Radio Times

The hedgerow parts and a hunched, hooded figure beckons to us from among the brambles. Intrigued by the ferocity of the lurker's hand gestures we approach with haste, treading on a twig in the process.

Shh! The figure turns and scowls. It's Clare Balding and she's spotted Something Serious through the trees. "Look at that," she hisses, squinting behind an unusually large leaf. "It's some pigs." A series of indistinct snuffles confirms the broadcaster's observation. It's some pigs. The excitement mounts. "This one's snout is going right into the mud. And that one is in mud right up to her shoulder. Ah," she concludes, exhaling jubilantly, as...

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Along with fellow RT contributor Stuart Maconie, I co-hosted a late-night ITV film review show in 1997. We inaugurated our own award, the Barn d'Or, to honour our film of the year.

The first and only spray-painted toy farm building was awarded to a then-unknown film-maker from Uttoxeter for his first almost-feature, crime caper Smalltime. It was just under sixty minutes long and shot for pin money on borrowed equipment with his mates, and we considered it a Nottinghamshire Mean Streets with humorous wigs. The young writer/director/producer/star was Shane Meadows, 24, and he sportingly posed for photographs with the Barn d’Or, worn as a hat.

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Crackly, 1950s archive footage of a ten-year-old girl intently writing a letter. A voiceover by a real ten-year-old: "Dear Grandma. Your breast-enhancement surgery looks beautiful. I only wish you were alive to see it. We could barely close the lid of your coffin…"

Welcome to the deeply wrong world of Wonder Showzen. This American cult hit, which pops up randomly late at night on MTV Two, is the best comedy you've never seen. Even in the States, where MTV Two also aired it in 2005-6, it only attracted 140,000 viewers – although that probably saved it from being forced off the air by conservative watchdogs.

America's TV...

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I've tried, but I can't think of a duller TV detective partnership than that of lumpen "I'm a bit thick, me, but I don't care" Detective Inspector Lewis and "I'm a pinched, posh git who quotes from classical works" Detective Sergeant Hathaway in Lewis. Admittedly, the supposed allure of Dalziel and Pascoe has always escaped me; to me, Pascoe looks as if he's half-hopefully waiting for a bus while Dalziel might as well be grazing in a field, staring malevolently at hikers.

But back to Lewis, boring, claustrophobic and tedious Lewis (Sundays, ITV1), with its dreary, attenuated stories. Sunday's episode (2 March) is a mess, lurching down...

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For those about to rock, we pity you. February has brought with it crushing news for those whose hearts throb to the beat of a louder drum: Planet Rock is no more. A tiny station with a big heart, a bulging fan base (listening figures topped an astonishing 560,000) and a similarly gargantuan collection of records by middle-aged men in tasselled leather blousons, it has gone the way of all flesh and, sadly, an increasing number of specialist digital stations.

Following a glum announcement from its chief executive about how digital radio is "not an economically viable growth platform", Planet Rock is, with immediate effect, defunct. It...

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By day, Dexter Morgan is a blood-spatter analyst in the forensics branch of the Miami-Dade Police Department; by night, he's a serial killer.

A character for whom the term "antihero" might have been invented, he preys only on other serial killers: he's both a perpetrator of brutal crimes and an irresistible dispenser of justice.

Dexter is a twistedly original series, and one of the most intriguing central characters television has ever seen – and that's clear from the very beginning:

A feeding mosquito is smacked into a red smudge. A razor cuts through bristles and a droplet of crimson blood hits gleaming white porcelain. Thick slabs...

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They call it "the Olympics of the dog world" but Crufts is far more important than that. At 117 years old (that's 819 in dog years), it's a whole five years older than Baron de Coubertin's glorified sports day, and while it's called a sporting event, it's really more of a hybrid (never a mongrel, mind) of high-level sports event, beauty pageant and Fame Academy.

For a start, the sheer scale of it is dazzling. Try to imagine over 20,000 pooches from 182 different breeds, all in one place. That's a lot of jumping over little plastic fences, chasing chew toys and running at heel while their...

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When Colin Welland waved his Oscar for Chariots of Fire in 1982 and declared "The British are coming!" it was taken as a quote from the tale of Paul Revere, who alerted colonials to attack in the American War of Independence. Welland was actually making an in-joke, but it also marked a turning point for British confidence at Hollywood's most important prize-giving.

