Radio Times

It may be that images of the mighty polar bear balancing on the last piece of receding Arctic ice as if it were a Fox's Glacier Mint, will be enough to spur the human race into climate change action. Never underestimate the power of a cute animal. But does global warming explain cinema's current obsession with snow and ice?

I detect a definite planet-wide appreciation of the poles in the proliferation of animated features like the musical penguin extravaganza Happy Feet and its inferior, beach-set cousin Surf's Up.

Since the stirring, Morgan Freeman-narrated documentary March of the Penguins, the plump, waddling seabird – and particularly...

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There's been no shortage of Jane Austen adaptations lately - there's another due on New Year's Day with BBC1's new version of Sense and Sensibility. No sooner has one suitor on horseback paraded past, than another dashing soldier is knocking at the door. And while it's pleasant enough admiring all these men in tight breeches, I'm never tempted to stray. My heart was won long ago by one particular set of sideburns - those of Mr Fitzwilliam Darcy.

Fictional journalist Bridget Jones was the first to openly fixate on Mr Darcy. An unmarried 30-something, she looked to Pride & Prejudice for comfort and hope. And it...

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You know that Christmas has really arrived when the annual chorus of naysayers test their larynges for the colossal, universal whinge: "There's nothing worth watching on telly over Christmas." In some ways, this group moan is a bit like hearing the first cuckoo of spring, except the moaners - those disappointed, thwarted souls - just go on and on and on and on and they don't sound anywhere near as pretty.

Even MPs leap on the bandwagon for a few inches of cheap publicity, confident in the knowledge that no-one's actually going to stand up and tell them to put a sock in it. Possibly a Christmas...

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The revamped Doctor Who has given viewers hours of thrilling entertainment. But what if the Beeb was to decide - as in days of old - that it wasn't worth keeping a kids' sci-fi series for posterity? Which scenes would you argue must never be wiped? Here are my suggestions:

1) Rose and the Doctor separated for ever…

…Or, as we now know, until Russell T Davies pens a kick-ass story reuniting them. In Doomsday, Billie Piper's mascara took the strain as she faced the reality of life without the Time Lord. Fans of long-standing remembered Michael Grade and sympathised.

As Rose and the Doctor said their...

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Bethlehem, Carmarthenshire: a tiny village in the throes of festive activity. BBC Radio 4's Christmastime (Sunday 16 December, 2:45pm) popped its head round the door and asked if there was anything it could do to help out. There was. It wasn't much, in the grand scheme of things, but Bethlehem told Christmastime that it wouldn't mind being given the chance to promote its post office.

With no pub (there was one, once, but it "closed before the Second World War") and the only school having rung in the new millennium by turning purple, going "gnnnn…ack!" and collapsing to the cobbles, Bethlehem's post office was all the village...

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Occasionally, artists enjoy an "imperial phase". It's the part of their career where, after a massive hit, they can do no wrong. Critics daren't criticise them; their employers daren't interfere with their work. Then, when their abilities dwindle, nobody notices. For an example, look no further than Ricky Gervais and Extras.

The first series of Extras was an awkward mix of Office-style realism, celebrity cameos where stars hammered away at one unsubtle quirk, and bargain-basement comic misunderstanding. The main character, Andy Millman, swung wildly from frustrated everyman to boorish bumbler and, in emergencies, simply became David Brent. Outside The Office, Gervais was lost.

More worryingly, Extras was so...

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Tuesday 2 January 2007 was the day that I proudly bought my first ever TV. (Up until that point I'd made do with family hand-me-downs.) It was flat, it was big, and it came with a port to hook up to my computer. Suddenly I could find stuff on the internet and watch from the questionable comfort of a sofa I picked up for 50 quid on eBay.

I sat down to enjoy an old episode of Animal Kwackers with trepidation, remembering that it scared me witless when I was five years old. Most of June and July were taken up with watching hour...

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He was short and thin. His ears stuck out. His beaky nose was so embarrassing that he stuck tape to the tip of it and his forehead, praying it would develop a tilt. When teams were chosen for any game, he was always the last to be picked.

