Lans of Hope and Paul-y

ANGELA! The Paul O’Grady Show, Channel 4, 5.00pm
For weeks now, the forum has been a-buzz with speculation over when Angela Lansbury would be appearing on The Paul O’Grady Show. Well, the wait is over. Tonight she is one of the guests in the studio, joined with musicals legend Jerry Herman and Kirsty Gallacher, whom I am sure is lovely, but isn’t quite in the same class.

With the recent news that Lansbury has been cast as Miss Marple and with her appearing in a Jerry Herman tribute show next week (hence the double booking) there should be lots for her and Paul to talk about, and maybe she will also please forum user Camden Pirate by revealing there will be a final Murder She Wrote. I can’t confirm whether there is even the remotest possibility of the latter, but heck, it’s worth your while tuning in to find out, isn’t it?

Shrink Rapped

The second series of Shrink Rap has arrived with very little fanfare. Perhaps that’s because of the controversy caused by the one-off special with Chris Langham a few months ago.

For those who haven’t come across this series before, clinical psychologist Pamela Connolly (aka Pamela Stephenson, wife of Billy Connolly and formerly of Not the Nine O’Clock News and other such comedy programmes) spends time talking to a clebrity and unpicking some of the life experiences that made them who they are. It may sound a bit X Factor but it has a more serious bent - reflected by the guests that choose to appear.

This second series perhaps doesn’t quite have the calibre of guests as the first (which featured Stephen Fry, Sarah Ferguson, Robin Williams, David Blunkett amongst others), but they include some very intriguing prospects such as Kathleen Turner and Salman Rushdie (plus Gene Simmons and Tony Curtis, perhaps less exciting). Tonight’s guest is probably the one for lowculture viewers to catch though, as Pamela Connolly meets Joan Rivers.

We love Joan’s wit, but it will be very interesting to see how the more ’serious’ side of her comes across. As all the guests, she has a fair amount of TRUE LIFE TRAUMA to discuss, but we imagine it will probably be more enlightening and moving than one of those ‘boo-hoo books’ you see everywhere (which were so effectively owned in last night’s Gavin and Stacey).

Two’s company

SERIOUS! Looking for Dad, BBC Two, 9.00pm
FRIVOLOUS! The Graham Norton Show, BBC Two, 7.00pm

We thought we’d just take a moment today to celebrate BBC Two. We like all the telly channels in the world, generally (except, at the moment, ITV1 and their refusal to show the full series of Pushing Daisies but we’re sure we’ll get over it in time), but there’s something quite special about BBC Two and the way it has perhaps the most diverse programming line-up of all the channels right now, yet pretty much all its shows manage to feel at home there. No mean feat.

Tonight is a perfect example of the diversity of the channel. At 7.00pm, we have a one-off documentary, Looking for Dad. Let’s overlook the fact that the title was used for a Channel 4 documentary a few years ago and accentuate the positive: it’s a journey of filmmaker Charlie Russell and his brother to try and find out something about their estranged father (WHO IS DEAD. Ahem. Sorry). They use clues from his flat, meet his friends and family and try to discover who he really was. It’s an unusual choice for this timeslot, and if you’re bored of the drugs and incest shenanigans in Hollyoaks and the never-ending wedding saga in EastEnders, this may be worth a shot. It will almost certainly have more heart.

On the opposite end of the spectrum is the return of The Graham Norton Show. Although it is essentially So Graham Norton with fewer vibrator jokes, it still works as a format - partly because Graham can still be funny when he wants to be (the interludes in the group songs in I’d Do Anything not so much), but mainly because most of his guests are good sports who are up for a laugh and thus there tends to be a great rapport between Norton, the guests, the audience and the assorted strange people on the phone or internet. We much prefer this show in short, weekly runs like this to the nightly, years-long marathon that was V Graham Norton, too. Tonight’s guests are Tony Curtis, Kevin Bacon and Robyn. How eclectic. How very BBC Two.

Blame the parents

PARENTAL! ONE Life, BBC One, 10.35pm

This is a curious one. It’s a programme looking what it’s like to be a pop star’s parent. Yet it’s not on Sky One, or ITV1/2, or Five, but in BBC One’s quirky real lives strand, ONE Life. And it’s not on in prime time, either, but late into the evening. We’re not really sure that the whole point of this is, or where it’s going, but it’s a topic that hasn’t really been covered so much by telly, so it may be interesting.

 

The parents here are those of a right rum assortment of pop stars: Courtney Love, Anthony Kiedis, Amy Winehouse (surely the show’s big draw), er, Asher D from So Solid Crew, and, umm, Suggs. Presumably they will be expressing their disgust at their children’s experiments with drugs, drugs, drugs, guns, and er, terrible fishfinger adverts.

Seeing as Anthony Kiedis’ father is renowned for getting him into drink, drugs and women, and Amy Winehouse’s parents are no strangers to the media (they have frequently publicly denounced her behaviour and famously told people not to buy her albums), this could be interesting. But we are really intrigued as to a) how they managed to get Courtney Love’s family here (will Steve Coogan be brought up??) and b) why on earth Suggs’ family are here.

