring

Originally aired in 1979/80 Shoestring‘s current repeat on terrestrial TV is indeed “another welcome chance to see”. With UK Gold seemingly ditching all but the highest profile and most saleable archive programming from its schedules and concentrating instead on rerunning series that finished their terrestrial runs mere weeks ago, (cf. Linda Green) it’s especially heartening to see a hitherto underexposed “classic” like this back on our screens. Read more

Sex Life

After Taboo, BBC2 looks ready to set the switchboards red hot with complaints from affronted viewers about Sex Life, particularly the first instalment: “Kids”. Perched in the 10pm slot on a Sunday night, this documentary promised us a look at the growing knowledge that British kids have of sex. Read more

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