Radio Times

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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How many Church of England vicars do you know who've confessed to thinking about breasts while meditating with a Shaolin kung fu monk? I know of only one such holy man. Peter Owen Jones: philosopher, warrior, priest. Anyone hoping for an ode to a certain purveyor of ecclesiastic comedy twaddle (that means you, Vicar of Dibley), kindly go and eat your dog collar.

I stumbled across the Reverend back in 2006 when he presented The Lost Gospels on BBC4 - a rousing exploration of the missing New Testament texts. I liked his fedora, his weather-and-strife-lashed under-eye area and...

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If the first rule of chat-show hosting is "Don't embarrass your guests", and the second is "Don't embarrass your audience" (and I have to confess that I've got no means of verifying these, as neither Jonathan Ross or Terry Wogan would return my calls), then you might imagine the Pub Landlord's attempt at the genre in Al Murray's Happy Hour to fall flat on its face in a puddle of weak lager.

The jovial, bullet-headed bigot has made front rows of comedy audiences across the UK writhe in discomfort for well over a decade, as he...

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You have to go to some considerable lengths to balls up a concept as simple as You've Been Framed!.

Jeremy Beadle had it down pat, and it went like this: presenter tells a joke so poor that the audience is left wondering which language it was badly translated from. Presenter introduces a loose theme for the next set of clips (usually a variation on dogs, babies or idiots swinging above a brook on a piece of rope). Clips are shown. Canned laughter is uncanned. Repeat. The only trouble is that Beadle didn't stick around and the...

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There's been no shortage of Jane Austen adaptations lately - there's another due on New Year's Day with BBC1's new version of Sense and Sensibility. No sooner has one suitor on horseback paraded past, than another dashing soldier is knocking at the door. And while it's pleasant enough admiring all these men in tight breeches, I'm never tempted to stray. My heart was won long ago by one particular set of sideburns - those of Mr Fitzwilliam Darcy.

Fictional journalist Bridget Jones was the first to openly fixate on Mr Darcy. An unmarried 30-something, she looked to...

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The revamped Doctor Who has given viewers hours of thrilling entertainment. But what if the Beeb was to decide - as in days of old - that it wasn't worth keeping a kids' sci-fi series for posterity? Which scenes would you argue must never be wiped? Here are my suggestions:

1) Rose and the Doctor separated for ever…

…Or, as we now know, until Russell T Davies pens a kick-ass story reuniting them. In Doomsday, Billie Piper's mascara took the strain as she faced the reality of life without the Time Lord. Fans of long-standing remembered Michael Grade...

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