Radio Times

Tuesday 2 January 2007 was the day that I proudly bought my first ever TV. (Up until that point I'd made do with family hand-me-downs.) It was flat, it was big, and it came with a port to hook up to my computer. Suddenly I could find stuff on the internet and watch from the questionable comfort of a sofa I picked up for 50 quid on eBay.

I sat down to enjoy an old episode of Animal Kwackers with trepidation, remembering that it scared me witless when I was five years old. Most of June and July were taken up with watching hour upon hour of old continuity anouncements or documentaries about the Cold War, so I don't have much idea of what was on British telly over the summer. But I did manage to break the stranglehold of nostalgia to keep appointments with a few shows.

The year kicked off with This Life + 10, which looked at the present-day lives of characters from the 1990s series This Life. It consisted mainly of upper-middle-class oafs getting drunk and bellowing at each other in a country mansion while, for some implausible reason, an annoying woman followed them around with a video camera. Even my girlfriend, a dedicated fan of the original, was reduced to throwing stuff at the screen (which I had to put a stop to, because that telly didn't come cheap).

In February came The Verdict. This presented a fictional rape case to a real jury - well, as real as a jury featuring Chris Tarrant's wife and Jeffrey Archer can get. Some jurors, particularly Sara Payne and Michael Portillo, managed to emerge with dignity, while others emerged as self-obsessed egotists. (Take a bow, footballer Stan Collymore, and rapper Dwayne Vincent, whom jurors were hilariously obliged to refer to as "Megaman" throughout.)

The jury eventually pronounced the accused rapists not guilty, but not without some of them having massive doubts. At some points, you forgot that it wasn't real. Then you thanked God it wasn't real. Then realised that cases like this are probably more common than we'd ever like to imagine.

I needed cheering up. The magnificent fourth series of Peep Show in late spring did the job, in which Mark attempted to get out of his wedding to Sophie by first proposing to a waitress and then contriving to get run over (neither of which worked, obviously). Paul Whitehouse and Harry Enfield's new sketch show Ruddy Hell! It's Harry and Paul began magnificently - particularly the mysterious man in a strange hat who deflects criticism from brusque women in positions of power by offering them a selection of soft-centred chocolates - but I'd stopped watching by episode three.

July's special episode of political comedy The Thick of It, however, reaffirmed my faith in British comedy: once again, it marked out Chris Addison as an exceptional comedy actor, as well as a brilliant stand-up.

I'm obsessed with food shows - as was minutely detailed in my daily blog - and 2007 threw up a mixture of tasty treats and bitter disappointments. First we had to bid farewell to Jeni Barnett, whose Good Food Live show on UKTV Food was unceremoniously axed despite her being one of the most reliably funny TV broadcasters in the country, and replaced with the astonishingly bad Market Kitchen.

I had to seek solace in the bizarrely dubbed French cookery show Le Breton Gourmand for a few months, until the autumn gave us the double whammy of Raymond Blanc's The Restaurant (or, as I call it, "Ze Restaurant") and Hell's Kitchen with Marco Pierre White.

Both exceptional in their own way, Blanc's show demonstrated the nightmarish reality of running a restaurant by throwing nine couples with no previous experience in at the deep end. Highlights included the novice chef who was more interested in setting up a drum kit than cooking, and Jane, one of the eventual winners, who would burst into tears if she noticed, say, a stain on a tablecloth.

Hell's Kitchen just stuck to the tried and tested formula of having a belligerent chef reduce celebrities to quivering wrecks, and Marco was sensational. Nigella Lawson, meanwhile, should be forced to sit down and watch every smug, self-satisfied moment of her most recent series before she deigns to inflict another one on us.

I'm already horribly over my word limit, so brief shout-outs to Alastair Campbell, for the unintentionally hilarious moment during his televised diaries where he imagined that Princess Diana was actually flirting with him at a dinner party in 1997; Paul Merton, for making a travel show about China that gave me the extraordinary new experience of actually wanting to watch something on Five; Stephen Fry, for his documentary on HIV, a worthy follow-up to last year's look at manic depression; BBC4's Flight of the Conchords, which managed to be both gently moving and screamingly funny; Al Murray's inevitable and welcome foray into the chat show medium; and Chris Ditchburn, who I spent endless hours watching spin a roulette wheel on Sky channel 847.

So yes, some top TV moments. Sadly, most TV output was unable to beat internet clips such as a series of hilarious dubbings of classic rock artists. Or the fainting goats. Or the Montgomery Flea Market video. Or the ten most ridiculous black-metal music videos.

But one thing's clear - we'll have no shortage of stuff to watch in 2008. Merry Christmas!

**

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So, it's the very last Dish of the Day. I'd planned to review some programme on the Discovery Channel about ghosts, but after 60 seconds I knew I was probably going to end up dispensing the same supernatural slagging I gave to a very similar show about 10 weeks ago, so at 12 midnight last night I stopped the Sky+ box and just started channel hopping instead.

I'd not adopted this approach before: a remarkable amount of research and planning has gone into this blog. (Well, 30 minutes browsing a copy of the nation's favourite listings magazine each week.) But the thing is, with so much of cable and satellite TV, you run into that problem I had with the ghostbusters: you end up watching something if not completely identical, then certainly remarkably similar to something you've seen before.

