In 1996, the BBC’s Saturday morning kids shows were still hugely popular and prestigious programmes, watched by children and adults alike. The 20th anniversary of their launch was marked with a lightweight – though entertaining – half-hour clip show on a Bank Holiday afternoon. 10 years on, the slot’s prestige and ratings have both plummented and it’s been relegated to BBC2. It’s likely hardly anyone over the age of 14 can tell you what the current show is called or who presents it. The 30th anniversary, however, was marked with over two hours of prime-time television in the middle of Christmas.

Yet Noel Edmonds has always had an eye for the historic. You can see it now when he recites umpteen pointless statistics on Deal or No Deal?, but you could also spot it when he gave his farewell address on the final Noel’s House Party, when he hyped up a satellite link to Australia on his Christmas Day show (“The first time family entertainment has been presented in this way”) or even when he remarked that we had the first tie-break “in the modern history of Telly Addicts“.

It was obvious he was absolutely thrilled to be back behind a desk covered with cuddly toys and with the whole of the BBC at his disposal once again. In fact, everyone was. There was a studio audience, made up of thirtysomethings in plastic Swap Shop hats, all eagerly clutching bits of merchandise and beside themselves with excitement at being part of this one-off soiree. There was John Craven, bounding down the stairs at the beginning and seen wiping tears from his eyes at the end, and – in between – reminding everyone what a unflappable and likeable presenter he’s always been. There was Maggie Philbin, who’d even brought in some old viewers’
letters from her attic to show off. And of course there was Cheggers, but then Cheggers is always excited, and spent the show bounding around the studio audience, seemingly able to remember every single thing that happened in every single episode of Swap Shop and Superstore (so at least his long-term memory is still intact).

Throughout, Noel proved himself yet again a master of this sort of show, able to seamlessly shift from offering his best wishes to Tony Hart (who, it was sad to hear, is in very poor health) to cueing up a daft clip of Cheggers cocking up reading out some bus numbers. Indeed, given the massive duration of the show, Noel had the chance to show off every trick in his presenting arsenal, and kept the whole thing moving along nicely. Given the number of guests, clip packages, phone calls and satellite links, this was probably just as complicated to put together as an episode of the original series itself.

And like the original shows, there really was something for everyone here. The programme turned out to be pitched just right, neither a bland celebratory affair nor a depressing slice of piss-taking. So while Elliot Fletcher’s abuse of Five Star was rightly shown again (unbleeped!), time was also spent paying tribute to regular guests like Johnny Ball, who turned up to reminisce about the occasion he gave away a commode as a prize. The fact they had so much time to play with allowed for much light and shade.

What was most impressive, however, was the amount of effort that went into sourcing both clips and guests. Here was Alison Standfast challenging Mrs Thatcher about her nuclear policy on the phone in 1987, and here she was 20 years later to talk about it. Here was Damian Ward and his partner Helen dancing to Phantom of the Opera on Going Live!, and here he was with a special message for Michael Crawford two decades on. Indeed, the appearance of Crawford, via satellite from Sydney, was a genuinely great telly moment, with the star clearly moved when Damian’s mum announced that seeing her disabled son getting the chance to dance on the telly and be treated so well by everyone was the best moment of her life.

They’d also clearly made the effort in finding the clips. Many of the original episodes had been junked so VHS tapes had been raided, bringing us such delights as a performance by Bucks Fizz from Jersey, where a fogbound airport meant Mike and Jay were still in London and appeared with Bobby and Cheryl via the magic of blue screen. Even when the clips still existed in the archives, most of them hadn’t seen the light of day since original transmission – when I watched “Philderella”, the Going Live! Christmas pantomime, in 1989, I would never have guessed I’d be seeing it again on prime time BBC2 in 2006.

The great thing about these clips, and what made the show so special, was that these are programmes that were never made to be repeated, and so you simply never normally get to see them again. Watching Noel and Cheggers trying to chat to each other via some malfunctioning equipment or Maggie picking out competition winners – the normal workaday telly of 20 or 30 years ago – remains a rare treat.

Inevitably, the programme mostly concentrated on Swap Shop, which took up about half of the running time. However its successors also got a fair crack of the whip, with Mike Read turning up to reminisce about Saturday Superstore. Interestingly Cheggers did the big interview with Mike, rather than Noel, presumably thanks to the bad feeling between the pair following Mike’s appearance on five’s Curse of Noel Edmonds a year or two ago. Regardless, it was brilliant to hear Mike discussing presenting the programme on the morning of the Herald of Free Enterprise disaster, explaining how pleased they were the BBC thought they had the skills and versatility to cope with such a situation, and the difficulties of trying to link from newsflashes to cartoons and pop stars.

The time devoted to Going Live! was a high point, as this writer had the fondest and most vivid memories of it – though sadly neither Phillip Schofield nor Sarah Greene were in the studio, although they did contribute an amusing segment with Trevor and Simon recorded in, of all places, LWT reception. Trevor and Simon were in attendance though, which was nice to see, although the sketch they performed in the studio was less impressive, as Don and Dougie Draper (of “We don’t do duvets” fame) were among their weakest characters, while they weren’t helped by Andi Peters proving that despite his distinguished executive career post-Saturday morning, he’s still completely unable to deliver a joke.

Indeed, the section devoted to Live & Kicking was perhaps the only part when the programme began to flag, partly because the clips really seemed too recent to get nostalgic about, while the interview with Andi Peters and Emma Forbes seemed mostly to be about Peters’ ridiculous diva-ish demands regarding the specific time during a programme he required madeira cake.

Intriguingly the programme ended around the same era as the 20th anniversary special. All we got was a quick chat with Fearne Cotton about her role as a recent Saturday morning presenter before a quick montage of the last decade. Fair enough they wanted to skirt through the final desparate days of Live & Kicking, where Katy Hill marshalled a sinking ship while Ant and Dec were cleaning up on ITV, but oddly only a few short clips of Zoe Ball and Jamie Theakston were shown, who at the time were a very successful team – and certainly more popular among the adult audience than Andi Peters.

Sadly, there was also only the briefest of mentions of Dick and Dom in Da Bungalow, which given the column inches and cult following they accrued seemed somewhat remiss.

Still, on the whole, the programme entertained royally, and the level of detail and effort that went into it was continually remarkable – backstage names like producer Cathy Gilbey and long-serving editor Chris Bellinger (who was credited as a consultant) were constantly being discussed and paid tribute to, and it’s testament to the production team that the whole thing didn’t come across as a bit of self-indulgent back-slapping. It was a well-deserved and well-produced tribute to a genre of programming that means so much to generations of kids.

All you needed to do was wear your pyjamas and spend ages rearranging the curtains to try and stop the sun shining on the screen and you could have been nine years old again.

If you like your Doctor Who in the breezy style then “The Runaway Bride” was for you.

With the same kind of casual manner in which he dispenses criticism of his scriptwriting, Russell T Davies gave us a Doctor Who story that felt effortless and fancy free. Or should that be Rose free? Indeed the absence of the character made “The Runaway Bride” feel that bit lighter and more energetic than recent episodes. The Doctor’s mourning of her loss was delicately judged, but it was a wise move to make the central driver of the story him moving on, rather than remembering his lost companion.

In this respect Davies again exerted his almost supernatural ability for judging with perfection how and when to nudge along the back story that underpins his version of Who. Donna’s observation that the universe is a terrifying place made for a refreshing change of perspective for one of the Timelord’s sidekick (albeit one that will most likely be flipped back with the arrival of Martha Jones in the next episode), and it served as a useful, if subtle reset of the Doctor-companion dynamic

Beautifully judged too was Sarah Parish’s performance as the Empress of Racnos. Her inherent scariness was perfectly diluted by a sense of comic campness and old-school badness that ensured younger viewers wouldn’t become too frightened by what was an impressive looking alien. By contrast, Catherine Tate’s Donna came across a bit like a character out of a Dead Ringers EastEnders spoof. You half-expected her to yell, “Shut your bleedin’ maaafff,” and, “Oi Doctor! Sort it!” However, to her credit Tate did a lot better during the story’s (very few) quiet moments.

