Fame is a fickle mistress; one minute, you’re royalty, the next you’re so far down the wanted list, you barely rank as a Z lister.

This is the fate of Kerry Katona, and in a miserably desperate bid to claw back some modicum of fame, she had filmmaker Lynn Alleway document her day-to-day life, for free.

Kerry didn’t receive a penny – or so we’re led to believe – for allowing Alleway access to her intimate moments and private life, and it’s a decision that she now regrets, and justifiably so.

‘Celebrities’ come from all walks of life, and just because you’re famous, you’re not automatically a good person, nor are you necessarily classy – just look at Jordan for proof of that – but for all the faults Jordan may have, she’s good to her kids. Read more & comment »

Lennon Naked was bundled into the BBC’s schedule as part of their Fatherhood Season. Ordinarily, such ‘seasons’ contain some good apples, some bad, but each relies on the other to bolster the whole…

There was no such bolstering needed for Lennon Naked; it’s a fine piece of work and utterly capable of standing alone. Although of course having seen the film, one can see why Aunty Beeb concluded that patriarchy is a key fundament.

And as I watched the oftentimes desperately sad story of Lennon’s life – his childhood instability and the later abandonment of his own son, copycatting the sins of his own father in that regard – I was pleasantly surprised to find the film provided an unbiased look at the man who became a legend. Read more & comment »

Channel Five’s new cop show, K-Ville, kicked off last night with the pilot episode that was first viewed in the States rather too soon – so some critics opined – after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans.

And Katrina forms the foundation on which this show is built, hence the title, which is short for Katrina Ville, the moniker afforded to New Orleans in the wake of the hurricane.

The concept however, aside from that one ‘twist’, is one that we’ve seen thousands of times before; there’s the good, solid, family man cop and the rogue, kinda-mysterious cop who doesn’t play well with others.

Chuck them together in a hasty partnership and you can expect rule abiding from one, rule breaking from the other, and of course, the obligatory flashbacks and ‘issues’ of which Americans are so enamoured… Read more & comment »

I find it hard to believe that Channel 4 gave this absolute pile of televisual steaming dog poo air time. It really does defy belief.

Even the person providing the narration voiceover clearly can’t stand N-Dubz and thinks they’re a joke, as does any right minded person.

They’re repellent chavs and rather sad wannabes; they wannabe like American gangsters from the ‘hood, but what they are,in actuality, is talentless berks.

Dappy – who thought to call this moron ‘Dappy’ by the way?? – needs Ritalin, and they all, to a man/girl need lessons in… well, anything remotely educational, such as writing, reading, or speaking. Read more & comment »

Of the offerings from BBC3’s comedy store, Mongrels ranks as one of the best, but to be honest, that’s not necessarily saying much.

In case you missed it, it’s a puppet-show “for adults”, which equates to meaning it relies on poor taste jokes and swearing, issued forth from – albeit cleverly crafted – puppets.

There were jokes about Harold Shipman, 9/11 – yes, they went there – and Michael Buble’s testicles, which tried too hard to shock; they didn’t shock, they were just in bad taste. Read more & comment »

Sometimes, there are programmes that come along that you think will be a total yawnfest, but if there’s zilch on elsewhere, you end up watching and being glad you did. This was such a show.

The blurb about it made it sound more like a sociology or humanities lesson, and as regular readers of Primetime will perhaps know, I don’t want my telly to teach me things. If I wanted to learn something, I’d go back to university.

However, though there were without doubt times when the film bordered dangerously on the precipice of becoming a dull history lecture, the moments that dragged it back to the safety of a televisual footpath were the numerous first-hand accounts proffered up about dads. Read more & comment »

I absolutely love Mary Portas; there’s no quarter given, none expected. If they’d just sent Mary into Iraq, the whole war thing would’ve been over before it’d begun.

And innocents abroad – such as the three sisters targeted for Mary’s retail rebirth regime – should run and hide or cower in a cupboard. If only they’d asked me prior to allowing Mary in, I’d have prepped them by sending them on an army basic training course to get lessons in toughening up.

But as it was, Anne, Debbie and Jen didn’t seem to know that Mary Hard As Nails Portas was going to whip them and their shop into shape, whether they like it or not. And I bet they had zero clue that before Mary was done, they’d be posing nude – but for strategically placed vegetables – for their own colander, I mean, calendar. Read more & comment »

The positive nostalgia fest continued on the BBC last night – or rather, early this morning – with this celebratory documentary of 40 years worth of Glastonbury.

And though the actual documentary ran along somewhat tedious lines in its use of the A- Z format, it nonetheless was, like the film about Steve Winwood, a lovely trip into the past.

