Radio Times

These days there are dozens of niche channels catering for comparatively narrow fields of interest. There's one exclusively for teachers, there are others for pub landlords, owners of Audi cars, Chelsea fans – there's even a channel for people who like watching ITV2, if you can imagine that.

So the existence of Horse & Country TV should be no surprise. Nor should it come as a shock that the channel is mainly dedicated to horses and country pursuits, with a sprinkling of adverts for products to control the internal parasites of your livestock rather than ones for Plenitude...

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What with Sky Sports 1, Sky Sports 2, Sky Sports 3 and Sky Sports Xtra, it's no surprise that, from time to time, Sky Sports just doesn't have enough sport to fill all the channels. Rock climbing, for example – that surely doesn't count as a sport. It's more of an activity, while urban mountain biking sounds like a bizarre contradiction in terms.

If you stay up late enough you can probably catch some All-England crumb-dislodging from Grantham, and I've even seen Keith Floyd cooking up a cassoulet on Sky Sports 3, which is about as far from...

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Why does musical comedy usually make me dive for the off switch, miss the off switch and crack my head on a coffee table?

1. Because hearing a cover version at a different speed or with inappropriate instrumentation is like watching someone put on an unusual hat. Amusing for two seconds, then it quickly becomes embarrassing. Culprits: anything from that punky version of Nellie the Elephant to Bill Bailey's cockney knees-ups.

2. Because making up new words to the tune of an existing song requires virtually no skill. All the hard work has been...

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A trip to Rome isn't complete without visiting Vatican City, you know. This is the kind of handy hint you'll pick up when watching Travel Girls, which follows the story of six girls striving for fame as TV travel presenters.

They're competing for the job of fronting a travel show by attempting to demonstrate their aptitude for fronting a travel show. So essentially, it's an audition. But when six attractive women compete for a prize, the law states that a TV series must be made out of it – thus the audition lasts 13 weeks, and...

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I'd defend the right of anyone to spend hours under a tattooist's needle to have the small of their back covered with mistranslated Japanese symbols that actually mean "municipal housing authority". But the permanence of these things is frightening. Even if you rub really hard with a flannel and some Dove Triple Moisturising Beauty Care Body Wash, they're going absolutely nowhere.

I don't have a tattoo. In rare moments of temptation I've always tried to think ahead and ponder the consequences. Even as an exuberant teenager, I knew that my obsession with The Cure was probably...

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God knows how I managed to put up with being a toddler in the early 1970s. I was being wheeled about in a pushchair offering minimal safety features compared to today's three-wheeled armoured personnel buggies. I don't think vitamins had been invented – Omega 3 oils certainly hadn't – so rickets and scurvy must have been a constant threat.

And as far as weekday TV entertainment went, there was a 15-minute segment at lunchtime, and 90 minutes in the late afternoon – both sandwiched by insipid programmes on British social history and bleak news updates...

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I've got a hundred radio stations on my Sky box, and I frequently get exasperated by TV programmes treating me like a child. When this happens, I find solace in Chris Needs's late-night phone-in show on BBC Radio Wales.

Because Chris, you see, treats me like an elderly woman. That's because his audience mainly consists of elderly women. The three-hour show is called, improbably, the Friendly Garden, and kicks off with a presumably self-penned tune which begins:

"In the garden, in the garden That's where I meet my special friends Where fun begins and never...

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After a similar recent excursion with Girls Aloud, it was time for ex-Blue Peter presenter Yvette Fielding to take some nervous actors from Emmerdale around three old buildings in the north of England, turn the lights off and wait for a gust of wind or a buzzing insect to make them squeal like pigs. Before I started watching this, I was certain that ghosts were a figment of an overactive imagination. Now it's over, I'll go further: the paranormal is something that's drawn on the back of a fag packet by bored television producers.

The first...

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Most of us have wised up to the obvious scams, such as the email asking to transfer $1million to our bank account, or the one where five suspicious-looking men turn up to read our gas meter. But there are still countless ways of being made to look pathetically gullible, and The Real Hustle is methodically working its way through them.

The show’s slogan is: "If it's too good to be true, it probably is". The utopian dreamers among you might see this as needlessly cynical but, unlike one poor chap in Monday's show, you probably haven't...

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I was busy frittering my life away playing online Scrabble when my girlfriend called from the next room. "Rhodri, quick," she shouted. "I think you should see this." She was transfixed by a programme called Le Breton Gourmand which, as all good GCSE French students will already have written neatly in their exercise books, celebrates the cuisine of north-western France.

"So what," I hear you exclaim, "there's nothing intrinsically fascinating about a plate of cabillaud aux haricots blancs." And you'd be right, as well as being a bit full of yourself. But as this show is...

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There are many ways of forcing human beings to absorb facts – let's see, there's bribery, there's torture – but teachers generally have two approaches. When I was at school, one of them was typified by Mr Roucoux, a serious Belgian man in an ill-fitting suit who took very little pleasure in droning on interminably about molecular structure. In response, we chucked pencil sharpeners around and repeatedly asked if we could go to the toilet.

The other approach was taken by Mr Maple, an eccentric chap full of joie de vivre who would successfully drill chemical...

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Hey, here's an idea: get a handful of people to compete for a prize on a TV show. Stick them in an unfamiliar situation and give them unpleasant tasks to perform. Eject one of them from the show each week in an unnecessarily protracted, supposedly nail-biting ceremony, leaving us with one squealing, triumphant winner at the end of the series. What? You've heard that one before?

In this version of the old formula, the contestants are cute city girls; the location is a farm somewhere in Cornwall; the tasks involve milking cows or wading through dung....

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After yesterday's ordeal of jet planes smashing into mountainsides, it's time to wind down with some laid-back programming – and it doesn't get much more placid than the "painting hour" on Discovery Real Time. Every weekday morning, 60 minutes of tranquillity kick off with The Joy of Painting.

It's presented by Bob Ross, a man who makes Whispering Bob Harris sound like Fearne Cotton trapped on a malfunctioning rollercoaster. Bob Ross died in the mid-1990s, but his shows are still widely syndicated, providing comfort, encouragement and a great big Afro haircut for the viewing public.

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Until I got a Sky dish, National Geographic meant glossy magazines featuring beautiful photographs of the Alpine tundra or exotic sub-Saharan wildlife. Now, however, it's synonymous with programmes that look at the many and various ways we can meet a violent death.

Their current schedule includes such relaxing documentaries as Landslides Investigated, World's Most Dangerous Drug, Seconds from Disaster, and When Routine Appendectomies Go Bad. OK, so I made the last one up. But the icing on the cake is the new series of Air Crash Investigation.

As you might imagine, the trailers for the...

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