Regular readers of Primetime will perhaps know that I’m a sucker for Christmas cookery shows; there’s a bit of Delia, Nigella, Jamie et al in my Christmas dinner every year, but I have to say, nothing Heston offered up for his Christmas feast will be appearing on my dinner table…

At least, I hope not, given that two of his feature dishes included whale spew and a mouse. I could most definitely get through the whole of Christmas without encountering either.

Heston had to really search out his whale vomit – officially called ambergris – but he eventually got some from a dealer in France. This of course conjured up a mental skit of Heston sloping off down a French alley, meeting a shady man and asking if he could score him an eighth of spew. Apparently, the whale vomit is very expensive, but we didn’t get to hear how expensive. I can’t believe there’s even a market for something so gross. Read more & comment »

When I first tuned into this new series, I thought it was probably going to be a Jeremy Kyle-esque affair, but fortunately, the very pleasant country house the estranged family assembled in didn’t really scream ‘Chavs Welcome’ so that was a relief.

And the members of the Minchew family – who hadn’t been on speaking terms for donkey’s years and weren’t at all chavvy – assembled with an air of apprehension that was almost palpable. But quite why they decided to have a camera crew witnessing the opening of cans of worms, and cats let out of long overdue bags is a bit of a mystery.

As I said, the family haven’t had much, if anything, to do with each other for a long time, but one of the eight siblings – same mum, a total of three different dads – Stewart, wanted his brothers and sisters to get together to do some hatchet burying. And unlike Jeremy Kyle’s clientele, not in each other’s heads. Read more & comment »

As ever, Unreported World brought us a story that defied belief in this – supposedly – enlightened age where human rights and equality should be a given.

They are not, and Aidan Hartley, who looks more like he should be presenting University Challenge or something similarly gentle, ventured yet again into a largely ignored corner of the world where thousands are living in the worst kinds of squalor, poverty, and are treated no better than cattle.

And what makes it infinitely worse is that it’s these peoples own government employees who are responsible for using them as currency. In the same way other governments might trade in bullion, in Malaysia, humans are a saleable commodity. Read more & comment »

I’ve always hated wasps; they’re useless critters and sure enough, as if I needed more reason to dislike them, it was a spawn of Satan wasp that caused the Collision.

But I suppose to give the wasp its due, it also caused love among the pile up. Mind you, one of those love affairs would’ve meant a bloke leaving his wife… mmm, every silver lining has a cloud eh?

I must say, it was a factor that took me a tad by surprise in a drama that had been filled with intrigue and what-ifs, but the wasp did in fact make its presence known in the very first episode, so the clue was there, we just had to be able to absorb seemingly useless trivia.

The scene in which the waitress tried to kill it didn’t seem especially relevant at the time but of course, with hindsight, if she’d swatted it, none of what happened would’ve happened. It’s all very interesting and chaos theory, which for me, added to the general excellence of the drama. Read more & comment »

I don’t know how I’ve managed to miss the previous series of The Thick of It, but I’ve employed someone to kick me up the backside for it. Just twice a day – it’s a part time position – but enough to remind me that TV critics need to be more on the ball.

However, having now watched the opener of the new series on Saturday night, the DVDs of episodes gone will be on my Christmas list.

And perhaps it’s not the worst thing in the world that I came at it with ‘new’ eyes because of course that way, I can’t mourn the passing of some of the characters but can celebrate the introduction of Nicola Murray – giftedly played by Rebecca Front. Read more & comment »

Coming as it does, so close to the anniversary of 9/11, Oliver Stone’s film – shown last night on Channel 4 – was sure to evoke a plethora of memories, and it didn’t disappoint in that regard.

The attacks on the World Trade Centers are still vividly etched in the minds of those of us who watched the horrendous events unfolding on TV, but what this film did was to tell the story from the point of view of those most directly involved, including of course, the two Port Authority police officers who were trapped in the rubble and around whom the majority of the film centred. Read more & comment »

I’m so glad that Saturday night TV is picking up. Mind you, after the god-awful summer schedules for Saturday, it doesn’t take much.

That said, Walk On The Wild Side and The Cube both make excellent half-hour-each diversionary telly, and both are brilliant in their own way.

This weekend is the first time I’ve seen Walk On The Wild Side and having seen it, I’m going to catch-up on the previous episodes on iPlayer. In case you’ve never seen it, the concept uses footage of animals and Jason Manford – and a whole host of other folks – do voiceovers to provide very amusing ‘what they might be saying’ stuff. Read more & comment »

This week’s episode of Rock ‘n’ Roll Hotel was the last, and I miss it already. I might have to go and stay in Sanctum for a night or two just to see what’s going on there now the cameras have left.

But it was, as ever, a nail biter in as much as deadlines were yet again looming – not to mention paying guests – and the hotel was far from finished… again.

But, refusing to be daunted by the enormity of the crisis, Mark carried on making preparations for when – and at that point, if – the hotel opened, such as hiring a manager. Read more & comment »

This week’s episode was every bit as good as last week’s, if not better in fact. One of the major high points for me was a brief appearance by Huey Morgan from Fun Lovin’ Criminals, with whom I’d happily get whacked on Scooby snacks any old time. However, I digress…

The saga of the Hotel That May Never Be Finished continued and as Christmas faded away and the New Year dawned, the hotel doors were somewhere in Europe, as were the beds, and Mick, second in command of the project, looked like he wished he was likewise.

Kevin on the other hand, the overall boss of the building work, was cooler than a polar bear’s dangly bits, despite the fact that the hotel was still nowhere near completion and Mark was on the brink of tearing someone a new one. And I doubt any court in the land would’ve convicted him if they’d seen for themselves the agony of trying to achieve even one deadline… Read more & comment »

When I started watching this BBC show on Friday, I thought it was going to be something like Grand Designs infused with elements of The Apprentice; big ideas and much hiring, firing and yelling. And it was all those things, but there was something else – some magical component that made me actually interested to see how this all works out…

And I suspect it’s because of the charisma of the man at the centre of the whole shebang, Mark Fuller.

The programme follows Mark as he oversees – and in large part, finances – the building of a luxury hotel in London’s Soho. It’s to be a rock ‘n’ roll themed hotel for which no expense is to be spared in kitting every nook and cranny out with luxury and contemporary fixtures and fittings. And in Friday’s first outing of this show, the build was months behind schedule and the only light at the end of the tunnel was in fact a financial oncoming train… Read more & comment »

This man is, I suspect, clinically insane. I’ve seen bits of episodes of Born Survivor in passing before but I’ve never watch one all the way through – I don’t know why – so on Saturday, I decided to sit down and check him out on Channel 4.

Bear is a former Special Forces soldier and in this series of daring/lunatic shows, he demonstrates how to survive “in the world’s most extreme environments”. For this episode, Bear ventured into the unforgiving and decidedly human unfriendly forests of Transylvania, where he negotiated steep ravines, cavernous underground water systems and encountered a potentially deadly brown bear. Read more & comment »