It’s been no secret that we love Only Connect, but if you don’t read the forum then you might not realise that we’ve been promising to put a team together ever since series one. The fourth series starts tonight, and I can reveal that we do indeed have a team taking part later in this series (although we’re called ‘Bloggers’ rather than anything lowculture-related). I can’t tell you how we did and I’m not sure when our episode airs, but you can’t miss us – we’re the ones who come across like rabbits trapped in headlights throughout.

We did have a lot of fun making the show, though, and everyone involved in it was lovely. I can reveal (not exclusively, as Dame VC already revealed it on her blog and Twitter) that there is a controversial SHOCK! TWIST! in the new series.

Tonight’s openers see the Epicureans (pictured) vs the Courtiers. I met the Epicureans in the hotel bar, and their captain is married to one of the Crossworders (aka the current OC champion of champions) and they left me to go and swot. So I know who my money’s on.

The LC chatroom will presumably be open for business throughout, and we’re promised new connecting walls on the BBC website this week as well.

Big Brother finals (save BBs 1, 2 and 5) always have an air of the underwhelming about them, and BB11′s final looks to be no exception, with the majority of interesting and/or likeable housemates having walked or been booted already. We’re left with the likelihood of a Josie victory, which would probably be preferable to a Mario/Andrew/Dave victory (I am assuming a JJ victory is as likely as Elizabeth winning BB2 would have been). In all honesty, though I have found this series pretty entertaining, with a great-looking house and some genius tasks, I would still rather Titan or Bob Righter took the crown than any of the actual housemates.

Presumably knowing that the series finale itself was likely to be a bit underwhelming, Channel 4 have decided to use the night to launch Ultimate Big Brother. No idea why it’s on a Tuesday rather than a Friday or even a Wednesday but there we go.

On the forum I admitted that the purist within me would like the 11 winners (or 18 if you count celebrities. I am not counting Teen BB or Celebrity Hijack because, let’s face it, no-one else will) to do this show, purely as a best-of-the-best thing, but it was rightly pointed out to me that the winners have either been nice but dull (Rachel, Cameron), unlikely to appear (Kate, Mark Owen) or utterly vile (Anthony) so it might not be that exciting to watch. Instead we’re promised some of the most memorable housemates – how many is unclear – and rumours suggest this will definitely include celebrity housemates. I am hoping there’ll be at least one from each series but I think that might be doubtful simply given the number of contestants and the chances that they’ll want at least a couple from some series (2 and 7 spring to mind).

Aisleyne and Nasty Nick have already ruled themselves out of the show but it will be interesting to see if they resort to Nikki Grahame, Brian Belo and Charley Uchea or whether they’ve gone for some more interesting picks. Also, Chris on the forum was speculating that in every ‘Ultimate’ reality show, someone undoes all their previous goodwill in their reappearance, so place your bets now on who that might be.

The show runs for the best part of three hours tonight, so make sure the comfy seat you use for The X Factor is nearby.

Who have been your best and worst BB contestants over the years? Comment here or in the forums and we’ll do a best and worst piece sometime in the run-up to the UBB Final.

If you don’t care about the final of BB11 and want something to watch before Ultimate Big Brother kicks off tonight, then I recommend The Great British Bake-Off (heck, I recommend it even if you are watching the BB final).  Mel and Sue are finally reunited, though are separated on-screen too often much to many people’s chagrin.  Hopefully this will be the vehicle to launch their double presenting act again – as long as that doesn’t mean the Giles’n'Sue double act stops.  Their upcoming Good Life show looks amazing.

Anyway this show is essentially Masterchef but with just cakes, and without Gregg Wallace saying ‘corrrrrr’ every ten seconds, i.e. a very splendid idea indeed.  Famous cake lady Mary Berry and some other bloke were judging last week as the contestants started to be eliminated through a series of baking-related tasks.  There were tears!  There were disasters!  There was no Christine Hamilton (robbed), but you can’t have everything.

Normally at this time of year, we’d make a crack about dead parents, but given that the drama has been about the judges, with Dannii having a baby and Cheryl having malaria, I reckon the participants are going to have to up their game this year, and we might well see some dead spouse and dead children sob stories emerge.

The early audition shows are going to be somewhat bizarre this year with no Dannii or Cheryl until judges’ houses stage and a parade of guest judges, including Katy Perry, Geri Halliwell, Pixie Lott (for reasons no-one can quite fathom) and the Second Coming AKA Nicole Scherzinger, who is being hyped so hard by the show’s publicity machine that she’s clearly being lined up for the American series if not as a standby for Cheryl or Dannii in case either of them has to miss next year. The guest judge gimmick is unlikely to detract from the rubbishness of the auditions-in-front-of-an-audience gimmick, which is back despite everyone hating it last year. Hopefully it’ll go the way of having 14 and 15 year olds in the show and be quietly dropped after two series with no fanfare.

Other changes of note this year include the ‘overs’ category being shifted to 28+ and the arrival of Konnie Huq as the presenter of the Xtra Factor. Sadly, I doubt her fiancé, Lord Charlton of Brooker, comes as part of the package, but we can dream. Oh, and if I might give a little plug, some LC members will be recapping the whole shebang each week over on The Bitch Factor, where we will no doubt get progressively drunker each week.

Fifteen years ago (can it really be that long?!) the charts were dominated by the sound of Britpop. The sumer of 1995 was one of the best summers for British music in recent memory, with the release of singles including ‘Alright’ by Supergrass, ‘Common People’ by Pulp, and ‘Wake up Boo’ by the Boo Radleys.

