Jekyll

A creature of dangerous unpredictability has returned to our screens. A person of hidden debauchery, of masked wantonness, of hitherto unexceptional virtues suddenly and dramatically revealed to possess capacity for unspeakable acts of irresponsibility. Read more

Any Dream Will Do

You pays your money and you likes it or lumps it. Read more

Election 2007

There is bad weather in the Western Isles. On Newsnight, “Radio 2′s Jeremy Vine” (in the words of Jeremy Paxman) has just exhibited a blurred map of Britain flecked with indistinct multi-coloured blotches. Read more

Election ’92

Fame may deal an inconsistently fleeting hand to practitioners of TV and politics, but when both worlds collide you see stardom at its most ephemeral. Read more

Comic Relief Night

Like smoking, photos of journalists speaking into a telephone, and speeded-up footage of trains running from London to Brighton, Lenny Henry is something you don’t see much on TV anymore. Read more

Sky blues

My desk at work is opposite a TV which shows Sky News non-stop. I’ve always found it to be a grisly, unpleasant and hysterical channel, and if the sound weren’t turned down on the television set I’m not sure if I’d be able to make it through each day. Lately, though, it seems to have become not just bombastic but bizarre. Read more

Blair: The Inside Story

Much as how an entire generation of people grew up under Mrs Thatcher, so an entire generation has grown wise under the present prime minister. Read more

Party Animals

Programmes that purport to “lift the lid” on certain professions consider there is always something worth lifting the lid for. Read more

Calendar countdown – slight return

Now that Broadcast magazine has compiled the highest rating TV of 2006, it’s time to update OTT’s chart of the most watched programmes of the decade so far. Read more

“I’ve got no brief for this moment”

Someone has finally won £250,000 on Deal or No Deal?. Read more

This Life + 10

Almost without exception the press hated this belated Christmas present from BBC2. The depth of their fervour was inversely proportional to the height of expectation the self-same newspapers had whipped up prior to the programme’s transmission. Most critics sounded as if they had been let down by the show, and wrote as if they had somehow been betrayed for previously speaking out so positively. Read more

2006

Advancing years take away from us what we have inherited and give us what we have earned. Our relationship with television is a forever-burning example of this; the longer we feel we’ve hung around pouring our time and energy into watching it, the more we feel not merely blessed but actually owed an increasingly rarefied quality of enjoyment in return. Read more

Talking the Michael

If anyone can sort out ITV, Grade’s the man. There’s really nobody else. Well, there is, but when Greg Dyke was asked about it the other week he reckoned Pol Pot had more chance of getting the job. Read more

“We’ve got Carol Vorderman in here tonight!”

He’s no stranger to inheriting other people’s quiz shows, having stepped into the dapper shoes of Michael Miles for the 1990s revival of Take Your Pick. But does Des O’Connor have enough sartorial know-how to slip into the capricious cloak of Richard Whiteley, especially after his titular namesake found it impossible to wear such a garment for a little over 12 months? Read more

Countdown

By the look on Des’ face, you’d have thought someone had died. But no, it was just Countdown‘s 24th birthday, and as usual our man was doing his best to grace the occasion with a crisply-executed ill-suited response. Read more

Torchwood

In the same way big screen versions of stage musicals used to have professional vocalists “singing” the parts of the lead actors, so it might be advisable to have professional scribes employed to “write” the scripts of Russell T Davies. Read more

Prime Suspect

Bad weather follows Jane Tennison everywhere. Like the Douglas Adams character who blunders through a soggy existence unaware of his real status as a Rain God, and for whom precipitation was but a lumpen fact of existence, so Tennison has served her time in a near-continual downpour of dirty rain. Read more

Robin Hood

There’s an almost primal satisfaction in seeing a familiar face back on Saturday night television where they’ve always belonged. Read more

Perfect circle

I reckon the new BBC1 idents are absolutely smashing. Read more

Hollyoaks

Once upon a time this was the best soap on television. Once upon a time it was the only programme of its kind to successfully mix improbability and wit and come up with endlessly entertaining drama. Read more

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