The following year, Welland's misconstrued boast seemed to carry through, as Gandhi, directed by Richard Attenborough, swept the board with eight Oscar wins, and Educating Rita and The Dresser were nominated in 1984. After that, though, normal service was resumed: Hollywood hegemony.

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Comedy! It's hilarious. Except when it's not, obviously. Then it's rubbish. Or, in the case of non-hilarious radio comedy, rubbish and incessantly, infuriatingly polite. Unless, of course, it's Just a Minute (Mondays, 6:30pm, BBC Radio 4), which has made a name for itself by being a) conspicuously not rubbish, and b) as rude as it's possible to be within the confines of a station that still, from certain angles, resembles a parson's tea party, on a lawn, with scones, in 1953.

Astonishingly, Just a Minute is now in its 40s. It's been going since 1967, and some wags will suggest that's where it should have remained,...

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Call it mean, call it cynical, but The Last Enemy has very quickly become The Last Turkey in my tormented, overheated, TV-sated brain.

Gawd, it's dull, I think because British television is just rubbish at thrillers. Paul Abbott's State of Play, waaaaaay back in 2003 (and now being made into a Hollywood film), was the last truly good Brit example of the genre. And before that? Mmm, probably Edge of Darkness. And that was 1985.

We can't do thrillers because they demand pace, speed and plot-driven action. We, on the other hand, allow our dramas - and not just thrillers - to become bogged down by characterisation....

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TV executives don't have many good ideas, so they live by two rules. One: if another channel has a good idea, copy it, even if your version is bad. Two: if you have a good idea, keep milking it dry, even after it's turned bad. Ashes to Ashes is rule two in action.

In 2006, Life on Mars was a great idea. A detective wakes up in 1973 and has to join the oafish coppers of the time, while figuring out what he's doing there. The problem was plausibly getting him home, but the creators had an answer: Sam Tyler was in a coma, exploring his...

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In the uplifting true-story drama The Pursuit of Happyness, Will Smith stars as Chris Gardner, while his son is played by…Jaden Smith, his real-life son, now aged nine. The kid can certainly act, but more importantly, he and Dad have a chemistry that's hard to fabricate.

Perhaps it's this shortcut to a convincing on-screen relationship that explains cinema's rampant nepotism. (Smith spoke of an "overwhelmingly powerful emotion" playing opposite Smith Jr, which may be why he cast seven-year-old daughter Willow in I Am Legend.)

It's still quite rare for sons and daughters to play children of mum or dad. Liza Minnelli only once appeared with her...

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Go on, admit it – when Tommy Lee Jones appeared in Clint Eastwood's geriatric astronaut caper Space Cowboys (he was the baby of the group at 54), you thought it was all over. Not his career, which was soaring, but his credibility. After more than 20 years, films like Batman Forever and Men in Black had left the granite-faced Texan financially secure for life.

His acting ability was never in doubt – his role as murderer Gary Gilmore in the 1982 TV movie The Executioner’s Song won him an Emmy – but box-office bankability seemed unlikely for the weatherbeaten character actor. Then, in his late...

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Well, I made it through to the end, but it was a close-run thing. When the British Academy Film Awards (Sunday 10 February, 9:00pm/10:20pm, BBC1) had a little rest for the Ten o’Clock News I’d seriously considered deep-frying my eyeballs. It couldn’t be any worse than sitting through the concluding half of such a turgid ceremony, surely?

I laugh every year at the Baftas. Not at them as they are actually being broadcast, but at all the hoopla beforehand, all of the guff about how they are “forerunners to the Oscars” (yeah, right, does anyone really believe that?) and how we can expect a star-studded ceremony with some...

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I've always had a bit of a thing for BBC Radio 4. Not a romantic sort of a thing, obviously. I've certainly never found myself smiling wistfully in the bath while thinking about, say, Farming Today. Nor have I ever felt the need to inform the station of my appreciation, whether by leaving a nice message on the Feedback answering machine or by sending a series of cryptic notes to Today's Edward Stourton ("The rook flies at midnight. King to f4? HUMPHRYS CAN'T HELP U NOW") before vaulting the security barrier at Broadcasting House and chasing him into the third-floor toilets.

No, this is more a platonic...

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