Details of The Events, which – despite press pointing towards Friday 11 September as the kick-off day, actually debuts with a short live broadcast on C4 on Wednesday 9 September – are still being kept under wraps. But before we speculate further, here’s that trailer…

So what do we know? The first episode, is the most intriguing; Brown stating “if it got out beforehand, we’d probably be stopped from doing it.” However, National Lottery-related iconography – and numbers – in the trail are hinting at some sort of Lotta-related stunt. Perhaps Derren’s hoping to get us all to bet on the same numbers.

Event #2 is shaping up to be a variant of a trick performed at his recent stage show, Enigma, where members of the audience were compelled to rise to their feet. Except, this time, he claims he’ll be causing viewers at home to become stuck to their sofa.

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The third Event is provisionally titled ‘How to Fool the CIA’, and is Brown’s take on the phenomenon of ‘remote viewing’, while the fourth… well, nothing’s been forthcoming on that.

“In the modern world of mass communication and big business,” says Brown, “simple tricks can be developed to make even the most secure of systems vulnerable when you know where to push.”

Details are scarce about Derren Brown’s upcoming C4 special, The Events, but this afternoon OTT has been sent three dimension-bending clips by way of trailers. So, let’s have a look.

The weirdness, it seems, is going on behind Derren.

Messing about with gravity, perhaps?

And whatever’s happening here is really subtle.

Although TV listings magazines for The Events‘ transmission week are currently being worked on, actual information about the show’s content is proving hard to find (C4 promises more will be forthcoming later in the week).

Nonetheless, the special has clearly been scheduled for September for some time. Back in June, Brown gave out enigmatic cards – stating: “DERREN BROWN THE EVENTS 09.09″ – at his theatre show, Enigma, in London. And surely the fact that the date inverted is 666 must be part of the strategy.

Ruth Watson

Alex Polizzi

Having presented three series of The Hotel Inspector for Five, in 2007 Watson quit the channel and signed a two-year deal with C4. The first fruit of this new partnership was 2008′s Hotel Inspector-alike, Country House Rescue.

Now the channel has announced Watson is to front Hotel SOS in which she uses “her expertise to transform the efforts of new hoteliers as they embark on setting up on their own” according to a press release from the channel.

It continues…

Famed for her sharp eye and attention to detail when it comes to perfecting hotel experiences, Ruth is determined to open the eyes of the six couples who all feel that running a hotel or B&B will be a piece of cake. Determined to shape the novices into professional hoteliers, Ruth visits and assesses each project, and in an effort to improve their plans sends the proprietors to Hotel Bootcamp at some of the UK’s top hotels to learn how the best in the business have earned their reputation.

For Ruth, the principles of a good hotel stay are the same regardless how big or small the business: a warm welcome, absolute cleanliness and a comfortable bed…

But upon meeting the six projects and their owners she soon realises she has her work cut out. From a run down 32-bedroom hotel in Blackpool taken on by two brothers, to a couple wishing to create a boutique B&B in Margate with a property they purchased at the height of the property boom, the problems and battles Ruth faces seem insurmountable.

Can she convince the owners round to her way of thinking? And will their new business ventures be the success they hope for?

Meanwhile, The Hotel Inspector continues in fine form on Monday nights on Five, now fronted by Alex Polizzi.

So let me be one of those happy few (currently less than 2 million), to say that not only am I still watching Big Brother, but I’m enjoying this series more than perhaps any in the last three or four years.  Outside the house, the show’s luck seems to have completely run out, but get past the camera runs and the opposite is happening.  Fate has decreed that storylines such as housemate Noirin’s ability to infatuate all the heterosexual males in her company, have been allowed to twist and turn to their fullest extent.

Let’s take Noirin, for example. Her first admirer was bullied out of the house by Marcus, who swiftly became admirer number two.  This led to an entertaining and protracted period in which Marcus’ ego was able to inflate to such an extent that not only had he convinced himself  Noirin reciprocated his lust, he also started referring to himself as in mythological terms, labelling himself Captain Cool-As-Fuck and the Dark House.

As a viewer you were desperate for his comeuppance to be delivered on screen, but in classic Big Brother style as soon as it came, your allegiances began to shift and Marcus suddenly became a sympathetic figure. And that’s how it has been this series – it’s been a year of shifting allegiances, slow-burning storylines, and at least a few genuinely intelligent housemates.  Plus, the show can still deliver some excellent and insightful editing by the production team.

Listening to the radio the other day, Mark Kermode said of the controversial Lars Von Trier film Antichrist, (and I’m paraphrasing here) anyone who slags it off without having first seen it is an ignoramus.  It would be good if the same rule could be applied to Big Brother.

So, without further ado… press release!