More seriously though, the continuing London-centric nature of the show is troubling. In fact the whole programme right now seems imbued with a kind of metropolitan attitude that presupposes we all agree on what’s hot and what’s not. One fears for the day when the Doctor will pass judgement on Johnny Vaughan’s Capital Radio breakfast Show and in this respect Doctor Who seems to be fast outgrowing Russell T Davies’ range of cultural references.

But what of the story? It has become widely accepted that plotting is RTD’s weakest attribute as a scriptwriter. On the plus side, the neat reveal of Donna’s drugging via the cups of coffee that brought her and her fiancé together was very nice, but on the minus a resolution that consisted pretty much of pouring loads of water down a big hole seemed a bit of a let down, if not a real worry. How did we know that all the aliens were dead, and perhaps more importantly, does it do a planet any good to get its core flooded with dirty Thames water?

In this respect Davies is baffling. He possesses all of the skills needed to take a clinical and balanced look at how to structure and pace a long-running series, yet when asked to bring those attributes of plotting and timing to bear on a single episode he seems to struggle. In the case of “The Runaway Bride” though, there were enough good points to paper over the cracks. The car chase, the sequence in which Donna watches the formation of the Earth, not to mention the audacity of coming up with as brilliant an image as the Thames running dry, ensured that this Christmas special was a triumph on so many levels it didn’t really matter that, once again, it failed to properly coalesce as a whole.

Inevitably, thoughts now turn to series three. The brief montage at the close of “The Runaway Bride” didn’t look as appetising as the one we saw this time last year, but then again that trailer offered us glimpses of the return of two of the series’ best-loved companions. The critical question for series three is how the Doctor’s relationship with Martha Jones will unfold. Clearly, the majority view is that we need to see something far removed from the Doctor-Rose dynamic and right now it’s difficult to see how the show can come up with anything other than a “playful romance”. That in itself is a criticism of Davies operating too much from within his own scriptwriting comfort zone. You suspect that attempting to create something new between the Doctor and Martha will stretch RTD further than he’s yet gone with Doctor Who.

Still if the Doctor-companion relationship retains its cheery irritability throughout 2007, then at least it’s pretty obvious that we have some major storylines to look forward to. After all, the key moment in “The Runaway Bride” wherein the Doctor utters the word “Gallifrey” for the first time in this new run has to be a pre-echo of something bigger looming, doesn’t it?

Whereas some might consider Vanessa Feltz’s new daytime show to be exploitationist, could it actually be a forum for challenging and re-evaluating societal norms?

By providing a platform for some of Britain’s “most controversial personalities”, Vanessa’s Real Lives enables a consideration of taboo subjects and unconventional behaviour. The episode in question considered appropriate age limits for sexual relationships, what society considers a proper expression of maternal love and the untapped potential of alternative health products.

Granted this was done by bringing on Lucy “Miss Lust” Hayward, a former teacher who was jailed for sleeping with a 15-year old school-boy; Veronika “Bitty”, Robinson, who breast-fed her two kids until the age of seven; and Jim Crawford, a man who’s elixir of youth is a phial of his own urine, but you can’t make an omelette without having a frank discussion with those eggs.

Hayward was first and gave an account of the relationship she’d started at 31 with a boy half her age.

Apparently, she’d been in an “oppressive relationship during her 20s” when she wasn’t allowed out much (I dare say the two kids she was supposed to be raising during the time may have limited her nightlife). When she moved to take a new job as an English teacher she starting socialising with younger people in the town who had “similar tastes in music”, and subsequently met the adolescent in question.

According to Hayward, he was a typical “Jack the lad, confident, cocky, a charming young man”, and in Vanessa’s treacly phrase, “Cupid’s dart struck very heavily and [she] fell in love”.

Hayward rebutted any cradle-snatching accusations by reminding us that she’d been in an “oppressive relationship during her 20s”. He was “15 going on 25″, and seeing as she was 31 going on 15, then in one sense you could say he was older than her. She made him feel like a man and he took her back to the youth she’d “lost”.

However, societal disapproval of such relationships led to her being fired from her job, convicted of indecent assault, jailed for two years and placed on the Sex Offenders’ Register for eight years. Because of this she now finds it extremely difficult to get work and resents being classified with paedophiles, especially considering the sexual abuse she’d suffered when young. She was the real victim here, and lest we forget she had been in an “oppressive relationship during her 20s”.

What the show failed to mention was that Hayward had been jailed for cannabis possession at the time of the indecent assault conviction, having allowed her home to be used by other teenagers to have “pot parties”. And while she may have claimed the relationship developed out of “mutual respect and friendship” it ended with the boy running away from home before revealing the details of the tryst to his parents. They claimed his personality changed as a consequence of the affair and he become withdrawn and introverted (maybe he was worn out from using all the sex toys and videos found by the police at his mistress’ flat). Hardly the most responsible actions from someone whose job description entails a significant amount of in loco parentis.

Hayward was also recently exposed by the People newspaper to be working as a dominatrix and caning punters while wearing a mortarboard and gown: I guess this must be payback for that oppressive relationship she had in her 20s …

But her story at least started a discussion on this particular societal norm. Was she the victim in all of this? Had the young man been exploited and harmed by such a relationship? And is Vanessa Feltz really a MILF?

While there was general disapproval among the audience, most struggled to articulate exactly how Hayward had transgressed, although to be fair they hadn’t been given all the facts. One woman argued that, “He was a young man with his life ahead of him”, as if he’d been killed in a road accident. Another stated, “He’s 15 – not a man. You wouldn’t sleep with your own father and brother”. Hayward, perhaps understandably, retorted that it’s “not really the same thing”, and Feltz agreed that it was a completely different topic (probably tomorrow’s).

Hayward further tried to excuse her lack of responsibility by claiming to have been “vulnerable” at the time of the affair due to the – yes – “oppressive relationship she’d had in her 20s”. Vanessa informed us that she was in her similar situation when her marriage had ended and one of her daughter’s friends informed her she was a “MILF”, but despite her own “vulnerability” at the time she hadn’t taken advantage of the situation as she “couldn’t have faced his mother afterwards”.

The MILF topic clearly struck a chord in one young man who seizeed his opportunity to display his support for sexual generation games by kissing Vanessa’s hand, telling her: “You very gorgeous – I like mature women. Can I call you baby?”

Keen to act on his beliefs, the gigolo insisted on dancing for Vanessa (“You are gorgeous – can I dance for you?”). While she took his place in the audience, he stood with his arms above his head, gyrating his hips and thrusting his pelvis. He then crouched down and brought his head level with her waist, gliding up along her torso and for good measure poking his nose into her cleavage. As his closer, he then lifted his shirt to expose his six-pack and nipples. Unfortunately, this did nothing for Vanessa (“I’m feeling hot – but only with embarrassment”), or Hayward. But then he was probably more than half her age.

Continuing the theme of matronly love was breast-feeding counsellor Veronika Robinson. Breast was most definitely best for her and her two children, who she’d breast-fed until the age of seven, having left the decision of when to wean to them.

The objections from the audience varied, beginning with practical issues (teething and biting). However, Robinson used this to her advantage as a means to set parenting guidelines: “You put the baby down and you say ‘no!’, and they learn very, very quickly that if they want to breast feed they don’t put those teeth in.”

This lesson had been so well learnt that when one of her daughters was asked to write a list of what she wanted for her ninth birthday at the top she wrote “bitty”. Well she probably didn’t phrase it quite that way but “birthday bitty” was what she’d got, and apparently, “It made her day and she had a very special memory of it”. No doubt she’ll be recounting it to a psychotherapist in a few years time.

Shifting the issue, Robinson argued that breastfeeding is a taboo in our culture, and one of the reasons people “have a problem is that they don’t see it”. However, as most of the mums in the audience were quick to point out, weaning is more associated with setting age-appropriate behaviour. One commented that you wouldn’t have your children using the potty at seven just because they still wanted to.

