You Can’t Take it With You

After the fun of Keith Chegwin’s genitals and locking people in a prison, comes one of Channel 5′s less well-publicised pieces of home-grown tat. And a rum one it is too. You Can’t Take It With You is C5′s answer to Antique’s Roadshow, but with a fraction of the time spent on it. Read more

Blackadder: Back and Forth

The worst bit comes first: meeting all the familiar characters – but in the present day, dressed for contemporary times, talking and behaving in a unsettlingly modern, up-to-date, way. This isn’t right – they all look too… ordinary. Read more

I Love 1979

Doesn’t it seem so long ago? No Big Brother, Saturday night television filled with singers and talent shows, cynicism over Britain’s Olympic hopes… yes, just marvel at how different the world was 10 weeks ago, before I Love the Seventies. Read more

Food and Drink

After the wacky antics of Ainsley’s Gourmet Express we enter the realms of a slightly more sedate Food and Drink. On air for more than 15 years it predates the current mantra “cookery is the new rock’n'roll” by some time. However has the presentation succumbed to the trendy gimmicks of its more recent rivals? We check out the freshness of Food and Drink. Read more

Olympic Grandstand

For most of us, the Olympic marathon refers not to athletes running 26 miles around Sydney, but the almost continuous coverage that’s going to be offered up by BBC Television over the next fortnight. With the games taking place on the other side of the world, and tickets being scarce, it’s probably the only way the vast majority of us are going to see any sport from Australia at all. Read more

Harry Enfield’s Brand Spanking New Show

On the BBC Harry Enfield’s programmes (in their various guises) always seemed like a slightly fusty, less imaginative version of The Fast Show. That’s ironic, of course, bearing in mind that The Fast Show is arguably a spin-off from Enfield’s programmes, however it cannot be denied that the offspring has supplanted the father in the annals of “credible” comedy. Read more

Scrapheap Challenge

Scrapheap Challenge is back. And this, the third series promises to be as good as the previous two. The challenge is for two teams to build machines, in 10 hours, out of junk (scavenged from a purpose-built scrap yard). Once built, the teams compete to determine the winner. Read more

SM:TV Live/CD:UK/S Club TV

SM:TV Live is the best Saturday morning show since Tiswas – and conceivably the best ever, anywhere. Read more

I Love 1978

In 1978, I was a mere two years old, having just learnt to read with the assistance of Lenny The Lion. It is therefore with some trepidation that I sit down to write this review as I have no authentic recollection of the political or pop-cultural reference points of that year but then again with I Love the Seventies that isn’t really required. Read more

Big Brother

Big Brother is all about mechanics – the mechanics of social interaction, the mechanics of popularity, and most importantly of all, the mechanics of television. This is, we are reminded, a television experiment. And yet, doesn’t there seem something obscene about the vast complicated machinery that has been employed to circle and provoke and record the tiny responses of the subject? Read more

The 100 Greatest Moments from TV Hell

People who hate lists, and hate making lists, especially lists of television programmes, must face shows like these in a state of utter despair. Their cries of pain at seeing TV history being cut-up, ripped out of context, ineptly sequenced and repackaged purely for superficial enjoyment sound like the lament of someone suffering from half a dozen sulphuric ulcers. Read more

I Love 1977

1977 was the year of my first dateable memory. Dressed up by my parents as a giant coin, I remember precariously making the short walk from our house to the local village fête. There – much to the delight of the enraptured parents – my siblings and I joined a procession of infants dressed in fanciful Jubilee related costumes. Read more

Big Brother

Big Brother is shutting down, the carpets are being rolled up, the beds stripped, the caretaker is standing by the back door jangling his keys. Read more

Cricket on 4

“Cricket – a game which the English, not being a spiritual people, have invented in order to give themselves some conception of Eternity” – Lord Mancroft Read more

I Love 1976

“Past tennis champions have included tough guys, posers, even homosexuals; but if the girls like Bjorn, he returns that compliment – with interest.” It’s a piece of dodgy film, voice-over by some eccentric Scandinavian reporter, showing one of icons of the ’70s jiving with some women in a seedy disco. Hooray, it’s I Love the Seventies again. Read more

Big Brother

“Anna and Mel turn into two loud-mouth fat slobs who spend their days in bed smoking and eating.” Read more

Hypotheticals

It’s late night television and the heat is off. Unencumbered from producing ratings winners, programme makers who occupy the twilight zone are able to kick back a little and construct more diverse and idiosyncratic television. It is customary for such programmes to either implicitly or explicitly recognise their position in the schedules. Read more

I Love 1975

Halfway through I Love the Seventies, and this strictly retrospective show clings to its common blueprint; a series of clip sequences comprising of various relevant and irrelevant people discussing particular trends or artefacts with popular recognition either born or reaching the height of their ubiquity in the year 1975, backed by occasional archive footage from contemporary sources. Read more

The Nazis: A Warning from History

Folks tuning in to watch I Love the Seventies a few minutes early the last few weeks will have seen one or all of the following: a black and white photograph of a shed full of executed peasant women; a line drawing recreating the image of a ditch the size of a field being filled with 10,000 dead bodies; film of a small stocky man with a moustache being cheered by half a million of his countryfolk as he led them to war; and the gates of a concentration camp, glinting in the afternoon sunlight. Read more

I Love 1975

Halfway through I Love the Seventies, and this strictly retrospective show clings to its common blueprint; a series of clip sequences comprising of various relevant and irrelevant people discussing particular trends or artefacts with popular recognition either born or reaching the height of their ubiquity in the year 1975, backed by occasional archive footage from contemporary sources. Read more

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