Radio Times

It's a very exclusive club: we love a show with the same quality control as The Sopranos, The West Wing and The Wire, yet there are fewer than 200,000 of us in the UK - next to nothing in TV terms.

The club's latest talking point? Nuclear war has turned Earth to toast. A big deal, in anyone's book. But in the final run of science-fiction colossus Battlestar Galactica (Tuesdays Sky1, HD), it's just a plot kink.

At the start of the show in 2004, humans in a distant galaxy fled a holocaust and sought a new home: the fabled planet of Earth. So...

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Tim Burton loves Johnny Depp.

"Johnny is like a character actor in a leading man's body," he once gushed. "He could do it all."

Johnny Depp loves Tim Burton, too.

"My life is my life because of Tim," he once declared. As you can see, they are really mad about each other.

They have a working director-actor relationship that Depp likens to "emotional shorthand".

It's said that when they work together on a film, which happens quite often, and Burton is giving his pet actor direction, the crew can't actually understand what they're saying to each other.

I'm sure the phrase, "Get a room" has been...

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I have a very reliable barometer of my own feelings towards TV shows - and this is probably common to professional television reviewers around the globe; if I like something, I can't wait for early delivery of the next instalment on preview DVD.

This is a luxurious way of watching telly, I'm quite aware of that, and I'm similarly aware that I'm very lucky in that I watch everything weeks before everyone else and I don't have to wait a week at a time for my favourites to come around on "proper telly" (unless I wish to, but that's what I call my Real Time Treats, something I'll...

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Last year Radio Times revealed that digital channel Dave was planning to make new Red Dwarf episodes: now find out what's really happening - and when.

Red Dwarf: Back to Earth is a new two-part special airing from Friday 10 April at 9:00pm on Dave. The title's not a gag and it's not a reference to the long-awaited return of this popular show: instead, Dave Lister is truly returning to his home planet. "When Lister's busy day of annoying Rimmer is interrupted by a monstrous attack, it's pretty much business as usual - until a shock development throws Rimmer, Lister, Cat and Kryten...

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There was no hope of hiding from the bombast in the opening show of Dancing on Ice (11 January ITV1), because it started early. As the overblown Carmina Burana blasted across the rink and the "celebrity" skaters lined up to grin with fear, the voiceover boomed: "This is one of the greatest challenges they will ever face." Oh for heaven's sake, it's not as if they're embarking on the early stages of stem-cell research, it's a talent show.

But the egregiousness didn't stop there. Step forward Tony Gubba, who commentated on the slow-motion bits after the contestants' live performances. With one brief sentence, Gubba easily...

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Where do you stand on Nicole Kidman's nose?

By which I mean, were you impressed with the latex proboscis they erected upon her porcelain features to help her impersonate Virginia Woolf in The Hours?

Or did you find the sight of it faintly comic and distracting? I'm afraid I'm in the latter camp.

When actors portray a recognisable non-fictional figure on screen, I really don't see the need for them to spend hours in the make-up chair having layers of latex glued to their face. (Unless it's John Hurt in The Elephant Man – fair enough.)

To paraphrase Laurence Olivier: have they tried...

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Former EastEnder Michelle Ryan is to star alongside David Tennant in the Doctor Who Easter special Planet of the Dead.

Ryan, most recently seen in Bionic Woman and Merlin, seems to have developed a taste for sci-fi and fantasy, and will play the mysterious Lady Christina de Souza. She said, "I'm a huge fan of Doctor Who and very excited to be joining David Tennant and the Doctor Who team."

The story is being kept under wraps, of course, but we do know that Lady Christina will join The Doctor on a bus trip that takes an unexpected detour into...

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I used to like Relocation, Relocation, but it's now reduced me to a gibbering ninny, leaving me whimpering on my sofa or screaming with my fingers in my ears.

This is nothing to do with presenters Kirstie Allsopp and Phil Spencer, who I think are admirable and who obviously know their stuff - it's the property hunters themselves.