Being a breast-feeding counsellor means Robinson was bound to emphasise the nutritional benefits of mother’s milk, but as one woman pointed out, why not just give it to them in a cup? With the zeal of a convert, Robinson continued to fixate on what she perceived to be a cultural taboo over breastfeeding, coming to the bizarre conclusion that, “We live in a culture where it’s fine to have a relationship with inanimate objects, yet we don’t want our kids to have one with human beings”.

Until this point women were dominating the debate, so it was nice to hear the male perspective. Unfortunately, it came from the MILF-loving dancer, who asked Robinson, “Do you know when you breast feed, do your boobs get bigger?” When this was confirmed he replied, “That’s why you want to breast feed, because you want your boobs big, eh?” Rather than seeing breast feeding at such a late age as unnatural he was simply jealous (“The kid is seven years old – it’s unfair!”).

The final guest was Jim Crawford, keen to explain the health and well-being that can be obtained by drinking your own urine. Jim’s life had changed four years ago when a friend had recommended a book on the potential benefits of drinking your own. Apparently, out of the “hundreds” of people she knew he was one of only six people she considered “open-minded” enough to share the information with. Or maybe she just didn’t like him.

Jim argued that urine is misunderstood and is actually the most medically researched substance in the world. On that basis, blood can’t be too far behind and I’d like to see someone on daytime TV using this argument to defend drinking it. Urine is, according to Crawford, “your own way of making you healthy”, although I was always under the impression it accomplished this by an outward rather than inward flow.

But in case anyone thought Jim was taking the piss (and with the authenticity of guests on a Vanessa Feltz show always open to question), a quick necking of a flute of his own vintage proved beyond doubt that he literally was.

If anyone was curious about the flavour then, according to the connoisseur, it has its own individual taste and changes according to gender. But how did he know this? Jim smirked rather too quickly for comfort in response to Vanessa’s query. It emerged his girlfriend practiced urine therapy on an “ad hoc basis when she fancies it”. It presented a lovely image in my mind, but as a picture tells a 1000 words, for the purposes of space I’ll go no further.

Apart from the hitherto disregarded nutritional benefits, there’s also the opportunity to incorporate urine into your beauty regimen. Jim uses it to hydrate his skin, claiming it calms after a shave “like nothing else”. To demonstrate this, and because he’s worth it, he smeared a couple of droplets around his chin, informing his perturbed audience that, “It will go straight through the skin and into it very quickly”.

Although informing him that he “smells like wee”, Vanessa was quick to sing the praises of his complexion. From a distance. And his skin did look relatively smooth and line free. But also unmistakeably yellow (just like his teeth), so I personally won’t be ditching the Clinique three-step system just yet.

As we returned to an audience uniformly unimpressed by Jim’s urine therapy, he did have one supporter.

Unfortunately, it was Veronika.

Her mother also takes the piss and recommends it to her grandchildren as a “great hair conditioner”. However, it might have the unfortunate side-effect whereby your female offspring breastfeed for prolonged periods.

Taken together, the show’s deviant trio demonstrate how unexamined social norms sometimes are for some people. While it’s easy to recognise when they’re being contravened, it’s sometimes more difficult to define exactly what the deviance is about the behaviour in question, apart from the jarring unconventionality.

This is well illustrated by the final comment from a member of the audience about Crawford’s urine-drinking – “I feel like I’m gong to be sick. I just don’t get it! I understand you’re not hurting anyone by doing this, so fair play to you, but personally, I think it’s wrong!”

Societal norm pariahs or pioneers? Here’s to you, Mrs Robinson, Mr Crawford and Ms Hayward.

As anyone who’s seen shirtless Newcastle supporters on a winter evening at St James’ Park will testify, Geordie men are made of hardy stock.

But the macho bravado of Toon Army members pales in comparison to the actions of Geordie underworld veteran Paddy Conroy, the first figure profiled in MacIntyre’s Underworld.

Out on license from an 11-year jail sentence for torture, kidnapping and escape, Conroy’s conditional release is complicated by a rival gangland family taking out a contract on his life. His re-appearance at a time of turf warfare between rival outfits threatens to worsen the fragile balance of power, due to his stated aim to re-establish his profile and reputation within the criminal fraternity.

Although now middle-aged and resembling a leaner Geoffrey Hughes, his eye patch (worn due to his eye haemorrhaging as a result of prison staff delaying necessary treatment for cataracts – or so he alleges) is a permanent reminder of the brigandish nature of his lifestyle.

The show starts with Paddy playing daddy to his two sons, Buster, 11, and Jack, 1. Long-suffering wife of 30 years Maureen also features in this homely sequence. However, as the couple recount the tale of how they met, it’s further evidence of the roughness of their environment. Conroy used to mug Maureen and steal her pocket money; unsurprisingly, she didn’t fancy a date with him when he asked. But Paddy wouldn’t take no for an answer and one day, in his own words, he “grabbed her by the hair and took her home … You think I’m jokin’, don’t ya!”.

Maureen’s expression indicated he wasn’t.

Conroy’s father ran a criminal enterprise in which Paddy served his apprenticeship and would later inherit. This provides some insight into his almost nostalgic view of historic criminality. Of his youth he states that “the villain was just a part of life in those days, especially from the more deprived areas. It wasn’t considered a bad thing unless you did bad villainy, immoral things”. Conroy makes a distinction between “gangsters” and villains. To him, a villain is just a product of his environment and upbringing, whereas “a gangster lives in a world of his own, an imaginary world”.

Conroy denies MacIntrye’s contention he might be perceived as a dangerous man (“I don’t think so – if you don’t have problems with me. But if you come attack us, then I’ll be a dangerous man”), and understands the current underworld difficulties as resulting from the new breed – those operating outside accepted criminal codes: “There’s loads of families from our sort of background who are good people, but you get families who are villains with no morals and not fit to walk this fookin’ Earth!”

Paddy considers himself a protector in the local community, and it says much for his standing (or, perhaps, the fear he inspired) that when he was jailed for violence against the police in the 1980s, thousands of people demonstrated on the streets for his release. Right-hand man Bullock even went to the extreme of climbing to the top of the Tyne Bridge to protest, but only managed four hours because “it was cold – freezing, proper freezing”. Conroy chides Bullock for not staying up there longer, although the latter defends himself by saying, “Well, it wasn’t planned properly. Next time I’ll take a sleeping bag and a flask!”

But despite Conroy’s bravado and criminal heritage, he’s clearly feeling the pressure of the license conditions and the price on his head. He wears a bullet proof vest in public, and his associates constantly monitor his surroundings. When the security lapses, as happens when Conroy returns from a night at the track, he starts to panic. After shouting, “Where the fook are ya?” repeatedly into his phone, he skulks in the lobby until his driver turns up, greeting him with, “Cunt! You cunt!”, before berating him further off mic.

Unable to retaliate in the way he had before his sentence, Conroy employs various means to deal with the tension, such as escaping to his country getaway 30 miles outside Newcastle. On his allotment he grows vegetables, and to MacIntyre’s surprise is particularly proud of the trophies he’s won for his prize leeks.

But even in his hideaway he has to be careful of his activities. As an example, his lifetime ban from using firearms means even a spot of rabbit hunting would result in an infringement of his license terms.

As Bullock, MacIntyre and Conroy chat in a shed, two associates bring in a couple of rabbits they’ve shot, and Bullock guts them by the riverbank. The shots of his handiwork are intercut with MacIntyre asking Paddy if he’s religious (he’s not) and whether he thinks he’s going to heaven (he does). To those who reckon he’s going to hell he retorts, “They can think what they like – it’s between me and the big fella!”

Conroy also uses other methods to relax, having smoked cannabis since he was 16. The green-fingered approach he uses on his leeks also applies to his cannabinoids (“Better to grow your own. See that: it’s fookin’ organic!”).

But the cannabis and leeks are insufficient to keep his ferocity in check. When his family plot in the local cemetery was desecrated in 1994 by a rival gang, his inability to tolerate any affront to his reputation or control his anger led to him committing the acts that resulted in his 11-year sentence.

