Radio Times

The toughest jobs in the UK can't really be featured in UK's Toughest Jobs. Balancing resources and demand within the NHS, negotiating wage settlements with postal workers, instilling some sense of respect at inner-city secondary schools, ensuring that aircraft don't slam into one another at 30,000 feet over southern England – these are all jobs which most of us would shun, lest we collapse from stress-related illnesses.

The show should really be called UK's Toughest Jobs Which Are Menial Enough for Us to Give to Errant Youths without Posing Too Much Risk to the General...

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I've had some odd flatmates in my time. When I was 23 I remember having one of the most almighty rows I've ever had with anyone, purely because I'd eaten a Dairylea triangle that wasn't mine. (And it wasn't even her last Dairylea triangle.) There was the man who said to me once, "By the way, if you hear strange noises coming from my room, it's because I've got hold of a load of nitrous oxide and I'm planning on staying in and laughing".

Then there was the bloke who threw a party without telling me,...

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If you've ever gone through a period of loneliness and introspection, you'll have inevitably ended up watching the QVC shopping channel. And if you've done that for any length of time, you'll have come across a woman by the name of Dawn Bibby. Dawn regularly turns up and spends an hour flogging us bits of card, ribbon, pens and rubber stamps – all in the name of something called "craft".

Dawn has proved popular. And, over the years, shopping channels have devoted more and more time to this thing called "craft". Practitioners of "craft" have even...

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The rock group Kiss were American through and through. Notorious in the States during the 1970s for monochrome make-up, fire breathing, blood spitting and gigantic tongues, they didn't have a hit in the UK until 1983 – by which time they'd jettisoned the slap in favour of a little light moisturiser, and were thus slightly more palatable to a British audience who preferred a more restrained approach to their heavy metal.

Despite this, bass player Gene Simmons in his full make-up is instantly recognisable over here – mainly because of savvy merchandising – and, thanks to...

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It's easy to dismiss wrestling as overwrought horseplay by men in leotards. Louis Theroux once made the mistake of doing exactly that while in the same room as some of America's top wrestlers, and he was soon begging them to stop levering off his head, and yes, they could have his dinner money, and yes, they were actually skilled athletes worthy of respect. Ouch.

There are no top wrestlers in my immediate vicinity right now, so I feel that I can speak freely. It's not that I think wrestling is stupid. I just don't understand it....

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I might be getting old before my time. Perhaps I'm just a miserable git. But I get weary when things that don't even have a pulse attempt to be my best mate. I walked into my bank recently and was greeted by an enormous turquoise sticker on the front door, which said "hi" in a cute, lower-case font.

I didn't need greeting. I knew that the front door was the way in. I knew that behind the door would be a row of cashiers serving a large queue of disgruntled people with sizable overdrafts. I knew...

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To the British, bounty hunting is as foreign a concept as baseball, punctual trains or cannibalism. If a criminal skips bail in the UK, it's up to the police to track them down. But in the USA, for some reason, this important work seems to be subcontracted to swaggering men in leather trousers and sunglasses who are liable to shout "We have you surrounded" at a moment's notice.

Bounty hunter Duane Chapman, rather like a stray in your back garden, is better known as "Dog". His show kicks off with a specially commissioned TV theme tune,...

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I know this is a bit "meta", so apologies in advance for writing a TV review of a TV review show presented by a TV reviewer.

Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe is currently showing on BBC4. Watching him administer corporal punishment to the stupidities and excesses of today's television can be a strange experience – mainly because the medium he is savaging has allowed him to do such a thing. It's a bit like your local Presbyterian church deciding that they're going to try having a short run of Satanic Saturdays.

Even the programme...

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You can't fault Psychic TV on its marketing. Its adverts feature a carefree, newly confident woman whose destiny has been mapped out thanks to the channel. She needed to know how her career would pan out; she consulted the psychics; they told her; and now she's getting on with her life, absolutely safe in the knowledge that she's never going to be run over by a juggernaut. Probably.

If you've not seen Psychic TV, here's the score. You either text in your poorly punctuated, barely decipherable problem, eg "I'm goin out on Fri wiv mates frm...

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The most glaringly absent channel on digital TV is something that would probably be called The Reality Channel. It would be wonderful if all the shows dependent on contrived clashes of conflicting personalities were dumped onto it, leaving the rest of television unsullied. You could dip in and out of these shows at will, and you'd never stumble across one by accident.

But it doesn't exist, so I stumbled over Singing with the Enemy by accident. Two bands of differing musical styles were stuck in a house far larger and more pleasant than their own and...

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As a cricket lover who frequently finds himself having to defend the sport against accusations of tedium, monotony and clothing that looks like ill-fitting toddlers’ pyjamas, I always feel indignant that golf rarely gets such criticism.

At least with cricket, the ball is always moving. Golfers spend much of the time wandering around a stationary ball, crouching, bending over or pretending to make a shot, under the rapt gaze of hundreds of spectators standing behind a tape – presumably to stop people like me bounding onto the green and screaming, "For heaven’s sake would you...

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Virgin launched their first TV channel this week. While The Riches, starring Eddie Izzard, is probably the jewel in their schedules, any fledgling channel has a requirement to balance out acclaimed drama with sensationalist claptrap. And look, here's The Real Exorcist: Devil Hunter, in which God-fearing Reverend Bob Larson travels around the USA, supposedly performing exorcisms.

While the show is billed as a documentary, it presupposes that the audience believes in exorcism. So it fails to address any concerns that it might be a load of old hokum, and thus becomes a 60-minute advert for Bob's...

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It always happens when you're at your most susceptible. You're bored, you're slobbing on the sofa wearing trousers with an elasticated waistband, fragments of pizza and chocolate are lodged about your person and you're stabbing at a remote control with a fat thumb. Suddenly, a Day-Glo American woman screeches at you from the television set, asking you to "just imagine" various things.

Just imagine having a waistline like hers. Just imagine achieving that waistline "the easy way" – ie through several months of ceaseless toil on some contraption called a lateral thigh trainer. Just imagine not...

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You can't help but wonder how the crew for Ross Kemp on Gangs go about securing his various meetings with vicious gangland thugs. I can't imagine a ditzy researcher ringing up and saying, "Hi, is that The Brutalizer? Oh hi, sorry to bother you, I just wondered if you might like to hook up with an actor from Romford who used to do the Fruit ’n Fibre ads? Hello?"

No, clearly Ross Kemp is described to these people as a fellow hard man, a bloke who has seen a good few people blown away by grenades...

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