Radio Times

It's the Noirin and Isaac show - but, surely, not for long…

Biggest jerk

Sorry to use such a horrible Americanism but the Anglo Saxon words reeling round my head in reference to Isaac are so much harsher on the ears…

Yes, Noirin's ex - the man she's still in love with and has been mooning over since the series began - is the latest addition to the Big Brother house. And, yes, he's instantly despicable.

Of course, anyone who in complete seriousness refers to themselves as "Daddy", but who isn't actually the father of a four-year-old child, is always going to...

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Emmerdale

To "Never lick an iceberg" and "Resist hugging hedgehogs", let's now add "Abstain from arguing atop a flight of stairs". They might never have made public information films about such situations, but admonition is nevertheless warranted.

Just ask pregnant Nicola. Ripe as a peach, she engages in a stair-top altercation with Lexi, who, in keeping with Soapland lore, is bitter and twisted on account of not being able to have children. Soon Nicola ends up in a crumpled heap at the foot of the stairs. Yes, more crumpled than usual.

Curiously, this is the least of Nicola's woes as the days go by. What with Jimmy and Rodney...

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We all know what to expect from Sunday night dramas, don't we? They are the TV equivalent of shortbread - colourless and bland, yet at the same time over-sweet to the point where if you have too many, you end up feeling sick.

Heartbeat… Ballykissangel…The Royal…Hope Springs…all no more than mildly diverting (although I have a strange, inexplicable fondness for The Royal) and more than a bit twee. Or in the case of Hope Springs, just flipping clichéd and awful.

A chocolate-box rural location is also essential to any Sunday night drama, lots of rolling hills and fields, sparsely populated by cunning local halfwits who never allow...

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Children's television has become a huge part of my life once again, now that I have my own family. My Sky+ planner is continually clogged up with episodes of Balamory, The Wiggles and Timothy Goes to School (it's like Little House on the Prairie with animals).

In recent years, thanks to DVD, I've been able to revisit and watch some of my favourite children's programmes again. I've been delighted to find the successful ones still manage to capture the imagination of my own children. Classics like Jamie and the Magic Torch (the boy clearly suffered from insomnia), Mr Benn (he never did buy anything from that shop)...

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The Bill has radically regenerated - and the gamble paid off for the first of its new, slicker, faster-paced and post-watershed episodes as a healthy 4.5 million viewers tuned in.

It's still The Bill at heart - the stories and the core of the long-running hit haven't been touched, but everything else was up for grabs.

Even the famous theme wasn't sacred: executive producer Johnathan Young says replacing it was a hard decision but that the team had also considered having no theme tune at all. Everything to do with the look and the feel of the show was re-examined and ultimately changed for its...

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Acclaimed documentary-maker Adam Curtis (The Century of the Self, The Power of Nightmares, The Trap) has made a new film, It Felt like a Kiss. Commissioned as part of an interactive theatre piece at the Manchester International Festival and billed as "starring Saddam Hussein, Lee Harvey Oswald, Doris Day, Enos the chimp and everyone above level seven in the CIA", it looks at America's rise to political and cultural superpower status, and how that confidence has since been undermined. Curtis describes it as "a lot more visceral, emotional and visual than my previous work."

Like Curtis's recent TV documentaries, It Felt like a Kiss is a collage...

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In 1996, documentary-maker Jane Treays made Painted Babies, a film following two little girls from different backgrounds as they competed in the highly competitive Miss Southern Charm baby beauty pageant in Georgia, USA.

Alisa Pomeray did much the same thing with Baby Beauty Queens (20 July, BBC3) though her subjects were closer to home. Madison and Tyla, both nine, and Sasha, seven, were competing in Mini Miss UK, the first British child beauty pageant.

There was no analysis, so we were left to make up our own minds about why any mother would want her young daughter to take part in a grotesque parade of pre-pubescents dolled...

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EastEnders

They might as well put the hospitals - and the police, the fire brigade and the Walford branch of Relate - on high alert now, as there are two celebrations in Albert Square this week, and we all know what a party in E20 entails.