The wait is nearly over. Tomorrow at 9pm live on Channel 4, Big Brother will celebrate a decade on the air with the arrival of 8 men and 8 women who each have a plan to entertain us over the summer months and leave the house victorious (and £100,000 richer).

Those entering the house could potentially spend up to 13 weeks in the Big Brother house but in true Big Brother style they won’t be allowed to get too comfortable. Within minutes of them all arriving, Big Brother will reveal to viewers and those in the house that they are not yet official housemates and will not get access to the full Big Brother house.

All hopeful housemates will have to individually earn their housemate status over the next three days by completing tasks set by Big Brother. Each task has been designed to challenge the hopefuls’ fears and pride and some will require them to go head to head against one another in a bid to become a bone fide housemate.

Only once the ‘hopefuls’ have successfully completed a task and been granted housemate status will they be allowed access to the ‘real’ Big Brother house. Until then they will only be able to access the living room (void of any creature comforts), a toilet and the garden.

Hopefuls won’t get access to their suitcases and will be forced to spend their first night sleeping on the living room floor. Bathing will be a bath in the garden which can only be filled by carrying cold water in a hole-ridden bucket across the garden.

All 16 people entering the house have been in hiding for the past few weeks. All that is being revealed before the launch is that the 16 are the most diverse group yet, with hopeful housemates from a wide range of countries and backgrounds. The eldest is 40 and the youngest is 18.

Tune in tonight at 9pm to see Davina McCall reveal the identities of the new potential housemates in the Big Brother launch programme direct from the house.

There was some excitement the other day when it was revealed E4 sitcom The Inbetweeners had managed to beat The Graham Norton Show on BBC2 in the ratings. To be honest, it’s not that surprising – Norton’s show is vaguely amusing but it’s the same format as So Graham Norton a decade ago, the guests on that episode were dull and BBC2 aren’t helping scheduling it after serious documentaries that are hardly the most suitable lead-in. The big question, though, is that if E4 can pull in huge (for them) audiences for comedy, where the hell is the comedy on C4?

How many home-grown comedy shows are being screened on prime time C4 this week? The answer is… none. Unless you count Chris Moyles’ Quiz Night. Which we won’t. That’s even less than ITV1. In fact with three months of the year gone, I can only think of three they’ve screened – the Peep Show-by-numbers Plus One, the irritating and unfunny Free Agents and the millionth series of The Sunday Night Project.

That’s hopeless, especially as C4′s Friday night used to be the stuff of legend. A decade or so ago you’d see US behemoths like Friends and Frasier and top British series like Father Ted. Okay, so some of it didn’t work (and I recall, for all the acclaim Spaced received, it was beaten by Ruth Rendell repeats on Channel 5 at the time), but the point was they were committed to comedy. Now look at Friday nights – at 9pm there’s Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares USA. Okay, so Ramsay is a big name for C4, but do we have to see all 13 episodes of this? Surely it’s of little relevance to the British audience? Show a couple as a novelty, maybe, but not the whole thing. Then at 10pm it’s a series of crap films like Date Movie. It’s as if they’ve just given up.

In fact C4 comedy, and Friday nights in particular, have been very poor for a while now. Andrew Newman, C4′s Head of Comedy, has just announced the axing of Tonightly, and with good grace is blaming “bloggers” for its failure. Definitely not because it wasn’t any good and was just a dreadful piece of satire-by-numbers, oh no. But even if Tonightly had been a hit and encouraged new talent, what would the channel have done with it?

Last year on Friday nights, C4 ran a series called New Heroes of Comedy, which in itself shows how poor the evening has got if they can run clip shows there (and they had the cheek to bill them as “Original comedy sponsored by Grolsch”). The idea, presumably, was to illustrate how the huge comedy stars of today have C4 to thank for their big break, but it felt more like an admission they didn’t become properly famous until they switched channels. Lucas and Walliams, for example, did stuff for iffy sketch shows like Barking for C4 but owe almost all their success to the Beeb (and they were doing Sir Bernard’s Stately Homes on BBC2 in 1999, a demeted series that nobody else would have risked) while Ricky Gervais is an even clearer cut case. All C4 found for him was a crap spoof chat show, so he went to the Beeb and made The Office.

The same is true of the current breed of comedy stars. Simon Amstell was on C4 for five years on Popworld but, other than a few derisory efforts on T4, they didn’t sem very interested in finding him anything else. Instead he quit, went to the BBC and is now a big star. Then there’s Harry Hill, of course, flung out at 11pm on C4 and now a prime time staple on ITV.

You could argue, though, that C4 shouldn’t be so concerned about that as their remit is to always look for the next big thing. Yet if that’s the case, how come they’re still allowing Peter Kay the opportunity to churn out his self-indulgent stuff, including devoting an hour to the making of the Amarillo video… four years later? Which was for the BBC anyway. How does Kay’s stuff fit in with their desire to innovate? And how come their big comedy name at the moment appears to be Jason Manford – basically, Peter Kay II?