Not my description of the young Steven Spielberg, but biographer John Baxter's. The boy who would become arguably the greatest popular film-maker of our time was never cool. At high school in Phoenix in the early 1960s, he joined the Boy Scouts, learned the clarinet and was obsessed with movie music rather than rock 'n' roll.

The classic nerd, he...

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"He wasn't a shark dressed in a dolphin suit," warned the voice, ominously. "He was a shark." As clunky descriptions of widely feared US concert promoter Bill Graham go, it was a corker. Not only did it encapsulate the frill-free ruthlessness of the legendary music impresario, it illustrated the vast shadow that the Notorious G.I.T. continues to cast across the crumbling coliseum of rock history.

As with the other testimonies that formed the basis of BBC Radio 4's excellent Between Rock and a Good Cause (Saturday 8 December), it also made Graham sound palpably, terrifyingly, alive - even though he'd actually died in 1991, and thus could...

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It's the week before Christmas, when the television channels are doing some last-minute dusting and a bit of light housework, airing the bedding and getting ready for an influx of guests in advance of the busiest period of the TV year. Which is a roundabout way of saying that, television-wise, there isn't an awful lot happening.

But BBC1 has broken into its special box of chocolates early to bring us Oliver Twist (nightly from Tuesday). It's an adaptation of the Dickens classic by EastEnders writer Sarah Phelps. You can tell Phelps is perfectly at home with the subject matter, as Oliver Twist is a bit like EastEnders,...

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Firmly established as a national institution, Question Time feels as if it has been around for ever, but in fact it's only in its mid-20s. On Thursday nights, the relentlessly hammering piano theme heralds an unpredictable hour of current affairs, featuring stressed public figures trying hard to look confident in the face of a tongue-lashing from the general public.

Amid the chaos sits the familiar figure of David Dimbleby, constantly fiddling with his glasses and generally wearing a wry smile. He knows that, in this era of political spin, his show is the only one where the politicians are truly put on the spot. When a furious...

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Mornings are for cricket, afternoons are for football, but late, drunken, solitary, post-pub nights in well-loved armchairs are for snooker. The exquisite serenity. The leisurely strolls around the table. The referee's immaculate white gloves polishing balls to a gleaming iridescence. The tranquil, understated commentary by Clive Everton or Dennis Taylor. "The table is playing well this evening, Clive." "Yes, it's a responsive cloth." Of course it is. It's a highly responsive cloth. But above all, the attraction has to be…well, it's the trigonometry.

Look, maybe it's a bloke thing. After a few beers in the pub, the pool table looks highly inviting. You slap down a couple...

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Christopher Nolan's tale of duelling Victorian magicians, The Prestige, begins with a fine explanatory passage from Michael Caine. To paraphrase: every great magic trick consists of three parts. The first is "The Pledge". The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards or a bird. The second is "The Turn", where he takes the ordinary and makes it do something extraordinary, like disappear. But the hardest part is the third, in which he has to bring it back – that's "The Prestige".

Movie-making pulls off a similar trick. As any screenwriting course will tell you, equilibrium must be shattered by something unexpected and the status quo...

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At around 7:00pm every Saturday evening, approximately eight million people take leave of their senses, jettison their critical faculties and tune into 90 minutes of unadulterated garbage. Eight million people can't be wrong, surely? Believe me, they can.

The X Factor is lowest-common-denominator television writ large, spawned from the same culture that foisted Katie Price and Peter Andre upon an unsuspecting world: a tired and repetitive format that plays on the aspirations of susceptible no-hopers with limited talent and even less personality, acting out their fantasies on a set with as much visual appeal as an unlanced boil.

Few of the contestants can hold a tune,...

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All bare bums and bloody-minded brouhaha, The Best DJ You've Never Heard in Your Life (Saturday 1 December, BBC Radio 4 FM) concerned original "shock jock" Howard Stern.

Ostensibly a profile of the most successful, divisive and - having accrued fines in excess of $10million – publicly-knuckle-rapped broadcaster in the history of American radio, it was also about someone else. Someone who, in one mind at least, was at least as important as his subject. For here, fidgeting on the peripheries of Stern's ungovernable radio zoo, nose squashed against the steamed-up glass, eyes darting excitedly from the semi-naked studio guests to the tall, strange DJ at the...

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