After half an hour, I was still dithering as to whether to tackle the thorny subject of selling lingerie on a shopping channel (Ideal World do this every so often, and it's basically two women giggling while a third stands there wearing a fixed grin and some fishnets), or maybe one of those amazing Islamic channels featuring six very stern-looking men sitting in a semicircle. I've no idea what they're doing, but I've narrowed it down to either live footage of a dentist's waiting room in Karachi, or the Iranian version of The X Factor where the researchers have forgotten to invite any contestants.

In desperation I turned to ESPN Classic, where you can see archive sporting moments, 24 hours a day. While watching regular live sports channels doesn't necessarily guarantee you top-notch entertainment - you're at the mercy of the talent of the sportsmen currently doing battle on the pitch, rink or table - you know you're getting a treat from ESPN, because they simply wouldn't bother screening a dull midtable Bundesliga clash between, say, Karlsruhe and Hertha Berlin.

I've seen untold moments of sporting greatness on this channel: full highlights of England's surprise win over Australia at Headingley in 1981; the legendary FA Cup win by Hereford over Newcastle in something approaching a mudbath back in 1972 - including this extraordinary goal; but tonight they were showing the first fight between Muhammad Ali (then Cassius Clay) and Sonny Liston, at the Miami Beach Convention Hall in April 1964.

Now, I'm not a big fan of boxing, which gave me the added advantage of not already knowing who was going to win. While I've occasionally watched American wrestling and been mystified by the roars, screams and air-punching of the crowd (after all, that's basically like an audience getting rowdy and boisterous at a performance of Dick Whittington at the Eastbourne Royal Hippodrome) there's something genuinely thrilling, I'm ashamed to say, about a crowd goading on two men who are beating each other savagely about the face.

Between rounds, Ali would be more interested in gurning to the photographers than receiving treatment from his corner, but after the bell had rung, he'd begin alternately punching and taunting Liston, to gasps from the commentator - at the time Ali was still only 22, and a relative newcomer.

Liston failed to come out for the seventh round; he'd had enough. Which was the cue for 15 minutes of complete chaos, as Ali waded through a sea of people, loudly proclaiming himself to be the greatest, and rendering any attempts to interview him completely farcical.

You see, it is possible to stumble upon incredible television, purely by accident. You just have to put the hours in.

ESPN Classic is on Sky channel 442.

Typical BBC3, I thought. Let's ratchet up the viewing figures by sticking three dysfunctional families - including six babies - into a house to live together, fill the place with cameras, and then just sit back and wait for the whole thing to turn into chaos, like the main square of a European town before a major international football clash.

In fact, it ended up being a surprisingly sensitive look at child rearing - although I've got to say that this is a subject I'm about as familiar with as the history of the crossbow, cat breeding, or rolling stock on the west coast mainline.

But it is only day two of a month-long project, so there are still plenty of opportunities for small children to start setting about each other with ice-cream scoops, or for the women in the house to start calling each other slags. For now, though, it's just a load of tired parents being given some sound advice.

Child experts Laverne and Elizabeth observe the three families around the clock, assessing their parenting skills and wincing when the children release ear-splitting screams whenever they're vaguely bored.

Laverne and Elizabeth are, as you might expect, well-spoken middle-class women, while the adults in the house are slightly vague, slobby, mumbling creatures (hilariously, much of the programme has to be subtitled) who start swearing at the drop of a rattle, and for whom the concept of getting up before 9:00am seems completely alien.

So the main tension in the house is really between the experts and the parents. The experts come across as holier-than-thou, issuing their slightly terse instructions in an authoritative manner, while the parents clearly just wish they'd both bog off and leave them alone.

What's immediately obvious, though, is that as soon as the parents bother following the instructions they've been given, the improvement is massive and immediate. Kids stop whining. They go to bed when they're told. They eat their food without being harangued. It's like magic.

So each set of parents is slowly and reluctantly coming round, albeit after plenty of inter-family bickering. One of the parents is a single mum, which has upset the balance of the house somewhat. One of the other mums is clearly threatened by her presence, and we're immediately introduced to her world of paranoia where any woman within three feet of her husband represents an irresistible temptation for him, regardless of whether the woman in question adores his sticking-out ears or, more likely, not.

A more tragic tale is of the 17-year-old couple comprising a can-do mum and a sullen, dead-eyed dad who has no real interest in being in the house save for the money he's presumably being paid by BBC3. Towards the end of the programme, the young mum burst into tears while talking to Laverne, saying that she hated him.

"He's given me something I can't cope with," she cried, and you couldn't help but let out a long sigh of sympathy. This was echoed by Elizabeth, who made lots of "ah, bless" noises immediately afterwards.

Anyway, I was flabbergasted to find myself engaged by a programme I'd never normally have tuned in to. Of course, you're basically watching a load of people parent really badly, so of course it's sensationalist telly - but at least it seems to be sensationalist telly with some kind of conscience. But hang on, what's coming up on BBC3? Oh, here we go again - another episode of Can Fat Teens Hunt?. Strewth.

All New House of Tiny Tearaways is on BBC3 (Sky 115, Virgin 106, Freeview 7).

Ah, the panel-based quiz show. The last refuge of the desperate commissioning editor. Despite the fact that They Think It's All Over and Never Mind the Buzzcocks are among the most profoundly irritating programmes on British TV, copycat shows keep on rolling out, forcing comedians who are normally pretty funny to deliver a load of stilted, supposedly comic observations in the name of entertainment.

