Radio Times

Rex, lies and videotape

This week, the heavenly housemates were treated to a cosy night in front of the telly - and their fellow contestants' audition tapes made for very interesting viewing.

Since then, Rex has been relentlessly abusing certain housemates for their crimes against humanity. But only certain housemates, you may have noticed…

Mild-mannered Rachel has borne the brunt of Rex's ire - for pretending to be more bubbly than she really is. That tart Maysoon deliberately stroked her arm to look sexy (her decision to quit the house last night is clearly an admission of guilt). And Kat, with malicious intent,...

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So summer is here, which usually in TV terms means "get out your boxed sets because there's nothing worth watching on proper telly". I have taken my own advice and am currently wallowing in mini DVD marathons of the lush Mad Men, the best drama of the year so far (with Damages a very close second) and 30 Rock (the finest US comedy since Frasier).

But I haven't given up hope. DVDs are all very well, but they can't possibly replicate the sense of community fostered by the shared enjoyment of "real-time" TV. And all is not lost because for those of...

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One of the great things about the Olympic Games is the sheer diversity of sport you get to see. From BMX to baseball, Greco-Roman wrestling to windsurfing, a whole host of weird and wonderful obscurities will be there. And I'll be watching pretty much all of them.

I've always enjoyed the niche sports. I become strangely addicted to muscular munchkins lifting ridiculous weights. Repetitive target sports like archery and pistol shooting always hit the spot too. And during the 2002 Winter Olympics I was watching late-night curling highlights before the British ladies looked like title prospects.

But my favourite ever Olympic moment is a...

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Listening to writer Simon Beaufoy telling a Radio 4 arts programme that his global-warming drama Burn Up (23/25 July BBC2) was as rock-solidly realistic and as super-fantastic as it's possible to get (I paraphrase Mr B here), I decided I'd better watch it again. Obviously, I'd missed something when I sat down with the preview DVD and decided that watching Burn Up was like being harangued by earnest sixth-formers about how the world is going to end right now and it's all my fault.

But it turns out that I hadn't missed anything after all. Burn Up still made me want to go out, start...

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Well, what have we here? Is this The Tudors, a historical drama, or is it some sexy romp packed with men in cloaks looking askance at one another across rather lovely refectory tables as the women drape themselves over the furniture, bosoms heaving like twin Heston Blumenthals peering over a wall? Is Hugh Hefner perhaps directing?

Well, no, as it happens, but yes, it is The Tudors, because that's sloe-eyed young Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Henry VIII, hurling himself around like a boy-band member who doesn't like the after-show sandwiches. Or should I say that's young Jonathan Rhys Meyers AS HENRY VIII BECAUSE HE SHOUTS A LOT....

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Q I'm about to take the plunge and investigate watching TV online, armed with a new laptop. Can you run through the basics of iPlayer?
Margaret Stevens, Tonbridge, Kent

A Essentially, iPlayer performs a very simple function. It allows you to watch or listen to, via your home computer, most BBC TV or radio programmes broadcast over the last seven days. Simply visit www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer, type the name of the programme into the search box, and there it is. It's free, and you can revisit the programmes as many times as you like. You can access "streamed" content - ie you watch/listen there on the site rather than...

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I was genuinely saddened by the news in June that parts of the Universal Studios tour in LA had been destroyed by fire. The King Kong ride was lost, and part of Courthouse Square, where, among others, Back to the Future was filmed.

But it was harder to get worked up about the damage to a set from Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds, mainly because it was that of a crashed airliner – the fire effectively made wreckage of wreckage.

What a long trip it's been for The War of the Worlds. Written by HG Wells in 1898, it was one of the first...

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Task 2/5

"Ooh, heaven is a place on earth," sang Belinda Carlisle, and she was right. So is hell. Who knew they were both located in Borehamwood?

In hell this week, the housemates have had very little with which to amuse themselves, other than peeling onions and turning off alarm clocks. In heaven, they have a swimming pool, luxury food and alcohol, yet their entertainment consists of watching Bex lick Luke's armpit. And worse.

As we know, Bex is very, very annoying. But she's also rather a sad figure, having decided that the best way to get the attention she craves is...

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"A sitcom," Chris Morris once said, "isn't usually the right tool for satire." Fair point, perhaps; after all, a show like My Family is about as sharp as a bag of marshmallows. But in the case of Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn's Yes Minister, we're dealing with a definite exception to that rule.

Yes Minister is not only a delight to watch but also a sharply observed, engaging and utterly iconoclastic look at the British political system. Instead of caricaturing the preposterous posturing that we're all privy to in the House of Commons, Yes Minister takes us behind the scenes at Whitehall to show us where and how...

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For several years Grey's Anatomy has been the most powerfully emetic series on television. But stand back, get out the hoses and prepare to sluice yourselves down, because Private Practice is here.

Private Practice is a Grey's Anatomy spin-off. Oh joy! Oh happy day! Just what the world needs, yet another thundering piece of soul-sucking tosh. Actually, I like Grey's Anatomy, but not in any way that makes me feel proud.

Grey's, centred on a group of trainee medics in a Seattle teaching hospital, has a certain admirable slickness that makes you just about forget the fact that...

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Q You advised Barry Hyman (Feedback, 5 July) to buy a hard-drive recorder to solve the problem of recording one digital channel while watching another. Is that the only advantage they offer over videotape?
Janet Miller, Bristol

A It's the main one, but hard-drive recorders (also known as personal video recorders or PVRs) do much more. Get one with a twin tuner built in and you can record one programme and watch another, record two programmes, or record two while playing back another. But you can also pause live TV and rewind it, because the PVR makes a temporary recording of whatever you're watching now (it'll wipe this...

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In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, it was James Stewart who asks the newspaper editor if he is going to print his confession about the shooting in question, and is told: "No, sir. This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

This has been a constant refrain in Hollywood, where real events have always been plundered for material, often with little regard for journalistic or historical accuracy. The question is: does it matter? Is it really cinema's job to provide a history lesson?

Take that wartime crowd-pleaser The Great Escape. It's based on the autobiographical book of the same name...

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Paul phoned: he wants to say "Hola!" to you. RT's Big Brother expert is in Spain, pretending to be getting away from it all but, come on: he was beside himself when he heard that the housemates were cycling to Madrid.

Does Paul know the housemates or what? He told me to make sure I watched out for Luke and Bex, that I try not to be caught up with Rex's arrogance. And obviously he wanted me to phone the eviction line for him many, many times.

I did know who the housemates are: you can't have been in the Western hemisphere and not heard Belinda's...

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What? William Petersen is leaving CSI: Crime Scene Investigation? And worse, he's doing so to spend more time working in "The Theatre"? Oh dear lord, what is it with actors and "The Theatre"? Why do they waste their time, pottering around on a stage in front of handfuls of bored and uncomfortable people, shouting at other actors?

I share my view of "The Theatre" with Mark and Jeremy from Peep Show who, in the last series, were appalled at being duped into seeing a friend's play. "You mean, we could be at home watching television, rather than being here?" the pair chuntered in wonderment before,...

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"Soap death" is a bit of an oxymoron when you think about it. No-one dies in a soap death - they get an upgrade to The Bill or end up on some reality TV show, reinvented as a singer/presenter/ rent-a-celeb. Dead soap characters have even been known to be resurrected in a fleeting attempt to raise ratings, such as EastEnders's comeback king, Den "Hello, princess" Watts.

Anyone who dies twice is worthy of a place in the soap death hall of fame, although in the case of Den Watts's second coming it is difficult to decide which required more of a suspension of disbelief: the...

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