Radio Times

Yes, a channel devoted to getting married. A chance for singletons to blub into their kleenex about how they've been left on the shelf, a chance for engaged couples to be enticed into spending even more of their parents' cash on essentials such as "ring cushions" or "memory boxes" and a chance for those who are already married to think, “Yeah, I remember the hopes, the dreams, the excitement. No, I won't walk the dog, it's your turn – have you farted? God, my mum warned me about you.” And so on.

The biggest problem with Wedding TV is avoiding all the inevitable reality shows where...

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There was a telling exchange in a recent episode of Property Ladder.

The much-lusted-after presenter, Sarah Beeny, was questioning a particular couple's decision to give up their careers and become property developers despite having poor organisational skills, and no money behind them. They replied: "But you CAN make a living doing this!" "Who says you can?" asked Sarah. "The television programmes say you can!" wailed the couple.

And therein lies the power of Property Ladder. It allows us to indulge our own pie-in-the-sky dreams of making thousands of pounds profit for virtually no effort - maybe just painting a few walls in an off-white shade, sticking...

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There's a weird stack of channels around the Sky 760 mark, all devoted to Christianity. Most of them feature bellowing preachers doing the fire-and-brimstone act in a series of Charismatic Pentecostal Churches.

"Charismatic" is a strange adjective to use here, although I guess it's more enticing than calling them Annoying Pentecostal Churches. (It would be great if gaining charisma did just require you to shout loudly at groups of people. But it doesn't, believe me, I've tried. No, I don't want to talk about it.)

But amid all the speaking in tongues and instant healing is Genesis TV, who adopt a slightly more imaginative approach...

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Despite common sense desperately barking at us through a megaphone from the top of a nearby stepladder, we will go to desperate lengths to try to get rich quick.

There's those pyramid selling schemes where you not only end up losing huge sums of money, but also spend precious hours persuading friends and family to do the same thing.

Then there's the lure of those adverts advising us that we can earn a fortune by working from home stuffing envelopes: somehow we're not alerted by the fact that these ads are scrawled in biro and stuck in a newsagent’s window. We willingly shell out cash...

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There will be people who'll read the title of this blog in disbelief. How can you love ITV's Rebus, they'll be asking - probably wearing a frown that wouldn't disgrace the eponymous hero himself.

Most of the dissenters will probably be dyed-in-the-wool fans of Ian Rankin's original novels. I write as an aficionado myself - Exit Music (the last Rebus novel) is still sitting on my bookshelf waiting to be read because I can't quite bring myself to say goodbye to the bloke just yet.

It's certainly true to say that the scripts aren't doing justice to the two strong, likeable actors who've tackled the title role. Successfully...

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The British road movie is rare. And here's an example of why. 2001's moving and funny Last Orders saw Ray Winstone, Tom Courtenay, David Hemmings and Bob Hoskins driving from south-east London to Margate, on the Kent coast, to scatter Michael Caine's ashes. This journey of 73.5 miles takes just under two hours. If they'd forgotten the urn, they could have turned back at Medway Services and still made it before nightfall.

To compare: last year's surprise indie hit Little Miss Sunshine, in which a dysfunctional family head from Albuquerque in New Mexico to the titular junior beauty pageant in Redondo Beach, California, covers 807.5 miles. It's...

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This week's Radio Ga Ga is brought to you by the letter R, the number four and the stench of bucolic woe. Following last week's peek at On Your Farm, I was inundated* with messages suggesting I might like to plunge deeper into the steaming silo of intrigue that is BBC Radio 4's agricultural output, on the basis that a) there's quite a lot of it, and b) it's bonkers.

Not being one to ignore public demand**, I thought this sounded a grand idea. After all, farms are generally fun places to be, what with their amusing animal noises and unusual smells, and I've been neglecting R4's...

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I'm a sucker for tranquil television. You know, the kind of non-threatening programming that has you letting out long, deep sighs of contentment, rather than giving you clammy palms, or forcing you to throw magazines about, or have you muttering about writing a stern letter of complaint to some kind of ombudsman. Man, I love the word ombudsman.

