The TV Week NOV 7TH - Friday NOV 13TH

Saturday
9.15pm Festival of Remembrance BBC1
10.35pm JLS Revealed ITV2 - Documentary following 2008 X Factor runners-up JLS on their rollercoaster ride from TV fame to success as a group in their own right.
Sunday
9.00pm The Children Who Fought Hitler BBC4 - Documentary telling the story of a heroic battle fought by the children of the British Memorial School to help liberate Europe from the Nazis. The school served a community of ex-First World War soldiers and their families living in Ypres in Belgium who lovingly tended the war graves.
10.35pm Alexander Armstrong's Very British Holiday BBC1 - Alexander Armstrong explores the state of the great British holiday. It is widely acknowledged that 2009 is a bumper year for the UK tourist industry, with many consumers tightening their belts and forgoing foreign holidays.
Monday
8.00pm Not Forgotten Channel 4 - Journalist and broadcaster Ian Hislop explores the compelling and poignant stories of soldiers from across the British Empire during the First World War. Ian provides a reminder that 2.5 million soldiers from Asia and Africa; from the Dominions of Canada, Australia and New Zealand; from Ireland and from the West Indies fought alongside the British "Tommy", and of these, a quarter of a million lost their lives for King and Empire.
8.30pm Miranda BBC2 - Sitcom starring Not Going Out's Miranda Hart in a semi autobiographical title role. Also starring Sally Phillips, Tom Ellis & Praticia Hodge.
9.00pm Collision ITV1 - Five-part drama focusing on a pileup on the A12. As the crash investigation team try and peice the crash together what they discover about those involved lead to surprising revelations. Starring Douglas Hodge and Kate Ashfield as the investigating officers. Real life brothers Dean Lennox Kelly and Craig Kelly teaming up to play brothers whose suspicious activities tear their family apart. Paul McGann as Millionaire whose involvment in the crash leads to love and Phil Davies as a man who takes one final trip with his mother-in law.
Airs all week.
9.00pm The Execution of Gary Glitter Channel 4 - Fictonal drama set in an imaginary Britain in which the death penalty has been re-introduced, this feature-length drama confronts viewers with the possible consequences of capital punishment in the UK. No crime arouses more passion than the abuse of children, and in this parallel world, the public, sickened by a spate of serious child abuse cases, has demanded the return of the ultimate sanction. The first person to be tried under the new Capital Crimes Against Children legislation is Paul Gadd, aka 1970s glam rock star Gary Glitter.
Tuesday
8.00pm John Sergeant on the Tourist Trail ITV1 - John Sergeant takes a journey around Britain and meets tourists of all nationalities. In this episode John joins some Californian gardening enthusiasts at RHS Wisley in Surrey. Then he is off to the Isle of Man to meet 10,000 Germans there for the annual TT race, followed by monster-hunting on Loch Ness, visiting the Lake District with some Japanese Beatrix Potter fans, and enjoying the Welsh Eisteddfod with a group of visitors from Java.
8.00pm Mad About the House BBC3 - Couples who can't afford to transform their house into a dream living space are given the cash to do so with the proviso that one half must make every design, decorating and DIY decision by themselves.
9.30pm Ross Kemp Remembers Pirates Sky1 - Ross Kemp and the BAFTA-winning documentary team conclude their investigation into modern day piracy in South East Asia.
10.35pm When A Mother's Love is Not Enough BBC1 - Rosa Monckton, businesswoman, charity worker and confidante of the late Princess Diana, explores the realities families face when caring for a disabled child. After the recent shocking high profile cases in which mothers have killed their disabled children.
Wednesday
8.00pm An Audience with Donny & Marie ITV1
8.00pm Country House Rescue Channel 4 - Ruth Watson revisits Mary-Anne and Alastair Robb, owners of Cothay, a medieval manor house in Somerset. Built in 1485, Cothay Manor is a superb example of medieval architecture. Fifteen years ago Alastair and Mary-Anne Robb bought and restored Cothay Manor.
10.45pm Bought Up By Booze: A Children in Need Special BBC1 - Callum Best explores what hope there is for the 1.3 million children in the UK currently being 'brought up by booze'.
Thursday
8.00pm River Cottage Channel 4 - With Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.
9.00pm Cutting Edge: Octomom Me & My 14 Kids Channel 4 - Documentary about "Octomom" Nadya Suleman who became the focus of the world's media when she gave birth to eight children in January 2009. She already has six Children and his now an unemployed parent, with 14 demanding children under the age of nine, who faces the constant presence of dedicated paparazzi.
Friday
8.00pm Axe Men Five - Cameras follow the work of North American loggers as they risk their lives to cut timber whilst battling mechanical failures, unpredictable terrain and falling trees.

