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

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

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

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

2001

Another 12 months on, and still Who Wants to be a Millionaire is one of ITV’s biggest successes. Read more

Dream Team

I like Dream Team. There, I’ve gone and said it now. My guilty secret is out. And do you know what? I don’t really care what the soap purists think. The way I look at it, if you’re going to ask people to suspend disbelief, then you might as well go for it on a scale of Brazil circa 1970 proportions rather than the Leeds-under-Revie extent so peculiarly propagated by the likes of EastEnders and Corrie. Read more

Malcolm in the Middle

After a long wait, the second family of American dysfunctionalism finally returned to our screens, albeit on Sky One. Whilst comparisons to Homer, Marge and their brood are inevitable only in the minds of lazy slag writers, the hearts of viewers have long regarded Malcolm in the Middle as something considerably more than a live action version of The Simpsons. Read more

Space

With a boom of celestial proportions, the much-vaunted Space, fronted by the redoubtable Sam Neill, began on Sunday evening. Read more

Big Brother’s Little Brother

The enduring pleasure of Big Brother’s Little Brother is the belligerently unsubtle way in which each evictee has been thrust onto our screens for five days, Sunday through to Thursday, thus reducing the compelling urge that most of them appear to suffer from – that a high profile media career awaits. Read more

The Champion’s League Final

In the 10 years since the advent of Sky and their subsequent domination of domestic football coverage, much has changed in the football landscape. With Match of the Day going into effective, perhaps even permanent, cold storage, the onus is now on ITV to provide some form of resistance, however diluted, to the mighty Sky machine. Read more

I Love 1982

Before sitting down to watch this programme, I made a conscious effort to recall 1982 as best I could. What did 1982 mean to me? What could my faltering memory recollect? Read more

Gillette Soccer Saturday

Given the hand wringing, wailing and general gnashing of teeth over Sky Sports plundering of traditional televised sporting events from ITV and (especially) BBC, it is refreshingly ironic that their flagship programme, Gillette Soccer Saturday, centres solely on football. With the demise of World of Sport and the reduction of Grandstand to a cruel parody of its former self, the battle for the hearts and minds of committed Saturday afternoon sports viewers has been fought for, and won, by Sky. Read more

Trouble at the Big Top

That the Millennium Dome turned out to be arguably the most controversial construction project in the nation’s history is hardly surprising. The warning signs were there in the pre-construction phase and, from inception onwards, this has been one of the longest running and compellingly watchable tragi-comedy shows of the ’90s. Read more

The X Files

Well we finally got that episode of The X Files almost a year after its original transmission in the States and the predictable question is, was it worth it? Read more

Malcolm in the Middle

So there’s this new American family comedy. Its central character is a gifted child from a dysfunctional family – throw in a black kid in a wheelchair, a right-on teacher, girlfriend problems and a whole host of other clichés. Serve up with the proclamation that it’s a live action version of The Simpsons from the same network who gave us Ally McBeal. Read more

Pokémon

One of life’s great cliches is that you know you’re old when you start complaining to your kids about the bleddin’ orrible racket coming from Top of the Pops. Read more

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