But they don't come any worse than this. And Then You Die just beggars belief. It'll surely be dredged up on one of those equally ubiquitous list-based programmes in a few years' time - I dunno, maybe The Nation's Top 500 Misconceived Panel-Based Quiz Shows. The spin they've put on it is that the presenter is a puppet. A Muppet-looking puppet, called Barrie Stardust.

As Barrie's character is an old-school, working men's club-type entertainer, this gives the production team the opportunity to stick a Celebrity Squares-style intro at the beginning, and allows the scriptwriters to pen a load of off-colour observations that Roy Chubby Brown and Bernard Manning would have rejected as substandard.

I can see why they're doing it. Theoretically it'll make the show appeal to those poor souls that marketing gurus have decided comprise the Dave channel's viewership - blokes who read Nuts or the Daily Star, can't really deal with anything remotely highbrow, and who will laugh at absolutely anything, but especially the word "tits".

It's only half an hour long, but it represents a massive test of endurance. The first round saw Barrie Stardust announce three topics currently in the news, and the panellists supposedly had to guess which one the British public find most annoying. What that means, of course, is that Barrie says "obesity crisis" and the panellists have to dredge up a related segment from their stand-up routines and pass it off as the "witty banter" that Dave supposedly prides itself on.

It's beyond desperate. The programme is littered with nervous laughter and embarrassed silences, during which the bloke with his hand up Barrie Stardust's back thanks God that he's hidden under the desk. The panellists do a good job of trying not to look uncomfortable - but not quite good enough. One of them, Rob Rouse - a very funny stand-up, as it goes - turned to the camera after one joke fell flat, and said, "Could you cut that one out?"

But of course, it stayed in. Just to give you an idea of the general level of humour, here are Barrie Stardust's lines for the opening of the second half of the programme, right after the commercial break:

"Welcome back to And Then You Die, the show that proves that a broken mirror doesn't just give you seven years of bad luck: if you're David Gest, it'll give you a lifetime of misery just by looking at it."

I rewound and watched this again and again, wondering if I'd missed something. I don't think I had. Perhaps the scriptwriters' strike has finally hit the UK.

The show ended with one team being awarded a prize of an urn containing Abu Hamza's oven glove collection - no, I don't get it either - and then Barrie performed a James Blunt song in a slightly stupid voice.

I was so eager to name and shame the cretinous bunch of sixth-formers who wrote this drivel, I fast-forwarded straight to the credits - but here's a thing: they're in tiny letters, with a big glow effect behind them, and moving so fast that you can't actually read any of the names. They could have saved time and effort by sticking a big notice up saying "The makers of this programme, fearful for their future in television, are desperate to remain anonymous."

And Then You Die is on Dave (Sky 111, Virgin 126, Freeview 19).

When I was about nine years old, I played a piano piece called Silver Trumpets at the St Albans Music Festival in a small room in front of about 30 adults, all of whom were there to see their offspring play a piano piece called Silver Trumpets. Believe me, you've never experienced anything like the levels of boredom generated by 12 primary schoolchildren playing Silver Trumpets, one after the other. I can still hear it in my head now - ham-fisted attempts at musicianship, devoid of subtlety, and sounding more like a piece entitled Rusty Saxophones.

Marc Yu, however, is only seven years old, and is already playing piano concertos with orchestras in vast concert halls to a rapturous reception - certainly more rapturous than the applause offered to the final entrant to perform Silver Trumpets at the 1980 St Albans Music Festival. This programme looked at his extraordinarily prodigious talent, and posed the question "nature or nurture?" in as many different ways as it possibly could over 60 minutes.

While it was tricky to tell whether Marc's mother was a classic "pushy mum" or just indulged his boundless enthusiasm, it was clear that she was the driving force behind his success. (My mother, I should note, did drive me to the St Albans Music Festival, and when it was finished she drove me back home again.)

She taught him Cantonese when he'd barely emerged from the womb, English shortly afterwards, and now they're embarking on intense Mandarin Chinese lessons. She would play Beethoven pieces to him while he was still crawling, which he can now play effortlessly. (My dad would play Buddy Holly records to me, but sadly my repeated attempts to join the cast of the West End musical Buddy - "It's Buddy Brilliant!" - have proved fruitless.)

I'm not complaining, honestly. I wouldn't particularly envy Marc's childhood: while he's a bright lad who seems remarkably unaffected by his current level of fame, the programme did ponder at length how he would deal with the process of growing up and particularly puberty. I mean, I may not be able to play a Rachmaninov piano concerto, but at least I've retained enough social skills to be able to talk to women without making them back away in horror. Well, most of the time.

The programme featured lots of 3-D diagrams of brains with their synapses fizzing, and extraordinary information about how a child's brain grows and becomes more capable when stimulated at a very young age. They looked at the Abecedarians project in the USA, where children from low-income familes were given top-level education until the age of five: this demonstrated the "nurture" argument. Meanwhile, an educational psychologist countered that Marc's talent somehow had to be down to "nature", and that there must be a "gene for genius".

It's one of those questions that isn't likely to be answered satisfactorily in the near future, but watching it did make me feel as if I'd missed an opportunity. I'd never blame my parents, but who knows what I could have achieved if I'd been bombarded with mathematical formulae at the age of two?