Ghosts in the Machine, BBC4

Ghostwatch, in its own little way, was as much of an epochal TV event as the Kennedy Assassination, the Moon Landings and Michael Portillo’s glorious excommunication from Parliament, and was the hilarious centrepiece to this engrossing retrospective of supernatural dramas, documentaries, entertainment and investigations.

Trailed as part of the Scene One drama series, Ghostwatch acted as a precognitive parody of the as-yet-unborn Most Haunted and Famous & Frightened, and all that curdled miasma of turbid sludge that aspires to penetrate the mysteries of the paranormal yet succeeds in creating only an amusing diversion clogged up to the nostrils with its own deluded sense of pioneering piety. The otherwise likeable Yvette Fielding snorted sulphur as she prissily pointed out that Most Haunted isn’t an “entertainment show”, as branded by Ofcom, but an “investigation”.

Ghostwatch was certainly an “entertainment show” even if many mentally indolent viewers perceived it as a genuine “investigation” into the spooky events of an ostensibly ordinary suburban family. The ‘deception’ was that the ‘stars’ of the show, other than the family, were well known presenters who were masquerading convincingly as fictional presenters. Craig Charles was the cheeky roving reporter, Mike Smith and Sarah Greene were TV’s golden couple intrepidly scouring the house for evidence of the malevolent ‘Mr Pipes’ – evil which manifested itself in the mutilation of a comatose girl; her face scratched as if by a wild animal – and, best of all, Parky playing the bemused anchor back in the studio, who was ultimately ‘possessed’ by Mr Pipes as the studio disintegrated around him.

Inevitably, there was a backlash. Not a serious backlash. It was just the frothing indignation of people who want Robbie Williams’ Angels played at their funeral, and who spend most of their lives telling other people how much they want Angels played at their funeral. Some prostituted the supposed psychologically-shredding terror of their “11-year-old son” as reason enough for their vituperative rage, masking their own shame that they were duped by a pretty obvious, but none-the-less clever, drama.

And while Ghostwatch was the sort of knockabout hokum peddled by Most Haunted and the like, it was not the most chilling programme here. The most terrifying was the Nigel Kneale drama, The Stone Tape, which posited the ingenious theory that ghosts exist because buildings somehow capture horrific events by ‘taping’ them like a cassette, which are then replayed at a later date.

The whistle-stop tour of ghouls and ghosts took in Kneale’s Quatermass And The Pit and the ghost stories of MR James, focusing on Whistle And I’ll Come To You that features the scariest bedsheets in the history of TV, and Mark Gatiss’s excellent Crooked House from last Christmas. The clip of Rentaghost, however, was inappropriate, coming from its rubbish latter period evidenced by the presence of the insufferable Dobbin the Pantomime Horse and McWitch. And redoubtable cult oracle Kim Newman provided a neat summary of the impact of British horror on popular culture in his slightly incredulous tone that makes him sound like an atheist relishing rejecting the fundaments of Christianity by smashing the tablets of the Ten Commandments over the head of Moses.

Derren Brown, who had a cameo in Crooked House, was on hand to debunk the fraudulent practices of Doris Stokes and other mediums; although he conceded that they do provide a comfort of sorts to believers. The only shame here was that Derek Acorah was seen defending his methods in a documentary – “I adhere to the spiritual codes in my responsibility” – rather than being given the opportunity to rebuke Brown’s caustic dismissal.

A token effort was made to analyse what makes horror and ghosts so alluring; much of which settled mundanely like a slit corpse at the bottom of the lake for the hackneyed observation that people just like being scared except for Matthew Sweet. He perceived that the popularity of the supernatural is a symptom of the lazy, consumerist ethos that stuffs concepts distilled of all their complexity into the unthinking cerebral corridors rather than impelling people to explore the supernatural in such things as religion or culture.

