Radio Times

The new series started last night with a prestigious move to BBC1 and a one-and-a-half-hour opening slot. It was like MasterChef: The Movie! Surely 3-D can't be far off, with Gregg's pudding-laden spoon bursting out of the screen at us before disappearing up to the hilt into his cavernous gob (you wouldn't have thought someone could have a trademark spoon move, but judge Gregg Wallace has).

Three groups of contestants were herded through the initial rounds - including the professional kitchen test - so fast you hardly had time to digest it. Have the producers...

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Limmy's Show is a sketch show written and directed by Brian Limond. Unlike every other current sketch show I can think of, there's no list of co-writers at the end. It's all Limmy. Limmy breaks out of the action to welcome us at the start, and to say goodbye at the end, before staring us out all through the credits.

In between is whatever's recently seeped out of his brain. Sometimes it can be fairly traditional characters, such as embittered ex-junkie Jacqueline, or Mr Mulvaney, the smooth executive with a penchant for minor crime and disorder. ...

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After 30 years of raising the tone of Sunday nights, The South Bank Show is going south. Monday 28 December's programme will be its last.

Will we miss it? The superb recent profile of poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy (6 December) suggested we will. Duffy is one of the few current writers you could safely bet will be read in 50 years' time and the programme did a great job of showing why. And left you wanting more.

Good arts programmes do that. They plant the urge to run out and visit a gallery,...

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I bet girls of all ages - little 'uns and young teens - love Miranda (BBC1, Mondays), and not just because its heroine, played by writer/actor/comic Miranda Hart, is so readily identifiable as a socially inept, galumphing owner of a joke shop whose lack of guile leads her into frequently cringe-making situations.

There's something innocent about Miranda, despite a handful of risqué jokes. There was a running gag in the first episode about a consignment of chocolate penises, which some male comics would have killed stone dead with either smut or depravity. Yet in Miranda...

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Whatever Gordon Ramsay is on, I want some. The man is unstoppable. Throw anything at him (tabloid scandal, near bankruptcy, flambéed TV ratings) and he keeps on going regardless, a bristling comet of nervous energy.

In Channel 4's The F Word's current incarnation - now called Gordon Ramsay's F Word in case it slips our minds who the presenter is - he directs his febrile passion at small-town chefs competing to please the diners. "I want these dishes looking - yes? - perfect, yeah?" he urged cooks from two local French restaurants, slapping one hand with...

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When Joan Collins first met her victims in ITV1's one-off makeover show Joan Does Glamour (13 October), there was a moment when she worried they might not recognise her. But honestly, how could they not?

Her Joan Collinsness shines from every powdered pore, it radiates from every thread of her big cream trouser suits and swirly silk blouses. She's spent decades ensuring she looks more and more glowingly like herself. Now she has decided she wants the rest of Britain looking like her, too.

Hence the makeover show, where she set out to bring "the...

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It's impossible to resist Harper's Island, the US murder-mystery series (Sundays BBC3, BBC HD). Short of pitching my tent on a mountain and refusing to come down until it's over, I've tried everything, even sitting with my back to the telly while reading an improving book (Ulysses last week). But nothing works and I've always cracked by the end of the opening credits.

Because Harper's Island is brilliant. It's as shallow as a drained swimming pool and has shamelessly borrowed every convention and set-up in the known horror/slasher film and TV-crime universe. It's packed with cheap...

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There are three levels of MasterChef: Celebrity, where school dinners will usually do; the main series, where "cooking doesn't get any tougher"; and the Professionals, where the cooking, um, gets even tougher.

Then again, you wouldn't have known you were watching professional cooks in Monday's series opener. Asked to spatchcock a poussin (a phrase I can't help thinking sounds vaguely rude), one contestant apparently heard "in the style of Jack the Ripper" because he slashed the tiny bird to pieces, stopping just short of slinging its guts over its shoulder.

It was no...

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The Holby City star tells us what's taking her fancy - and what's not - on TV at the moment.

At the top of my list is Waking the Dead. The stories are excellent and not too predictable, which is always refreshing. I was particularly keen to watch this series because my friend Sharon Maughan, who played my mum in Holby City, was in the first episode. Not only did she have to work with her husband, Trevor Eve, but she played twins - it can be tough enough playing one character! I would love to be...

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For anyone who followed Katie Price and Peter Andre's ITV2 reality series, with its laboured sexual innuendos, shallowness and naked materialism, our worlds made a little less sense when the couple split up. The final sequence of Katie and Peter: The Last Chapter earlier this year showed a solicitous Andre help a limping, injured Price over the finishing line of the London Marathon. Then - nothing. Fade to black. All over.

But ITV2 knows when it's on to a good thing and has neatly exploited the split with an Andre special and a six-part Price series,...

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I've never been a fan of The Street. I've always thought it was aimed at armchair poverty tourists; people in velvet slippers who peer through their expensive spectacles at The Street's gallery of ill-used northerners shouting at one another in public. As our tourist reaches for a sunblushed tomato, he or she can be heard to murmur: "What ghastly people, how lucky we are not to live somewhere so horrid."

It's The Street's queasy mixture of the tough and the saccharine that I've never been able to get over, and the fact that its endings are always...

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First, a confession. For all its faults, I love Top Gear. Always have. So what I'm about to say comes from a caring place.

It's losing it. It has peaked. It has become the TV equivalent of the Royal Bank of Scotland a few years ago - swaggeringly successful around the world, headed by cocky men, everyone riding the crest of a big wave. But riding for a fall.

At its best it's still sublime TV, but at its worst it's embarrassing. Much of the latest series felt laboured, forever trying not to sound...

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Children's television has become a huge part of my life once again, now that I have my own family. My Sky+ planner is continually clogged up with episodes of Balamory, The Wiggles and Timothy Goes to School (it's like Little House on the Prairie with animals).

In recent years, thanks to DVD, I've been able to revisit and watch some of my favourite children's programmes again. I've been delighted to find the successful ones still manage to capture the imagination of my own children. Classics like Jamie and the Magic Torch (the boy clearly suffered from insomnia),...

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In 1996, documentary-maker Jane Treays made Painted Babies, a film following two little girls from different backgrounds as they competed in the highly competitive Miss Southern Charm baby beauty pageant in Georgia, USA.

Alisa Pomeray did much the same thing with Baby Beauty Queens (20 July, BBC3) though her subjects were closer to home. Madison and Tyla, both nine, and Sasha, seven, were competing in Mini Miss UK, the first British child beauty pageant.

There was no analysis, so we were left to make up our own minds about why any mother would want her young daughter...

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