Radio Times

In Radio Times magazine I recently foreswore The X Factor on the grounds that if I took just one hit, I would be hooked. You know what I'm going to say next.

Largely because I couldn't be bothered to switch channels after a particularly bracing You've Been Framed, which featured many delicious and painful-looking mishaps involving skateboarders (always my favourites), I drifted into The X Factor, girded by a nice bottle of prosecco.

Of course, that's it. I might as well be chained to the immersion heater every Saturday night from now until...

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Watching the Olympics Opening Ceremony (8 August BBC1), it was hard not to be overawed. It was so spectacular, on such an epic scale and so precisely drilled, you couldn't help thinking, "Crikey, London will never match this in 2012."

Then, a few days later, came the letdown. It turned out great chunks of it were faked. The most breathtaking part of the ceremony had been when the giant-sized footprints formed by fireworks marched across the city towards the Bird's Nest stadium. What a genius idea! What a spectacle! Except it emerged that Chinese TV had...

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I try to remain aloof from New Tricks (Mondays BBC1), mainly because that infuriatingly jaunty theme tune with its in-built chortle drives me mad. It has lazy lyrics ("It's all right, it's OK/Listen to what I say") and you can just imagine Dennis Waterman (he sings it, of course) clicking his fingers during the recording.

But I know when I'm beaten. New Tricks is a tank, a great big turreted panzer of a television series that gets you in its sights then pins you up against a wall. It's a beast that brings in audiences...

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I've never thought The Archers does love very well. Or rather, it tends to approach love in a kind of Henry James, Portrait of a Lady-type way: very delicately, with lacy hankies and barely a hint of ankle. It's never really been able to capture rip-roaring, wallpaper-stripping, bedhead-thumping, proper love.

It tried with Ruth and Sam, but I never, for one moment, believed all of that panting in the cowshed. No, that was never love, even though Ruth succumbed to the horrors of the A40 Oxford ring road to spend a mucky weekend with Sam.

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Listening to writer Simon Beaufoy telling a Radio 4 arts programme that his global-warming drama Burn Up (23/25 July BBC2) was as rock-solidly realistic and as super-fantastic as it's possible to get (I paraphrase Mr B here), I decided I'd better watch it again. Obviously, I'd missed something when I sat down with the preview DVD and decided that watching Burn Up was like being harangued by earnest sixth-formers about how the world is going to end right now and it's all my fault.

But it turns out that I hadn't missed anything after all....

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For several years Grey's Anatomy (Thursdays, Five) has been the most powerfully emetic series on television. But stand back, get out the hoses and prepare to sluice yourselves down, because Private Practice (Tuesdays Living) is here.

Private Practice is a Grey's Anatomy spin-off. Oh joy! Oh happy day! Just what the world needs, yet another thundering piece of soul-sucking tosh. Actually, I like Grey's Anatomy, but not in any way that makes me feel proud.

Grey's, centred on a group of trainee medics in a Seattle teaching hospital, has a certain...

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Has there ever been such a classic sporting event with such feeble commentary? More than 12 million people were gripped by the climax of the men's Wimbledon final (6 July, BBC1), one of the best tennis matches ever played. But all commentators Andrew Castle and Tim Henman could manage, when they bothered to speak at all, was the occasional limp platitude or hesitant aside.

As one exquisite rally followed another we got revelatory insights from Castle along the lines of "This is top tennis now," or "You have to take your hat off to Federer." Or...

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David Butcher on the dangers of indigestion from binge surfing.

The red button was a gift watching Glastonbury (BBC3), where TV coverage struggled, inevitably, to do justice to all the acts on the bill. Touch the magic button and you could take your pick from five bands at once or, even better, flit between them.

It's wonderful to have that choice, but hard to resist it, like one of those all-you-can-eat buffets where you end up piling flavours on top of each other because you don't want to miss a treat. At one stage I...

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