Billy Collier, a criminal who worked for a rival family, was allegedly heard boasting in a local pub he’d been paid £5,000 to dig up the grave, chop parts of the body up and put them through Conroy’s window. After that, it was only a matter of time before Paddy and his henchmen exacted their revenge.

While the pain felt by Conroy is understandable – with him unable to hold back tears as he recounts the story – the retaliation he had planned for those alleged to be responsible is chilling, issuing his threat head-on to the camera: “I would have killed the whole family. All their loved ones. I would have murdered every single one of them if any of them had done that to my family”.

Within days, with only the digging up the grave part of the alleged plan carried out, Collier was kidnapped at gunpoint from a local shop and tortured. He was abandoned in a warehouse by his attackers after having his teeth pulled out with pliers. Conroy denies being behind the amateur dentistry (“I just beat him up. Hit him with a stick, pool cues, hit him with a gas bottle. He got a beating but not a great beating”), but admits to driving him 400 yards and leaving him at the location where his teeth would be torn out.

Conroy was arrested, but managed to escape en route to court, and was on the run overseas before being caught by Interpol. Security was much tougher on his return: to be on the safe side, a 17 vehicle convoy, aeroplane, helicopter, snipers and a gunboat made sure he kept his court appearance.

However, his holidays in the sun did nothing to moderate his temperament, and Conroy cracked under pressure in court, attacking the prosecuting lawyer. As a result he was dragged out past the jury by four prison officers, which, as Conroy concedes, “didn’t help” his innocent plea. He was found guilty on all charges and sentenced to 11 years, although Maureen continues to accept Paddy’s version of the attack on Billy Collier.

Conroy struggles to process the changes made in the Newcastle landscape in the decade of his incarceration, and also finds unfamiliar the spectacle of a new godfather (John Henry Sayers) controlling his former patch (“They say they run Newcastle, but no one fookin rules me”). With the old-skool underworld against him, Paddy is forced to make new alliances with local Triad gangs (the “new breed” which he had earlier railed against), and not without reason. A confrontation with 14 members of the Sayers gang led to Paddy having to endure a severe beating, in the knowledge that to fight back could have resulted in his death, and to involve the police (strictly against his criminal code) would have meant he’d contravened his license conditions.

The ongoing feuds and precarious situation cause Paddy to worry about his eldest son Buster, (“One day you will be the bossman”) and that he’ll inherit the internecine feuds in the same way he did from his own father. Buster is only now realising the extent of his father’s criminal lifestyle. His copy of Zoo magazine shows a pixellated snapshot of dad alongside a cover feature on “Britain’s deadliest gangs” (“Meet the men who run YOUR manor”). This side of his father he finds hard to understand, with the additional implications of what it means for his own future.

One reason for Buster’s concern over his family’s criminal heritage may be the example of his cousin Dylan, who at 22 has already been jailed four times. Despite Paddy’s assertion that he’s a “good lad in general, just bored”, Dylan is back in jail within four days of being released from his latest sentence after brandishing two sawn-off shotguns.

Yet despite having a clear understanding of the reality of prison life (“Everyone in there is depressed – whole prisons suffer from depression”), Paddy risks his license conditions being invoked after an unnecessary run-in with the police. During a raid on his sister’s house he allows himself to be drawn into a verbal confrontation with an officer and is charged with a public order offence. Unwilling to face court proceedings, Conroy goes on the run again, despite the knowledge he risks a heavier sentence as a consequence. However, this proves to be unnecessary, and somewhat farcical, as his 72-day period in hiding turns out to be just to avoid a £130 penalty charge, which is sent through the post to him after he avoided the initial court date.

Despite this good fortune, and the end of his license period meaning Conroy is a free man once again, he’s unable to shake off past events – particularly the feud with the Sayles family. Conroy interrupts his cooking of a celebratory family dinner to launch into an uninterrupted four-minute tirade, unintelligible in parts and incoherent in others, where he tries to piece together what may have been slights on his reputation and the intentions of his rivals (his perceptions and thought processes clearly affected by his cannabis use), leaving no doubt he’ll retaliate at some point, “and it’s coming fookin’ shortly, believe you me”. His rant culminates in him shouting, “Get that on your fookin’ documentary!”, before resuming his preparation of the family meal.

At this point, just by giving its subject enough rope, the profile allows the true nature of Conroy to emerge, demonstrating that any performance by an actor of a “gangster” role can never fully convey the menace of intent that an authentic criminal has. Despite certain sequences that humanised him (sequences with his family and on his allotment) and a refusal by MacIntyre to allow a caricature to develop – as would be likely in a Zoo feature – Conroy’s inherent brutality continually re-surfaces. His own need to distinguish between his own criminal acts and those of “gangsters” suggests that to some degree he is fully aware of the nature of his lifestyle and its implications, the essence of which it was essential MacIntyre captured in his “fookin’ documentary”.

When you first sit down to watch Entourage, if you haven’t already, there’s a very strong chance you’ll dislike it, or worse, feel total indifference.The floss-thin plot is as follows – Vincent Chase is an extremely pretty, fairly wealthy, young, moderately successful actor living in LA. Assisting his far from strenuous living are his childhood friends from Queens, New York, who each play roles as manager, chef and driver. They worry about cinematic choices, women, and fast cars. They go to a lot of industry parties, and even Turtle – the tubby runaround boy for Vincent, and a man with a consistently reversed baseball cap and the attitude of a 12-year-old who can’t wait to go to college and join a fraternity – gets laid a frankly insulting amount through the series. These are smug little boys.

ITV2 have recently acquired the rights to the first three seasons of the show, and are churning through them in order. The first, shorter series of episodes border on the banal. Entourage relies entirely on character to push the situation forward, while the plot is usually as loose as waiting for a phone to ring about a “deal”. By the second season, finer details emerge – Vince, for all his childish frivolity in tinseltown, wishes to be taken seriously as an actor, which is why he’s so frequently turning down the role of Aquaman, a big budget, daft sounding blockbuster, in the face of his agent, the brilliantly named Ari Gold.

Ari is in near constant friendly warfare with Eric (or “E”), Vince’s well meaning and professional manager/put upon, but well paid, best friend – bickering over scripts and lunch meetings for their client, each citing endless usually selfish reasons that one thing or another works out best for Vince. Ari, played in turns, ruthlessly, hilariously and sharply by Jeremy Piven, is a near perfect character, whose scenes, arguments, dialogue and increasingly stifling marital issues become more entertaining each episode. They also provide a surprising depth and sense of genuine likeability to a wheeling, dealing and occasionally cheating character that should be severely lacking in any sympathy at all from the audience.

Even better, is Jonny “Drama” Chase. Once the star of cult sci-fi television epic Viking Quest, and the man who was so nearly Joey from Friends, he is supported only by the good fortune and expansive bank account of those around him to keep afloat in day-to-day life, and have the time and expenses to consider, for example, getting his underwhelming calves surgically enhanced to give him a better chance of impressing casting directors with the quality of his legs – a good example of one of the show’s more obscure, but oddly entertaining story arcs.

Elsewhere, he simply finds himself the butt of the others’ jokes, particularly after an incident in a recent episode in which he was banned by Hugh Hefner from the Playboy Mansion, under accusations of releasing a caged chimp at a party. As much as he is played for effective laughs, his character highlights that – in between all the sex, pot and credit transactions – Entourage possesses a beating heart, even if for once, and quite interestingly, the audience are more aware of it than the characters.

One of the more off-putting things for those uninitiated with the show, is the blurring of lines between genres – again, most relative in the first episodes. It’s not outright hilarious enough to be a comedy, and it’s never harsh or eventful enough to be a drama. Therefore, it’s a very light “dramedy”, but considerably and thoroughly hipper and more engaging than Heartbeat. In this debatable confusion could well be the key to the show’s increasing worldwide success.

