Radio Times

Fans of Foyle's War writer Anthony Horowitz have a new and very different show to look forward to. He's created Collision, an ambitious ensemble drama series about the disparate lives of people caught up in a major road accident.

The show is filming now and stars Primeval's Douglas Henshall (pictured) and Kate Ashfield as the cops investigating the crash and its unusual aftermath. Paul McGann, Claire Rushbrook and Phil Davis are among those playing crash victims, nearly all of whom are harbouring a dark secret. Collision airs on ITV1 next year.

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Has BBC1 become obsessed with comical, It's a Knockout!-style game shows? Hole in the Wall, in which contestants in lycra and cycle helmets are pushed into a pool by a foam wall, debuted last month with a middling 3.3m viewers.

Now Top Gear's Richard Hammond has signed up to host Total Wipeout, another Saturday-night show in which contestants in lycra and cycle helmets try to complete what the hit US version accurately calls "the most ridiculous obstacle course ever assembled". The fun starts on BBC1 early next year.

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The triteness of The Dark Side of Fame with Piers Morgan (Mondays BBC1) is mesmerising. Week after week it's like taking a bath in the banal, something that should be horrible, but which is actually rather soothing. "Hey, you, person watching at home," The Dark Side of Fame says, "you think your life is tough but you haven't been married four times like Jim Davidson and you didn't torpedo your TV career by making homophobic remarks on a reality show." We at home, on the other hand, merely wave a wearily dismissive hand as we ask, "Who the hell cares?"

On 22 September Morgan interviewed Jason...

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In Hollywood, sci-fi and fantasy are king. Titanic may still head the top 20 all-time worldwide box-office list, but it's the only film there that's based in fact.

Below it, you will find a variety of marauding dinosaurs, invading aliens, undead pirates, broom-riding schoolchildren, and, of course, a particular galaxy "far, far away".

Peter Jackson's remarkable Lord of the Rings trilogy, has now put the Star Wars saga into the shade. This surely makes him the king of fantasy.

He took an imagined world – albeit one that existed in literature – and gave it life.

More amazingly, he convinced half the world to come...

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Children's shows to be remade

Classic kids' programmes Rentaghost and Worzel Gummidge are on their way back. Production giant RDF has bought the rights to both, and thinks they can be "reworked for a modern audience". But in this day and age can Rentaghost still get away with a camp jester named Mr Claypole? And will today's youngsters find it any less disturbing than we did when Worzel pulls his own head off?

New arrivals at Emmerdale

Emmerdale turns posh this Christmas. Joining the cast as sexy, wealthy couple Natasha and Mark Wylde are former LA Law star Amanda Donohoe and Dynasty/The Colbys smoothie...

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You have to hand it to the people at ITV3 - they've taken their inestimable back catalogue of aged detective dramas, and fashioned a whole "season" out of them. And just in case you think they've got a nerve in bombarding us with creaky whodunnits for no particular reason, the channel shoehorns in that magical word "awards" to make it appear just a wee bit more shiny and up to date.

Actually, I'm being mean here, because the Crime Thriller Awards season (Mondays, ITV3) is great fun if you're a crime nerd like me. I can watch weathered-cops shows until cobwebs form over my eyes, though...

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The stunning crane jump from Casino Royale - Daniel Craig's first outing as 007 - has been voted the best ever James Bond stunt in a survey of over 1,400 RadioTimes.com users.

It was closely followed by the daring scene from 1977's The Spy Who Loved Me, in which Bond skis off a cliff edge to almost certain doom, only to open a Union Jack parachute in mid air.

The full results of the survey are as follow:

1. Jumping from crane to crane - Casino Royale (12%)
2. Ski chase and parachute jump - The Spy Who Loved Me (11%)
3....

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This year's Eurovision Song Contest caused pan-continental outrage, with block voting by ex-Soviet states powering Russia to victory. Even Terry Wogan told RT he wanted to quit the show.

