Radio Times

I am a man. I have a car. It has four wheels and I quite like driving it. But, honestly, what else do you need to know? They go. Some faster than others. They come in different colours. Mine's blue and has got a CD player. They're also quite expensive. That's enough information, surely?

It would be altogether too easy and too obvious to devote the bulk of this piece to a character assassination of Jeremy Clarkson. But, hey, what's wrong with easy and obvious? The man's a prig, a smug boor who sports a ludicrous haircut and has an unfeasibly high opinion of himself. And that's just...

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It's the show that takes Walking with Dinosaurs to its very extremes. There's no denying we're fascinated by the beasts that roamed Earth millions of years in the past. So as well as being rip-roaring entertainment, Primeval also challenges some dino-related preconceptions.

Chief among these must surely be the much-vaunted belief that the creatures were wiped out by some kind of natural disaster. Instead, it seems far more likely Professor Cutter and his pals are to blame for decimating the dinosaur population. To date, they have variously shot at, harpooned, machine-gunned and run down with a jeep the poor, unsuspecting, prehistoric beasts to cross their path....

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For the baffled, here's the key difference between the season's two major US film award ceremonies: the Golden Globes are voted for by the journalists of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association; the Academy Awards by the industry.

Because the Globes come first, they're regarded as a dry run – as well as a tip sheet – for the Oscars. Some years, it's as if the 6,000-plus members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have simply copied the HFPA's homework.

The Golden Globes would normally be handed out at a fundraising dinner – far more informal and pally than the traditional showbiz spectacular – and, like...

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People are very precious about bedtimes. I note elsewhere on RadioTimes.com that a viewer is bemoaning the fact that the new Glenn Close legal thriller/murder mystery Damages went out at the supposedly ungodly hour of 10:20pm last Sunday. Far be it from me to question anyone's sleeping habits, but 10:20pm isn't late. A lot of us are still up and awake and we want to watch some decent telly.

I remember similar pouting when BBC1 broadcast its very, very good comedy series Outnumbered after the BBC 10 o'Clock News last year. Some sleepy viewers complained. But broadcasters know that there's a big audience out there...

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Gardening, eh? Never understood the point of it myself. All that mud, bending over and Latin always struck me as precisely the opposite of fun, and exactly the sort of pastime I'd embark upon only if a) my friends, TV, family, book collection and Scrabble board were to be lost in a house fire, or b) my brain were to fall down the back of my trousers and get stuck in my trainers.

As a result, my knowledge of gardening is somewhat limited. Actually, for limited, read pitiful. And crap. To be honest, all I know about gardening is that it's got something to do with sheds...

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In shows like Property Ladder, enthusiastic amateurs with no experience buy a house, knock a wall through and do up the bathroom in the hope of turning a quick buck. In contrast, Grand Designs follows projects that begin life as muddy plots, or involve reconstruction beyond the realms of mere "renovation". They're the brainchildren of people with know-how and skill, or those pursuing such a unique and original passion that they have to invent cutting-edge technologies or revive lost skills to make it a reality.

Grand Designs is also an example of great storytelling. But it doesn't simply chart the evolution of an amazing piece of...

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You have to go to some considerable lengths to balls up a concept as simple as You've Been Framed!.

Jeremy Beadle had it down pat, and it went like this: presenter tells a joke so poor that the audience is left wondering which language it was badly translated from. Presenter introduces a loose theme for the next set of clips (usually a variation on dogs, babies or idiots swinging above a brook on a piece of rope). Clips are shown. Canned laughter is uncanned. Repeat. The only trouble is that Beadle didn't stick around and the YBF! format became a bloated caricature of its former self.

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Are you sitting uncomfortably? Then BBC Radio 4 will begin.

Broadcast during Woman's Hour, its MR James at Christmas season (24-28 December, 10:45am/7:45pm) squirmed in its unlikely surroundings like a nest of rats in the sleeve of a hand-knitted cardigan. As such, it posited the perfect antidote to the deluge of tinsel, cuddliness, Bernard Cribbins* and enforced seasonal jollity that traditionally besets the station, each of its five ghost stories dangling like a black bauble from a tree once used to hang someone vengeful in a three-cornered hat.

If the season could've been encapsulated in one word it would be "beware", spoken sotto voce, ideally by either a)...

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If there's one thing that ruffles the feathers of RT readers, it's giving away the endings of films. You can just about get away with hinting that the ship sinks in Titanic, but otherwise, if in doubt, remain tight-lipped.

This makes writing about M Night Shyamalan extremely tricky. If the writer/director/producer is known for one thing, it's his twist endings – to the point where he's now hidebound by audience expectation.

It was The Sixth Sense that made his idiosyncratic name (the "M" stands for Manoj and the "Night" he added, somewhat pretentiously, in college). Don't worry, I'm not going to give away the wham-bang revelation that throws...

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One of last year's most eagerly anticipated US imports, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, did no more than limp on to More4 where it gave a little cough and promptly died.

Quite right too. It was smug, self-satisfied and not very good. Expectations for Studio 60 before its launch in the US were high because it was the baby of Aaron Sorkin, creator of The West Wing, that overrated series beloved of TV snobs everywhere. (That and The Sopranos. Yes, gawd save us all from West Wing and Sopranos bores. And you can add Dexter and The Wire to that little list too. Both good, but...

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