Television

Fact: in 1963, air travel was so new and exciting that the awed gasps of the passengers as the plane took flight frequently drowned out the noise of the jet engines. Fact: in 1963, air travel was so comfortable that passengers emerged from long-haul flights even more refreshed, relaxed and cheerful than when they boarded

Ricky Gervais’s latest sitcom, Life’s Too Short (BBC2, Thursday), is really a series of sketches on his favourite themes — failure, rejection, self-delusion and humiliation. I gather from friends of friends that at UCL he was often teased, not always pleasantly, for not fitting in with the right gang. Exclusion of one kind or another

One of the useful things about having teen and near-teenage kids is discovering what the vulgar masses watch. Last week, for example, during half-term, I got to see two hugely popular programmes which I would probably never have bothered watching on my own: Undercover Boss USA (Channel 4, Wednesday) and The X Factor (ITV, Saturday,

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall thinks it’s time we all went veggie (River Cottage Veg; Channel 4, Sunday). Coming from a man whose favourite dish is human placenta marinaded in fruit-bat extract, who slaughters his own pigs with a pocket knife and dances naked in their gore as he turns them into 2,058 varieties of artisanal black pudding,

‘We all need to rendezvous every week. It keeps us all as a community,’ said Jane Copsey on the In Touch anniversary programme (produced by Cheryl Gabriel). The Radio 4 magazine for the blind and partially sighted has been around for 50 years dispensing advice and encouragement, hope and cheer. Nowadays it’s been cut to

Whenever I find myself dreaming about how awful things would be under a red/green dictatorship — increasingly often, these days — the one person who gives me a glimmer of hope that I might get out of the hell alive is Stephen Fry. He’s a leftie, of course — but, like Frank Field and Kate

I imagine there is software that helps you write biopics for television. First you pick the childhood from a drop-down menu, selecting [poor but respectable] [very poor] [so poor that all your belongings will fit into a single wheelbarrow which your mother pushes from a grim slum to the nearby hell-hole]. Father deserts family [yes]

‘I don’t suppose the war will leave any of us alone by the time it’s done,’ prophesied one of the characters in the new series of Downton Abbey. Oh, dear, I’m sure she’s right. So I wonder which will be the character who comes back with shellshock, which one with no legs, and which one

The Promenaders have excelled themselves this year. I thought initially they were slightly more docile and slightly less dotty than usual, but no. Not only at the Last Night, but also at the Israel Philharmonic Prom on 1 September, they found their voice — so strongly that the BBC actually suspended the broadcast of the

When future historians sift through the wreckage of Western Civilisation to try to find out where it all went wrong, I do hope they chance upon at least one episode of The World’s Strictest Parents (BBC3) and one of Deal or No Deal (Channel 4). The World’s Strictest Parents is another TV variant on the

Years ago I did some charity gig with Will Self, a sort of Desert Island Books. He had chosen a Raymond Chandler, and I remarked on the similarities between Chandler and P.G. Wodehouse. Both were educated at Dulwich College, both were wonderfully stylish and stylised writers, both were masters of the dazzlingly witty, totally unexpected

I’ve got this idea for a book, when I get the time, called Everything You Know Is Wrong. Its job will be to attack all the idiot received ideas of our age — what my father-in-law calls ‘notions’. High on the list of candidates, most definitely, is the commonly held belief (especially among stand-up comics)

Prince Charles turned up on TV again this week, in Britain’s Hidden Heritage (BBC1, Sunday), wandering round a country house in Scotland that he had helped to restore. Prince Charles turned up on TV again this week, in Britain’s Hidden Heritage (BBC1, Sunday), wandering round a country house in Scotland that he had helped to

Angus Macqueen is a film-maker whose CV includes The Death of Yugoslavia, Gulag, Cocaine and a slightly odd period commissioning the likes of The Secret Millionaire as Channel 4’s head of documentaries. These days, happily, he’s back making his own stuff — and BBC2’s Chilean Miners: 17 Days Buried Alive was another gem. Commentary was

After rootling in the BBC archives on the internet recently I started thinking, wouldn’t it be good if more programmes from the past were shown in full? The online archive contains less than a tenth of the total footage stored by the BBC (which would amount to nearly 70 years of TV if you watched

Hold on to your seats, everyone, and grab yourselves a stiff drink. I’ve got a story gleaned from this week’s Dispatches: How Murdoch Ran Britain (Channel 4, Monday) so shocking that it will completely change your views on government, the media, everything. OK, here goes: in 2004 Tony Blair wanted Britain to sign up to

The latest series of The Apprentice (BBC1, Sunday) had, I gather, its best ratings ever. God knows why. All those ghastly people! Lord Sugar! His sidekicks! The stupid, infuriating, boring contestants! The last episode in the current series consisted of interviews with the four finalists, all of whom, in their own different ways, were barking.