Radio Times

I love filthy, depraved TV comedies. The more filthy, the more depraved the better. Sadly television doesn't serve me well, so short of lurking around the more shadowy corners of Kings Cross wearing too much rouge and asking if anyone knows where I can get a particularly scummy sitcom, I have only Peep Show (Fridays, Channel 4) to feed my addiction. (And BBC4's The Thick of It too, when it's on. Oh, and Curb Your Enthusiasm).

Peep Show is wonderful, a model of edgy comedy perfection, with sharply brilliant, misanthropic, literate scripts from writers Sam Bain...

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I wonder what particular kind of viciously destructive bile courses through the insides of a person who’d bother to sit down, take up a pen, and scribble hate mail to Kate and Gerry McCann.

In a revelatory sequence during Emma Loach’s excellent, moving film, Madeleine, One Year On: Campaign for Change (Wednesday 30 April, 8:00pm, ITV1), the McCanns were seen sorting through their post. There was a box for the psychic sightings, another for messages from well-wishers and another for, well, the horrible stuff. And it was really horrible. Gerry McCann read the toxic “greeting” on...

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It's the nanosecond of hush that's the big giveaway…that tiny, barely perceptible pause between the winner being read out, and the start of the applause.

However fleeting, it's a foolproof way of telling when a Bafta TV Awards audience is wrongfooted. It's easy to measure, and lasts just long enough for a horrified, semi-audible exclamation of "What???!" before you slap your weary, unwilling hands together, just out of strained politeness. Or, more likely, you don't bother at all and to hell with seeming bad-mannered.

There were quite a few of these charged mini-silences at last night's British...

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This world is filled with myriad excruciating experiences, but surely none of them is quite as head-buryingly awful as walking down the red carpet at a showbiz do, hearing only the sound of your own breathing.

Such is the lot of nobodies, and we're out in force for the Baftas on Sunday. We take solace in, and find shelter with, one another, as rows of shrieking celeb-watchers and paparazzi don't clamour for our attention while we mince into the Palladium for the awards ceremony. "You go first, then I'll walk behind you. It will be fine. Really."...

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Let's get straight to the point - Jon Hamm is startlingly handsome. As Don Draper in BBC4's Mad Men (Sundays, 10:00pm, with a BBC2 repeat on Tuesdays at 11:20pm) he has the kind of sharply chiselled 1940s matinée idol looks that could stop traffic and possibly alter the sequence of traffic lights just by Hamm crossing the road.

He's one of the many gorgeous things about this brittle, amoral US import centred on advertising execs in 1960s Madison Avenue in New York (the 'mad' in Mad Men). Nothing much actually happens, but oh dear lord what does...

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There's a moment involving the demise of an ailing cat in Sunday's Pulling (6 April, 9:30pm, BBC3) that is so outrageously funny - and just so, so wrong - that you will laugh till your hair falls out. But then, you will look guiltily behind you, just to make sure no-one is waiting to trap you in a butterfly net and entomb you in a coal cellar for being recklessly amused by something that will have cat-lovers everywhere reaching for the self-righteous moggy-shaped indignation they keep in a box above the fridge.

I'm the first to...

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It's the music that gets me every time - the jangling, nerve-shredding guitar then the barbed, black, yet strangely sinuous lyrics "When I am through with you, there won't be anything left"…over and over. It's like being slapped around the face as your hair is being pulled. But in a good way. That's Damages for you (Mondays, BBC1), and its fabulous Simple Mindsy-New Ordery theme tune by the LA-based band The VLA. Listen for yourself at MySpace.

As the weeks have rolled by Damages has burrowed under my skin like a painful, bloodsucking insect. I simply...

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There's a crucial scene in the final episode of Ashes to Ashes (Thursday 27 March, 9:00pm, BBC1) that I guarantee will have Gene-ettes - devotees of the mighty DCI Gene Hunt - lactating and picking out curtains for the imaginary nursery that will soon be filled with many similarly imaginary tiny tow-haired Hunts. I will say nothing more, except that it is surely aimed squarely at a woman's atavistic urge to nurture children and - yes, it has to be said - to find protection from a big, strong, capable man.

And therein lies the appeal of...

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I've tried, but I can't think of a duller TV detective partnership than that of lumpen "I'm a bit thick, me, but I don't care" Detective Inspector Lewis and "I'm a pinched, posh git who quotes from classical works" Detective Sergeant Hathaway in Lewis. Admittedly, the supposed allure of Dalziel and Pascoe has always escaped me; to me, Pascoe looks as if he's half-hopefully waiting for a bus while Dalziel might as well be grazing in a field, staring malevolently at hikers.

But back to Lewis, boring, claustrophobic and tedious Lewis (Sundays, ITV1), with its dreary, attenuated...

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Call it mean, call it cynical, but The Last Enemy (Sundays, 9:00pm, BBC1) has very quickly become The Last Turkey in my tormented, overheated, TV-sated brain.

Gawd, it's dull, I think because British television is just rubbish at thrillers. Paul Abbott's State of Play, waaaaaay back in 2003 (and now being made into a Hollywood film), was the last truly good Brit example of the genre. And before that? Mmm, probably Edge of Darkness. And that was 1985.

We can't do thrillers because they demand pace, speed and plot-driven action. We, on the other hand, allow our...

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Well, I made it through to the end, but it was a close-run thing. When the British Academy Film Awards (Sunday 10 February, 9:00pm/10:20pm, BBC1) had a little rest for the Ten o’Clock News I’d seriously considered deep-frying my eyeballs. It couldn’t be any worse than sitting through the concluding half of such a turgid ceremony, surely?

I laugh every year at the Baftas. Not at them as they are actually being broadcast, but at all the hoopla beforehand, all of the guff about how they are “forerunners to the Oscars” (yeah, right, does anyone really believe that?)...

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Some while ago, I declared my addiction to Friends re-runs on E4 and E4 +1. If I was at home, I'd watch, 8-9pm every night. But there comes a time in an addict's life when she has to step back and ask herself: "Why am I doing this? Why am I spending empty hours watching episodes of a TV show that I already know off by heart?"

Of course, the answer is "because you can't be bothered to do anything else and besides, you quite like eating M&S lasagne from a tray on your lap in front...

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The couple in a recent Relocation, Relocation (Wednesdays, 8:00pm, Channel 4) had spent five years - that's FIVE YEARS, remember this, it's important - planning a life change that involved moving from their native Newcastle to Suffolk, with a holiday home in France.

A long time, isn't it? Imagine all of the thought that must have gone into this big move. And surely it goes without saying that a pivotal part of the plan would involve actually visiting the places you aimed to move to? Sensible, don't you think?

But, staggeringly, they hadn't. So this...

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What a week! There's Vera Duckworth's funeral in Coronation Street (28 January, 7:30pm, ITV1), Monty Don, a comfortably baggy middle-aged man in the Michael Palin mould, looks at plant pots in Cuba (Around the World in 80 Gardens, 27 January, 9:00pm, BBC2) while in CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (29 January, 9:00pm, Five), there's a freezer full of hermaphrodite carp.

Bless CSI. Even at times like these, when the new television season is well under way and viewers are dabbling around, wondering if Echo Beach (1 February, 9:30pm, ITV1) has robbed their life of meaning,...

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