Radio Times

So, it's the very last Dish of the Day. I'd planned to review some programme on the Discovery Channel about ghosts, but after 60 seconds I knew I was probably going to end up dispensing the same supernatural slagging I gave to a very similar show about 10 weeks ago, so at 12 midnight last night I stopped the Sky+ box and just started channel hopping instead.

I'd not adopted this approach before: a remarkable amount of research and planning has gone into this blog. (Well, 30 minutes browsing a copy of the nation's favourite listings magazine each week.) But the thing is, with so...

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During the war, American GIs were said, with a mixture of male envy and female admiration, to be "oversexed, overpaid and over here". Well, we're finally getting our own back, having parachuted an entire regiment of British comedians into America's backyard, there to beat them at their own game.

I don't know about oversexed – although if lurid tabloid stories are to be believed, Steve Coogan will keep the British end up – but a new wave of comics like Eddie Izzard, Ricky Gervais, Simon Pegg and Sacha Baron Cohen are certainly reaping big bucks "over there", without selling nylons.

Many Brits have attempted to export their jokes...

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Order! Order! The concluding episode of Days in the Life: Pink Floyd at 40 was an exercise in aggravation. Invisible gavels hovered over every grumble, gripe, moan, tut, tsk and sigh. Being posh, however, the band was at pains to ensure its incessant squabbling remained reasonably restrained.

One assumes this was something to do with not wanting to get any port on its cravat. Or, indeed, not wanting to find any lawsuits in its mailbox. Either way, it was all grimacing self-control and simmering passive aggression round Floyd's way.

"I was never friends with Dave or Rick," sighed field marshal Roger Waters of his former band-mates. "I...

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Typical BBC3, I thought. Let's ratchet up the viewing figures by sticking three dysfunctional families - including six babies - into a house to live together, fill the place with cameras, and then just sit back and wait for the whole thing to turn into chaos, like the main square of a European town before a major international football clash.

In fact, it ended up being a surprisingly sensitive look at child rearing - although I've got to say that this is a subject I'm about as familiar with as the history of the crossbow, cat breeding, or rolling stock on the west coast mainline....

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I'm a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! has got a lot to answer for. For starters, I now haven't been to the pub for 16 nights. And in the absence of your regular correspondent Grace Dent, I thought you would like to know why men like me are tuning in night after night for more bickering, sniping and subtropical subplots.

Firstly, I'm a Celeb… is that rarest of things - an ITV programme packed with tiny pleasures. And I'm not simply talking about Ant and Dec.

The cheeky Geordie funsters have, as always, been baiting of the celebs. And this year the diminutive duo have been getting...

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Ah, the panel-based quiz show. The last refuge of the desperate commissioning editor. Despite the fact that They Think It's All Over and Never Mind the Buzzcocks are among the most profoundly irritating programmes on British TV, copycat shows keep on rolling out, forcing comedians who are normally pretty funny to deliver a load of stilted, supposedly comic observations in the name of entertainment.

But they don't come any worse than this. And Then You Die just beggars belief. It'll surely be dredged up on one of those equally ubiquitous list-based programmes in a few years' time - I dunno, maybe The Nation's Top 500 Misconceived...

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When I was about nine years old, I played a piano piece called Silver Trumpets at the St Albans Music Festival in a small room in front of about 30 adults, all of whom were there to see their offspring play a piano piece called Silver Trumpets. Believe me, you've never experienced anything like the levels of boredom generated by 12 primary schoolchildren playing Silver Trumpets, one after the other. I can still hear it in my head now - ham-fisted attempts at musicianship, devoid of subtlety, and sounding more like a piece entitled Rusty Saxophones.

Marc Yu, however, is only seven years old, and is...

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I've gone to preposterous lengths to try and review this programme. You don't really need to know the boring details, but because of some extraordinarily bad planning on my part, I'm currently sitting in the passenger seat of a Fiat Punto, going down the M4 towards Carmarthen, while watching Discovery Real Time on the screen of my mobile phone.