Music tends to be akin to a strong smell in that a hint of it, that was hitherto long forgotten, can instantly transport you to another time and place. That can be bittersweet, but for me personally, the archive footage was yet again more sweet than bitter. Read more & comment »

Stevie Winwood was a household name when I was in my formative teen years, and a pioneer among many others of the time. But it was arguably Winwood’s innate talent, coupled with his shunning the limelight wherever possible, that made him something of a mystery and a contradiction in terms.

And as this excellent documentary on BBC4 last night showed, Stevie was/is arguably only ever really happy when immersed in the English countryside. Not very rock ‘n roll eh? Yet he’s the embodiment of the words through his writing and multi-instrumentalism.

Filmmaker Paul Bernay took us by the hand and led us back to the formation of seminal band, the Spencer Davis group in the ‘60s, through Traffic and Blind Faith, and back again, and all the while, Steve wrote prodigiously and seemed always to be longing for his cottage in the middle of nowhere. Read more & comment »

4oD is really coming up trumps for me in this World Cup drenched week, and as well as We Live in Public – as reviewed below – Channel 4’s catch up service played a blinder in the form of Gladiators: Back from the Dead.

Complete with rather lavish reconstructions, we were guided through the fascinating – if grisly – find of dozens of skeletons  in York.

The vast majority of those skeletons belonged to young men; far too young to have died of natural causes, even by the standards of their time, which was 2,000 years ago.

How long they’ve lain there, nameless corpses just waiting for their secrets and their lives to be revealed from their resting places under seemingly innocuous Yorkshire soil. And thanks to forensic anthropologist Dr Michael Wysocki, revealed they were, in enthralling detail. Read more & comment »

If, like me, you’re sick to the back teeth of football, you may well be making greater use of catch-up TV services.

And while frantically hunting around for something that didn’t involve the World Cup, I found We Live in Public on 4oD. And I’m so glad I did; what a fascinating film it is!

Made by acclaimed filmmaker Ondi Timorer, the film is about the life of Josh Harris, who’s proclaimed in the film to be “the greatest internet pioneer” of our times. And I’d have to agree that he was ahead of his time.

He was a daring do sort of a bloke, with more than a touch of the nutter about him, but that paid off. In the beginning anyway. But as the film went on, and we saw Harris’s boom and bust story unfold, it turned into rather a sad and somewhat disturbing tale. Read more & comment »

Oh emm gee… will commissioning units everywhere never tire of ‘life swapping’? Just exactly how long are we, the viewing public, going to be subjected to the same formula of programme making, which is, stick total opposites together then sit back and watch?

We’ve had Wife Swap, Life Swap, Ladette to Lady, Tower Block of Commons, How the Other Half Live…

The list is rather depressingly endless, and now we can add this three-parter to the list. However, despite that moan, I’m harbouring a guilty secret, but more on that later…

Peckham Finishing School for Girls was exactly what you would’ve expected it to be, and the ‘twist’? Well, if it can be so described, it was that instead of MPs or celebs, the BBC plonked four privileged girls from the Home Counties onto the mean streets of Peckham for our delectation. Read more & comment »

By way of a foreword to this article, I should say that when the stories about Woods’ infidelities surfaced, I didn’t care who he’d boned. I really didn’t. And I still, some six months later, don’t care.

He’s a golfer, not a President or a world leader of some kind. Nor is he some kind of religious figure head or indeed anything that would – in my opinion – be justification for the kind of furore that his seedy little story warranted.

There are only two salient points to the story in my view, and they are that Woods is a) a man, and b) a famous, wealthy man. Put those two together and you have the perfect spark for the blue touch paper of ‘scandal’. Read more & comment »

Comedian and TV presenter, Stephen Fry, has criticised what he termed the “infantilism” of UK television.

Fry made the comments as he delivered a speech at the Bafta Annual Television Lecture in London, where he also spoke of the “absurdity” of some of TV’s rules and regulations.

He said, “If I wanted to be angry… I would say infantilism’s the problem.

“The number of times I turn on the television and I think ‘Gosh children’s television’s gone on, that’s a really good art documentary…

“Oh my God, it’s nine o’clock in the evening. This is for grown ups?’ It’s just shocking… Read more & comment »

If you enjoy seeing a) snakes and b) dead snakes, then tonight’s Inside Nature’s Giants will be a must-watch for you.

On Channel 4 at 9pm, we’ll see the show’s experts venture into the swamps of the Florida Everglades, where giant Burmese pythons are thriving.

Many have been released into the wild by pet owners or have escaped from reptile breeding centres, and now up to 100,000 are threatening some native species with extinction.

Mark Evans and Joy Reidenberg meet ‘python hunters’ in the Everglades who are attempting to control the pythons’ numbers through a cull, and join reptile expert Jeanette Wyneken to dissect two pythons: a nine-foot male and an enormous 14-foot female… Read more & comment »