Radio Times

The news isn't funny, is it? Not with Iraq festering away? Not with the renaissance of Al Gore and Hillary Clinton, the world's least comedic double act? Not with California in cinders? Oh, yes, it is. The news is funny, very funny indeed and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is there to prove it.

Often to be found on More4, The Daily Show is America's funny bone and conscience rolled into one laugh-out-loud, but thought-provoking, whole. The format is simple and recognisable to anyone familiar with Newsnight: a loquacious but authoritative host, a selection of overearnest correspondents and, finally, an interview with someone in the news.

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If you stick me in front of any cookery show - well, nearly any - it's like sedating me with horse tranquilliser. I'll sit there, quietly absorbing the instructions, relishing the gentle sound of chorizo being chopped or mushrooms being skewered.

It's like being transported to another world, a world where Keith Floyd is always drunk, where James Martin is always wearing a sensible pullover, and where Ainsley Harriott constantly asks, "What am I like, ladies and gentlemen?" while sprinkling parsley from a greater height than is really necessary.

I've decided to watch food programmes on cable and satellite all week, which is a bit...

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Weary of Strictly Come Dancing's waltz, or Paul O'Grady's schmaltz? John Turode skewering a Masterchef student isn't your scene? OK, you get the idea. If you come home exhausted from work and can't face hard news, soft soap, or your kids bingeing on Tracy Beaker re-runs, there is an alternative. Bubbling away in the stranded backwaters of the early-evening Freeview schedules is Takeshi's Castle, a game show of two halves with numerous guilty pleasures.

Japan has long excelled at this kind of shiny, disposable programming - Clive James frequently showed extracts of Japanese game-show contestants enthusiastically enduring all manner of painful indignity in his global television...

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When I was younger, watching Eastern European animation was a rare treat. For some reason, the slightly languid, restrained atmosphere of Czech or Russian cartoons seemed to have more beauty, more subtlety, more attention to detail than, I dunno, Battle of the Planets or Hong Kong Phooey. They wouldn't be shown very often on British TV - mainly because children were demanding repeats of Battle of the Planets or Hong Kong Phooey, I guess - but when they were, I was glued to the screen.

This fascination has stayed with me - things like Yuri Norstein's beautiful Hedgehog in the Fog still make my spine...

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There have been many, many times during Long Way Down, the filmed record of Charley Boorman and Ewan McGregor's fundraising journey by motorbike from John o'Groats to Cape Town, when I've wanted to pat Boorman on the head and put him in a basket by the fire.

Boorman is adorable, a bit like a rather sweet but untrained puppy. I love his (and McGregor's) stock response to some of the mightiest feats of some of the world’s ancient and glorious civilisations (the pyramids at Giza, for example) – "Wow! Amazing!" But I also love The Thoughts of Charley on Important Stuff and That.

Such as war. Admittedly...

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Am I smarter than a ten year old? Well, that depends. If I was put head to head with a primary-school kid and challenged to, say, arrange a skiing holiday for 20 people, I'd be fairly confident that I wouldn't cock up the flights, forget to inform the group of the maximum baggage allowance, or burst into tears if I had trouble finding a hotel.

But, on the other hand, I've not had a French vocab test in 20 years – thank goodness – so the ten year old, fresh out of last week's double French lesson, might have a chance of beating me and shouting, "J'ai...

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I love local radio. I love its community spirit and its homespun pluck. I love its hearthside warmth, its wildly inaccurate weather forecasts and the fact that its cheery parochialism ensures a national news story will always play second banana to a local news story, even if said local news story is actually about a banana, and how it provoked a relatively minor pavement incident outside Threshers on Tuesday when a popular local magistrate slipped on it and bruised his clavicle.

Most of all, I love the wiggle in its walk and the giggle in its talk, even though – especially though - these are almost certainly...