We also get to see lots of baby photos of the stars, including Amy looking like a young Alanis Morissette. Come to think of it, Alanis hasn’t released a record since, ooh, about the time Amy hit it big. Could this programme reveal that they are, in fact, one and the same? And what has Suggs done to poor old Captain Birdseye in order to bag that advertising contract? These are the things we really need to know…

Box of Delights

The life of being a previewer for your favourite website is not easy, you know. Sometimes we look at the next week’s TV listings, full of despair because there is nothing good to talk about that we haven’t already previewed. And yet like buses, the law seems to be that you wait for ages for something exciting to come along, then it all comes along at once. Tonight sees such a ridiculous embarrassment of riches on the box that Steve and Rad needed to collaborate together (in a move that hasn’t been seen since, oooh, Christmas) to get it all in. So get a cup of tea and a biccy and plan your evening with us….

RETURNING! EastEnders, BBC1, 8pm

It’s good to see that Gemma Bissix’s lucrative career of playing scheming bitches called Clare didn’t end when she finally bowed out from Hollyoaks last year (and boy, does the show miss her. It’s never the same without a good villain, and no, Jake Dean certainly does not count), as she reappears tonight in the TV alter ego we all knew before Clare Devine ever set foot in Chester: Clare Bates (née Tyler), in EastEnders on BBC1 at 8.00pm. Having been last seen as a rosy-cheeked schoolgirl heading off to Scotland with adoptive dad Nigel, she makes her entrance tonight in fine style - being thrown out of a car while wearing a skimpy dress and not looking not wholly unlike archetypal soap bitch-with-a-soft-centre Izzy Hoyland. Clare quickly reconnects with Dot, who’s in dire need of a project at the moment, and then sets her sights on Ian, as everyone in the Square eventually does. Seriously, even the gays are going to be after him in a couple of weeks. When will this madness end?

ENDING! Jam and Jerusalem, BBC1, 8:30pm
We know that this series is never going to go down in the comedy annals in the same way that Absolutely Fabulous or The Vicar of Dibley have. However, we still love it, and it’s a darn sight better than recent episodes of French and Saunders. This gentle, warm and still pretty darn funny series ends tonight when we see whether Tash will marry Spike. We’d like to see a Jam and Jerusalem wedding, so let’s hope she says yes, eh?

SINGING! The Choir: Boys Don’t Sing, BBC2, 9pm
We loved The Choir last year and we’re very pleased to see it back. For the uninitiated amongst you, the series featured loveable, geeky and slightly hot choirmaster Gareth Malone (who has a touch of the Tennant about him, we think) in his attempts to transform a bunch of inner-city ‘yoofs’ into a choir to sing at the World Choir Olympics (if only they would integrate that into the ACTUAL Olympics, we would be so into that). This year, he’s trying to repeat the same trick, only the 2008 twist is that it’s an all-boys choir and they’re competing in something at the Albert Hall instead. So there’s a few echoes of The History Boys there, too. Only, we hope, without all the slightly creepy sexual undertones. This is your standard life-affirming fare, but none the worse for it.

JAW-DROPPING! Hey Paula!, ITV2, 10pm
Someone over at ITV2 has clearly broken into our top-secret personal diary, the one where we write our topmost secret telly wishes. While they couldn’t quite see fit to give us “The Paula Abdul and Janice Dickinson Crazy Medicated Bitch Channel”, they’ve done the next best thing, and got hold of Paula’s very own reality show Hey Paula! to play directly after American Idol at 10.00pm. It doesn’t take a genius to guess that the Paula in this show is Idol Paula, with the car-crash level upped by a factor of 20, so it will either be the greatest programme ever or the absolute worst. Possibly it will somehow manage to be both at once, thereby snapping the space-time continuum cleanly in two and killing us all where we stand. But let’s hope not, eh?

COMPETING! Alan Carr’s Celebrity Ding Dong, Channel 4, 10pm
If you’re not a Paula Abdul fan, get the hell out of here and never come back. Sorry, that should read: “why not try Alan Carr’s Celebrity Ding Dong on Channel 4 at 10.00pm instead?” - our mistake. We’ve read an interview with Alan Carr, seen a few trailers and looked at the listings, and yet we’re still not really sure how on earth this show works, except that it pits celebrities versus civilians (no doubt inspired by Liz Hurley’s famous clanger about the vast chasm between the two species) in a series of zany questions. It’s got legs, certainly, but we’ll wait until after the first episode before our final judgement.

