Radio Times

So summer is here, which usually in TV terms means "get out your boxed sets because there's nothing worth watching on proper telly". I have taken my own advice and am currently wallowing in mini DVD marathons of the lush Mad Men, the best drama of the year so far (with Damages a very close second) and 30 Rock (the finest US comedy since Frasier).

But I haven't given up hope. DVDs are all very well, but they can't possibly replicate the sense of community fostered by the shared enjoyment of "real-time"...

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Well, what have we here? Is this The Tudors, a historical drama, or is it some sexy romp packed with men in cloaks looking askance at one another across rather lovely refectory tables as the women drape themselves over the furniture, bosoms heaving like twin Heston Blumenthals peering over a wall? Is Hugh Hefner perhaps directing?

Well, no, as it happens, but yes, it is The Tudors, because that's sloe-eyed young Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Henry VIII, hurling himself around like a boy-band member who doesn't like the after-show sandwiches. Or should I say that's young Jonathan...

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What? William Petersen is leaving CSI: Crime Scene Investigation? And worse, he's doing so to spend more time working in "The Theatre"? Oh dear lord, what is it with actors and "The Theatre"? Why do they waste their time, pottering around on a stage in front of handfuls of bored and uncomfortable people, shouting at other actors?

I share my view of "The Theatre" with Mark and Jeremy from Peep Show who, in the last series, were appalled at being duped into seeing a friend's play. "You mean, we could be at home watching television,...

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Mainstream television often seems like a soft play area devoted entirely to teens and their half-formed sensibilities, what with its childishly silly sci-fi dramas and endless, tedious soaps.

But there is something at long last for literate grown-ups - you know, people who can form coherent sentences and whose lips don't move when they read - Criminal Justice, running every night from Monday to Friday (30 June to 4 July) on BBC1. It's rewarding, even though it's a big commitment and it's hardly a laugh a minute - a young man, Ben Coulter (the gifted...

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I was unfeasibly annoyed when I learnt that Shark (Fridays, 10:00pm, Five) had been cancelled by its American network. Not that it's a masterpiece of popular drama, you understand - it's fairly formulaic and frequently very silly. But at least every week it has a decent enough story arc that makes some kind of sense, with a beginning, a middle and an end. It's not meandering, self-indulgent twaddle like, say, Heroes, or soapy pap like Brothers and Sisters and Dirty Sexy Money.

And daft though it is, Shark, which stars James Woods as a straight-talking LA...

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I really do feel there is something shameful about my devotion to Grey's Anatomy (Thursdays, 10:00pm, Five). I kind of hate this emotionally gloopy, damp, annoying, self-centred, frequently nauseating American medical soap, so I kind of hate myself. But I kind of love it too. I particularly love it when I compare it to Casualty (BBC1, Saturdays).

Casualty is weedy and pathetic, and I always feel it grovels for my attention, as in "please watch us. Please. Watch us. Please. You can spare us 50 minutes of your time,...

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I always get the feeling that Heroes is watched by people - and by people I mean 13-year-olds - who think it's great drama. But of course, 13-year-olds wouldn't know great drama if it knocked on their doors and introduced itself.

Heroes (Thursdays, 9:00pm, BBC2) is tosh. Effortlessly dull tosh at that, packed with ludicrous portent and mind-bendingly dreary characters. The whole thing is so uninvolving it's impossible to care who's doing what, and why. Save the world/don't save the world. Am I bothered?

The first series was bad, but the second is even worse,...

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Think of Bank Holiday Mondays and what comes to mind? Rotten weather (of course), visits to DIY superstores, buying sofas, pottering in the garden, maggoty dismembered corpses…er, let's back up, shall we. Yes, I realise the latter probably isn't up there with putting your slippered feet up as you watch The Sound of Music (2:50pm, BBC1) for the 10,000th time in your life, but maybe a savage serial killer drama will hit the spot after a long day doing nothing in particular? If so, then prepare to unwrap that bar of chocolate you've been keeping at the...

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You have to hand a big chocolate bar to the imaginative soul at ITV who dreamed up The Duchess in Hull (Monday 19 May and Tuesday 20 May, 9:00pm, ITV1). Take a working class family living on a rough council estate in one of Britain's least appetising cities (and before the outcry, can I say that I have lived in Hull, so I know exactly what I'm talking about). They are overweight and have no ideas about healthy eating.

One day there's a knock on their door and guess who it is? None other than the Duchess...

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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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