Top Ten TV Bastards

Do you remember 2000? What a year it was – it was the year of the best nostalgia programmes of all time. I Love the Seventies was an entertaining, well-produced series. Better still, Channel 4′s Top Ten was one of the best programmes for years, by turns fascinating, informative, entertaining and laugh-out-loud funny. Unfortunately the thing about nostalgia is that by its very nature it can’t go on forever, and after I Love… dwindled into smug irrelevance, now Top Ten is a shadow of the excellent show it once was. Read more

RI:SE

With the weight of history hanging on his eyelids, the fact that Mark Durden-Smith had obviously enjoyed one hell of a good night’s sleep didn’t bode well. We first saw the louche, preening Son-of-Chalmers a couple of minutes before 7am. Read more

Teachers

Before disappearing to America ex-Channel 4 boss Michael Jackson specifically commended this drama as having “the right tone and attitude” for his station, conveniently omitting a qualifying sentence explaining just what were said “tone” and “attitude” and what was so amazing about them. Read more

Heroes of Comedy: Dick Emery

When the Heroes of Comedy series first began on Channel 4 it was something of a revelation. Here was a tribute programme that used “talking heads” to the best effect yet seen and dispensed with ponderous and hagiographic narrative. People who actually knew and worked with the subject talked and revealed a little of the subject that might otherwise have gone unknown to mortals such as I. Read more

The Falklands Play

There’s an adage when it comes to writing drama – don’t tell, show. Read more

That Tony Wilson

Given that Granada’s regional opt-out timeslots have so often been occupied by the works of Tony Wilson, it’s only fitting that they should use one of said timeslots to transmit a self-produced retrospective of his unique and truly individual career path. Read more

Snoddy

Remember these names – you may be tested later; Firstly, the debit column – and remember folks, this is the abridged version - A Kick Up the Eighties, Laugh? I Nearly Paid My Licence Fee, City Lights, Pulp Video, Naked Video, All Along the Watchtower,Caledonian MacBrains and Elaine. Now, to counterbalance that horrendous litany of disastrous failures with the credit column (in its complete entirety); The Vital Spark,Scotch and Wry and… er… actually, that’s it. Read more

Behind Bars

I’ll readily confess that my sole reason for viewing Behind Bars was the salient and not entirely inconsequential fact that I’m currently employed in a prison. Read more