In 2002, TJ Worthingon reviewed the first two decades of C4′s comedy and suggested, “the channel has always undergone peaks and troughs in comedy, and while this trough is worryingly deeper than any that it has undergone previously, hopefully the next peak will be just around the corner”. Six and a half years on, we’re still waiting.

With David Morrissey turning in a brilliant performance that was refreshingly different from that usual brilliant performance he does (as essayed from Holding On right through to Doctor Who), and a final episode that tangled backwards across the series, buffing up the previous two parts to make them look even better, here was the best British TV drama series, since – well – I’m not entirely sure. Certainly if we were to include one-offs I would have to go back to Longford which was an amazing bit of television – but in terms of actual drama series – dramas told over a multiple, but finite number of episodes, stretching over a few weeks, I really struggle to think of anything comparable this decade. Indeed the aforementioned Holding On is perhaps the last great TV drama series I can recall watching. Surely the last ten years has given us more than Red Riding?

Greatness seems to have been bestowed on Red Riding, not for what it is, but rather for its pedigree.

Boasting pretty much every distinguished actor Britain has produced in the last twenty years (minus Michael Sheen and John Simms), and based on a well-regarded series of books by David Peace, the publicity, the previews and the very aesthetic of Red Riding boasts an offering headed straight for television’s top table.

However, episode one proved this journey might not be as straightforward as anticipated.  Although it looked utterly beautiful, this was two hours of television that offered a muted colour palette, underplayed performances, a lot of violence, but not a gripping storyline.  The deliberately languid pace may have been bold, but it also highlighted the fact that there wasn’t a whole lot going on.

Conversely, the second episode (or film as Channel 4 would have it) felt more substantial right from the off.  Gone were the beautifully lit urban tableaux and deliberately naturalistic dialogue, and in their place came a relatively taut investigation into the West Yorkshire Police Force’s investigation into the Ripper murders.

Clearly, part of Red Riding’s structure is to stick resolutely with one character throughout the episode.  Here it was Paddy Considine playing Peter Hunter, a principled senior police officer brought in to weed out police corruption.  Thrust into a world where everyone is a suspect, this felt like familiar territory for television drama, and it was inevitable that at least one of Hunter’s lieutenants, handpicked for the job by the man himself, should turn out to be on the side of the bent coppers.

That wasn’t the only predictable path this episode walked.  Hunter’s uneasy on-off relationship with fellow detective (Maxine Peake) was a familiar TV trope, albeit one that after the final episode has aired might prove to be necessary in order to bring Peter Mullen’s creepy clergy character – a figure that has lurked at the fringes of conspiracy in the first two episodes – back into the action.  His role, and trying to discern exactly what it is, has so far been one of the more successful elements of Red Riding.

As this week’s film unfolded, the connections to the previous episode proved to be more substantial than suspected, in the process retrospectively contextualising those first two hours and repositioning them as a more useful use of air time than previously thought.  Conversely, connections with the Yorkshire Ripper murders grew less important over the course of the second episode, until finally we were to learn that Hunter’s detective work wasn’t going to have any bearing at all on the eventual arrest of Peter Sutcliffe. 

This perhaps was the film’s greatest flaw.  Although the denouement, linking a supposed Ripper victim back to the bloody events at the climax of the previous episode, was satisfying in overall plot terms, it was rather overshadowed by the greater (and real-life) drama playing out elsewhere in the police station.  The evocation of the Ripper murders at the beginning of the episode had been so effective, that as a viewer it became difficult to care as much about Peace’s constructed conspiracy theory when events from real history – events that had exerted a genuine impact on the lives of many of the viewers – were playing out in the background. 

After four hours on our screens, you get a sense that Red Riding is still only just warming up.  Week two was substantially better than week one, in part because it was more substantial.  There seems to be a lot of pieces in place which should allow for the denouement to stretch back across the series and bring it all together.  Perhaps by the end of this third episode we will have finally borne witness to a drama that can live up to all the praise prospectively heaped upon it.

Kate, who claims to be the words and numbers game’s first ever ‘out’ lesbian contestant, caused ripples that rocked Dictionary Corner by offering up the word ‘poofter’. Now she’s spoken about the experience on Lesbilicious, the online lesbian magazine.

“I saw ‘poofter’ imediately,” she says, “then I saw ‘woofter’. I sat there scratching my head, thinking, ‘What do I do now? Do I player poofter or do I play woofter?”

Read the full interview here.

Entitled You Have Been Watching, and set to air on C4, it’ll feature the Screenwipe host plus guests casting their eyes over the week’s TV from both the UK and around the world.

A transmission date is yet to be confirmed.