Radio Times

You can't fault Psychic TV on its marketing. Its adverts feature a carefree, newly confident woman whose destiny has been mapped out thanks to the channel. She needed to know how her career would pan out; she consulted the psychics; they told her; and now she's getting on with her life, absolutely safe in the knowledge that she's never going to be run over by a juggernaut. Probably.

If you've not seen Psychic TV, here's the score. You either text in your poorly punctuated, barely decipherable problem, eg "I'm goin out on Fri wiv mates frm work culd u tell me if I will find luv...

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The most glaringly absent channel on digital TV is something that would probably be called The Reality Channel. It would be wonderful if all the shows dependent on contrived clashes of conflicting personalities were dumped onto it, leaving the rest of television unsullied. You could dip in and out of these shows at will, and you'd never stumble across one by accident.

But it doesn't exist, so I stumbled over Singing with the Enemy by accident. Two bands of differing musical styles were stuck in a house far larger and more pleasant than their own and given a week to write and record a song together....

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As a cricket lover who frequently finds himself having to defend the sport against accusations of tedium, monotony and clothing that looks like ill-fitting toddlers’ pyjamas, I always feel indignant that golf rarely gets such criticism.

At least with cricket, the ball is always moving. Golfers spend much of the time wandering around a stationary ball, crouching, bending over or pretending to make a shot, under the rapt gaze of hundreds of spectators standing behind a tape – presumably to stop people like me bounding onto the green and screaming, "For heaven’s sake would you hit the bloody thing, Colin Montgomery? Please?"

I don't...

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I sincerely hope you missed the instalment of BBC2’s British Film Forever devoted to thrillers, in particular the extended section on London to Brighton. For a debut feature released last year to merit so much airtime in the company of Brighton Rock, Get Carter and The Long Good Friday is testament to its power and instant modern classic status. Unfortunately — an irksome habit of the series — they blatantly gave away the ending.

In the film, written and directed by Paul Andrew Williams, big-hearted prostitute Kelly (Lorraine Stanley) and juvenile runaway Joanne (Georgia Groome) escape London’s seedy underworld after a violent incident to the cleansing sea...

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Virgin launched their first TV channel this week. While The Riches, starring Eddie Izzard, is probably the jewel in their schedules, any fledgling channel has a requirement to balance out acclaimed drama with sensationalist claptrap. And look, here's The Real Exorcist: Devil Hunter, in which God-fearing Reverend Bob Larson travels around the USA, supposedly performing exorcisms.

While the show is billed as a documentary, it presupposes that the audience believes in exorcism. So it fails to address any concerns that it might be a load of old hokum, and thus becomes a 60-minute advert for Bob's exorcism empire.

The solemn voiceover faithfully describes the procedures that...

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It always happens when you're at your most susceptible. You're bored, you're slobbing on the sofa wearing trousers with an elasticated waistband, fragments of pizza and chocolate are lodged about your person and you're stabbing at a remote control with a fat thumb. Suddenly, a Day-Glo American woman screeches at you from the television set, asking you to "just imagine" various things.

Just imagine having a waistline like hers. Just imagine achieving that waistline "the easy way" – ie through several months of ceaseless toil on some contraption called a lateral thigh trainer. Just imagine not having just buried your face in a four-litre tub of...

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“Who likes techno?” asked Who Likes Techno? (BBC Radio 4, Tuesday 2 October), a polite, nervous little documentary that attempted to flog the history of drum machine-based dance music to the seething mass of modish excitability that is Radio 4’s lunchtime set.

Clearly, it was stuffed from the get-go. Squeezed into a slot normally reserved for heated debates about dead politicians and topsoil, its titular question fell into a small teapot of incongruity, splashed about for a bit, gurgled, then died. It might as well have asked listeners if they liked indecipherable hieroglyphics, or standing up too quickly after studying a granary cob on an unusually low...

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We don't love Dragons' Den because we're a nation of sensitive, nurturing, not-remotely-jealous (no way), kindly philanthropists who come over all warm and squishy when someone who has devoted their life to a nutty invention strikes it lucky with an input of several grand and the chance to work with Peter Jones, who is very tall.

No. It's because we are utter gits.

There are two reasons why we love Dragons' Den: 1) we get to see the inventors squirm and 2) because we all have our favourite and least favourite Dragons, and admire/loathe their little quirks.

The way Theo Paphitis seeks out physical flaws in a...

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You can't help but wonder how the crew for Ross Kemp on Gangs go about securing his various meetings with vicious gangland thugs. I can't imagine a ditzy researcher ringing up and saying, "Hi, is that The Brutalizer? Oh hi, sorry to bother you, I just wondered if you might like to hook up with an actor from Romford who used to do the Fruit ’n Fibre ads? Hello?"

No, clearly Ross Kemp is described to these people as a fellow hard man, a bloke who has seen a good few people blown away by grenades in disused multistorey car parks, someone who isn't afraid of...

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If you're sitting at home and feeling a bit lonely, you can either phone a close friend to get their reassurance that you're probably not the only one, or you can turn on your TV and be presented with cast-iron proof.

Chatbox offers a 24/7 window on the world of the slightly desperate singleton. You're able to flirt with complete strangers via text message, send blurry camera phone pictures of your head to be displayed on the TV, or phone the chatline at 10p a minute to leave uninspired, unenticing descriptions of yourself in the hope that they will eventually lead to a Mills &...

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These days there are dozens of niche channels catering for comparatively narrow fields of interest. There's one exclusively for teachers, there are others for pub landlords, owners of Audi cars, Chelsea fans – there's even a channel for people who like watching ITV2, if you can imagine that.

So the existence of Horse & Country TV should be no surprise. Nor should it come as a shock that the channel is mainly dedicated to horses and country pursuits, with a sprinkling of adverts for products to control the internal parasites of your livestock rather than ones for Plenitude Bio Contour Eye Gel.

"For horse lovers only"...

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