The biggest festivity/catastrophe-waiting-to-happen is Libby Fox's 18th birthday. With an IQ higher than the rest of Albert Square combined, Libby is thrown into turmoil when a message arrives from her estranged, deranged and imprisoned dad Owen, wanting to see her. (He, you'll recall, kidnapped and tried to kill Libby, after abusing and assaulting her mum Denise.) Some birthday present, that. Prison shop...

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Biggest…loser

There are a number of words I could have inserted after "biggest" to accurately describe short-lived housemate Kenneth - but here at Radio Times we do our best to avoid that sort of language. So instead of just hurling insults, let's look back at some of Kenneth's "best bits" from his brief sojourn in the house.

A lot of the most notable moments centred on the lovely Bea. After an argument with her - an argument that he started and that ended with Bea using her superior wit and intellect to show him up for the unsavoury, insecure creature that he is - Kenneth...

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I have a confession to make: I eat cheese with fruitcake. Now, to some of you, this won't sound in the least bit unusual. To others it will seem like some kind of deranged affectation.

It never struck me as in any way odd until I moved Down South. But during my first Christmas in London, I cut myself a bit of Christmas cake and carved a nice wedge of stilton to go with it.

My friends were horrified and demanded to know: "What are you doing?" It was then that I realised that they really do do things differently down here.

There continue to be similar misunderstandings...

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They say you must learn the rules before you can break them. Alan Ball served his time writing Six Feet Under, a dry TV drama about how life is a long, slow rehearsal for death, and American Beauty, an achingly earnest film about middle-class angst. You'd expect his vampire drama to be pained, drained and pretentious.

It's not. True Blood is a lusty wade through our darkest desires; a salty mess where the supernatural mingles with explicit sex and violent death in the sultry Deep South; the sort of shamefully addictive titillation that's just what you need on Friday nights in summer.

We're in Bon...

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I wasn't too far into watching Desperate Romantics, BBC2's jokey melodrama about the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of Victorian artists (Tuesdays), when a lightbulb came on above my head. It was an actual lightbulb, as I'd switched on a lamp in the living room.

But there was mental illumination, too, when I realised that Desperate Romantics reminded me of the episode in Blackadder the Third featuring the poets in the coffee shop.

I'm sure you remember the one. It starred Robbie Coltrane as a volcanically bad-tempered Dr Johnson, and Shelley, Coleridge and Byron were lounging around, being comically tragic ("Be quiet, sir! Can't you...

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Filming began today on the new series of Doctor Who, with fans getting their first on-set glimpse of Eleventh Doctor Matt Smith and his companion Amy Pond, played by Scottish actress Karen Gillan.

Smith has his work cut out for him, replacing the much-loved David Tennant in the role, while Gillan follows in a long line of female companions, most recently including Billie Piper and Catherine Tate. As Amy, she will first meet the Time Lord in episode one of the new 13-part series.

Also new to the job is Stephen Moffat, who takes over as showrunner from Russell...

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Best musical performance

Returning BB5 housemate Michelle Bass can actually sing, with vibrato and everything (although, to be fair, she has had five years to practise Pie Jesu). But the award has to go to Dogface, who howled her way - like her namesake - through the song, pronouncing every word phonetically. Mmmm…Jesus Pie. Sacrilicious!

Biggest girl

No, I'm not talking about Michelle - who, admittedly, has put on a few pounds since she was last in the house - but Siavash and his reaction to an arachnid infiltrating the kitchen. Despite being hairier than a spider himself, Siavash leapt up on to the worktop...

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The mere prospect of Anonymous on ITV1 on Saturday (18 July) makes me want to take out my own eyes, poach them on a low heat, cover them in Tabasco sauce and pop them back in again.

I haven't seen it, so if it's a daringly experimental piece of work that will leave me aghast with its elegant artistry then I'm prepared to be flogged in the market square of your choice. But it sounds like a load of old tosh to me.

We've probably all seen the publicity shots of Louis Walsh done up to look like an old woman (ho ho). And by...

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