My girlfriend concurred with my opinion. "God, we should really learn a language or something," she said. Sadly, the programme suggested that at our age, the part of the brain receptive to new languages had probably withered away through lack of use, so maybe we'll just stick to watching telly.

My Brilliant Brain can be seen on National Geographic (Sky 526, Virgin 230).

I've gone to preposterous lengths to try and review this programme. You don't really need to know the boring details, but because of some extraordinarily bad planning on my part, I'm currently sitting in the passenger seat of a Fiat Punto, going down the M4 towards Carmarthen, while watching Discovery Real Time on the screen of my mobile phone.

It's only thanks to an extraordinary innovation called a Slingbox that I'm able to do this, although I can't help wondering whether the inventors might have been better off focusing their efforts on, I dunno, combating Third World hunger than allowing me to watch a programme about fishing while travelling through south Wales at 70mph. It has truly put me at the cutting edge of pointless mobile internet technology.

Trout 'n' About concentrates, as you might expect, on trout. It forms the centrepiece of Real Time's Saturday morning programming, which is 100 per cent devoted to the noble art of angling. A bloke called Paul and another bloke called Greg travel around in their car - which they've called Iris - stop here and there, and, well, try and catch some trout. On this particular show, they were in Argyll, a picturesque area famous for its sea trout, although the magical beauty of the lochs was diluted a bit on a screen measuring 2in x 1in.

Also, the rumble of the engine drowned out some of the sound, so it wasn't always entirely clear what was going on. At one point the duo were standing waist-deep in a river, which shows a level of commitment to catching fish that leaves me speechless. I've never even sat on the bank of a river with a fishing rod: my main interest in watching fishing on the telly is that it pushes all my relaxation buttons.

You don't ever get extreme fishing shows where some bloke tries to catch some red mullet while someone else fires at him from a nearby speedboat with an air rifle. It's always fantastically calm. Although my viewing experience would be a bit calmer if I wasn't having to advise my girlfriend when she can pull out and overtake a National Express coach.

"I've caught some seaweed," said Paul, or maybe it was Greg, it was hard to tell. "You have to celebrate everything you've caught, when you're fishing," said their guide. I'm guessing that doesn't include chlamydia.

By the end of part one, no-one on screen had succeeded in catching a single fish, which is, or so I thought, the primary aim of fishing. But everyone seemed remarkably unconcerned, which made me think that perhaps standing waist-deep in water is in fact the primary aim of fishing - but that's something you can do more easily and safely in the shallow end of your local swimming baths. One exchange between two anglers went as follows:

A: How's it going? B: Great! A: Caught any fish? B: No!

Weird.

There were some handy tips given to anyone wishing to take up this hobby of wading around Scottish rivers, which included wearing a life jacket, carrying a whistle and a mobile phone, and presumably not trying to watch Discovery Real Time on said mobile phone. I'm sure Trout 'n' About ended satisfactorily and with no loss of life, but I've had to turn it off now because I'm feeling a bit queasy and I need to watch the road. Apologies. Normal service - whatever that means - will resume tomorrow.

You can catch Trout 'n' About on Discovery Real Time (Sky 250, Virgin 271).

While those of us who don't class ourselves as eye-candy have probably tearfully given up on the idea of television presenting, there's still a way in. Become a TV chef. You don't have to be beautiful. Fans of Antony Worrall Thompson are unlikely to have posters of him on their bedroom walls. I'm not privy to the contents of Clarissa Dickson Wright's postbag, but I'm guessing that lustful notelets from potential suitors are pretty thin on the ground.

In fact, I have a theory that the uglier or more overweight the TV chef, the more we implicitly trust their opinions. "They must know what they're talking about," I ponder, "because there's certainly no other reason for getting them on the telly."

When a dowdy Nigella Lawson used to be a guest on Nigel Slater's television programmes about ten years ago, her recipes for grilled mushrooms would carry great weight and untold significance. Today, now they've completed her transformation into a pouting starlet, I can't take her seriously.

Which brings us to My Greek Kitchen, presented by an impossibly beautiful British Greek Cypriot called Tonia Buxton. On her website, she describes herself as an author, historian, cook, athlete and television presenter.

The woman is clearly a superhero. Her capabilities know no bounds. She is clearly not of this world. At the same time, for all I know, she might be a living nightmare to spend time with. She might involuntarily begin projectile vomiting when she gets upset, for example. But going by My Greek Kitchen, she's the pinnacle of human perfection.

As for my theory above, well, I don't particularly care about what she's cooking, because I'm too busy staring at the almost filthy way she massages a spicy marinade into raw pork fillets.

At one point on Wednesday night's show, she introduced us to her husband, at which point any male viewers will have emitted a hilarious groan of disappointment as their elaborately constructed fantasy of cavorting on a Cypriot beach with Ms Buxton evaporated into the ether.

Oh, but hang on a minute. Their conversations are stilted and devoid of affection! Oh, thank you, God! She doesn't really like him! There's still hope to cling to. Along with a recipe for a black-eyed pea and marrow stew.

This isn't her first foray into food-related TV. She used to co-present a programme called Beauty and the Feast, alongside an equally beautiful doctor called Simone Lester. They would invite three men who had a particular occupation - and this could be rugby players, accountants, mechanics, firefighters - to come over to what was notionally "their house", cook them a meal, and subject them to beauty treatments.

