Radio Times

I wonder what particular kind of viciously destructive bile courses through the insides of a person who’d bother to sit down, take up a pen, and scribble hate mail to Kate and Gerry McCann.

In a revelatory sequence during Emma Loach’s excellent, moving film, Madeleine, One Year On: Campaign for Change (Wednesday 30 April, 8:00pm, ITV1), the McCanns were seen sorting through their post. There was a box for the psychic sightings, another for messages from well-wishers and another for, well, the horrible stuff. And it was really horrible. Gerry McCann read the toxic “greeting” on a Christmas card in which the sender claimed their “brat”...

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So, who wants to hear about my trip to the shops in search of Apprentice ice cream? Well, as an ice cream-tasting expedition it was fundamentally flawed (there was no ice cream, hence no tasting), but as a first stab at investigative journalism, I’m really quite pleased with it.

The manager of the shop confirmed that Claire’s team had indeed paid her a visit - back in June 2007! (I realise they don’t film the show on the week it’s broadcast, but who knew it lagged that far behind? It's strange to think that Sir Alan's Apprentice may already have been chosen.)

What’s more – and this will...

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OK, so, yes: watching Doctor Who is a collective experience, sure it is. We're all there on Saturday nights and that's a great thing, whatever. But stuff what I said about that - this week I got a preview DVD! I only mentioned preview discs to you before as an aside and now here I was, the gold-dust parcel in my hands: tell me honestly, what would you do?

I borrowed headphones, got a bowl of chilli con carne from the BBC canteen and tried very hard to watch quietly. Sixty pairs of eyes burnt into my back as I spent a lunch hour laughing aloud and jumping...

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It used to be so easy: a woman would take off her glasses and shake her hair out of its bun. Aghast, a male co-worker would exclaim, "Why, Miss Jones, you're . . . beautiful!" But perceptions and images of women have come on a long way since those prehistoric days. Having your hair tied back and being short-sighted is no longer acceptable visual shorthand for "ugly".

Or is it? In Her Shoes is a comedy drama in which chalk-and-cheese sisters find common ground, and I seem to recall it has something to do with a pair of shoes. Now, as a bloke, I suspect I’m not...

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French director Jean-Luc Godard famously said, "A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end . . . but not necessarily in that order." It's a theory that Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu has taken to heart with the non-linear plotting of Amores Perros, 21 Grams and now Babel (starring Brad Pitt, left).

This multi-stranded drama skips between three continents and four stories, involving Brad Pitt, a Japanese teenager, a Mexican nanny, and two Moroccan goatherds. Of course, these “fractured” narratives are familiar from art-house movies, but Babel is a major studio picture.

In the 1990s, Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs and...

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Wacky ice-cream flavours, Lucinda as project manager and the prospect of Claire being fired – all the ingredients for a deliciously indulgent bowlful of reality TV.

So, what flavour ice cream would you sell to the people of London? My favourite was Lee's homely "cup of tea" flavour, but Lucinda’s team settled on toffee-apple and avocado varieties (Lucinda championing the latter by donning an avocado-coloured suit). She also made Lindi her second in command, which reminded me of that toilet paper advert where the three-year-old's in charge of the company.

Early on in the series, I enjoyed Lucinda's quirky ways, but lately I'd come to wonder if...

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It turns out you should never judge a sitcom by its impossibly dull sit. Try not to nod off when I tell you that BBC3's Pulling is about three attractive but flawed metropolitan women who live together and make bad romantic decisions. That'll be Friends without men, then. Or a Sex and the City-inspired, aspirational romp. Roll on the unreasonably muscular conquests, sex talk and shoes that cost more than most people's houses.

Or not.

In fact there are plagues more appealing than the lifestyle and personalities touted by the daringly rank Pulling. There's no diddling about with girlie fecklessness here. This show blasts you with...

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Anyone remember The Great Egg Race? A quaint, scientific challenge-based show from the early 1980s, it required its contestants to solve such delicate problems as taking a photograph of an oil rig from a fluttering kite.

