Radio Times

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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"There's nothing like a professional show…and this is nothing like a professional show!" gurgles Rick Wakeman, ensconced in the small, saggy armchair of merriment that is Rick's Place (Planet Rock, Saturdays, 10am - 1pm).

He's right. Wakeman's breakfast show is a masterclass in ineptitude. There are pauses, clangers and fluffs. Things fall over (Wakeman, usually, though this week's show saw the former keyboard player with Yes accidentally knock a stack of listeners' letters to the carpet tiles - a gaffe that prompted a desperate cry of "Christ!").

Wakeman's jokes are something else. Frankly, I don't know how he gets away with them. Cracker-cheap, wonderfully rude...

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We're all familiar with daytime television having either been a) off work ill b) skiving c) a student or d) "working from home" (also see b) at least once in our lives. We therefore know that it is the fastest and most effective way to induce a mild brain-coma.

According to TV schedulers, around mid-morning on a weekday viewers don't need intellectual stimulation (apparently this doesn't start until 7:00pm when BBC4 springs to life with a documentary on the 1915 Armenian genocide). Instead we must make do with hypnotically bland property programmes or a re-run of Friends episode 3,783 (The One Where They Take Funny and Bludgeon...

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Most of us have wised up to the obvious scams, such as the email asking to transfer $1million to our bank account, or the one where five suspicious-looking men turn up to read our gas meter. But there are still countless ways of being made to look pathetically gullible, and The Real Hustle is methodically working its way through them.

The show’s slogan is: "If it's too good to be true, it probably is". The utopian dreamers among you might see this as needlessly cynical but, unlike one poor chap in Monday's show, you probably haven't just forked out £400 on eBay for what you thought...

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I was busy frittering my life away playing online Scrabble when my girlfriend called from the next room. "Rhodri, quick," she shouted. "I think you should see this." She was transfixed by a programme called Le Breton Gourmand which, as all good GCSE French students will already have written neatly in their exercise books, celebrates the cuisine of north-western France.

"So what," I hear you exclaim, "there's nothing intrinsically fascinating about a plate of cabillaud aux haricots blancs." And you'd be right, as well as being a bit full of yourself. But as this show is in French, it's overdubbed by French actors who recite a...

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There are many ways of forcing human beings to absorb facts – let's see, there's bribery, there's torture – but teachers generally have two approaches. When I was at school, one of them was typified by Mr Roucoux, a serious Belgian man in an ill-fitting suit who took very little pleasure in droning on interminably about molecular structure. In response, we chucked pencil sharpeners around and repeatedly asked if we could go to the toilet.

The other approach was taken by Mr Maple, an eccentric chap full of joie de vivre who would successfully drill chemical formulae into our heads by alternating them with eye-opening double...

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Hey, here's an idea: get a handful of people to compete for a prize on a TV show. Stick them in an unfamiliar situation and give them unpleasant tasks to perform. Eject one of them from the show each week in an unnecessarily protracted, supposedly nail-biting ceremony, leaving us with one squealing, triumphant winner at the end of the series. What? You've heard that one before?

In this version of the old formula, the contestants are cute city girls; the location is a farm somewhere in Cornwall; the tasks involve milking cows or wading through dung. And the prize? To become the girlfriend of a dishy...

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After yesterday's ordeal of jet planes smashing into mountainsides, it's time to wind down with some laid-back programming – and it doesn't get much more placid than the "painting hour" on Discovery Real Time. Every weekday morning, 60 minutes of tranquillity kick off with The Joy of Painting.

It's presented by Bob Ross, a man who makes Whispering Bob Harris sound like Fearne Cotton trapped on a malfunctioning rollercoaster. Bob Ross died in the mid-1990s, but his shows are still widely syndicated, providing comfort, encouragement and a great big Afro haircut for the viewing public.

To say that Bob is softly spoken doesn't really do...