It was a terrible premise for a show, and executed in the most toe-curling fashion imaginable. It was awful. But it didn't matter. Because Tonia Buxton was on it.

This has all probably marked me out as supremely shallow, and I suppose it's possible that you'd like to hear more about My Greek Kitchen instead of me going all moon-eyed over some woman. Well, there's not a lot else to say. She cooks a few Greek dishes and, like all TV chefs, she says "literally" a lot.

"Then you literally add two tablespoons of crème fraîche," she might say. As opposed, presumably, to all the other secret hidden meanings behind "adding two tablespoons of crème fraîche". Indeed, the use of "literally" has become so endemic among TV chefs, that if they don't say it while reciting their recipes, you wonder what on earth you're supposed to do next.

Anyway, I will now literally post this blog.

My Greek Kitchen is on Discovery Travel & Living (Sky 276).

Such is my love of food-related telly, it's probably not that surprising that UKTV Food is often my first port of call when I switch on the box. The box! Man, I've not called it that for a long time. Probably because my TV no longer resembles a box - I guess it's more of a tray.

But anyway, you can always rely on the channel to serve up comforting portions of shows you've seen umpteen times but fancy seeing again - you know, Keith Floyd cavorting in the Dordogne, Madhur Jaffrey being statuesque in the Punjab, Jamie Oliver sounding for all the world like a bit-part character in Only Fools and Horses.

But there's also a daily show to break up the carnival of repeats, called Market Kitchen. It's only been going for six months or so: previously the channel had a live programme - Great Food Live - which was hosted by the peerless Jeni Barnett, a broadcasting legend so effortlessly in command of her medium that watching it was like having a daily masterclass in live television.

But in a moment of madness, the bigwigs axed the programme and replaced it with this thing, which is recorded in the environs of Borough Market in south London, and is presented by a rolling rota of five presenters, who are all, without exception, utterly appalling.

It almost seems unfair to name and shame them; they count among their number a couple of well-known food writers, and the wife of one of Britain's most famous chefs - and she's probably the worst of the lot. But regardless of which of them turn up to front the programme, it's always the same. Autocues are either gabbled in panic, or read solemnly and flatly like prayers at school assembly. Interviews are led down conversational culs-de-sac, and terminated abruptly when the time runs out.

It's like a catastrophic blind date. It makes Abigail's Party look like the Notting Hill Carnival. And of course it's not broadcast live, presumably for fear that the production team would sustain massive heart attacks if it was. You can't do anything other than feel anxious while it's on. It's like watching a stand-up comedy act die, day after day after day.

The set is bizarre. While recipes are demonstrated and chefs asked about their new books, there's a smattering of audience members sitting around at tables, as if they were in a cafe. They seem unsure whether to talk amongst themselves, or pay attention.

Occasionally one of them will be given a pre-scripted question to ask the chef, the answer to which they either already know, or don't particularly care about. "Would you, er, season the dish at this point?" "Er... you could do." Cue tumbleweed...

If you're lucky, they'll have a guest who's a bit more of a TV natural. The chef Paul Merrett is on this week, and it was a relief when, on Tuesday's show, he took charge (with the words "I can handle this one on my own") and the presenters were relegated to audience status. The audience, meanwhile, were probably tempted to have a crack at presenting. It certainly couldn't get any worse. Come back, Jeni Barnett, all is forgiven.

Market Kitchen is on UKTV Food (Sky 259, Virgin 260) weekdays at 12:30pm.

You tend to associate the QVC shopping channel with imitation diamonds, or space-saving plastic bags in which you can store your whole family and pop them neatly in the bottom drawer of the wardrobe when they're not needed. But look, QVC can help you out if you're hungry, too.

Kitchen demonstrations aren't a new thing on the channel – umpteen gadgets and gizmos have been flogged over the years by lower-league celebrity chefs – but the idea of demonstrating the advantages of a three-kilo lump of air-dried ham (only £48.66 plus £5.95 postage and packing) is a new one on me. This hour was entirely devoted to Welsh food, and if it were a true reflection of the Welsh diet you'd be hard pushed to say whether they'd succumb to heart disease before scurvy, or the other way around.

There were cakes, followed by pies, followed by sausages, pies, cakes and sausages, with cake and sausages for a main course, lamb for a palate cleanser, and chocolate for pudding, with a plateful of cheese before bedtime to ensure a nightmare-filled slumber in which you found yourself in a never-ending challenge to retrieve a shoulder of pork from a lake of chocolate fondue.

All this produce was hoovered up enthusiastically by QVC regular Debbie Greenwood, encouraged by Angela Gray, a food columnist for the Western Mail. We didn't hear too much from Debbie, who had probably skipped breakfast and lunch in order to really get stuck in to some honest Welsh tucker, and she mostly made noises along the lines of "mmmm", "oooooh", and "nggghhghhhh" while nodding slowly with her eyes shut. Essentially, it was an hour of watching two women ploughing through comfort food.

The fact that the programme was promoting the novel idea of sending you Welsh mince through the post didn't stop those essential QVC quirks shining through. For starters, the build-up of Christmas paraphernalia on the set is gathering momentum. It's common for the first Christmas show of the year to air at some point towards the end of June – "it's never too early to start preparing" – and by the beginning of December you can't move for tinsel, baubles and convincing imitation reindeer.

