Radio Times

The toughest jobs in the UK can't really be featured in UK's Toughest Jobs. Balancing resources and demand within the NHS, negotiating wage settlements with postal workers, instilling some sense of respect at inner-city secondary schools, ensuring that aircraft don't slam into one another at 30,000 feet over southern England – these are all jobs which most of us would shun, lest we collapse from stress-related illnesses.

The show should really be called UK's Toughest Jobs Which Are Menial Enough for Us to Give to Errant Youths without Posing Too Much Risk to the General Public.

A new episode on Saturday night...

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When Pedro Almodóvar's captivating modern ghost story Volver was shown at the Toronto film festival last year, its Spanish star Penélope Cruz told reporters she'd had trouble leaving her character behind – not to mention her character's behind! She had been asked to wear what she delicately referred to as a "false ass" for the part of Raimunda because Almodóvar wanted her to resemble an Italian film heroine of the 1950s and 60s, and her own backside was deemed too "slender".

Cruz certainly cuts a suitably voluptuous figure in yet another celebration of womanhood from the Spanish director, and the hour-glass figure created by strategic padding...

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I've had some odd flatmates in my time. When I was 23 I remember having one of the most almighty rows I've ever had with anyone, purely because I'd eaten a Dairylea triangle that wasn't mine. (And it wasn't even her last Dairylea triangle.) There was the man who said to me once, "By the way, if you hear strange noises coming from my room, it's because I've got hold of a load of nitrous oxide and I'm planning on staying in and laughing".

Then there was the bloke who threw a party without telling me, and I arrived home to find members of the circus...

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First I must declare a slight, and maybe even a bit of a tragic personal interest – I’ve liked Russell Brand ever since he very politely held the door open for me, a total stranger, in our local newsagent’s. I told you it was tragic. But come on, well-mannered young men are hard to find these days.

He’s a curious, polarising figure. There are those who think he’s a preening, prancing, bejewelled, nest-haired twerp or others who see him as a quixotic, unpredictable and treasureable comic talent. Brand’s cause hasn’t been helped by the fact that television hasn’t served him particularly well. Both Russell Brand’s Got Issues and...

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In Ambridge, no-one can hear you scream. This isn't because the local yokel massive is too busy gurgling about bales of hay or ooh-aaaarrrring over some incident or other in the lower field to heed your distress (although, clearly, it is). It's because the preposterous animal sound effects that accompany nearly every scene of the enduring soap will invariably render you inaudible.

Have you ever listened to The Archers? It’s like being trapped in a silo with the cast of Old McDonald Had a Farm. Moos, baas, bleats, barks and squawks litter the programme like ossified dog food on the floor of an abandoned kennel. Here an...

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If you've ever gone through a period of loneliness and introspection, you'll have inevitably ended up watching the QVC shopping channel. And if you've done that for any length of time, you'll have come across a woman by the name of Dawn Bibby. Dawn regularly turns up and spends an hour flogging us bits of card, ribbon, pens and rubber stamps – all in the name of something called "craft".

Dawn has proved popular. And, over the years, shopping channels have devoted more and more time to this thing called "craft". Practitioners of "craft" have even started referring to themselves as "crafters". Today, there's even a...

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The rock group Kiss were American through and through. Notorious in the States during the 1970s for monochrome make-up, fire breathing, blood spitting and gigantic tongues, they didn't have a hit in the UK until 1983 – by which time they'd jettisoned the slap in favour of a little light moisturiser, and were thus slightly more palatable to a British audience who preferred a more restrained approach to their heavy metal.

Despite this, bass player Gene Simmons in his full make-up is instantly recognisable over here – mainly because of savvy merchandising – and, thanks to Gene Simmons Family Jewels, we're starting to recognise him even...

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Watching one of Channel 4's The 100 Greatest… shows is the TV equivalent of a tube of Pringles: once you switch on, you can't switch off. They're tasty and addictive, yet somehow leave you feeling bloated and slightly guilty.

