Radio Times

When Hollywood runs out of new ideas, it has two options: remake an old movie or update an old TV show. With the latter, audiences of a certain age are then expected to troop along to relive their childhoods, as with the 2004 revival of US buddy-cop favourite Starsky & Hutch.

Even though Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson brought the cops back to life with gusto, I thought it was sad to see a classic brand undermined by mocking irony and facile homoerotic quips. At least Mission: Impossible and The Fugitive were respectful to the spirit of the originals.

Ultimately, television...

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"I'm absolutely worn out," sighed Michael (well, nine weeks of lying, cheating and backstabbing will do that to you). And after the teams had been given their task of renting out luxury sports cars he took his Ferrari down a side street, presumably for a little snooze (he certainly wasn't going to do any business there).

Michael had already admitted he knew nothing about cars but in case we weren't convinced, his next choice of venue was a fruit and veg market on Portobello Road ("Get yer Ferraris 'ere! Just £65 an hour, yer tasty Italian Ferraris!")

Still, Michael did little to raise the hackles this week,...

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The read-out on the spaceship that crash-lands at the beginning of Planet of the Apes helpfully informs us that the year is 3978. But in the second sequel, Escape from the Planet of the Apes, three of the simians from that distant future take a trip back to the 20th century to, frankly, mess with the fabric of time.

Film-makers love to monkey with us like this. But the trouble with the future is that it eventually becomes the present; science fiction becomes either science fact or science "that never actually came true – did it?”

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four remains the most famous example:...

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Ever since Changing Rooms offered neighbours the chance to assault each other's houses with the help of gaudy interior designer Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, there has been a seemingly limitless demand for property-related reality shows. Our TV schedules are congested with copycat programmes on everything connected to the humble home. If property was really that exciting we'd all be estate agents. So why do we love them so?

Well, voyeurism is the obvious answer. That old parental caution "don't talk to strangers" seems to be part of our national psyche in adulthood. Thus our natural curiosity for seeing how people live is fulfilled not by knocking on the...

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Think of Bank Holiday Mondays and what comes to mind? Rotten weather (of course), visits to DIY superstores, buying sofas, pottering in the garden, maggoty dismembered corpses…er, let's back up, shall we. Yes, I realise the latter probably isn't up there with putting your slippered feet up as you watch The Sound of Music (2:50pm, BBC1) for the 10,000th time in your life, but maybe a savage serial killer drama will hit the spot after a long day doing nothing in particular? If so, then prepare to unwrap that bar of chocolate you've been keeping at the back of the cupboard (go on, you know it's there),...

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OK, hands up, who fell for it? This week, the teams were given the task of creating and advertising a brand of tissues and, admit it, when you watched the resulting TV ads, you thought Alpha had blown it.

The two schoolchildren sharing a tissue and a shy smile in Renaissance's ad were so cute, weren't they? And Alpha's effort was so naff, and garish, and laboured. It couldn’t possibly impress the watching ad executives.

That's what I thought – and then I remembered bellowing BARRY SCOTT!, the in-your-face advocate of miraculous, all-purpose cleaning product Cillit Bang! Renaissance boss Raef and his sidekick Michael had forgotten the...

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Admit it, you want to read Agatha Christie novels now. Tonight's Doctor Who was a 43-minute advert for her and I'd have said there could be no harder customer to convince than me. Miss Marple leaves me looking at my watch, the Orient Express is just a train and Poirot makes me crave slapping people. Mostly Poirot himself.

But put the woman herself into a Doctor Who comedy murder mystery with a jewel thief called the Unicorn and a ten-foot wasp and I'm sold. It's only a surprise that ITV1 didn't go the same route when it revamped random Christie novels into the modern-sounding, hip Marple.

Doctor...

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Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain wasn’t the first film to depict a gay, male relationship and win Oscars. That honour goes to Philadelphia, Jonathan Demme's unapologetically mainstream Aids drama starring Tom Hanks, which won two out of five nominations at the 1993 Academy Awards. (Brokeback won three out of eight.)