So obviously they had to give these Welsh treats a festive spin – you know, it's perfect for having at new year, it's an ideal gift for an eccentric uncle, it's fantastic for stuffing your face in a moment of self-indulgence and self-loathing in the bathroom on Boxing Day while no-one is looking.

All the cameras were perfectly angled to pick out the maximum moistness in everything, with glistening puds and oozing roast joints, while Debbie continued to ooh and aah. Oh – and Debbie's a great one for getting us to "imagine" things, which is a standard shopping channel gambit. "Imagine having people over for a buffet," she says. "Imagine serving this at your dinner party." "Imagine there's no heaven, it's easy if you try."

I have Welsh blood myself, and I spent many childhood Christmasses in Wales. So while finding QVC as absurd as ever, this was something of a nostalgia trip. I love the fact that one of the brands was called Siwgr a Sbeis (sugar and spice), just as I adore the way that the Welsh spelling of ambulance is ambiwlans. There's pretty.

So I urge everyone to buy cakes from Crickhowell and pies from Pontypridd. And if they've sold out, well, coming up on QVC is a nine-carat gold black rhodium botanical design pendant.

A Taste of Wales was on QVC (Sky 630, Virgin 740, Freeview 16).

One thing unifies every single TV chef. Asked about their philosophy regarding food, they'll all say: "It's all about simple recipes, using the very best ingredients." This mantra has been particularly apparent throughout Gary Rhodes's series, Local Food Heroes.

Over the last few weeks, Gaz has subjected us to a fairly humourless guide to the best of British food producers, using a strange voice that he only started to adopt in earnest about five or six years ago. He used to have a chirpy London accent: now, he speaks in an achingly slow, slightly posh, slightly strangled way, as if a big gorilla is standing behind him with a large knuckle pressed into his back.

And he says weird things, too, like: "The flavours are staring us in the face." At one point during Sunday's finale, he actually said: "I could have that and just spread it on the most wonderful wild of strawberries sensation." No really, he did. But most of all, he stated very seriously how important it is to make simple recipes, using the best ingredients. For a change, I'd quite like to see some overly complicated recipes, using unappealingly unnatural ingredients. For example…

Monosodium Glutamate Surprise

Ingredients:

4 fl oz sump oil 4 fl oz cooking oil 4 tbsp monosodium glutamate 1 x can corned beef 2 x factory-farmed chicken breasts 4oz vegetable-fat spread 1/2 pint skimmed milk, on the turn 1 x watermelon alcopop 1 x can "gourmet" cat food 1lb frozen mixed vegetables 1 x ham and cheese slice 8 pints cooking sherry 1 x strawberry mousse (lite) 4 x bananas, unripe, flown in at vast expense from an unsustainable forest mince to taste

Method:

- Combine the sump oil and the cooking oil in a bowl, using a teaspoon.

- Transfer the mixture into a second bowl, continuing to mix using the same teaspoon.

- Add the monosodium glutamate. Pour off exactly 7/8 of the contents into a third bowl, reserving the remaining 1/8 of the mixture in the second bowl. Wash up the original bowl. Pat it dry with a piece of kitchen roll. Put it away in the cupboard.

- Open the can of corned beef. Tip onto a chopping board to create a satisfying thud. Chop the beef into exact 1cm³ cubes. Arrange the cubes in lines on a large plate. Admire your handiwork. Now throw them away, remembering to reserve one cube for garnish.

- Using a whisk, gently whip the chicken breasts until they form soft peaks.

- Pour a little of the oil mixture (from the third bowl) into a searing hot pan. Throw away the remainder from both bowls. Yelp slightly. Remember that teaspoon we used earlier? Use it to add the vegetable fat spread. Stand back and watch in amazement. Now fry the skimmed milk, searing it on all sides in order to seal in all that moisture. Reserve. Now deglaze the pan using the watermelon alcopop.

- Boil up the cat food, frozen veg and the ham and cheese slice for four hours, until the mixture has reduced to a thick paste. Reserve.

- Decant the cooking sherry into a ceramic jug, via a funnel which you have had to go out and buy especially. Throw away the funnel. Drink half the sherry until you are beginning to glaze. Mix the other half with the strawberry mousse, beating with a wooden spoon until you are smooth and glossy.

- Peel the bananas. Trim them with a sharp knife until they are absolutely straight. Arrange them on a plate in the "andante" formation as discussed in Appendix B on page 182. Top with the corned beef cube, whipped chicken, fried milk, boiled paste and sherry/mousse mixture. Sprinkle liberally with mince, uncooked.

- Serve.

Gary Rhodes's Local Food Heroes was on UKTV Food (Sky 259, Virgin 260).

If you stick me in front of any cookery show - well, nearly any - it's like sedating me with horse tranquilliser. I'll sit there, quietly absorbing the instructions, relishing the gentle sound of chorizo being chopped or mushrooms being skewered.

It's like being transported to another world, a world where Keith Floyd is always drunk, where James Martin is always wearing a sensible pullover, and where Ainsley Harriott constantly asks, "What am I like, ladies and gentlemen?" while sprinkling parsley from a greater height than is really necessary.

I've decided to watch food programmes on cable and satellite all week, which is a bit self-indulgent, but after having had to watch "Are You Smarter than a Ten Year Old?" last week, I figure I deserve a break.