The recent first episode of the new series was a corker. I've blotted out most of the details, I think due to mental self-preservation (see first paragraph), but I do recall that it featured a spectacularly annoying woman.

She was terribly jaunty and laughed a lot, which...

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Life isn't fair. I look at Gregg Wallace, the bald judge on cookery talent show MasterChef, and that's what I think: life isn't fair. How come his job is to eat for a living and mine isn't?

His whole raison d'être is to be stocky and hard to please four times a week. I could do stocky and hard to please, yet thanks to the perverse cruelty of life, I don't get paid to sample half-a-dozen dishes of freshly cooked haute cuisine a day and critique them, and I don't think it's because I didn't work hard enough at school.

What makes this worse...

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So. We're into the final week already, and doesn't it bring home what a short series CBB is? The celebs have got it easy. Yet a lot of them don't seem to think so. Ulrika uses her "dancing eyes" (among other techniques) to make it clear how little she's enjoying the experience, Michelle threatened to leave several times and Mutya actually walked out last week.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm sure the intensity of the situation makes it a lot tougher than three weeks on holiday with your mates, but surely you can grit your teeth and get through 22 days of boredom, punctuated by...

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There's a 36-year age gap between garrulous Samuel L Jackson, aged 60, and shy Scarlett Johansson, 24.

But they are united by The Spirit, a super-stylised adaptation of Will Eisner's 1940s comic strip from director Frank Miller (creator of Sin City, showing on Saturday 17 and Friday 23 January BBC3).

The actors were filmed against a green screen on a "digital backlot", and the rest of the action was dropped in afterwards.

While Jackson gained fame relatively late (he was 46 when Quentin Tarantino made him an Oscar-nominated superstar in Pulp Fiction), Johansson was in her teens (14 when she turned heads in...

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After watching Trial & Retribution (Fridays, 9:00pm, ITV1), I always feel that the world has become a little bit worse. There's no specific reason, it's just that T & R's world-view is so relentlessly bleak that it leaches into anyone who happens to be watching, inevitably colouring their outlook on life.

Thanks to this osmotic process, by the end of any given episode I feel washed out and miserable, and my already tottering faith in my fellow men and women is even more roundly dented.

Everyone in Trial & Retribution is horrible, particularly the police officers. Mean-spirited, mean-minded, petty, bullying, they shout, coerce, oppress...

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A pop star in a teddy bear suit and a gangsta rapper dressed as a car shut themselves in a bathroom together to discuss their feelings. You have to hand it to Big Brother - sometimes it comes up with some fantastically surreal stuff.

Coolio and Michelle will never be best friends (although I predict they'll release a single together after the show) but they have, for now, agreed an uneasy truce.

Whose side you take is down to whose approach you are most comfortable with. I think Michelle has set herself up as a sensitive, innocent type - but her farts don't smell sweet,...

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Hollywood A-lister Tom Cruise is to appear on Jonathan Ross's comeback show, along with Stephen Fry and Lee Evans - but it's the host, not the guests, that everyone will be watching.

Friday Night with Jonathan Ross returns to BBC1 on 23 January after Ross's suspension, and experts are not sure "Sachsgate" is really behind him.

"I think Ross is going to find it pretty unbearable," BBC presenter Mark Lawson told Radio Times. "So I think it will quickly suit both parties to find a way for him to leave the BBC."

Radio 2 DJ Paul Gambaccini disagrees: "The controversy...

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So, Lucy was the first evictee from this year's Celebrity Big Brother house. A glamour girl is always going to face hostility from some quarters, but Lucy was far from the dumb brunette many expected and, judging her on her behaviour in the house, I thought she was all right. She could take a joke, wasn't afraid of confrontation (after all, she told Coolio to his face "you're the most irritating person I've ever met") and took being evicted with good grace.

Of course, the real reason Lucy was voted out is Ulrika. A lot of people want to keep her in long enough to...

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