Radio Times

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As a result, half-hour skit shows seem to have lost their way, superseded by other comedy formats on the rise...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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This may seem even more unlikely than a talking blowfish, but I just can't get enough of Torchwood's Owen Harper. When the good doctor was shot and killed recently, I spent many an hour fretting about his ultimate fate. As a fan of sci-fi, I know that deceased cast members rarely stay dead for long – but damn it, it all looked so final, didn't it?

And judging by the postings in a lot of online forums, some people would have been happy if it was. Allow me to put the case for the defence.

At first...

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There's a smug "truth" oft-cited by lazy film critics that, no matter how successful, TV actors are congenitally unable to cross over to movie stardom.

The most oft-cited example of this is David Caruso, who was poised for Hollywood success after wowing us in NYPD Blue and, er, TJ Hooker, only to bomb with Jade et al to return to what he must have always known he did best – starring on the small screen, in CSI: Miami. Then there's the curse of Friends (the odd Scream excepted, have you ever seen Breast Men? The Shrink...

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Before we start, let's remind ourselves that sitcom couples come in all varieties, not just the "we're-married-and-argue-a-bit"-type in the My Family mould, a shining example of sitcom coupledom though they are. When you dig deep into the Quality Street box of our sitcom heritage, there are less obvious but more tasty examples to be found (they're the equivalent of the purple ones with the nut and caramel centre).

The platonic couples: Tony and Gary from Men Behaving Badly, defenders of mid-30s underachievement, are completely devoted. They love booze, birds and belching, but not as much...

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By day, Dexter Morgan is a blood-spatter analyst in the forensics branch of the Miami-Dade Police Department; by night, he's a serial killer.

A character for whom the term "antihero" might have been invented, he preys only on other serial killers: he's both a perpetrator of brutal crimes and an irresistible dispenser of justice.

Dexter is a twistedly original series, and one of the most intriguing central characters television has ever seen – and that's clear from the very beginning:

A feeding mosquito is smacked into a red smudge. A razor cuts through bristles and a...

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Like me, are you having a hard time keeping up with the rapidly expanding world of idents? You know, those little clips of channel branding ("ident" being short for identification) that remind you which station you're actually watching, in case you mistakenly find yourself tuned in to The Adult Channel thinking it was BBC4. (Anyone can make that mistake.)

The internet being what it is, there are even websites devoted to them (check out www.idents.tv and www.thetvroom.com), right down to the specific ident Anglia TV deployed in 1975. You can also download a pile of...

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So Vera Duckworth, Corrie's original neighbour from hell, has shuffled out of Weatherfield to take her rightful place in the bulging pantheon of soap immortals. For 33 years, Liz Dawn seared herself into our retinas – and eardrums – as the common-as-muck loudmouth with stone-clad pretensions. Comedy gold. And it set me wondering: who is the greatest long-running character in Soapland? And do I have my own all-time favourite?

I apologise in advance for the fact that I know practically nothing about The Archers or Emmerdale and must tiptoe past Crossroads for qualitative reasons (sorry,...

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