However, the summer was dominated by the chart battle between two of the worst singles ever released (‘Country House’ and ‘Roll With It’) by the two biggest bands of the day – Blur and Oasis. Blur won the single battle, Oasis the album battle, and over time, both groups went on to shell shedloads of material, so the ‘war’ was essentially immaterial.

BBC Four is celebrating the era tonight, with its Blur night (and much as I like Oasis, I can’t see the Gallaghers getting their own BBC Four theme evening any time soon) that features a repeat of the excellent, albeit too short, documentary The Britpop Story at 9.15pm (though I wish they’d repeat the ‘Britpop Now’ musical showcase of summer 1995 sometime. Memories…), then the main event, the premiere of Blur documentary film No Distance Left to Run, followed by footage of the band at last year’s Glastonbury.

Whether you prefer the melancholy of ‘No Distance Left to Run’ and ‘End of a Century’, the punk-pop of ‘Popscene’ and ‘Song 2′ or the all out chirpyness of ‘Girls and Boys’ and ‘Parklife’, nearly everyone likes something Blur have done, and this is a great chance to learn more about the band behind the hits as well as to wallow in a bit of nostalgia.

As Channel 4 gets ready for the final series of Big Brother, it’s trying to wring as much as it can out of the franchise with a handful of spin-off shows. Earlier this week we had a behind the scenes programme, and tonight there’s a fun bit of fluff (first shown on E4) as Davina dishes out a bunch of awards such as ‘best bad boy’, ‘best bitch’ and so on.

There is something a little odd here in places as people and moments Davina has spoken of in interviews many times as being her favourites are pushed aside in honour of the producers’ favourites and those who were actually available on the day. Nevertheless, it’s a nice bit of fun seeing some of the old clips again, and we get to see the winner of the viewers’ vote for best series, a choice I found a little surprising.

Of course, all these awards could be rendered null and void if the new series proves to be the best yet. The photos of the 80 hopefuls don’t necessarily inspire confidence, but then sometimes the most interesting seeming housemates turn out to be awful, dull or awfully dull (Kathreya, Bea) and some of the more unlikely candidates (Sophie, Kate) turn out to be surprise winners.

These are troubling times, what with a potential double-dip recession (not as fun as it sounds, more’s the pity), a Government better suited to a Five reality show, and aliens on Hollyoaks. Seriously now, you’ve made your point, come back Bryan Kirkwood! All is forgiven. Even Rapebot Katy. It is in these times of trouble we look for heroes to lead us through the hell. The French had Joan of Arc, the Americans have Oprah, and we have The Celebrity Lesbian Saviour of retail Mary Portas!

It may come as a surprise to you that Mary Queen of Shops is back. It certainly did to me, mainly because in September 2009 Mary apparently signed a two-year deal with Channel 4 and was to disappear from the BBC never to be seen again. I have no idea what has happened with that, and frankly I don’t care because it means that tonight we see Mary sparring with backwards bakery owner Angela Maher who doesn’t take to Mary or her advice, and for the last part of the show barricades herself upstairs with her Fondant Fancies and refuses to come out. Fantastic!

Fresh from being all over Charlie Brooker’s programmes last week, Victoria Coren is back with one of her own tonight as Radio 4′s Heresy returns.

The premise is gloriously simple – each week a panel of famous names (this week: Grayson Perry, Rufus Hound and Julia Hartley-Brewer) debate three pieces of received wisdom (Edinburgh isn’t what it used to be, It doesn’t get any tougher than this, that kind of thing). It’s usually a very enjoyable way to pass half an hour, not least as it gets you thinking about your own heresy categories (one LC reader even won a special prize last year for suggesting some on Victoria’s blog).

He started out writing about TV for fun, went on to write about it for money, and now makes lots of TV shows and wins awards for them. Some day Charlie Brooker will be responsible for running all of British television, a day I look forward to as all telly will presumably be awesome, albeit quite angry. In the meantime Lord Charlton’s diverting himself to radio for a bit, and a new celebrity quiz show on Radio 4, So Wrong It’s Right.

A show that celebrates failure, three celebrity guests compete to come up with the worst experience, idea, or answer to any given question. As with You Have Been Watching, the actual quiz show element’s pretty perfunctory, and it’s all just an excuse for Brooker & friends to spend half an hour grumbling entertainingly. I doubt we’ll get another mental image quite as disturbing and unlikely as Victoria Coren describing her time on a Club 18-30 holiday last week (you may still just have time to catch Episode 1 on iPlayer) but tonight Lee Mack, Josie Long and Tom Basden will be trying to impress Charlie with some horrors of their own.

We’ve had to do without hearing the words “110%” for an unusually long time, since it was decided that in the leadup to an election, letting Alan Sugar on the telly would be enough to sway the whole nation’s vote (now if it was Margaret being suspected of such superpowers, I could understand it.) There’s still no word on when we can expect the next proper series of The Apprentice so in the meantime this’ll have to do: A six-part series in which a bunch of 16 and 17-year-olds who can taste success in their spit, compete to become the Junior Apprentice. So not actually that much younger than some of the contestants on the regular show (Rocky was only about nine, wasn’t he?) and the previews suggest there’s a junior version of Lucinda Ledgerwood in the mix, so there should be at least some of the unhinged behaviour we’ve come to expect as they attempt to sell 23 varieties of cheese.

While Sralan (Ldalan? Ldsugar? It just doesn’t seem right somehow) and Nick Hewer are still present and correct, queen of the withering look Margaret Mountford has sadly left the show to spend more time with her papyrus (this is not a euphemism) so this spin-off is also our first chance to see how her replacement Karren Brady fares. Now, now, we should give her a fair chance and not pre-judge her just because she clearly won’t be as good as La Mountford and we’re all going to hate her.