Radio Times

You'll like this blog. Not a lot - but you'll like it.

I don't recall much about the television of my childhood, but I do remember being happily bamboozled by Paul Daniels on a regular basis.

Nowadays, TV magic shows have gone the way of so many brightly coloured handkerchieves and sundry rabbits, disappearing into the black hole of the magician's top hat. (Though if David Blaine could be persuaded to follow them, I suspect nobody would really miss him.)

Not so long ago we were treated to the madcap antics of American double act...

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Vic and Bob fans will probably already be aware that the duo are returning this Christmas for a one-off special of their surreal variety show/celebrity panel game Shooting Stars. Joining Messrs Reeves and Mortimer will be score-keeping musical man-baby George Dawes (aka Matt Lucas) and a panel of celebrity guests.

The show is set to air on BBC2 on Tuesday 30 December. But until then, why not relive some hilarious Shooting Stars moments with our collection of classic clips..?

1. The spectacular musical medley that introduces this Shooting Stars Christmas special kicks off with Vic...

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To tie in with BBC Radio 2's programme The Album as Art (Tuesday 16 December, 10:30pm) - part of a season celebrating the album - we've put together a photo gallery of some of the most iconic album covers of all time.

The Beatles - Revolver (1966)
The Beatles - Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)
David Bowie - The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972)
David Bowie - Aladdin Sane (1973)
The Clash - London Calling (1979)
Joy Division - Unknown Pleasures...

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A video-clip countdown of my personal top five 007 film scenes, featuring some acknowledged classics along with some less celebrated gems (plus Alan Partridge's take on the opening scenes of "the best film ever made"). And if you detect a slight bias towards the wooden suavity of Roger Moore, well, what can I say - nobody does it better.

5. You Only Live Twice

A rooftop: Sean Connery takes on all comers, darting and slugging his way through a gaggle of miniature henchmen like a powered-up character in a retro computer game. The jaunty...

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It's so tempting to go for something unintentionally funny when picking the definitive spectacle from Blue Peter's first 50 years. Contenders could have included:

The horrified look on Mark Curry's face when he separated a giant Lego man's head from its body, wrecking in seconds what must have been months of work.

An apoplectic Percy Thrower describing the vandals who wrecked the BP garden in 1983 as "mentally ill" live on television.

A studio full of Girl Guides and Brownies resolutely keeping their posts around a campfire that's steadily growing into an inferno in the...

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Bond villains. They're usually mad, they're frequently bad, and they're always dangerous to know. In the 21 Bond movies to date, there have been 24 assorted psychopaths and geniuses, each with a dastardly and often earth-threatening scheme. Their one shared goal is the destruction of 007, and the messier his demise, the better. Here's my rundown of the best Bond villains depicted on screen:

5. Karl Stromberg

Appearing in the over-the-top The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), Stromberg is best known for planning to destroy the world and build a new one underneath the sea. He doesn't get...

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Anyone who watches comedy programmes with an unhealthy regularity will know that the sketch-show format is frighteningly unreliable. Even the ones that you mark down as your favourites end up coasting - as soon as the comedians figure out that if they can make 20 per cent of it thigh-slapping stuff, they can get away with padding out the rest with familiar catchphrases, shaggy dog stories and the ubiquitous and horrible musical pastiche stuck at the end.

As a result, half-hour skit shows seem to have lost their way, superseded by other comedy formats on the rise...

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The X-Files ran for nine series and, in Special Agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, gave us one of TV's most celebrated partnerships. But in a show rich with well-drawn characters, who else really stood out?

In terms of keeping viewers awake at night, you'd have to go some way to beat Eugene Victor Tooms. Tooms was a killer who would lunge from the smallest of hiding places to tear the livers from his unsuspecting victims with his bare hands. Actor Doug Hutchison endowed this unlikely, bendy-limbed mutant with creepy believability, right up to the moment...

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One of the great things about the Olympic Games is the sheer diversity of sport you get to see. From BMX to baseball, Greco-Roman wrestling to windsurfing, a whole host of weird and wonderful obscurities will be there. And I'll be watching pretty much all of them.

I've always enjoyed the niche sports. I become strangely addicted to muscular munchkins lifting ridiculous weights. Repetitive target sports like archery and pistol shooting always hit the spot too. And during the 2002 Winter Olympics I was watching late-night curling highlights before the British ladies looked like title prospects....

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"Soap death" is a bit of an oxymoron when you think about it. No-one dies in a soap death - they get an upgrade to The Bill or end up on some reality TV show, reinvented as a singer/presenter/ rent-a-celeb. Dead soap characters have even been known to be resurrected in a fleeting attempt to raise ratings, such as EastEnders's comeback king, Den "Hello, princess" Watts.

Anyone who dies twice is worthy of a place in the soap death hall of fame, although in the case of Den Watts's second coming it is difficult to...

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It's one of the most famous silhouette profiles in history: the aquiline nose, the meerschaum pipe and the deerstalker hat. But of all the actors to shed light on Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle's most famous creation, who can best lay claim to that bohemian consulting room in Baker Street?

Basil Rathbone portrays him as a smooth sophisticate, while Peter Cushing - in emphasising the sleuth's scholarly bent - ends up downplaying his wilder excesses. It is really only Jeremy Brett, in the Granada television adaptations of the 1980s and 90s, who fully captures the...

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Is there a more curmudgeonly character on television than Andy Dalziel?

All right, Victor Meldrew is a miserable old sod with the semi-permanent expression of a man forced to lick a dog's scent from a thistle, but at least we know it will always end in a joke at his expense. And Inspector Morse might be a grumpy old goat on occasion, but after a glass of wine and a bit of Mozart he could always invite Lewis over for a friendly game of Scrabble and a bit of a laugh about the day's grisly murder investigation....

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Joss Whedon gave the world Buffy and Angel - and viewers took them to their hearts. He also gave the world Firefly - and viewers didn't care so much.

It's hard to see where Whedon went wrong in creating a series based around two former soldiers, who fought on the losing side of a bitter war, now trying to eke out an existence in a harsh universe. The writers told tight, exciting stories. The cast made light work of drawling cowboy dialogue that, though it used far more words than by rights a sentence ought...

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I'm confident that I speak for my people (women) when I say that the translucent, white British male thigh should only be exposed in the gravest of emergencies. Sorry, menfolk, but that means tiny shorts are out. And this applies tenfold on television.

But one man's pasty thigh-flashing I'll let pass: that of king forager Ray Mears, whose cropped, utility beige legwear is an essential aid to his acrobatic hunter-gatherer demonstrations. I'm also sure that a full trouser would cramp his trademark stance: the squat-and-explain.

It's not his scoutish khaki outfits that I find so...

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