Entourage has repeatedly been feted as something of a masculine edition of Sex and the City, another HBO classic. Replacing New York with LA, the four central, effortlessly stylish and very sexually active cosmopolitan women exchanged for four fish-out-of-water males with similar interests and pursuits. But, despite it’s immensely attractive cast, Entourage lacks the glamour and idealization of Sex. Its formula is so winning, because the viewer not only gets a funny, irreverent, realistic and therefore, occasionally cynical perspective on Hollywood life, but the main characters are just fairly normal. Like the rest of society, they have their own goals, and quite often misrepresent themselves – but generally, they are simply, hopelessly, themselves.

It is also genuinely good fun to watch, and perfectly fits its Sunday night slot as a smart slice of light entertainment. The glitz is appealing, offering a quality potentially akin to say, Dallas, and the “insider” view on the concerning industry is refreshing – for further reference of its accuracy, the show is the work of Mark Wahlberg, with many of the plotlines and story arcs based on his ascent to stardom with the help of his friends throughout the ’90s. In each episode, it can be expected that a celebrity guest or two will make an appearance, at which point a reasonable knowledge of popular American culture is helpful, but not essential. Here, the surprise appearances and name-dropping feel a lot more natural than say, Extras, and although the stars often appear in a self parodying way, the spoofing is never as harsh or startling as those in the work of Gervais, or even Larry Sanders.

A notably short review then, for a show that needs your attention, ratings wise, and one that definitely deserves 30 minutes of your time – if not just to see something that proves there are several degrees of smart behind this particular slice of brainlessness.

Being honest, did we ever want the Blind Date couples to live happily ever after?

The bickering on the plane, tantrums on the veranda and the pre-mediated verbals on the sofa with Cilla, it was Cupid’s misses that made the show a hit, with the occasional happy ending only there to help maintain the illusion that we watched the thing for these magic moments.

ITV1′s Dating the Enemy ditches the Blind Date pretence and gets straight down to business: a couple are deliberately mis-matched on the basis of their being the complete opposite of their stated ideal partners, and have to endure three days in each other’s company. The aim at the end of the 72 hours is to see if the wooing by one half of the couple is enough to convince the other to – well – “date the enemy”.

The show starts with “ambitious Chelsea socialite” Melanie, a cross somewhere between her namesake Melanie Griffith and Geri Halliwell. To illustrate her go-getting nature an Apprentice-esque sequence shows the hard-working girl’s lifestyle: conducting business in the back of a cab (“On my way to a very important meeting”) on her BlackBerry, being extremely professional with clients and, er, sniffing a bunch of roses at a flower stall.

Melanie is candid about what she can’t tolerate in a man – scruffiness, dirt, lacking ambition, and not being a gentleman. However, while she listed her beau no-nos, these were intercut with shots of her date-to-be waking up with three-day stubble, munching toast in the middle of the afternoon (and not using a plate, so doubtless getting crumbs over the carpet) and belching.

For “slacker and proud of it” Mark, knowledge, experience and love are the essentials of life, stating that, “at the risk of sounding like an old hippie [and probably smelling like one], I would say that I can unashamedly defend why my way of life is the way of life to live”.

So the successful Sloane and the scruffy slacker – surely the perfect match for a lorra, lorra laughs.

As Melanie makes her way to Brighton (BlackBerry constantly on the go), Mark ruminates on how he can convince her he’s more than just a slacker (having a shave would have been a good start). At 36, with “neither academic or career success”, and working in a comic store, clearly he has his work cut out. Philosophising over his lack of occupational progress (“On paper I look like a bum, maybe, but to me it’s more a career of life than work”) Mark decides on a back to basics approach to win over Melanie: a night of camping under the stars. After all, as the scruffy one notes, “what’s not to like about tenting under the sky – it’s all good”. Well the potential for getting wet and dirty for one, things we discover Melanie will not tolerate (“I don’t want to go anywhere dirty”).

The love train pulls in to Brighton, and the odd couple meet, with Melanie confessing later in the show how gorgeous she found Mark (“He’s just like a tall Orlando Bloom”). Mark decides to reveal the evening’s plans by holding up the tent bags and asking, “What are we going to do?”, perhaps under the delusion being such a hard-working city girl means Melanie has never seen a tent before.

After finding a suitable clearing, things don’t get off to the best start as Mark realises he can’t pitch his tent (“I’m absolutely buggered”). Fortunately Melanie, the novice to this camping game, is on hand to point out why he’s having such difficulties (“It’s inside out”).

But three hours later, with the tent up and the campfire burning, the two swap notes on how their lifestyles contrast. Melanie always has a plan and her diary is constantly booked-up, with something on “every day, sometimes two things on at night”. In contrast, Mark confesses he’s more “a sitter and a thinker than a mover and a shaker”. But at least he looks like a tall Orlando Bloom while he’s lazing around.

After surviving the “coldest night’s sleep she’s ever had”, Melanie travels with Mark to the Isle of Wight to meet the parents. She is looking forward to the encounter, and over the dinner expects an insight into Mark and his background. On hearing the description of them as “aging hippies” she’s under the impression they’ll be “fun and light-hearted”. But before she’s received her first course at the Horse and Groom this proves not to be the case.

After telling Mark’s dad she organises events and parties for a living, and the next is a fashion event for the British Red Cross, he retorts with, “So lots of anorexic young ladies walking up and down in overpriced clothes, with the odd celebrity turning up?”

Being a professional, Melanie takes this in her stride, and responds with an anodyne question to deflect the awkwardness (“Why did you move to the Isle of Wight?”). However, I’m quite sure she wouldn’t have asked this if she knew what was going to be the response …

“If you go to these new towns in the south of England, everyone aspires to the same boring shite. Not everyone’s aspiring to a four-wheel drive, and the availability of spirituality over here is more accessible, and I do like being away from the human species. I don’t like people very much. It’s a nice place and the trees are nice, but people are a bit revolting, ain’t they, don’t you find?”

While this made for great TV, it’s hardly polite dinner conversation.

The charm offensive continues (Melanie being charming and Mark’s father offensive), with patter asking Melanie if his misanthropy has “given you an insight into maybe changing your perception of life?”, although by the expression on her face the only thing she seems to want to change right now are her dinner companions.

Taking refuge in the ladies (or “fillies” as daintily signed on the door), Melanie lets off steam about Mark’s dad and how he’s “quite rude to put me down and what I do”, which is perfectly understandable. It’s one thing to question someone’s way of life, another to completely disrespect it. To add to the dining debacle, Mark confirms to Melanie he share’s his dad’s views, which means he’s managed to be both dirty, scruffy and ungentlemanly within the first 24 hours of their date.

On their final day together, no doubt as a response to her treatment by Mark’s father, Melanie turns the tables on her date, considering him to be “all talk and no action”. Over lunch at a café (appropriately called Belchers) Melanie asks him if he has any plans to perform some of his poetry at the reading evening (“This is your moment to shine”). The mere thought of it has Mark blushing so much he has to remove his jumper (Melanie: “Are you feeling flushed because of the pressure?”).

Melanie continues her probing as the pair engage in some pottery painting at a workshop. She asks Mark if he’s prepared to display his porcelain Elvis in his house for people to see, and if so, why the difficulty in reading his poetry in public …

“I don’t get embarrassed about showing things I’m slightly able to do, but if it’s something I want to do …”

“Or you have more to lose?”

“It’s difficult for me to expose the raw inner feelings, and that is what I put into the things I write …”

This becomes evident in the show’s climax at the poetry evening, when Melanie meets some of Mark’s friends, purportedly along to offer support. Rather than challenge his preconceptions of how an audience may react, they reinforce his negative views, with one opining on how “soul-destroying” a single heckle would be. Melanie proffers that she’d think the same but consider it a “risk worth taking”, a phrase clearly unfamiliar to the men as they have to ask her to repeat it.

As Melanie is by now fully aware, Mark’s slacker ideals mask a basic lack of confidence and self-belief, reinforced by an absence of parental encouragement (he later admits that Melanie has given him the “verbal kick in the pants I needed 16 years ago”) and his friends’ meekness. His statements about “a career of life rather than work” reveal a belief system that gives him reasons to get away from attempting new things or achieving anything. It’s not a case of him rejecting ambition, but being scared of it.

