Points of View

You’ll not catch me slagging off Anne Robinson. Alright, so Watchdog is often self-satisfied and badly researched, and she may be unpleasant on The Weakest Link (actually, I think she’s quite funny), but a while ago, she was one of my favourite people on television. Read more

Malcolm in the Middle

So there’s this new American family comedy. Its central character is a gifted child from a dysfunctional family – throw in a black kid in a wheelchair, a right-on teacher, girlfriend problems and a whole host of other clichés. Serve up with the proclamation that it’s a live action version of The Simpsons from the same network who gave us Ally McBeal. Read more

Hollyoaks

Three years ago, the fictional residents of Hollyoaks had their aimless lives thrown into turnoil when local hero Kurt Benson was prosecuted for deliberately pushing a fellow labourer off some scaffolding on a building site. His “trial” was screened on five successive nights on Channel 4 in a desperate attempt to inject some tension into this crucial occasion. Read more

Attachments

The internet – a signifier for progress or simply a rancid melting pot of cyberjunk? If the new Information Age was intended to usher in innovations in mass communication rather more exciting than the flurry of onscreen e-mail chat we currently understand by it, then the idea of a television drama centred around the web is a beguiling concept on paper. Read more

Coronation Street

At the end of an eventful week for the Street, in which Curly, Ken, Mike, Alma, Les and Ashley have found themselves hostages in a botched supermarket hold up, it is a triumph for the human spirit to see – just days later – Ashley back on the job with his Mrs, Mike restraining his wife when she attempts to kick off a bar room brawl in the Rovers, and Curly manfully providing emotional support for the police markswoman who gunned down the armed robber (who in a twist of fate so beloved of the soaps happens to be the brother of Linda Baldwin). Read more

Pokémon

One of life’s great cliches is that you know you’re old when you start complaining to your kids about the bleddin’ orrible racket coming from Top of the Pops. Read more

Conference Live

Political Party Conferences have been a feature of British daytime television for many a year. The days when both Tory and Labour gatherings consisted of the great and the good sitting in a row behind several trestle tables and rubber plants talking about nationalisation in an atmosphere reeking of musty, creaking senility may be long gone, but an uneasy relationship between conference and live television remains. Read more

You Can’t Take it With You

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

Blackadder: Back and Forth

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