Saturday saw the beginning of the second series of The Deli, featuring chef Spud Taylor. "What? Who? Huh? Seriously?" I hear you say, which is unsurprising, as this hour-long spectacular screens on the little-watched Living in Spain channel, which exists purely to lure wealthy Britons to the Costa del Sol with the promise of it being just like East Sussex, but, like, warmer.

Spud is, as you might expect, not particularly Spanish. He's from the Wirral, in fact. "Trust me," he says at the opening of the show, which is worrying, as that's usually what people say before fleecing you of your wallet, or kidnapping your mum. "Trust me, this is a really good show, you're really going to enjoy this, don't go anywhere."

All right, Spud, it's OK, I've committed myself for the next 60 minutes. Go for it. I can't think of anyone better to inform me about Spanish cuisine than someone from the Wirral called Spud.

The programme focused on tomatoes. Spud and the camera crew went to Valencia, for that festival where the crowd pelt each other with around 120 tons of tomatoes and leave the place looking like a bloodbath, but with pips in.

I'm sure it's rooted in the deepest Spanish traditions, but I've always found it a bit offensive, and figure that if a nearby screen were simultaneously showing images of starving kids in Zimbabwe, everyone would probably take the tomatoes home and make a nourishing soup instead.

And if they need a recipe, Spud's on hand to help: the sequences of fruit-based fighting were interspersed with others of Spud at work in the deli he owns in Malaga. He's only on his second series, but he's already adopting the TV chef lingo. We'll see a lot of this during the week, but here's the first great construction: verb + foodstuff + preposition.

For example, "We're going to slice this bread down, and toast it off". The preposition is utterly unnecessary. It's a creeping TV menace. "We're going to cook this out. Then we're going to fry it off, season it up, flour it over, sieve it through and then fricassee it, er, beyond."

Spud's not the greatest TV presenter in the world, but at least it's a real kitchen - complete with battered sieves and general feeling of chaos - and he gets through the recipes with the minimum of messing about: a quick gazpacho, tomatoes on toast, a roasted red pepper soup.

But after having a bit of trouble slicing up some Spanish bread, he decides to ditch the whole Spanish thing, and instead makes some focaccia. And then he finishes up with that authentic taste of Spain, er, spaghetti puttanesca. Olé!

The Deli is on Living in Spain TV (Sky 293).

When I was younger, watching Eastern European animation was a rare treat. For some reason, the slightly languid, restrained atmosphere of Czech or Russian cartoons seemed to have more beauty, more subtlety, more attention to detail than, I dunno, Battle of the Planets or Hong Kong Phooey. They wouldn't be shown very often on British TV - mainly because children were demanding repeats of Battle of the Planets or Hong Kong Phooey, I guess - but when they were, I was glued to the screen.

This fascination has stayed with me - things like Yuri Norstein's beautiful Hedgehog in the Fog still make my spine tingle. So, a whole hour of Russian animation on Sky Arts? This was a must-see, even if it was in their series of Russian Propaganda - the chances of me being persuaded to defect to Moscow at this stage of my life were pretty slim, not least because Moscow doesn't really want me.

The underlying messages were, perhaps predictably, rather depressing. The sequence kicked off with Someone Else's Voice, a cartoon from 1949 in which a Russian magpie, having recently returned from a trip abroad, decides that the song of the nightingale is old hat, out of fashion, and that that she can do a lot better. The woodland creatures who are self-professed fans of the nightingale turn out to see the magpie give a concert, which turns out to be a hilarious one-note approximation of jazz.

I mean, the Russians must have really struggled to create a piece of jazz quite as rotten as this - in fact, just as Les Dawson was a master of the piano and able to doodle atonally for our amusement, I strongly suspect that the Russians involved had to be secret jazz masters to have produced such a thing. The magpie is laughed out of the forest. One bird, I think it was an owl, says: "She'd better exercise her voice in lands where people like such drivel." And they go back to enjoy listening to the nightingale.

Moral of the story? That there should be an absolute ban on self-expression, on being remotely interested in new cultural developments, and all attempts to give impromptu jazz concerts should be savagely repressed.

The anti-jazz theme continued in Shooting Range, a 1971 cartoon in which an unemployed American gets a job as a live target on a shooting range, because the proprietor figures that he can prise more money out of his customers if they have a human being to shoot at. (A bit like a low-budget version of Hostel.)

In this vision of the US, the cars don't work, barely anyone has a job, those who do are so fat that they're bursting out of their ill-fitting clothing, and you can't move from A to B without being bombarded with tuneless saxophones warbling over syncopated drums, like John Coltrane on a cocktail of steroids and chicken vindaloo. Possibly true in small parts of America, but hardly endemic.

It ended with a portrayal of the church as an aggressively malign social influence, combined with a commentary on the horror of the Vietnam war. This was interspersed with grim newsreel footage that surprisingly didn't feature any mention of the brutal Russian suppression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956, or the Czechs 12 years later. Grim. I had to go and watch Hedgehog in the Fog again, just to calm me down.

You can see more Russian Propaganda cartoons next Wednesday evening (21 November) on Sky Arts, Sky channel 267.

Am I smarter than a ten year old? Well, that depends. If I was put head to head with a primary-school kid and challenged to, say, arrange a skiing holiday for 20 people, I'd be fairly confident that I wouldn't cock up the flights, forget to inform the group of the maximum baggage allowance, or burst into tears if I had trouble finding a hotel.