But after watching a reading by a relaxed poetess, he confounds his friends and Melanie to get up on stage and do a reading, and an accomplished one at that, of a “very well-known poem” (Desiderata by Max Ehrmann). This leaves Mark’s friends “gobsmacked”, and Melanie taken aback (“After the last 24 hours I never expected him to do it”). In addition to this, the organiser of the Brighton Poetry Society encourages Mark to attend their next meeting, where he says he’ll “do one of mine”. But has this minor show of ambition been enough to compensate for being dirty, scruffy and his early ungentlemanly conduct and convince Melanie to “date the enemy”?

Unfortunately, not.

Although Mark has gone up in her estimation due to his public performance, and that he no doubt looked like a tall Orlando Bloom as he did it, it wasn’t enough. Her verdict was that “on a piece of paper he’s perfect, but there’s a thing inside of him that won’t move him forward”, which leads her to doubt Mark will actually go through with the performance of his own work – despite his invitation for her to come back to Brighton to watch him.

The show’s heart-warming moments came not from the potential of any romance between the two, but seeing Mark’s personal development thanks to an infusion of Melanie’s carpe diem spirit (“There’s a Mark way of doing things and the slightly more effective way of doing things”). He didn’t get the girl, but he got some of his confidence back.

As they parted with a hug and a song by the appropriately named Embrace, on reflection, maybe Mark could have chosen a different poem with which to enchant Melanie, as Ehrman’s lines clearly state to:

“Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection.
Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment,
it is as perennial as the grass.”

I’ve been trying to dig up the past. For some reason, Gerald Harper, the star of BBC1′s Adam Adamant Lives! was referred to in my family as “Old Lemonade-Bottle Shoulders”; after a few years nobody could remember why. Nobody can today. And it bothers me..

Especially because that “why” recurred watching the first in a highly-promising BBC4 series of half-hour histories of cult fantasy TV that kicked off with a tribute to the titular hero. And kept on recurring, because just what was it about such an obvious dogs’ dinner of a programme that could inspire memorious devotion? At a recent BFI preview screening of a new Adamant DVD, Juliet Harmer, the series’ jiggle factor and one of the great lost ’60s starlets, was asked how much fan mail she’d received way back when. “Oh, masses – mostly from 14 year old boys,” she admitted. “All of whom are here tonight,” quipped her husband.

No disrespect to the astonishingly well preserved Ms Harmer but if any of those grown-up boy fans went away from the screening of a rather awful old programme with their juices flowing as freely as 40 years ago, they were en route to a secure ward.

This hardworking tribute’s commendable balance of seriousness and dry humour transcended most other retro-clipjoints insofar as it allowed those involved to make a case for their work, and a reasonably good fist they made of it. But, crucially, not quite good enough. Because Harper’s Adam Adamant came across resoundingly as the dud history has always held him to be, and for once we didn’t need the ambassadors of the bleeding obvious (Theakston, Maconie) to tell us why.

For the tinies, a brief recap; in 1902 Edwardian gent, detective and adventurer Adam Adamant is double-crossed by his fiancée, frozen in a block of ice and then dug up in swinging London by cloth-capped labourers, whereupon his travails on adapting to modern mores and morals go hand in hand with his resumption of doing the Right Thing, offing cads and thwarting dastards (as scriptwriter Brian Clemens wryly pointed out, “Just a simple enough storyline”).

There is a suggestion that the absence of almost all sexual chemistry from the programme (Harmer’s character “Georgina Jones” was always Adamant’s platonic friend) was an attempt to gag Mary Whitehouse’s ever-rising gorge with a clean, Sexton Blake-esque hero for the times -although this doubtless didn’t mean that Kleenex didn’t do very well out of adolescent fantasies about Juliet Harmer. As per the look of the show, all the cliché boxes were ticked in short order – predictably Art Nouveau-ish titles and typefaces, given Carnaby Street’s burgeoning obsessions with hyper-stylised turn of the century chic; Harper was a proto-metrosexual, Wyngardesque fop; there’s a Mini; there are discothéques; pop art ensigns and Union Jacks; and a visual language informed by maybe one too many Nouvelle Vague nights and De Sica specials down the Arts Lab.

But the most important thing about Adam Adamant was the elephant in the room called The Avengers.

The genial and personable Harmer, Clemens, Harper and producer Verity Lambert all owned up to the clunking obviousness of the series’ hamfisted and, in retrospect, laughable attempt to trump ABC’s masterpiece. Even an otherwise impartial and unironic script compared the two shows thus: “Edwardian gent teamed with beautiful girl … and Edwardian gent teamed with beautiful girl”. The unspoken tag, of course, was that The Avengers had queered this pitch three years previously.

By this time the narrator had all but given up. The Avengers was “sexier, slicker”, better-funded … which made one wonder why on Earth we were watching a show about a show which was playing against a stacked deck from the start. But it was worth watching, a kind of TV autopsy on a patient who is still alive.

Clemens and Lambert tried to limit the damage, but when one compared the surviving Adamant footage – too few cameras, too much flare, bad stock, shoestring lighting, school-pageant swordplay – with the sleekness of Emma and Steed, one knew the game was pretty much up. To “get” even a fraction of the premise behind Adamant, suspension of disbelief had to be as entire as the leading man’s cryogenic immersion. As Harper said, “Where did Adam learn to drive that Mini?”. We never found out. One could equally have asked, “Where in the name of God did that ridiculous name come from?” No wonder the guy was so good at fighting – in 1902, he must have copped a lot of diss for a handle like that.

Clemens and the ever-enjoyable sci-fi expert and all-round good egg Kim Newman (who seems to be turning into Walter Becker out of Steely Dan) tried another tack; stressing the show’s “weirdness”, but evidence of this – aside of a premise so hair-raisingly daft that for a viewer to assimilate the absurdity of Adamant’s situation per se was to intrude on the drama of an individual episode – we saw few examples save for a flimsy generic grooviness as ultimately empty as The Mod Squad‘s.

Tellingly, the tribute did not flag up a single “classic episode”, because on the evidence here one suspects that there weren’t any. There were, apparently, no storylines of landmark mindfuckery. No “Fall Out”, no “They Keep Killing Steed”. But how else? Production values were feeble, 13 shows assembled in as many weeks, the sort of schedule that would keep Crackerjack going but not a prestige prime-time thriller. Even Harper came close to admitting the self-defeating stupidity of such a situation.

Clemens summoned the “best pop music … fashion … football … in the world” from a lucky-bag of ’60s shibboleths, as though to lend the programme reflected glory simply by the period in which it was made. Actually Adam Adamant came across as a ’60s remnant as cheap and inglorious as the Tracked Hovercraft or Ronan Point.

The jarring and unsettling undercurrent of nauseous paranoia informs all the best British postwar film and TV fantasy (Quatermass, Danger Man, The Prisoner, The Avengers) in which the very stones and mortar of civic normality (government “facilities”, army camps, deer parks, embassies, Ministries) become the loci of the irrational, surreal and downright scary. This is absent from Adam Adamant. There are no megalomaniacs on the London Underground or robotic assassins in chalk quarries on the North Downs. The very fact that a son of luxury and indulgence was reborn into a similarly luxurious and indulgent world of supposed dippiness and discontinuities – all neon and mandrax and Woodbines and kohl and indulgence (where’s the Floyd? Is that Syd there? Or is it Jeff Beck?) – somehow distances him from us, as it must have done four decades past.

Doctor Who could bring aliens to mining communities, what did Adam Adamant ever do to relate his swashbuckling to those gawping at six-inch screens in Mexborough or Abertillery?

Postwar Britons appreciated classic screen fantasy when it promiscuously impinged on their quotidian realities. One of the most chilling sequences in British cinema history opens the Wyndham-derived The Village of the Damned (1960) in which the only indication of lurking horror is a little Bedford coach skew-wiff in a ditch on a grave-silent mist-filled country lane where even birds are holding their breath – and the paralysis that noiselessly fells anyone who strays near. There is a shadow of the unknown and shocking, somewhere … as in the ETA Hoffmann story of the semi-supernatural Scarbo from the Nachtstücke (Night Tales), we are not quite sure of this terror, “how it had got in” to an otherwise ordinary existence, the monster under every child’s bed come uncannily to life.