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It’s always easy to spot murderers in Silent Witness. So easy, in fact, that they might just as well wear T-shirts with the words “I Am the Murderer” picked out in sequins. But even an explanatory colouring book, a set of flash cards and a trail of bright red glitter leading to the culprit wouldn’t be enough for Dr Nikki Alexander, Silent Witness’s daft forensic pathologist.

You see, Dr Nikki (Emilia Fox) has a problem. She’s obviously a highly trained professional, but she is also an idiot. Think about it. A murderer is on the loose and you could be in jeopardy. So what would you do, ladies...

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Until I got a Sky dish, National Geographic meant glossy magazines featuring beautiful photographs of the Alpine tundra or exotic sub-Saharan wildlife. Now, however, it's synonymous with programmes that look at the many and various ways we can meet a violent death.

Their current schedule includes such relaxing documentaries as Landslides Investigated, World's Most Dangerous Drug, Seconds from Disaster, and When Routine Appendectomies Go Bad. OK, so I made the last one up. But the icing on the cake is the new series of Air Crash Investigation.

As you might imagine, the trailers for the show aren't designed to reassure us about aviation safety: "Was...

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I know what you're thinking. It's a question that also gives me sweat-soaked nightmares and causes me to wake up screaming, "No, mummy, no!" at 3:00am. What has become of Neil and Christine Hamilton?

Well, the former Tory MP and his overbearing spouse have landed a job on a channel called Overseas Property TV, which exists to promote that exciting sport of buying up cheap housing around the Mediterranean and successfully pricing the locals out of the market.

Their show, the curiously titled Destination Lunch, brings together an unholy mix of people under the umbrella of daytime entertainment. A TV chef, Paul Bloxham; a...

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My own painstakingly researched data reveals that 90 per cent of wear and tear on my remote control is sustained between 11:00pm and 2:00am. Channel-hop as I might, reliable post-pub entertainment is tough to find. I've lost my initial fascination with those shows that basically ask you to "phone this number and guess what I'm thinking", while the BBC Learning Zone is as enticing as a nightclub with no clientele save for a bloke lecturing on Hispanic architecture. Riding to the rescue, however, is Live Roulette.

The daytime trailer promises that I can play roulette in the comfort of my own home – something of an...

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If BBC3's strategy is to boost viewing figures by giving their programmes preposterous titles that promise something akin to a 21st century freak show, they're doing a grand job. Alongside Help Me Anthea, I'm Infested, Dog Borstal and My Penis and Everyone Else's, we have Help! I Smell of Fish, a documentary studying three sufferers of so-called fish odour syndrome. They could have called the show "trimethylaminuria" – the medical term for the condition – but if they had, I probably wouldn't have bothered watching it. Clever folk, these TV producers.

"What's it like to be smelly?" pondered the Geordie narrator. "Erm, I wouldn't know, myself,"...

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Every week, I hope it will happen. Just once, after detective Horatio Caine delivers one of his daft pre-title sequence one-liners, moments before The Who leap in with Won’t Get Fooled Again, will someone, anyone, thump him?

I’d rather like it to be Frank, that plodding sap of a detective who trails in the wake of the sleek CSI personnel like a whipped dog after a cruel master. Nothing too vicious, just a smart punch to the smug Caine face, accompanied by a “take that, you dismal, sanctimonious windbag”.

I feel so strongly because Detective Horatio Caine (David Caruso) is the most pretentious TV hero ever...

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Glossy lifestyle magazines and foodie TV shows might suggest otherwise, but the British still have a dysfunctional relationship with wine. I recently heard an English actress describe how she "adores drinking wine". This was intended to sound sophisticated, but it actually conjured up an image of her necking mugs of corked Lambrusco.

Anyway, while most of us enjoy the odd glass - and raise our eyebrows in pleasant surprise when we think it tastes above average - choosing a bottle presents problems. Our ignorance has been genetically refined over centuries, and even though we shell out for evening classes run by supposed wine experts who attempt to...

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