Radio Times

Top Gear is television's greatest anomaly. It is the specialist interest show made all-inclusive.

I, for instance, know nothing and care even less about cars. If the conversation turns to motoring it's as unpleasant as having my every facial orifice packed with wet bread. What’s more, I feel no affinity whatsoever with Messieurs Clarkson, Richard Hammond or James May. They're like the great guffawing boobs you'd find at the back of the school bus on a day trip, pressing their arses against the window at passing truckers. And yet I LOVE Top Gear, and I'm not alone.

Though...

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When Wife Swap first hit our screens in 2003, the title titillatingly hinted at suburban sexual shenanigans, and we tuned in in droves - to discover, instead, a brow-furrowing social experiment.

A pair of women are transplanted into each other's homes - places that are, more often than not, radically different to their own - and expected to follow their new family's routines for the first week, before they get to do things their own way in the second.

While on paper it looks like the kind of car-crash reality television that many of us would stay late...

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We're all familiar with daytime television having either been a) off work ill b) skiving c) a student or d) "working from home" (also see b) at least once in our lives. We therefore know that it is the fastest and most effective way to induce a mild brain-coma.

According to TV schedulers, around mid-morning on a weekday viewers don't need intellectual stimulation (apparently this doesn't start until 7:00pm when BBC4 springs to life with a documentary on the 1915 Armenian genocide). Instead we must make do with hypnotically bland property programmes or a re-run of Friends...

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Don't piddle on Judge Judy's feet and tell her it's raining. Because "Stupid" isn't written across her forehead and because, I guarantee you, if you live to be 100, you'll never be as smart as she is today.

These are just some of the ripe put-downs and fabulous Judyisms that she uses to strip away any foolish litigant's attempts at getting one over on her. She’s a tenacious, truth-seeking rottweiler, fixing defendants with a gimlet gaze that would make a hard man feel like a schoolboy, and a cocky schoolboy wish he’d never been born.

Her...

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If you're not yet acquainted with this daytime TV jewel, then let me do the honours. Diagnosis Murder is an absurdly cheerful American daytime crime drama starring Dick Van Dyke as Dr Mark Sloan. He's an avuncular physician slash sleuth with a silky white side-parting you could ski down.

Van Dyke stars alongside his real-life son Barry who, conveniently, plays his cop son, Steve Sloan. In each episode the Sloans happen upon a death. Could this be foul play, they ask? It always is. It's a neat, if nepotistic, set-up.

Diagnosis Murder became a BBC1 daytime staple...

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Dramas about ancient Rome are often guilty of playing up the bloodthirstier aspects of life back then, and the joint BBC/HBO production Rome is certainly no exception. But then I suppose if we viewers wanted to know about Roman technological advances and cultural nuances, we'd be tuning in to Adam Hart-Davis instead.

This historical drama has more corpses per episode than your average crime series. And the ever gorier methods of dispatch make it an ideal substitute for any CSI fan experiencing withdrawal symptoms from their favourite show.

Rome purports to teach viewers about the fascinating historical and...

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Had enough of being an identical twin? Need a new face to escape the police? Or simply want your dead lover's ashes added to your breast implants? Then you need Nip/Tuck's McNamara and Troy.

In the glamorous, wealthy world of South Beach, Miami, plastic surgery is the answer to every problem, and surgeons Sean McNamara and Christian Troy are a cut above the rest.

Their prowess isn't limited to the operating theatre either. Over four series, married man Sean has had sexual relations with a patient, a porn star, his son's nanny and one of Santa's elves.

And...

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In these darks days of international tensions, wars, dispute and espionage, few common languages remain. One that does, though, is great pop music; a unifying force for good from the Beatles to Britney Spears and from Janis Joplin to Justin Timberlake. If only some of it could find its way into the Eurovision Song Contest.

Unfortunately, one of the few occasions when the countries of our continent come together doesn't allow a little thing like quality to get in the way. This, however, matters not. We don't watch Eurovision to be blown away by stunning compositions - that...

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As I watched this year's troupe of sacrificial lambs giddily toddle their way into the eighth Big Brother house, I took some time out from wondering how many of them were taught the art of make-up application at clown school to consider just how much of my life the greatest pop cultural phenomenon of our time has eaten up…like a rabid Doberman of meaningless celebrity chewing away at the ticking clock of my existence.

And then I stopped. I stopped because I was scared of the truth. Scared to admit that only last week my flatmate and I...

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What use a British summer without Wimbledon? More than any other event in the calendar, this tennis favourite sums up everything good and bad about middle England, cramming it into a two-week-long sporting garden fête. The strawberries. The flag waving. The freshly cut triangular sandwiches. The intense anticipation of glory shafted by the crushing disappointment of cruel defeat.

Yes, everything about Wimbledon is England through and through. Except for the winners, they're normally American. Or Swiss.

But it matters not - we don't need to win to enjoy ourselves. We're happy, nay giddy, just to take part and...

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I never really used to watch this show much, even though I think "confused hippie/part troll" Bill Bailey's a comedy legend. The problem was the presenter Mark Lamarr. He was just too annoying.

Dubbed the "cheeky cockney 1950s throwback" by Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer, as far as I could see he was more of a self-obsessed, cheeky, cocky prat. He had an infuriating way of interrupting guests when they were humming songs for fellow contestants to identify. It was just plain irritating.

But now there's a new kid on the block. You may recognise him from Channel...

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It's a question so commonly asked that you should already have a pre-ordained answer filed somewhere in the forefront of your lobes ready to pull out at a moment's notice. Which superpower would you most like to have?

Me, I'd like to be able to leap rooftop to rooftop with amplified strength and dexterity - like Spiderman but without all the sticky web nonsense. You?

In fact, given the fascination we hold for superhuman abilities, the bigger question is: why wasn't Heroes made before now? In television terms it's an open goal for ratings success. A series...

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Football is an ever-changing world.

In the 1960s it was rattles, England, Bobby Moore, crap wages. In the 1970s we had bubble perms, slow-motion replays, communal baths. The 1980s was all tight shorts, hooliganism and unforgettable mullets. And the 1990s saw Richard "Hairy Hands" Keys on Sky, Ron Manager's Jumpers for Goalposts, and Baddiel and Skinner's Three Lions.

Now, in 2007, we have WAGs (heaven help us), diving and Roman Abramovich's yachtfuls of cash. But one thing has remained constant: Match of the Day.

Saturday night, 10:30pm-ish, there's Gary Lineker with his trademark cheeky schoolboy...

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Ah, the luxury hotel: a world unto itself where anything is possible and theoretically available. Of course, the reality of luxury hotels isn't like that at all, and nor is the delightfully unhinged Hotel Babylon.

You might think a series starring Max Beesley and Tamzin Outhwaite isn't necessarily the most appetising recipe for scrumptious television. You might well be wrong.

Tamzin is a revelation as Rebecca Mitchell, the exceedingly glamorous, exceedingly repressed hotel manager, while the unnervingly handsome Beesley as her deputy, Charlie Edwards, is the sort of cheeky chappie you end up rooting for, and not...

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