Radio Times

Tuesday 2 January 2007 was the day that I proudly bought my first ever TV. (Up until that point I'd made do with family hand-me-downs.) It was flat, it was big, and it came with a port to hook up to my computer. Suddenly I could find stuff on the internet and watch from the questionable comfort of a sofa I picked up for 50 quid on eBay.

I sat down to enjoy an old episode of Animal Kwackers with trepidation, remembering that it scared me witless when I was five years old. Most...

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So, it's the very last Dish of the Day. I'd planned to review some programme on the Discovery Channel about ghosts, but after 60 seconds I knew I was probably going to end up dispensing the same supernatural slagging I gave to a very similar show about 10 weeks ago, so at 12 midnight last night I stopped the Sky+ box and just started channel hopping instead.

I'd not adopted this approach before: a remarkable amount of research and planning has gone into this blog. (Well, 30 minutes browsing a copy of the nation's favourite...

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Typical BBC3, I thought. Let's ratchet up the viewing figures by sticking three dysfunctional families - including six babies - into a house to live together, fill the place with cameras, and then just sit back and wait for the whole thing to turn into chaos, like the main square of a European town before a major international football clash.

In fact, it ended up being a surprisingly sensitive look at child rearing - although I've got to say that this is a subject I'm about as familiar with as the history of the crossbow,...

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Ah, the panel-based quiz show. The last refuge of the desperate commissioning editor. Despite the fact that They Think It's All Over and Never Mind the Buzzcocks are among the most profoundly irritating programmes on British TV, copycat shows keep on rolling out, forcing comedians who are normally pretty funny to deliver a load of stilted, supposedly comic observations in the name of entertainment.

But they don't come any worse than this. And Then You Die just beggars belief. It'll surely be dredged up on one of those equally ubiquitous list-based programmes in a few years'...

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When I was about nine years old, I played a piano piece called Silver Trumpets at the St Albans Music Festival in a small room in front of about 30 adults, all of whom were there to see their offspring play a piano piece called Silver Trumpets. Believe me, you've never experienced anything like the levels of boredom generated by 12 primary schoolchildren playing Silver Trumpets, one after the other. I can still hear it in my head now - ham-fisted attempts at musicianship, devoid of subtlety, and sounding more like a piece entitled Rusty Saxophones.

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I've gone to preposterous lengths to try and review this programme. You don't really need to know the boring details, but because of some extraordinarily bad planning on my part, I'm currently sitting in the passenger seat of a Fiat Punto, going down the M4 towards Carmarthen, while watching Discovery Real Time on the screen of my mobile phone.

It's only thanks to an extraordinary innovation called a Slingbox that I'm able to do this, although I can't help wondering whether the inventors might have been better off focusing their efforts on, I dunno, combating Third...

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While those of us who don't class ourselves as eye-candy have probably tearfully given up on the idea of television presenting, there's still a way in. Become a TV chef. You don't have to be beautiful. Fans of Antony Worrall Thompson are unlikely to have posters of him on their bedroom walls. I'm not privy to the contents of Clarissa Dickson Wright's postbag, but I'm guessing that lustful notelets from potential suitors are pretty thin on the ground.

In fact, I have a theory that the uglier or more overweight the TV chef, the more we...

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Such is my love of food-related telly, it's probably not that surprising that UKTV Food is often my first port of call when I switch on the box. The box! Man, I've not called it that for a long time. Probably because my TV no longer resembles a box - I guess it's more of a tray.

But anyway, you can always rely on the channel to serve up comforting portions of shows you've seen umpteen times but fancy seeing again - you know, Keith Floyd cavorting in the Dordogne, Madhur Jaffrey being statuesque in the Punjab,...

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You tend to associate the QVC shopping channel with imitation diamonds, or space-saving plastic bags in which you can store your whole family and pop them neatly in the bottom drawer of the wardrobe when they're not needed. But look, QVC can help you out if you're hungry, too.

Kitchen demonstrations aren't a new thing on the channel – umpteen gadgets and gizmos have been flogged over the years by lower-league celebrity chefs – but the idea of demonstrating the advantages of a three-kilo lump of air-dried ham (only £48.66 plus £5.95 postage and packing) is a...

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One thing unifies every single TV chef. Asked about their philosophy regarding food, they'll all say: "It's all about simple recipes, using the very best ingredients." This mantra has been particularly apparent throughout Gary Rhodes's series, Local Food Heroes.

Over the last few weeks, Gaz has subjected us to a fairly humourless guide to the best of British food producers, using a strange voice that he only started to adopt in earnest about five or six years ago. He used to have a chirpy London accent: now, he speaks in an achingly slow, slightly posh, slightly strangled...

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If you stick me in front of any cookery show - well, nearly any - it's like sedating me with horse tranquilliser. I'll sit there, quietly absorbing the instructions, relishing the gentle sound of chorizo being chopped or mushrooms being skewered.

It's like being transported to another world, a world where Keith Floyd is always drunk, where James Martin is always wearing a sensible pullover, and where Ainsley Harriott constantly asks, "What am I like, ladies and gentlemen?" while sprinkling parsley from a greater height than is really necessary.

I've decided to watch food programmes...

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When I was younger, watching Eastern European animation was a rare treat. For some reason, the slightly languid, restrained atmosphere of Czech or Russian cartoons seemed to have more beauty, more subtlety, more attention to detail than, I dunno, Battle of the Planets or Hong Kong Phooey. They wouldn't be shown very often on British TV - mainly because children were demanding repeats of Battle of the Planets or Hong Kong Phooey, I guess - but when they were, I was glued to the screen.

This fascination has stayed with me - things like Yuri Norstein's...

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Am I smarter than a ten year old? Well, that depends. If I was put head to head with a primary-school kid and challenged to, say, arrange a skiing holiday for 20 people, I'd be fairly confident that I wouldn't cock up the flights, forget to inform the group of the maximum baggage allowance, or burst into tears if I had trouble finding a hotel.

But, on the other hand, I've not had a French vocab test in 20 years – thank goodness – so the ten year old, fresh out of last week's double French lesson,...

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Of all those programmes where a load of people are stuck in a place they'd rather not be and paid money to stay there for as long as the viewing public put up with them, I'm a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! is by far my favourite. So much so that I'd occasionally even watch the thing. Imagine that.

But it was never the bushtucker trials that piqued my interest, nor the creation of nutritionally dubious evening meals from disappointing ingredients, nor indeed the reliably chirpy presenting team of Dec and Ant (as I believe...

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