I missed the first couple of outings of this new sitcom on E4, and having watched it last night, I’m glad I did.

On paper, it should be good; Ashley Jensen’s in it, as is Jenna Elfman – the ditzy blonde from Dharma and Greg – but not even their comedic skills could drag this woefully obvious sitcom out of the realms of Just Plain Bad.

Unsurprisingly, US network CBS canned it fairly abruptly after viewing figures dropped rapidly off the scale. So if you are slightly deranged and actually like the show, don’t expect to see it through to its natural conclusion because it was euthanised before season two could be born. Read more & comment »

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 »

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 »

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 »

What an absolutely epic episode this was, and with the end now so tantalisingly/terrifyingly close, we’re getting answers…

That said though, I suspect some issues are going to remain a mystery. For instance, just who, or what, is ‘mother’ and where’s she from?

Is she some kind of murdering Madonna type or what?! But religious figures through history have been pretty violent sorts often, so maybe Lost is suggesting that God is in fact a woman – I’d always suspected as much – and ‘Mother’ is She?

Well, let’s take a look at what we now know after the jump… Read more & comment »

I can’t believe we’re so near the end now! It’s quite scary actually; what’s life going to be like post-Lost?!

However, while it’s still here, there’s plenty of theorising to be done, and we did get a few answers last night!

For instance, we know now that Fake Locke – who we assume is the Man In Black – did indeed appear to Jack as his dad Christian, in order, apparently, to guide an Island-newbie Jack to where the water was at.

So I think it’s fair to assume that all the ‘hallucinations’ there’ve been – such as Kate seeing her horse in the middle of the jungle – are down to Fake Locke… Read more & comment »

This was, yet again, an utterly awesome episode! And things are starting to become a tad clearer as the fabric of time and reality wears thin in Sidestep world, where the Losties that we’ve got to see living there are inextricably drawn together, and memories of their alternate lives on the Island are seeping in…

But as ever, for as many questions we received answers to, there were yet more questions to be answered.

However we do now know that the whispers in the jungle – that have been an integral part of the show from the get go – are the souls of dead people in limbo… Read more & comment »

I was very pleasantly surprised by this latest US import – made by the Fox network. I’d thought it was going to be dross, because a) based on the synopsis of the show, it seemed utterly unbelievable and b) it’s on the Sci-Fi channel, and let’s face it, that is a notorious laugh-at-not-with channel.

However, my husband insisted on watching it because he thought it was going to be sci-fi, not unreasonably given the channel it’s on, but the only thing sci-fi-ish is that it seems to be set in the future.

Other than that, it’s basically an action thriller… Read more & comment »