Similarly, The War Game knew what it was about, using comparable juxtapositions of the everyday (repointed suburban brickwork, school playgrounds) and the unthinkable. Adamant‘s existence in swinging London was anything but ordinary for most Britons. Fantasy, benign or malign, works best when it has a base and earthbound antipode against which to shine.

Adam Adamant Lives! wasn’t a disaster, an abortion, a tragedy, an OTT. It was just rather sad and bad. But no matter; if we do not experience the mistakes of the past, how can we expect to learn from them? And of course, by the end of this series, Mr Harper’s creation could end up looking like a colossus. Because next up come Survivors, Doomwatch, Starcops (erm …), Blake’s 7 (oh dear) and (swallows hard) The Tripods … Gulp. Sell those and you’ll truly be a man, my son.

Angus McIntyre, who both produced and directed this splendid and affectionate attempt at rehab, is to be roundly congratulated; from the most unpromising seam he has unearthed a valuable piece of TV history, a programme of questionable value which nonetheless provokes comment and discussion. Nobody has yet been able to make a series about failed cult comedy shows, for example: Hardwick House, The Continuous Diaries of Ian Breakwell, They Came from Somewhere Else, Nightingales and Big Jim.

In other words, with this disinterment McIntyre has pulled off an intelligent coup for TV archaeology which should spawn imitators and for all those who care or think about the genre, a goldmine. Let the excavations commence.

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.

“It’s a very special day,” he mumbled as if delivering a eulogy. “Yes,” immediately boomed Carol, jump-starting proceedings by wrestling proceedings out of Des’ grey hands and into her own forever-affable universe.

“It’s a very special day,” she repeated, before leading the audience in a rousing chorus of “Happy Birthday to Us”. Visiting pupils from Otley grammar school were shown enthusiastically joining in. A couple of old women began to sway. The air was thick with the whiff of embarrassed jubilation. And still Des didn’t smile.

In fact he refused to crack a grin throughout the entire programme. At one point he appeared on the verge of letting slip a sly chuckle, only to resolve this dribble of emotion into a cocky snort. His eyes betrayed no sign of enjoyment. His voice rarely rose above that of an apologetic restaurateur. At several points he appeared to be checking an atlas for the quickest route home. He bid us goodbye as if brushing off a money spider that had been stuck to his moustache.

And it was all going so well. From those dark days of the late ’90s, when he single-handedly made enemies of the entire nation by defecting from the BBC to ITV, Des had just reached the point at which everybody had more or less forgiven him – only to go and blow it all again by proclaiming himself too lazy to continue making the journey up to Countdown‘s Yorkshire studios. Now he’s off, presumably to spend more time pottering in a diameter of three or so miles around his sundial, leaving behind him a show that is once more looking for a suitably avuncular, comforting host.

Which would make a change from the present incumbent. In retrospect Des was never going to completely settle into Richard Whiteley’s high-backed purple chair, despite this reviewer’s initial enthusiasm. Time just wasn’t on the man’s side. It actually worked against him, conspiring to illuminate rather than mask his shortcomings. And it was happening day after day after day.

A dose of Des every 24 hours soon proved a far cry from a regular weekly helping. Those dusty turns of phrase and mildewed mannerisms which proved to be devastatingly effective following hard on the heels of frantic football action started to seem singularly jaundiced cloistered within the confines of a parlour game. Suddenly Des and his patter felt very, very old. Worse, so did Countdown.

The one factor above all else which had helped keep the format, ahem, ticking over down the decades – the show’s blatant comprehensibility – became an anachronism. Des wasn’t conferring any dignity or patronage onto Countdown‘s enduring rules and rituals. Instead he was behaving as if he didn’t much care for them. He came to treat them as an irritation rather than representing the whole point of him being there. The show had always been inconsequential, but Des somehow turned this into a bad thing.

It’s hard to see how any of this was intentional. It’s equally difficult to doubt Des’s sincerity in accepting the job in the first place and seeking to make a reasonably decent fist of following in the footsteps of someone like Richard Whiteley.

The problem now is trying to convince us he’s not bailing out because he’s given up. His stated reason of disliking the travelling is simply not worthy of a man of Des’s reputation and grasp of public relations. Sure, he may have harboured such feelings deep down, but you’d never expect somebody like him to come out and say so on the record.

His actions smack of taking the least worst way out and of not wishing to face up to the challenges before him. Now we’ll never know whether Des did have the capacity, in the long term, to fashion the programme in his own image, accept its values, cherish its quirkiness and learn to smile. You’d like to think he could have made it a success. The fact he’s denied us – and himself – that pleasure is pure petulance, bordering on the selfish.

So he’s lost the good faith of the nation all over again. And it’s a pity he had to dress up his exit in such tattered clothing which ill suits both him and the programme he’s leaving behind.

Yet you have to wonder now whether it’s worth pulling the plug for good, especially as whoever takes over would have a bigger mountain to climb than that which faced Des. At least he inherited a show that was still a success. The new presenter will step into a show that is sprawling on the ropes.

You wake up screaming and drenched in sweat. No, darling, don’t worry, go back to sleep. It’s all right … it wasn’t really you who commissioned Man to Man With Dean Learner. Unfortunately, there is a poor soul out there who goes to their rest without that excuse, because he (or she) okayed one of the most buttock-clenchingly terrible half-hours of TV in 2006. And he (or she) has to live with that. For ever.

“Dean Learner”, the curious creation of Richard Ayoade, first appeared on the brilliant cult spoof Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace in 2004. He is palpably absurd, at once a cretinous and untalented would-be superstud who talks in a bizarrely camp cockney singsong redolent of Ken Livingstone. And who now has, we are told, got himself a chat show on a major TV channel. As you do.

Nobody in their right mind, of course, would employ someone as obviously hated by the camera as this walking aberration – aside from his woodenness, there’s that daft David Grant-out-of-Linx scrunch-dry perm. Perhaps only Uncle Staveley from I Didn’t Know You Cared, a bombmaker for the Ulster Volunteer Force or the incontinent maiden aunt of the chief timetabler for postbuses in Westmorland would make a less likely host for prime time TV, whose tics and devices the show seems otherwise so eager to satirise to the nth degree of exactitude. This, of course, is supposed to be the point – this is supposed to be why it’s funny. Because it’s silly. Yes, we’re in Alan Partridge territory. Again.

The above feeble get-outs mirror those which holed Knowing Me, Knowing You … amidships – the fundamental implausibility of its premise, and now that its undeserved success has given programme-makers carte blanche to sanction swill like this (“Well, it’s supposed to be bad!”), it has another damning case to answer.

The problem with Knowing Me … was that, at the time of its inception, the likes of Partridge would never have come within a country mile of a chat show, and this effectively neutralised the programme’s valiantly-attempted use of authenticating detail of its look and feel and texture. The quite breathtakingly dreadful The Kumars at No 42 took this creaky conceit even further, but Man to Man … might do us one service in serving as the final resting-place of the always-dodgy spoof chat show format.

It’s hard to know where to start when enumerating what’s wrong with the thing, but one could suggest it began when someone at C4 gave more than 10 seconds consideration to such a diabolically bad idea in the first place. Worse, the pretend Dean Learner’s chat-show might be even more unpalatable TV than if the Learner and his concept and programme actually been for real.

Everything about this sorry affair is heavy-handed, dated. The irony is clunky, sledge-hammered home; self-conscious, crappy host; self-referential, camp look; fittings and furniture and tux and waistcoat like an ’80s footballer’s, frills and leatherette and teakalike. Made-up guests. Ho ho. Aren’t we clever.

