Radio Times

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 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 dramas - and...

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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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Sunday night on BBC1 throws up one of those divinely barmy conjunctions of television programmes. At 8:00pm we have Lark Rise to Candleford, a dainty soap opera based on Flora Thompson's novels that uses the 19th-century postal service as a metaphor for social division. It's well-mannered and nicely dressed, everyone knows their place and the heroine is the prim postmistress (played by Julia Sawalha). It's Cranford-lite, but fills the gap for anyone who yearns for more bonnets in their lives.

Then comes the 9:00pm watershed, when the gates are opened and a ravening beast is unleashed -...

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People are very precious about bedtimes. I note elsewhere on RadioTimes.com that a viewer is bemoaning the fact that the new Glenn Close legal thriller/murder mystery Damages went out at the supposedly ungodly hour of 10:20pm last Sunday. Far be it from me to question anyone's sleeping habits, but 10:20pm isn't late. A lot of us are still up and awake and we want to watch some decent telly.

I remember similar pouting when BBC1 broadcast its very, very good comedy series Outnumbered after the BBC 10 o'Clock News last year. Some sleepy viewers complained....

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One of last year's most eagerly anticipated US imports, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, did no more than limp on to More4 where it gave a little cough and promptly died.

Quite right too. It was smug, self-satisfied and not very good. Expectations for Studio 60 before its launch in the US were high because it was the baby of Aaron Sorkin, creator of The West Wing, that overrated series beloved of TV snobs everywhere. (That and The Sopranos. Yes, gawd save us all from West Wing and Sopranos bores. And you can add Dexter and...

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You know that Christmas has really arrived when the annual chorus of naysayers test their larynges for the colossal, universal whinge: "There's nothing worth watching on telly over Christmas." In some ways, this group moan is a bit like hearing the first cuckoo of spring, except the moaners - those disappointed, thwarted souls - just go on and on and on and on and they don't sound anywhere near as pretty.

Even MPs leap on the bandwagon for a few inches of cheap publicity, confident in the knowledge that no-one's actually going to stand up and tell...

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It's the week before Christmas, when the television channels are doing some last-minute dusting and a bit of light housework, airing the bedding and getting ready for an influx of guests in advance of the busiest period of the TV year. Which is a roundabout way of saying that, television-wise, there isn't an awful lot happening.

But BBC1 has broken into its special box of chocolates early to bring us Oliver Twist (nightly from Tuesday). It's an adaptation of the Dickens classic by EastEnders writer Sarah Phelps. You can tell Phelps is perfectly at home with the...

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Every week I've dared myself to sit through an entire episode of Flight of the Conchords. I rarely get very far. Seconds after the title sequence I'm overwhelmed by a restlessness that fatally undermines my resolve.

Flight of the Conchords makes my teeth itch, it makes my scalp want to get up and walk around the room, it makes my eyes want to poke themselves out.

I had such high hopes, too. I enjoy pastiches, if they are done well, and I'd heard Flight of the Conchords' musical parodies were particularly fine. And they are. It's just...

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