Let's face it, there are far more constructive things to be doing of an evening than consuming visual junk food for the brain. Like doing your laundry, for instance, or taming the weekend's accumulated hangover with an early night.

Instead, you turn on the TV only to be sucked in by a celluloid vortex cataloguing The 100 Greatest…Musicals of All Time. Before you know it, midnight has come and...

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It's easy to dismiss wrestling as overwrought horseplay by men in leotards. Louis Theroux once made the mistake of doing exactly that while in the same room as some of America's top wrestlers, and he was soon begging them to stop levering off his head, and yes, they could have his dinner money, and yes, they were actually skilled athletes worthy of respect. Ouch.

There are no top wrestlers in my immediate vicinity right now, so I feel that I can speak freely. It's not that I think wrestling is stupid. I just don't understand it. It either goes way over my head, or way under...

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I might be getting old before my time. Perhaps I'm just a miserable git. But I get weary when things that don't even have a pulse attempt to be my best mate. I walked into my bank recently and was greeted by an enormous turquoise sticker on the front door, which said "hi" in a cute, lower-case font.

I didn't need greeting. I knew that the front door was the way in. I knew that behind the door would be a row of cashiers serving a large queue of disgruntled people with sizable overdrafts. I knew that those cashiers would not let off a load of...

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When John Ford was dying, fellow director Howard Hawks would visit and they'd discuss "how tough it was to make a good western without John Wayne". The Duke proved a rock and lucky charm to both – he made over 20 pictures with Ford, and five with Hawks – and because of that remains perhaps Hollywood's most famous muse. Both directors made their best westerns with him – for Ford, Stagecoach and The Searchers; for Hawks, Red River and Rio Bravo.

In Greek mythology, the muses were nymphs who provided artistic inspiration – not quite the macho 6ft 4in figure of Wayne. Grace Kelly fits the bill...

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To the British, bounty hunting is as foreign a concept as baseball, punctual trains or cannibalism. If a criminal skips bail in the UK, it's up to the police to track them down. But in the USA, for some reason, this important work seems to be subcontracted to swaggering men in leather trousers and sunglasses who are liable to shout "We have you surrounded" at a moment's notice.

Bounty hunter Duane Chapman, rather like a stray in your back garden, is better known as "Dog". His show kicks off with a specially commissioned TV theme tune, all squealing guitars and thundering drums, which informs us that...

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Do you remember that episode of Extras, where a lascivious Patrick Stewart outlined his idea for a film to Andy Millman (Ricky Gervais)? Its premise was straightforward – women’s clothes would simply fall off, anytime, anywhere.

I’m irresistibly drawn to this memory when I watch The Tudors (Fridays, BBC2), a roisterous new series made for the anything-goes Showtime network in the US. (Showtime is the parent of Five’s new import, the excellent, mucky and blackly funny Californication on Thursdays.)

The Tudors isn’t The Six Wives of Henry VIII. The lead actor isn’t padded and wheezing. Oh no, here the young Henry VIII is a rambunctious, gallivanting, priapic bundle...

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I know this is a bit "meta", so apologies in advance for writing a TV review of a TV review show presented by a TV reviewer.

The fourth series of Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe is currently showing on BBC4. Watching him administer corporal punishment to the stupidities and excesses of today's television can be a strange experience – mainly because the medium he is savaging has allowed him to do such a thing. It's a bit like your local Presbyterian church deciding that they're going to try having a short run of Satanic Saturdays.

Even the programme announcer had a slight note of...

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America's Next Top Model gives a whole new meaning to fashion roadkill. It doesn't so much assault the senses as whack you over the head with a heavyweight handbag and beat you into submission.

It is television that shows no mercy; a production that cares neither for its contestants nor its audience but is taking both of you bitches down. It is, in the words of its creator and host Tyra Banks, FIERCE.

Sure, the viewer has a sense of taking part, joining in with the unchanging script each week, repeating Tyra's mantras ("Twelve beautiful girls stand before me…"). But we don't vote in this model...

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