But that kind of thing looks distinctly unimpressive in 21st-century television schedules. The ante has to be upped to include steel girders, welding and combustible materials - and Scrapheap Challenge does exactly this, with panache, gusto and the occasional explosion. It's now in its umpteenth series, presented by actor Robert Llewellyn (best known for playing the mechanoid Kryten in space-age sitcom Red Dwarf) and the reliably effervescent Lisa Rogers....

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It's the nanosecond of hush that's the big giveaway…that tiny, barely perceptible pause between the winner being read out, and the start of the applause.

However fleeting, it's a foolproof way of telling when a Bafta TV Awards audience is wrongfooted. It's easy to measure, and lasts just long enough for a horrified, semi-audible exclamation of "What???!" before you slap your weary, unwilling hands together, just out of strained politeness. Or, more likely, you don't bother at all and to hell with seeming bad-mannered.

There were quite a few of these charged mini-silences at last night's British Academy Television Awards ceremony at the London Palladium. We tapped...

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So this time when someone stopped me in the corridor, I was ready. You'd like this guy, it was Moray Laing: tall, smart, and he edits Doctor Who Adventures magazine, so he knows everything. Including how I would react to this week's episode.

"You'll cry," he warned me. And I don't want to say whether he was right or not but, cough, the rest of this blog is about football.

He did have one thing to ask me, though: "Do you write your blog immediately after the show?"

What does he think I am? What kind of social life does he think I have? Saturday night? Of course...

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When the news of Charlton Heston's death was announced on Sunday 6 April (he was 83), images of Moses and Judah Ben-Hur dominated the coverage thanks to his career in epic movies.

Raised during the Depression and toughened up by military service, Heston's 6ft 3in physique and booming voice made him the definitive CinemaScope leading man, with parts such as the circus boss in The Greatest Show on Earth. He said Planet of the Apes was his most physically demanding role, but still made sequel Beneath the Planet of the Apes.

Yet, despite his commanding presence in biblical robe or loin cloth, I still retain...

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At times, Martin Scorsese’s Howard Hughes biopic The Aviator feels like a big-budget episode of Stella Street, in which John Sessions and Phil Cornwell created an English suburb populated by the very famous.

In Scorsese’s movie, we have Cate Blanchett’s note-perfect, Oscar-winning turn as Katharine Hepburn, for which she had freckles painstakingly painted onto her face, arms and chest, wore a red wig, studied Hepburn’s films and did daily voice exercises. Then there’s Kate Beckinsale, who’s nowhere near as convincing as Ava Gardner, Jude Law as Errol Flynn (he wishes) and pop singer Gwen Stefani as Jean Harlow.

Whether Leonardo DiCaprio is an accurate facsimile of Howard...

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This world is filled with myriad excruciating experiences, but surely none of them is quite as head-buryingly awful as walking down the red carpet at a showbiz do, hearing only the sound of your own breathing.

Such is the lot of nobodies, and we're out in force for the Baftas on Sunday. We take solace in, and find shelter with, one another, as rows of shrieking celeb-watchers and paparazzi don't clamour for our attention while we mince into the Palladium for the awards ceremony. "You go first, then I'll walk behind you. It will be fine. Really."

Sometimes we latch onto celebs with whom we have...

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In a startlingly David Brent moment, Renaissance project manager Simon chose to demonstrate the concept of "glamour" by lying on the floor displaying his crotch to his bewildered team-mates. That was the image seared into their brains, then, as they headed off to start their photography task at Bluewater shopping centre.

Alpha, meanwhile, decided to hire a celebrity lookalike for their venture, and set up some auditions. An impressive (if several sizes too large) Del Boy was followed by an unremarkable-looking grey-haired man in a neat black suit. He claimed to be playing "the character of George". What, George your next-door neighbour? George, that well-dressed bloke down the...

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The schedules are liberally sprinkled with backward glances and paeans to the past, but when it comes to yester-vision, ITV4 is in a league of its own. Take a wander through its retrocentric realm (6:00 to 9:00pm daily tend to be the happy hours) and you'll find exotic riches, heady flavours and a language not spoken anywhere else.

But what precisely will you find on ITV4? What can possibly tempt you away from all that is street and happening and now?

Squealing tyres

Why bother with homage, in Ashes on Mars, or whatever, when you can have the real thing? Car chases on ITV4 are excitingly filmed...

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