REMINISCING! The Law of the Playground, Channel 4, 10:30pm
There was a time at the end of the last decade and the start of this one when you couldn’t turn on your telly without a bunch of talking heads babbling on about the wonders of growing up in the 70s and 80s. Which was fine, because we all know that any conversation between 20 or 30 somethings always turns to the things of our childhood in the end. But there are only so many conversations you can have about all things retro before you get all meta and starthaving retrospectives of the retrospectives and the aforementioned space-time continuum comes and gets us. So what we are trying to say is that we are quite surprised to seeThe Law of the Playground returning for a second series. Perhaps Channel 4 decided it had been long enough without a nostalgia-fest that they could get away with it (or perhaps they were just desperate for some cheap filler whilst they wait for new episodes of Ugly Betty). The usual suspects are here: Justin Lee Collins, Vic Reeves, and, ooh, look who it is! Myleene Klass! Who’da thunk it, eh?

JAMMING! Later…200, BBC2, 11:35pm
The institution that is Later… With Jools Holland returns for a new series, and kicks off with its 200th episode. Although there is often a bit too much boogie-woogie jamming for our liking, the series is always guaranteed to pull off a few corkers from established artsists and is renowned for launching some great talent to boot. Tonight the big draw is a set from Radiohead, but there are other goodies to be had as well, including Cat Power, Dionne Warwick, Mary J Blige and Feist, a booking that will make at least one lowculture user very happy indeed.

So there you have it. Phew. We’re going for a nice lie down now.

Johnny be Good

There really isn’t much happening tonight that we haven’t previewed in recent weeks. So thank goodness, then, for a ‘new series’ (surely it was only a few weeks since the last one finished?) of The Culture Show. We do like this show, which manages to marry lowculture and highculture most successfully, and always teaches us something we didn’t know before.

Lauren Laverne is back hosting, following the shortest maternity leave since Myleene’s, and still shows no signs of reforming Kenickie (for shame). She’s a nice, warm, funny, engaging host for this, even if we do kind of prefer Verity Sharp. Still, as long as the annoying Zina Saro-Wiwa never gets the main gig, we’ll be happy. Mark Kermode also returns, and we are intrigued to see whether his quiff can get even higher.

Tonight’s episode features Sons and Daughters, Toby Young, Simon Pegg, The Coen Brothers, Chris Rock, a little architecture piece and, the key selling point (for us anyway), Johnny Depp AND Tim Burton, who will be talking about Sweeney Todd, a film that has had the forum users squeeing for months.

If you fancy cleansing your brain after The One and Only, then this could be just the ticket. We can pretty much guarantee no terrible Kylie imitators who sing the songs incorrectly will be featured.

Big Fat Last Sunday of the Year

WIZARDRY! JK Rowling: A Year in the Life, ITV1, 7pm

QUIZARDRY! The Big Fat Quiz of the Year, Channel 4, 9pm
We have to say, in terms of books, 2007 was a disappointment. We didn’t much rate the latest by Nick Horby, Alice Sebold or Armistead Maupin and we are still on the waiting list at the library for this year’s Booker winner. Perhaps everyone else was too scared of the competition of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which at the time, felt like an event akin to the second coming. Or at least Kylie Who. Although now the moment has passed it’s easy to forget all the fuss, as it feels so long ago (much like Christmas, really). The book itself created one of the biggest ever sweepy wins on the forums (because there were so many deaths, although not Neville, which we feel a bit cheated by as we were sure he was a dead cert) and a fairly mixed response, although we loved it.

Anyway, in a crowd pleasing move, ITV is giving us a fly on the wall documentary of JK Rowling’s life as she finishes book seven, gets it published, is asked a billion times what she will do next, and outs Dumbledore. We don’t imagine we’ll get to see her reaction to not being made a Dame in the New Year’s Honours, when Jacqueline Wilson was, though. Shame.

Whilst we are mentioning kids’ books (or sort of), a quick nod to The Shadow in the North at 8:55pm on BBC1. Starring Billie Piper, it’s the second adaptation of Philip Pullman’s Sally Lockhart books. But we haven’t read any of them, nor did we watch the first part last year, and a quick trawl of the forums shows no-one else seems to have, either. Still, it’s there if you want it, and we know a few of you love some costume drama action.

The main event of the evening, and the one which will no doubt lead to the last mass drinking session in the chat room of 2007, is the annual Big Fat Quiz of the Year, where the token non-comedian, non-man this year is Lily Allen (we said it at Comic Relief, we’ll say it again, there are plenty of female comedians out there, you know. Give some of them some work!), joining David Mitchell, Jonathan Ross, Rob Brydon, Noel Fielding and Russell Brand (wot no Myleene Klass, John Barrowman or Adrian Chiles?). We loved Noel and Russell on this last year, although they hadn’t been on our screens as non-stop as they have been this year, so it remains to be seen if they are endearing again this time round, or if they’ve become annoying.

Nonetheless, this show always produces loads of laughs and is also a bit easier than the nasty quizzes you get in the newspapers at this time of year, of which we can only answer about 5%, so it helps us feel a bit superior.

This is followed at 11:05 by a repeat of the last episode of series 4 of Shameless in preparation for the new series, which starts on the 1st. Join us tomorrow as we preview it in our Old Year/New Year double bumper edition…