But, on the other hand, I've not had a French vocab test in 20 years – thank goodness – so the ten year old, fresh out of last week's double French lesson, might have a chance of beating me and shouting, "J'ai gagné!"

Similarly, I couldn't tell you the dates of the reign of Elizabeth I, the chemical formula for sulphuric acid, or confidently annotate a cross section of a volcano. I used to be able to. But that just makes me, well, more forgetful than a ten year old. Not a great premise for a programme, is it? But I'm afraid it exists.

On this show, adults have to answer a range of hilariously easy questions in order to win up to £50,000. Seriously, these questions make the first five on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? feel like taking on a PhD in Bioinformatics. But, should the adults become confused under the glare of the studio lights, a group of precocious ten year olds are also answering the questions on their secret electronic pads, and they'll be on hand to help out – albeit while sniggering slightly.

Tuesday's show featured a 62-year-old computer consultant. "How old are you?" asked the presenters, Dick and Dom. "I'm 62," he replied. "And what the hell are you doing on this programme?" I mumbled from the sofa. "And what are you doing on this show?" asked Dick and Dom, in an unexpected echo. "It's my wife's fault," he replied, pointing to her in the huge audience which had congregated to watch this battle between Goliath, and several Davids in school uniform.

He breezed through the answers, the only minor problems occurring on subjects that just weren't taught at school in the 1950s. Anyone over the age of 45, for example, will regard something like Venn diagrams with confusion and suspicion. But hey, that's not their fault.

Dick and Dom were trying, hilariously, to introduce a note of suspense into proceedings, but our contestant was having none of it. What's the chemical formula for salt? "Sodium chloride," he announced immediately. "Um... Do you think there's any point in us doing the prolonged silence thing?" Dick asked Dom, or vice versa, I dunno. "Mm. He's very confident, isn't he."

Of course he is, he's a 62-year-old computer consultant, and you're asking him elementary general knowledge questions. The queues to go on this programme must be hundreds of thousands strong, and if they're not, let me have a go, I'll take Rupert Murdoch's money if no-one else wants it.

Having said all that, he walked away at the £7,500 point, having forgotten what number the Roman numeral "D" represented. His forfeit was to look into the camera and announce that he wasn't as smart as a ten year old. I think I could put up with this minor humiliation in exchange for £7,500.

To discover whether you can outthink a schoolchild, watch Are You Smarter than a Ten Year Old? on Sky One (Sky 106).

Of all those programmes where a load of people are stuck in a place they'd rather not be and paid money to stay there for as long as the viewing public put up with them, I'm a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! is by far my favourite. So much so that I'd occasionally even watch the thing. Imagine that.

But it was never the bushtucker trials that piqued my interest, nor the creation of nutritionally dubious evening meals from disappointing ingredients, nor indeed the reliably chirpy presenting team of Dec and Ant (as I believe we should start calling them, because it sounds a bit like "decadent", which of course they're not, but hey).

No, what I enjoyed was the grindingly repetitive live footage that was shown overnight, which featured celebs wandering aimlessly about, or sitting down and gazing into space, or engaging in rambling discussions with their fellow celebrities about the most mundane and trivial of subjects – mainly because any of the interesting stuff was silenced by the on-duty lawyer with an over-cautious finger on the mute button.

But they've stopped doing that. I'm guessing it's because showing "Make Your Play" instead and getting people to call a premium-rate number to take part in a mind-numbingly simple wordsearch game pulls in more cash than watching celebrities disappear to the toilet.

So the only side order to the main serving of the ITV1 show is "I'm a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here Now!" on ITV2, presented by Mark Durden-Smith in London, while in Australia we have Matt Willis (last year's winner, apparently) and his fiancée Emma Griffiths. And all you need to know about her is that she posed for this dubious photo.

The programme presupposes that you've actually watched the main ITV1 show earlier that evening. I hadn't. So I hadn't got a clue who this year's celebs were. As the programme went on I eventually managed to pick up this information - but I still haven't got a clue who this year's celebs are. Some of them looked vaguely familiar, but I'd be hard pushed to put a name to any of them, which really puts them on a par with the staff at my local supermarket.

The one person that ITV were banking on to bring some pizzazz to proceedings was Malcolm McLaren, and he walked off the show before he'd even arrived in the jungle – thus beating his nemesis John Lydon who, in series three, put himself through a week of stultifying boredom before leaving. So what hope for this ITV2 package of supposed highlights?

None. Willis and Griffiths are excruciating to watch. They, and indeed the producer, seem to believe that cute smiles and self-conscious giggling can somehow offset wide-eyed confusion and pitiful banter, which mainly consists of repeating what the other person has said and then laughing. I, as well as the lawyer, had my finger constantly feeling for the mute button.

Durden-Smith, by comparison, is a consummate screen professional, but he's stuck in a studio with a mindless audience and faceless guests – at one point, they actually play a game called "Guess the Guest" in which you have to surmise which one of three people is the special guest. Incredible.

So, not much happened. Dec and Ant wandered in, then wandered out. We were shown a preview of a forthcoming challenge in which a Land Rover slides into a lagoon, which looked about as dangerous as a log flume. We were promised "high jinks too racy for ITV1", but all we got was vapid rambling, followed by Emma Griffiths saying, "What's that all about?" I have to admit that it's a pertinent question.

I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! is on every night on ITV1. I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here Now! follows on ITV2 (Sky 118, Virgin 114/113, Freeview 6).