I love gently paced, reassuringly peaceful cookery shows. Non-hysterical shopping channels. On a recent flight to Japan, the fact that they woke me up with a video of a smiling woman doing gentle stretching exercises was enough to make me almost weep with pleasure.

And the...

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You can see Channel 4’s marketing department faced a big problem when it poured itself a glass of sparkling mineral water and sat down to decide how to promote Britz, its huge two-part drama (Wednesday 31 October and Thursday 1 November). The nights are drawing in, the committee would have pondered, the temperature is dropping and your audience’s trip home from work is probably going to be chilly and bleak.

So, then, after your viewers have turned up the central heating, had a warming evening meal and sat cosily on the sofa, waiting to be entertained, how do we sell them a four-and-a-half-hour drama, spread across...

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There are many TV shows whose aim is to help us transform our homes from stinking hovels into luxurious palaces. Most of them concentrate on jobs that require you to get your hands dirty – you know, knocking down a partition wall to fool your brain into thinking you have more space, when you actually have one less place to hide mountains of junk. Or hacking away at brickwork to reveal lead water pipes that are slowly reducing your family's cognitive abilities.

Colin and Justin, however, never get their hands dirty. Their forte is soft furnishings and accessories, and between them they have the enviable ability...

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After the first episode of The Peter Serafinowicz Show, one viewer wrote to Radio Times saying "Peter needs a ruthless editor". That's just what he doesn't need: left to his own devices he's created a silly, unpredictable, technically superb little marvel that's the antidote to identikit sketch shows.

It's right to be self-titled, because it feels like a unique comic brain squirting messily onto the screen. Who cares that nobody's saying "You'll soon grow to love the weird taste of internet ham" in the playground, that accountants aren't impersonating Alan Alda ("Ludicrous! Preposterous!") by the water cooler? Serafinowicz is a bit weird for mass consumption, but I...

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I'm on something of a regime at the moment. Which is a vague, roundabout way of admitting that I'm attempting to eat less, and exercise more. In fact, I'm exercising on one of those contraptions from TV Warehouse that I was so disparaging about on this blog a couple of weeks ago. And my eating plan consists of muesli for breakfast, a banana and a yoghurt for lunch, and in the words of those adverts for magic weight-loss milk shakes, "a normal dinner".

Whatever “normal” might mean. For me, a normal dinner means one plate of food, not three, not topped off with a fried...

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If you flick your way through the Sky channels, it's rare that you ever reach channel 900, either because you've been distracted by repeats of Catchphrase, or you've passed out through sheer boredom. But on the off chance that you do, you'll be confronted with a few dozen channels of... I don't know what to call it. Glamour television?

Of course, I say “glamour television” in the most sarcastic tone I can muster. It's not hardcore porn. If there is such a thing on British television, it's probably hidden away on a password-protected, pay-per-view channel, and I'd feel so pathetic trying to explain it away as...

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Doc Martin looks at first glance like dull, patronising pap. It's got simple plots, an absurdly beautiful rural setting - Port Isaac in north Cornwall, renamed Portwenn for the show - and a supporting cast who talk in Somerset accents, as do all TV actors asked to play people from Cornwall, or Norfolk for that matter. (Nobody ever uses authentic Cornish idioms, either: "teasy"; "hell-er"; "bleddy"; "he in't daft" etc.) In short, it seems perfect for Sunday nights on ITV1.

Thankfully, someone noticed that despite its cosy medical-drama trappings, it's too edgy and, frankly, too good for the Sunday cocoa-and-moccasins crowd. (It started on Thursdays and now...

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Well, it's not because there aren't enough sightings of Gordon Ramsay on television. There was a time, not so long ago, when the former Rangers footballer seemed more ubiquitous than Santa at Christmas. And, Gordon, I say that in the spirit of light-heartedness - please don't hit me.

See, there's one of the points. Ramsay's a hard-looking bloke, which makes for palpable tension. He's powerfully built - we know that because for some reason he changes into his chef top at the start of each programme, when surely he has a changing room at home - he sneers brilliantly, and his head, gorgeous and blonde as it is,...

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