At the time, outside of the art house and specialist circuit, films about homosexual relationships were still rare – Personal Best, Torch Song Trilogy, Cruising.

But at least a shift in attitude in the 1980s had superseded the previous cinematic norm: a hint of homoerotic ambiguity. Think of the 1958 adaptation of Tennessee...

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You have to hand a big chocolate bar to the imaginative soul at ITV who dreamed up The Duchess in Hull (Monday 19 May and Tuesday 20 May, 9:00pm, ITV1). Take a working class family living on a rough council estate in one of Britain's least appetising cities (and before the outcry, can I say that I have lived in Hull, so I know exactly what I'm talking about). They are overweight and have no ideas about healthy eating.

One day there's a knock on their door and guess who it is? None other than the Duchess of York, a woman whose own problems with her weight...

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How is Michael still in this competition?! The task this week was to sell bridal gowns and paraphernalia at a wedding exhibition, and as a sales team, Michael and Sara were a marriage made in hell. Sara was painfully pushy but Michael's obsession with "closing deals" at all costs (and remember we're talking cup cakes here, not real estate) made me wonder if he hadn't seen Glengarry Glen Ross one too many times.

As Alex pointed out, Michael takes the aggressive approach he's learnt from working in telesales (and we've all had experience of how teeth-grindingly annoying that can be) and transfers it directly into customer's faces.

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I'm confident that I speak for my people (women) when I say that the translucent, white British male thigh should only be exposed in the gravest of emergencies. Sorry, menfolk, but that means tiny shorts are out. And this applies tenfold on television.

But one man's pasty thigh-flashing I'll let pass: that of king forager Ray Mears, whose cropped, utility beige legwear is an essential aid to his acrobatic hunter-gatherer demonstrations. I'm also sure that a full trouser would cramp his trademark stance: the squat-and-explain.

It's not his scoutish khaki outfits that I find so helplessly alluring. It's his utterly earnest desire to imbue us...

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Every week it happens. I get lulled into a false sense of security by the mind-bogglingly simple opening round, you see. Then along comes "Information Overload". I concentrate hard on my TV screen as my senses are assaulted with conflicting aural and visual stimuli, unlike anything outside of maybe an acid trip.

Now for the test: "What colour was the ice-cream cone that appeared when the newsreader was talking?" asks the chap in the suit that's working really well with his broad shoulders and chiselled jaw.

"Red," I say, confidently, to the television.

"Red?" guesses the hapless adult on the gogglebox.

Wrong!

"Blue?" ventures...

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The Doctor wouldn't tell you in tonight's episode, so I will: the answer to Donna's question is that a woman Time Lord is called a Time Lady.

It wasn't a hard answer, you could argue she might reasonably have worked it out herself, and it's true that the Doctor was occupied. But still, it sounds somehow naff. They definitely did not think of Time Lady first and then work out the male equivalent. Time Lord sounds a little posh, Time Lady is just somehow dismissive, like you married a Time Lord for his Tardis. And Time Ladies is worse, it's like the chucking-out hour in pubs: Time Ladies,...

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The career of Frank Sinatra, who died ten years ago this week, is marked by a season of films on TCM.

As a pin-up of the 1940s, he made such popular musicals as Take Me Out to the Ball Game and Till the Clouds Roll By.

A grittier role in From Here to Eternity in 1953 marked a change of pace, leading to more dramatic fare such as Some Came Running, but also comedies like The Tender Trap. And, yes, even the odd musical of the calibre of High Society – all a fitting tribute to Ol’ Blue Eyes’ talents.

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Since one of my favourite ever films, The Poseidon Adventure, falls well outside the critically accepted canon, I’m used to the idea of the guilty pleasure. A high-wire 1970s disaster movie designed for its popular appeal, whose dialogue has been derided as "waterlogged" and its characters "cardboard", it'll never trouble Citizen Kane, The Godfather or Bicycle Thieves in any critic's Top Ten.

But do you know what? I'd sit down and watch it right now if it was on – while I'd really have to be in the right mood for, say, confirmed classic La Règle du Jeu.

This, it seems, is the...

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