Radio Times

Britain's Got Talent always arrives like a circus train blowing into town. Ring the church bells! Hang out the bunting! Oddballs with groundless faith in their own talents are making fools of themselves! "Finally the wait is over!" Dec kept yelling.

The same panel of judges was back: Simon Cowell, still with the blinding teeth, the loo-brush hair, the winking; Amanda Holden with the hyperbole ("I just want to say that it was a complete privilege listening to that"); Piers Morgan looking suspiciously younger than he did in the last series.

But the show itself proved almost too much, its knockout moments stacked...

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I don't want to work myself into a lather but I'm going to come clean - in this week's soap opera, Ignite were a useless shower and would have been all washed up if it hadn't been for a slip from Empire. Phew! With all the soap puns out of the way we can concentrate on this week's task which, in case you hadn't twigged, saw the teams producing a range of bath and shower products.

Sir Alan picked Nooral and Paula as project managers. Interesting, since we'd seen little from either so far. I must say, I've had my doubts about Nooral since it was first...

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A lot of kids' shows are clearly portrayals of mental visions, but the trips aren't always good. In the Night Garden viewers, for instance, suffer the ravings of Igglepiggle, a blue yeti adrift in the dark in a boat, whose hypothermic nightmare is to be trapped in a forest full of babbling freaks, struggling with an erratic transport system.

The Backyardigans (Nick Jr/TMF) is a brighter, hipper fantasy. Five computer-generated creatures hallucinate a cheery adventure, unconfined by time and space, until the munchies strike and they return home for a snack.

One day they're prospecting for gold; the next they're running...

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Design and build a piece of home fitness gear? Absolutely. Prepare a pitch? No problem. You'll give us a day to do it? Um…

Sir Alan sneered at Empire's boxy product and, yes, it did look a bit like "an old TV with some wires hanging out the back". But what did he expect when he'd given them 24 hours to come up with something that would normally require months of research and product testing?

All the more incredible, then, that Ignite's "Body Rocka" looked so good. With its smooth, gleaming white curves, it was as if Apple's plans for world domination had extended...

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Something of a furore has arisen around Michael Parkinson's recent comments in Radio Times about the life and death of Jade Goody and her treatment by the press.

"Her death is as sad as the death of any young person but it's not the passing of a martyr or a saint or, God help us, Princess Di," says the veteran broadcaster.

"When we clear the media smoke screen from around her death what we're left with is a woman who came to represent all that's paltry and wretched about Britain today."

The media have reacted in a variety of ways to Parkinson's...

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Are you as excited as we are about The Doctor's upcoming Easter adventure (Saturday 11 April, 6:45pm), Planet of the Dead? Want to know more about it? Well, Radio Times reviewer Mark Braxton has seen it, and had this to say:

"The Time Lord seems to have met his match in the chic, catsuited Lady Christina. As the naughty aristocrat, Michelle Ryan is given quite an entrance here, diving like Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible into a Fort Knox-style museum to steal a priceless artefact. Evading the police, she meets the Doctor on board a London bus, and as getaway vehicles go, it's unbeatable....

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A long time ago (well, in 1988) on a sound stage far, far away, one of the funniest and most charming British sitcoms of all time was born. Yes, it's hard to believe that it's been more than 20 years since Red Dwarf first appeared, but 2009 sees the show's coming of age commemorated with the first official on-screen reunion since 1999.

I'm really excited by the prospect of watching some new Red Dwarf. Not because I've been anxiously awaiting the long-delayed motion picture (I haven't), but because it'll be great to see the show's characters interacting with one another for what might be the...

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"Write about children's telly," a colleague urged me. "It's in crisis - Russell T Davies said so." I may have done something rude like roll my eyes at this point, not because I don't care, you understand, but because crises (moral, financial, ratings, quality - take your pick) in children's TV are like rows about MPs' expenses or gaffes by Jonathan Ross: if you miss one, don't worry, there'll be another along shortly.

The panic used to be that children watched too much TV. My parents certainly thought so. They talked admiringly with other parents about families they'd heard of who had banished TV altogether. (If...

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It's a cliché to say that when you first arrive in New York it feels like you've been there before, because you've seen it so many times in the movies, from On the Town to Ghost Busters (Sunday 5 April, C4).

On my first visit, I had a particular sense of déjà vu when I passed the otherwise unremarkable Carnegie Deli, setting for the beginning of Woody Allen's Broadway Danny Rose.

There's something special about an authentic location.

The Interpreter (Saturday 4 April, ITV1) is a political thriller that, to my mind, delivers a lot less than...

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I am perfectly serious when I claim that New You've Been Framed! is the most brilliantly subversive show on television, bar none.

Yes, I can see that this is an odd thing to say as you are surely thinking, dear reader, that these are merely by-the-yard, formulaic blooper shows featuring camcorder footage of people falling over at weddings.

You'd be right, it is all of those things - and in your heart of hearts surely you must realise that there are few things on earth funnier than watching people falling over at weddings.

But since he took over writer/narrator duties, Harry Hill has lifted New You've...

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The idea behind the new BBC1 reality series The Real Swiss Family Robinson is for British families in crisis to be "marooned" on a desert island, where peeing into a hole in the ground presumably puts all of their woes into perspective.

I'm not convinced. It didn't do much for the Dyes from Essex (below). Dad Andy's building firm had collapsed so he, wife Vicki, daughters Courtney and Charlotte and Charlotte's boyfriend Tom tootled off to the Pacific island of Kiribati for three weeks.

They might just as well have gone on a camping weekend in the New Forest because it was pretty clear,...

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Girls against boys. Yasmina versus Rocky. A big-shot restaurateur toe-to-toe with a humble sandwich shop owner. Was Rocky's story destined to be that of the underdog taking a shot at glory and, against all the odds, winning through?

No. He got fired. It's The Apprentice, stupid. It's ruthless, not romantic.

The task: cater for some meetings and posh drinks bashes for "City high-fliers". Of course, you can't simply serve food in The Apprentice; there has to be a theme. While the girls' team made a half-hearted attempt at Mediterranean - tomato and basil on everything - the boys opted (only three years too early) for...

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