Radio Times

I wouldn't necessarily recommend the Teachers TV channel for blockbusting entertainment, unless you get your kicks out of listening to strategies for improving Year 4 maths results, or dry analysis of Estelle Morris's views on closing the attainment gap between disadvantaged and affluent pupils.

But even Teachers TV has to let its hair down at some point, and yesterday they showed an episode of Classmates, a fantastic Channel 4 documentary series from 2002 which reunited former pupils of a particular school, and filmed their recollections of school dinners, French vocab tests, and administering wedgies in the bogs....

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It's hard to write about this show without it sounding like an editorial from Socialist Worker. But the tone was set in the first few seconds, when the narrator informed us that, at the behest of his wife, Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen's family and staff were moving from their London town house to a country pile in Gloucestershire. Staff! This immediately conjured up images of scullery maids, nannies, gardeners saying "Right you are, sir", rotund cooks, butlers, bellboys and God knows what else besides.

In fact, it was actually only his wife's personal assistant and her family, but...

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It's rare for a new comedy series to lob something genuinely unexpected at you. It's usually some kind of panel game where the spontaneous wit feels tired and pedestrian. Or a sketch show desperately trying to wring the last drops of humour out of sideways glances at modern life. Or it might be a sitcom, where the jokes are flagged up about ten minutes in advance thanks to horrendous gurning on the part of the lead characters.

I was unlucky enough to catch that Only Fools and Horses spin-off sitcom, The Green Green Grass, last week. Everyone involved...

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They say that sarcasm is the lowest form of wit – but I've come up with another theory. The most elementary form of wit can be taught to a child – in fact, a computer could probably regurgitate it without too much trouble. Used to express mild irritation by men over the age of 40, it's usually accompanied by a comical scowl, and takes the form: "I'll xxxxxx YOU, in a minute". Let's just see this in action:

A: Oooh, I could murder a cup of tea. B: I'll murder YOU, in a minute!

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I've never been particularly fond of animals. The nearest my sister and I ever came to having a pet was when my dad won a stuffed toy – an enormous purple dog – at a raffle. We left it in the corner of my sister's bedroom and, for some reason lost in the mists of time, referred to it as "Jesus" while giggling hysterically.

So the Animal Roadshow probably wasn't particularly designed to appeal to me. There were no purple dogs called Jesus. Instead, we have an undersexed gecko, a dog "driving its owner mad", some...

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The Legal TV channel is nothing if not eclectic. You can see a Judge Judy-style character with the improbable name of Judge Extreme Akim wield a baseball bat with "Justice" written on the side – and no, I'm not speaking metaphorically, he really does – while solving disputes between hyperactive American families. And within a few minutes you can be settling down to several sober, sombre episodes of Crown Court, that festival of facial hair that screened in the mid-1970s during long afternoons on ITV.

Crown Court used to present fictitious cases in front of a real...

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I told a few people that I was going to be reviewing a brand-new reality TV show today, but none of them believed me when I told them what the concept is. I don't suppose I can blame them, really. I mean, who'd guess that a show would ever be made where 12 people suffering from attention deficit disorder compete to secure their place on a team performing quintuple heart bypass surgery?

I'm joking, of course. But seriously, though, who could ever imagine that someone successfully pitched a programme where ten topless models go head to...

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I don't ever remember having much interest in Halloween. As a student I wasn't remotely tempted to don fangs and a pointed hat and terrorise passers-by with displays of drunken behaviour – although I did know a few goths who did that kind of thing all year round.

And I never went trick or treating as a child - I think the unacceptability of getting something for nothing was drilled into me at a very early age. I remember my dad – an imposing gentleman of six foot six – answering the door on Halloween to cries...

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Yes, a channel devoted to getting married. A chance for singletons to blub into their kleenex about how they've been left on the shelf, a chance for engaged couples to be enticed into spending even more of their parents' cash on essentials such as "ring cushions" or "memory boxes" and a chance for those who are already married to think, “Yeah, I remember the hopes, the dreams, the excitement. No, I won't walk the dog, it's your turn – have you farted? God, my mum warned me about you.” And so on.

The biggest problem with...

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There's a weird stack of channels around the Sky 760 mark, all devoted to Christianity. Most of them feature bellowing preachers doing the fire-and-brimstone act in a series of Charismatic Pentecostal Churches.

"Charismatic" is a strange adjective to use here, although I guess it's more enticing than calling them Annoying Pentecostal Churches. (It would be great if gaining charisma did just require you to shout loudly at groups of people. But it doesn't, believe me, I've tried. No, I don't want to talk about it.)

But amid all the speaking in tongues and instant healing...

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Despite common sense desperately barking at us through a megaphone from the top of a nearby stepladder, we will go to desperate lengths to try to get rich quick.

There's those pyramid selling schemes where you not only end up losing huge sums of money, but also spend precious hours persuading friends and family to do the same thing.

Then there's the lure of those adverts advising us that we can earn a fortune by working from home stuffing envelopes: somehow we're not alerted by the fact that these ads are scrawled in biro and...

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I'm a sucker for tranquil television. You know, the kind of non-threatening programming that has you letting out long, deep sighs of contentment, rather than giving you clammy palms, or forcing you to throw magazines about, or have you muttering about writing a stern letter of complaint to some kind of ombudsman. Man, I love the word ombudsman.

I love gently paced, reassuringly peaceful cookery shows. Non-hysterical shopping channels. On a recent flight to Japan, the fact that they woke me up with a video of a smiling woman doing gentle stretching exercises was enough...

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There are many TV shows whose aim is to help us transform our homes from stinking hovels into luxurious palaces. Most of them concentrate on jobs that require you to get your hands dirty – you know, knocking down a partition wall to fool your brain into thinking you have more space, when you actually have one less place to hide mountains of junk. Or hacking away at brickwork to reveal lead water pipes that are slowly reducing your family's cognitive abilities.

Colin and Justin, however, never get their hands dirty. Their forte is soft furnishings...

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I'm on something of a regime at the moment. Which is a vague, roundabout way of admitting that I'm attempting to eat less, and exercise more. In fact, I'm exercising on one of those contraptions from TV Warehouse that I was so disparaging about on this blog a couple of weeks ago. And my eating plan consists of muesli for breakfast, a banana and a yoghurt for lunch, and in the words of those adverts for magic weight-loss milk shakes, "a normal dinner".

Whatever “normal” might mean. For me, a normal dinner means one plate...

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