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There are many reasons why you might wish to see Elizabeth: the Golden Age at the cinema – the imperious yet impish performance of Cate Blanchett, the ravishing wigs, an entire Spanish Armada created by computer – but historical accuracy should not be among them. Director Shekhar Kapur's film takes countless liberties, not least showing Elizabeth in search of a husband with whom she might produce an heir – she was in her 50s at the time of the Armada. Some critics have taken issue with this, but I think it's an unimportant criterion upon which to judge a dramatic film. So they've concertinaed certain events to...

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Of all those programmes where a load of people are stuck in a place they'd rather not be and paid money to stay there for as long as the viewing public put up with them, I'm a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! is by far my favourite. So much so that I'd occasionally even watch the thing. Imagine that.

But it was never the bushtucker trials that piqued my interest, nor the creation of nutritionally dubious evening meals from disappointing ingredients, nor indeed the reliably chirpy presenting team of Dec and Ant (as I believe we should start calling them, because it sounds a bit...

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Since I started doing this blog, I've come to recognise the power of the programme title. In fact, if someone told me that a lot of the titles are thought up first, and then the programmes are built around them, I wouldn't be particularly surprised.

Sitcom titles, of course, have to shoehorn in a proverb or saying. Let's think...say, one about a mill owner, who dies and forgets to bequeath the mill, leading to all manner of wrangling and legal shenanigans among his close relatives, might be called Mills on Wills.

Documentary series, however, just have to go straight for the jugular with something...

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It's last orders down the pub. Much of the known world is retiring to bed.

You've had a busy day. You have awakened to the Today programme, read a daily paper, caught the lunchtime news. You might have come home to the six o'clock bulletin and surfed through BBC News 24. You may even have snatched the occasional news summary throughout the day on Magic FM. You're tired but well-informed. Under such circumstances, it is perhaps not unreasonable to ask, what exactly is the point of Newsnight?

For over 25 years this bastion of news and current affairs has straddled the late-evening schedules like a cantankerous afterthought....

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I wouldn't necessarily recommend the Teachers TV channel for blockbusting entertainment, unless you get your kicks out of listening to strategies for improving Year 4 maths results, or dry analysis of Estelle Morris's views on closing the attainment gap between disadvantaged and affluent pupils.

But even Teachers TV has to let its hair down at some point, and yesterday they showed an episode of Classmates, a fantastic Channel 4 documentary series from 2002 which reunited former pupils of a particular school, and filmed their recollections of school dinners, French vocab tests, and administering wedgies in the bogs.

This programme featured the class of 1977 at...

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In 1989, Meryl Streep, greatest screen actress of her generation, played a romantic novelist and sex object in She-Devil, while Roseanne Barr filled the role of the dowdy-turned-satanic housewife who sets out to bring her down. Crucially, Streep was 40, and just about to cross that invisible Hollywood divide where the glam female roles dry up and you get to play mums ... or monsters.

For a few years, Streep slipped into a domestic holding pattern. Then, entering her 50s, she forged a new and rewarding sideline in fearsome harridans. First, the monstrous, machiavellian senator in The Manchurian Candidate, then the fire-breathing fashion editor-in-chief in The...

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It's hard to write about this show without it sounding like an editorial from Socialist Worker. But the tone was set in the first few seconds, when the narrator informed us that, at the behest of his wife, Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen's family and staff were moving from their London town house to a country pile in Gloucestershire. Staff! This immediately conjured up images of scullery maids, nannies, gardeners saying "Right you are, sir", rotund cooks, butlers, bellboys and God knows what else besides.

In fact, it was actually only his wife's personal assistant and her family, but it got things off on the wrong foot. Much of...

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Robin Hood looks like it was made out of Playmobil, one of those clip-together kits of shiny trees and plastic figures with blunt weapons and detachable hair. Just look at Jonas Armstrong - he's even got the raggedy fringe and painted-on stubble. These people don't live by their wits, they're let out of the box for 45 minutes and then tidied back into the toy cupboard.

I knew I wasn't going to like it from the opening episode. It was Pirates of the Caribbean done in the style of an end-of-term school play. They all looked like children too - how was Robin supposed to have spent five...

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