It's only thanks to an extraordinary innovation called a Slingbox that I'm able to do this, although I can't help wondering whether the inventors might have been better off focusing their efforts on, I dunno, combating Third World hunger than allowing me to watch a programme about...

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While those of us who don't class ourselves as eye-candy have probably tearfully given up on the idea of television presenting, there's still a way in. Become a TV chef. You don't have to be beautiful. Fans of Antony Worrall Thompson are unlikely to have posters of him on their bedroom walls. I'm not privy to the contents of Clarissa Dickson Wright's postbag, but I'm guessing that lustful notelets from potential suitors are pretty thin on the ground.

In fact, I have a theory that the uglier or more overweight the TV chef, the more we implicitly trust their opinions. "They must know what they're talking...

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Such is my love of food-related telly, it's probably not that surprising that UKTV Food is often my first port of call when I switch on the box. The box! Man, I've not called it that for a long time. Probably because my TV no longer resembles a box - I guess it's more of a tray.

But anyway, you can always rely on the channel to serve up comforting portions of shows you've seen umpteen times but fancy seeing again - you know, Keith Floyd cavorting in the Dordogne, Madhur Jaffrey being statuesque in the Punjab, Jamie Oliver sounding for all the world like a bit-part...

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I love Christmas. As far as I'm aware, it's the only time of the year when Alan Hansen tries to sell me cheap chocolate (from Morrisons) and the Spice Girls attempt to convince me that they shop, en masse, in Tesco. And has Antonio Banderas actually heard of M&S, I wonder?

But let's put to one side the joys of celebrity-packed Christmas commercials as we head along the home straight on our TV toboggan. The wonderland of Christmas telly is just around the corner as we hurtle down the snowy slopes towards the time of year when TV goes into the loft, brings down the fairy lights and...

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What made you want to do what you do? Was it the money? The prestige? The fear of disappointing an overbearing, embittered mother? Or was it the prospect of receiving an H Samuel traditional gold quartz carriage clock from your 19-year-old line manager after 43 years spent licking envelopes behind a plasterboard partition?

Interestingly, it appears that "a considerable number of us" were inspired to enter our respective vocational fields - or, to put it in less florid/flagrantly inapt terms, our "job" - by a fictional character. How many of us, exactly? No idea. But Mark Lawson said it on Radio 4 so it's probably at least...

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You tend to associate the QVC shopping channel with imitation diamonds, or space-saving plastic bags in which you can store your whole family and pop them neatly in the bottom drawer of the wardrobe when they're not needed. But look, QVC can help you out if you're hungry, too.

Kitchen demonstrations aren't a new thing on the channel – umpteen gadgets and gizmos have been flogged over the years by lower-league celebrity chefs – but the idea of demonstrating the advantages of a three-kilo lump of air-dried ham (only £48.66 plus £5.95 postage and packing) is a new one on me. This hour was entirely devoted...

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As a fan of westerns, I will always return to the classics of John Ford (My Darling Clementine), Howard Hawks (The Big Sky) and Anthony Mann, whose Winchester '73 was one of five collaborations out west with James Stewart. These examples come from the genre's heyday.

In his book The Crowded Prairie, historian Michael Coyne sets the premature demise of the western in 1980 (the very year, he reminds us with some irony, that Americans elected screen cowboy Ronald Reagan as president). In short order, three revisionist westerns flopped: The Long Riders, Tom Horn and Heaven's Gate – the latter notoriously taking down a...

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One thing unifies every single TV chef. Asked about their philosophy regarding food, they'll all say: "It's all about simple recipes, using the very best ingredients." This mantra has been particularly apparent throughout Gary Rhodes's series, Local Food Heroes.

Over the last few weeks, Gaz has subjected us to a fairly humourless guide to the best of British food producers, using a strange voice that he only started to adopt in earnest about five or six years ago. He used to have a chirpy London accent: now, he speaks in an achingly slow, slightly posh, slightly strangled way, as if a big gorilla is standing behind him...

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