Election coverage – week two

When Baldrick stood for election in the constituency of Dunny-on-the-Wold, his campaign manager Edmund Blackadder proposed a strategy to win that focused wholly on “issues, rather than personalities”. It helped that the entire population of this rotten borough were three rather mangy cows, a dachshund named Colin and a small hen in its late 40s, but as Blackadder and a bewigged 18th century Vincent Hanna discovered, the strategy paid off. 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

People Like Us

How many new ways are there to satirise the suppressed longings and ritualised comforts of suburban or provincial lives? It’s a perennially popular target of television comedy but the profile of a vicar which opened John Morton’s People Like Us gained ample fresh mileage from well trodden territory. Read more

Election coverage – week one

It’s the end of the first full week of the TV election campaign. Read more

The 100 Greatest TV Characters

As a purveyor of fine TV criticism I felt duty bound to lend my watching support to Channel 4′s latest Bank Holiday compartmentalisation of popular culture. Read more