Radio Times

Top Gear is television's greatest anomaly. It is the specialist interest show made all-inclusive.

I, for instance, know nothing and care even less about cars. If the conversation turns to motoring it's as unpleasant as having my every facial orifice packed with wet bread. What’s more, I feel no affinity whatsoever with Messieurs Clarkson, Richard Hammond or James May. They're like the great guffawing boobs you'd find at the back of the school bus on a day trip, pressing their arses against the window at passing truckers. And yet I LOVE Top Gear, and I'm not alone.

Though it started as a rather weedy, serious look at automotives...

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A new coffee-table book, The Hammer Story (published 26 October by Titan), reminds us that, although Christopher Lee's Dracula remains emblematic of the studio, their first hit was 1955's The Quatermass Xperiment (adapted from the BBC series), in which an astronaut mutates into a giant cactus. Horror trends come and go, but our love for the monster movie never seems to wane.

Monster movies have always carried a subtext. Fear of scientific meddling informed 1950s classics such as The Fly and Tarantula, whose giant spider was the result of experiments into growth nutrients to help feed an overpopulated world. King Kong, the hairy daddy of all...

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I recently asked Mike Leigh if he'd ever consider going back to television. (After all, until the late 1980s, he made his films exclusively for the small screen.) He seemed horrified at the thought - not because it would be a backward step, but because TV had changed so much in 20 years, he said he'd hardly recognise the place.

Although plenty of great film directors learned their craft on television - Sidney Lumet, Steven Spielberg, Ron Howard, and more recently, Atonement's Joe Wright and Knocked Up's Judd Apatow - the traffic tends to go in one direction. However, the need to put food on the table sometimes...

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What with Sky Sports 1, Sky Sports 2, Sky Sports 3 and Sky Sports Xtra, it's no surprise that, from time to time, Sky Sports just doesn't have enough sport to fill all the channels. Rock climbing, for example – that surely doesn't count as a sport. It's more of an activity, while urban mountain biking sounds like a bizarre contradiction in terms.

If you stay up late enough you can probably catch some All-England crumb-dislodging from Grantham, and I've even seen Keith Floyd cooking up a cassoulet on Sky Sports 3, which is about as far from sporting endeavour as you can get.

But every...

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I watch telly, all day and every day, for a living. Great, isn’t it? Particularly when you consider what else I’d be fit for. I wouldn’t be able to earn my living in light engineering for instance, or herding donkeys. Thus my colleagues and I, this tiny band of brothers and sisters, watch DVDs of forthcoming programmes for previewing purposes. (It’s a deadline thing, we couldn’t do our jobs if we had to watch programmes in what we in Radio Times Land call “real time”.)

Thus we watch these DVDs in our various offices and the hurly-burly of the working day means we have to interrupt one another’s...

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Why does musical comedy usually make me dive for the off switch, miss the off switch and crack my head on a coffee table?

1. Because hearing a cover version at a different speed or with inappropriate instrumentation is like watching someone put on an unusual hat. Amusing for two seconds, then it quickly becomes embarrassing. Culprits: anything from that punky version of Nellie the Elephant to Bill Bailey's cockney knees-ups.

2. Because making up new words to the tune of an existing song requires virtually no skill. All the hard work has been done for you, and substituting the word "glove" for "love"...

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Rise, people of Birmingham, rise. This mockery of your accent must end and it must end now. For too long has it been the subject of needless and unfair derision.

Yes, it's different. And yes, some think it's strange. But it remains the most interesting and unique of all the colloquial tongues. It's better for telling jokes than Scouse and it's more menacing when miffed than Mancunian. And that's why its prime television exponent right now, the unassuming, self-effacing Adrian Chiles, is the leader of this uprising.

Chiles is the classic everyman. From football on Match of the Day 2 to pop culture on The Apprentice: You're...