Now Eurovision's under-fire bosses have announced that 2009's contest will use both televoting and old-style juries, which should be less geographically biased.

But even if the system had been in place earlier, it wouldn't have helped us this year: our man Andy Abraham came last in Belgrade, with a song that was deeply unpopular throughout Europe.

What did you make of this year's Eurovision? Is block voting to blame for the UK's recent run...

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Women love Bruce Parry. And I don't mean just those who gush "Bruce is HOT!!!!" on websites. I mean the tribeswomen who always greet him with unalloyed joy. In the first episode of Amazon with Bruce Parry (15 September, BBC2), he stayed with a sweet, accommodating family in Peru's High Andes. The matriarch beamed at his arrival, presented him with charming hand-knitted accessories, then sobbed when he left. The women featured in Parry's previous series, Tribe, always cried at his departure, too, and who could blame them? He was genial, respectful and he loved helping around the house.

But, apart from the weeping women, Amazon was...

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John Cleese returns to British TV this October as part of a major overhaul for popular digital channel Dave. He'll present Batteries Not Included, a light-hearted series about gadgets that features fellow comedians Alex Zane, Dom Joly and Richard Herring.

Dave's slate of new programmes - up to now it's been focused on repeats - also includes Argumental, a panel show where chairman John Sergeant will encourage team captains Marcus Brigstocke and Rufus Hound to have a good barney; Car of the Year, hosted by Johnny Vaughan, and the return of Red Dwarf. Dave has commissioned four new episodes of the cult space sitcom, reuniting the...

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When did you last throw a sickie and take the day off?

Well, don't feel guilty. The visionary American director Terrence Malick took seven years off between The Thin Red Line in 1998 and his 17th-century historical epic The New World in 2005.

But that was nothing compared to his 20-year break between Days of Heaven in 1978 and The Thin Red Line. It only took Michelangelo four years to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

In fairness, after Days of Heaven, Malick moved to France to teach and work on future screenplays.

Anyway, his films are usually worth waiting for so...

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I don't have any time for people who witter on about there never being "anything worth watching" on the telly. The statement itself is rubbish and what makes it worse is that it's generally uttered by bores who add the all-important rider: "…apart from Newsnight and The West Wing. Oh, and I LOVE The Sopranos. And have you seen The Wire - it's brilliant…"

What they are really saying here is "push off, peasants, watch your soaps and your X Factor and your Strictly Come Dancing. I am much too clever and important and I watch only the...

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Big books, big budgets, big productions. Adaptations of classic novels are probably better placed than any other type of screen drama to succeed, and in the months leading up to Christmas, there are always a couple nestling in the schedules.

This is because the English autumn, with its ancient and peculiar festivals, darkening evenings and foreboding skies is the perfect season for indulging in a bit of heavyweight literary escapism - ever so slightly lightened, of course, by the skilful cutting and trimming that takes 1,000 pages from print to screen.

These epic dramas are tautly structured and austerely hued. They are directed with subtlety and...

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Bond villains. They're usually mad, they're frequently bad, and they're always dangerous to know. In the 21 Bond movies to date, there have been 24 assorted psychopaths and geniuses, each with a dastardly and often earth-threatening scheme. Their one shared goal is the destruction of 007, and the messier his demise, the better. Here's my rundown of the best Bond villains depicted on screen:

5. Karl Stromberg

Appearing in the over-the-top The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), Stromberg is best known for planning to destroy the world and build a new one underneath the sea. He doesn't get his hands dirty in the film, but looks effortlessly cool...

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Does this look like the face of a Time Lord to you? Because it does to Doctor Who supremo Russell T Davies.

Davies brought the sci-fi show back to life in 2005, and made David Tennant a household name as The Doctor. Four series in, Davies is set to oversee a number of Doctor Who specials - presumably starring Tennant (but Who knows?) - before handing over the reins to Steven Moffat ahead of series five in 2010. But back in June of last year (according to emails serialised in The Times) Davies already had his eye on a post-Tennant future…
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