Well, no, actually. Because, unlike Marenghi, these are people working with a lumpen script that of Cro-Magnon stupidity masquerading as postmodern chutzpah. In show two, the “guest” was a motor-racing driver, Steve Pising (played as an Anglo-Oz pseudo-Nigel Mansell with laudable effort but in vain by Matthew “Garth Marenghi” Holness). Instead of milking laughs by skirting the ambiguities of the character’s name – itself a cheap shot – it was “pissing” right from the off, and then this “gag” recurred roughly 141,000 times throughout the next half-hour. I’d rehearse some of the lines, but I think I’d rather extract my own eyeballs with a sugar spoon than write them down, or even remember I’d ever watched this crime against TV.

No, don’t go away, there’s more. There is actually a laugh track on this. Honestly. Given the exhilarating acuity of the spoofery on Marenghi, one hopefully suspects that this might be an ironic device, but if it is, it doesn’t work – the ha-ha stings to each lame pun, innuendo or simile merely emphasising the hideousness of the whole. One cannot shake the feeling that everyone involved is fervently praying, “Look, it’s supposed to be shit, all right? Don’t take it seriously.” Well, if I sit through 30 minutes of what is ostensibly comedy and I don’t even crack a smile, in fact if I end up hunched and whimpering with embarrassment behind the sofa, I think I am entitled to take such a disappointment at least a tad seriously.

A week before this TV car crash occurred, a must-have DVD of Marenghi episodes appeared, showing what the people behind this terrible show can really do. C4 have busily tagged it to Man to Man; it would be a shame if the former, one of the quirkiest and best TV comedies of the last 10 years was to be tainted by association with what is, without question, a turkey whose wings we will hear beating many years hence.

Abominable. You don’t wanna know. You really don’t.

Despite claims by some that Britain has become a nanny state, what we are in fact living under is a dominatrix dictatorship.

Just watch any terrestrial TV station for a couple of hours. It’s inevitable at some point you’ll encounter a stern-faced disciplinarian issuing a series of orders to some masochistic member of the public.

But as if Mistress McKeith, Mistress Frost et al aren’t enough, Channel 4′s latest strict mistress is double-barrelled dominatrix Cesarina Holm-Kander, Your Money or Your Wife‘s whip-cracking financial trouble-shooter. Holm-Kander, the show’s self-styled “debt buster”, aims to bring her boardroom expertise to the bedroom and help couples climb the debt mountain they’ve managed to accumulate; and with the average debt of the under 30s being £8,000, Holm-Kander won’t be short of victims.

First in the series was credit card queen Kerri, a 22-year old psychology student and model, who was definitely more the latter than the former. Label lover Kerri (motto: Life’s too short not to get everything you want) felt it was important to look good, but was unable to manage this on her alleged £40,000 salary, and had ran up a five-figure debt on credit cards.

It wasn’t difficult to see how this had happened. Kerri admitted to spending £3,000 to £4,000 a month on clothes, had two silver convertibles, and had undergone a £5,000 boob job in 2004, although it was perhaps appropriate the latter should have been financed by plastic.

Amazingly, boyfriend James (motto: If you can’t afford it you shouldn’t get it) was unaware as to the full extent of Kerri’s spending, although you would have thought he couldn’t have missed the overnight breast enhancement and been curious as to how it was paid for. Maybe he was having too much fun.

Mistress Cesarina (motto: Spending money you don’t have to achieve your dream is the recipe for a financial nightmare) certainly had some work to do, as not only were the couple deep in debt but planning to go into business together and open a nightclub. Could she whip the profligate pair into equitable shape?

The first part of Cesarina’s master(card) class was to reveal the true extent of Kerri’s debts, not just to James, but to the debt diva herself. Kerri’s tenuous grip on her financial affairs was such that she was unaware of how much she was in arrears, although you’d have thought a model would have known a thing or two about figures.

Kerri told James she was “£30 – 40 thousand” in debt, although Cesarina was quick to point out the exact figure was £41,000. If you were being generous you could say Kerri was only a thousand out, but it would perhaps be more accurate to state she was £11,000 out. James was surprised it was that much (“I thought it was half of that”), although Kerri at least had some idea where the money had gone (“I shouldn’t have bought all those shoes.”).

After Cesarina got financial and informed Kerri she was technically insolvent – then explained to her exactly what this phrase meant – the mistress got down to drawing-up a post-nup agreement and attempted to pass on the organisational skills needed to manage their debt. Being a financial expert, Cesarina reckoned she could knock off £9,000 of Kerri’s arrears inside two weeks, although I wasn’t that impressed. Even though I’m a beginner at this financial advisor stuff, I could have knocked £41,000 off James’s debts inside two minutes with some simple advice: dump Kerri. However, he was determined to stand by his woman, insisting they were “in this together”.

Despite this declared spirit of togetherness, he was strangely absent from the next part of Cesarina’s attempts to “dent the debt” with a spot of public shaming. As a psychology student Kerri should have understood the motivation here. Carrying a suitcase of £20 notes which contained the amount she was paying in interest on her loans each month, Kerri had to walk the streets and hand out to passers-by the money, explaining to them as she did so why she was being so generous. Kerri thought this exercise was a waste, although as her mistress was quick to point out, this was what she was doing on a corporate basis by virtue of her interest payments each month.

But just in case the symbolic effect of the lesson wasn’t enough, James obeyed their mistress’s next set of instructions by cutting up all of Kerri’s cards. In addition to this was an enforced budget of £7 a day, with all their financial decisions having to be made together and Cesarina having access to their online accounts.

Following this was the inevitable asset-stripping which, understandably, had the Visa vixen feeling a little nervous, but while she was likely to lose the shirt off her back it was unlikely Cesarina was so strict she was going to take the implants from her chest. After going through her possessions and calling in an auctioneer, Cesarina was confident she could raise £2,000 by selling the tagged items, but James and Kerri resisted the proposed flogging by their monetary mistress.

James said he’d “rather get a job than sell this stuff” which in more than the way he’d meant revealed why the pair were so indebted. Kerri also refused to sell many of her “investments”, such as her £900 bag. But, as Cesarina pointed out, this wasn’t an investment, it was a debt … in the shape of a bag. This also applied to £34,000 in the shape of a Beamer that was parked next to the other convertible Kerri couldn’t part with as she wanted “the best of anything”. With an attitude and car like that, it was no surprise when Cesarina fitted her client with a tracking device so she could be monitored 24 hours a day.

The next stage in installing discipline was an attempt to show the superficial and ultimately pointless nature of Kerri’s desire for image. She had to discern a designer bag from a high street one, which, unsurprisingly, she was unable to do – but then she wasn’t alone. When the bags were shown to people on the street (the people Kerri the “model” was most likely to spend her time mixing with), they too were unable to tell the difference or which was the most expensive-looking. As Cesarina pointed out, many celebs wear high-street attire, and besides this try and blag as much free stuff as possible. Some of them probably even take advantage of the firm Holm-Kander mentioned that offered designer bags for a £30 monthly hire fee.

But the final test of Kerri’s newly found obedience was a spot of entrapment. Could she resist the ultimate accessory of the conspicuously consumptive: a pampered pooch as carried by the likes of Paris Hilton?

Knowing of Kerri’s desire for a £1,000 pug puppy, Cesarina had a secret meeting with James (in the front of a parked car for added furtive authenticity) to inform him of her cunning plan. He was to take his girlfriend to her pedigree chum to see if he could use a pug to make a mug of her. Four hidden cameras were recording the occasion as he attempted to entice her. However, she refused to take the bait, worrying that she didn’t want Cesarina to “lose respect for me or be told off”. Right on cue after this display of submission, Cesarina rang Kerri to congratulate her for not giving in to temptation.

By the end of the first month, Cesarina had saved the couple £9,845, although this sum was perhaps less impressive when taken into account the £7,900 that had been saved by selling one of the cars. Much of the advice Holm-Kander had given (organise your bills, pay them on time) was the practical kind you’d expect a layman to offer, and when the financial expert told them all they had to do to clear the remaining £31,155 was carry on with £7 a week budget for the next two years you had to wonder if it wasn’t just Kerri with the tenuous grip of financial reality.

But then this hadn’t all been about financial gains, and the experience had taught Kerri and James lessons about each other. The psychology student had learned she can’t have everything she wants and James had realised his woman can be tamed. But then what else would you expect a dominatrix to teach you?