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When, back in March, Auntie announced that Mark Radcliffe would be joining forces with fellow BBC Radio 2 stalwart Stuart Maconie for the purposes of a new evening show, I was inconsolable. "Turncoats! Poltroons!" I roared, in the manner of a (marginally) less hirsute Captain Haddock, imagining a fate akin to that which befell Whizzer and Chips when it was forced, weeping, into an arranged marriage with fellow comic powerhouse Buster (ie a slow, agonising death).

"Surely," I continued, raining tearful blows on my copy of the latest Radio Times, "anyone can see that the combination of such similar broadcasting styles will only dilute the award-winning presenters'...

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A trip to Rome isn't complete without visiting Vatican City, you know. This is the kind of handy hint you'll pick up when watching Travel Girls, which follows the story of six girls striving for fame as TV travel presenters.

They're competing for the job of fronting a travel show by attempting to demonstrate their aptitude for fronting a travel show. So essentially, it's an audition. But when six attractive women compete for a prize, the law states that a TV series must be made out of it – thus the audition lasts 13 weeks, and the Travel & Living channel gets two series out of...

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I'd defend the right of anyone to spend hours under a tattooist's needle to have the small of their back covered with mistranslated Japanese symbols that actually mean "municipal housing authority". But the permanence of these things is frightening. Even if you rub really hard with a flannel and some Dove Triple Moisturising Beauty Care Body Wash, they're going absolutely nowhere.

I don't have a tattoo. In rare moments of temptation I've always tried to think ahead and ponder the consequences. Even as an exuberant teenager, I knew that my obsession with The Cure was probably a fleeting thing, that Robert Smith wouldn't always be my...

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When Wife Swap first hit our screens in 2003, the title titillatingly hinted at suburban sexual shenanigans, and we tuned in in droves - to discover, instead, a brow-furrowing social experiment.

A pair of women are transplanted into each other's homes - places that are, more often than not, radically different to their own - and expected to follow their new family's routines for the first week, before they get to do things their own way in the second.

While on paper it looks like the kind of car-crash reality television that many of us would stay late at work to avoid, Wife Swap somehow underpins those peek-through-your-fingers...

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God knows how I managed to put up with being a toddler in the early 1970s. I was being wheeled about in a pushchair offering minimal safety features compared to today's three-wheeled armoured personnel buggies. I don't think vitamins had been invented – Omega 3 oils certainly hadn't – so rickets and scurvy must have been a constant threat.

And as far as weekday TV entertainment went, there was a 15-minute segment at lunchtime, and 90 minutes in the late afternoon – both sandwiched by insipid programmes on British social history and bleak news updates on the Angolan civil war.

Today we have...

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I've got a hundred radio stations on my Sky box, and I frequently get exasperated by TV programmes treating me like a child. When this happens, I find solace in Chris Needs's late-night phone-in show on BBC Radio Wales.

Because Chris, you see, treats me like an elderly woman. That's because his audience mainly consists of elderly women. The three-hour show is called, improbably, the Friendly Garden, and kicks off with a presumably self-penned tune which begins:

"In the garden, in the garden That's where I meet my special friends Where fun begins and never ends"

But as the "garden" is full of "special friends"...

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It’s impossible not to love Bruce Parry, Tribe's vomiting pixie and the neatest, sweetest and most pocket-sized of all of the TV explorers. Ladies, he is the perfect TV Boyfriend.

If you accompanied Bruce on a camping trip, you just know he’d be far too charming and courtly ever to insist you carried on to the next rocky outcrop if your feet were hurting. In fact, he would fashion you a sedan chair from coconut husks while wafting you with palm fronds.

And if you wanted to find somewhere to plug in your hairdryer – no problem. Bruce would whip up a perfect scaled replica of...

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After a similar recent excursion with Girls Aloud, it was time for ex-Blue Peter presenter Yvette Fielding to take some nervous actors from Emmerdale around three old buildings in the north of England, turn the lights off and wait for a gust of wind or a buzzing insect to make them squeal like pigs. Before I started watching this, I was certain that ghosts were a figment of an overactive imagination. Now it's over, I'll go further: the paranormal is something that's drawn on the back of a fag packet by bored television producers.

The first location was a 15th-century building in York that used to...

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