He could, of course, just as well have been talking about the wonders of BBC4, such as this documentary, as opposed to more facile TV channels that would have you believe the fortunes of some so-so chefs is more captivating than the wonders of wildlife.

Yes, we are still pissed off that Autumnwatch has been pruned to a crude Friday stump as a sacrifice to the heinous banality of Masterchef.

Doctor When

It has now been confirmed by the BBC that the next of the Doctor Who Specials - Waters of Mars will screen on Sunday 15th November on BBC1! This is the second of the final four specials to feature David Tennant as The Doctor.

The Thick of It, BBC2

Much like the life of man or woman, brilliant comedies have three distinct stages: the astonishing, witty and original first series, which gleefully burns comedic stale tropes at the stake and dances round them laughing and naked; the second/third series in which the humorous zenith is scaled and it stands aloft a blustery peak, emanating a guttural roar of feral triumphalism; and the inapposite decline, in which the comedy palls, only a little but it does pall, and it starts to resemble the slothful, moribund antiquities it so once jubilantly usurped.

Often the change is imperceptible like the vague twitch that heralds the irremediable wane into Parkinson’s, but it’s still apparent, and this new series of The Thick of It bears all the pitiable signs of irreversible infirmity. It’s still very, very good but is absent of the peerless excellence of the first couple of series.

Some comedies terminate after two or three series – The Office, Fawlty Towers, Father Ted (which was due to finish anyway) – some even bail out after one – The Day Today, which starred the brilliant Rebecca Front who joins the Thick of It as Hugh Abbot’s (Chris Langham, a career now less likely to be revived than the late Dermot Morgan’s) replacement Nicola Murray in the Department of Social Affairs and Citizenship.

The promotion of Murray to the cabinet at least offered some hope that the cascading bile of Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi) could be repelled, especially as she repudiated his rancorous bullying with a stark wit, sarcastically answering his concerns over her 16-year-old daughter who has left school that she did so because of her heroin habit, a Nigerian boyfriend and dalliances with prostitution.

But by the end of the episode Murray had crumbled under the onslaught of Tucker’s tongue that performs the same role in fictional politics as a battering ram breaching the gates of Jerusalem during the Crusades. But in the intervening period between her defiance and capitulation, Murray was seen to be just another manipulative cog in the political machinery.

Hugh Abbot, for all his faults, offered the viewer a lifeline into this alien world of honed amorality; Murray doesn’t achieve that, she’s just another parasite sucking the life out of the reciprocating parasites that surround her. She pits the underlings left over from Hugh’s tenure (we call him by his Christian name because we liked him) against one another, hinting that some, but not all of them will be kept on. This means that Ollie (Chris Addison) and Glenn (James Smith) bicker tiresomely as they fight for their jobs, while under Hugh there was a depth to their antipathy, as if rooted in a genuine rivalry rather than shoulder-charging each other out the way in a desperate rush for the lifeboats. But Glenn’s pining for his £600 desk chair that was appropriated by Murray and then consigned to the skip by Tucker was funny.

Murray seems to be cruel and astute because it is in her nature to be so, but it’s these traits that estrange her from the viewer. Hugh was a feebler, more junior facsimile of Jim Hacker from Yes Minister. Over the course of the half-hour episode, Hugh’s principles to do the right thing (i.e. what the public would expect of public servants) were slowly corrupted by the diabolical vulgarity of Tucker and he would eventually meekly succumb, but do so hilariously.

With Murray locking horns with Tucker, and Ollie and Glenn duelling with backstabbing daggers, the repetitive street-by-street warfare is concentrated into a single, inanimate frame common to the Beano where a big scrap is illustrated by a big cloud of dust with the only visible human presence protruding fists pummelling the adversaries.

This isn’t to say that Tucker’s diatribes have lost any of their inventive extrapolation of Anglo-Saxon oaths, but merely that they now serve less of a purpose; degraded into a Soviet-style parade in Red Square, casting eyes-right to the half-dead dictators glumly watching on from the frozen Kremlin balcony whenever there’s a brilliant quip such as: “The only other candidate [than Murray] is my left bullock with a smiley face drawn on it!” Or: “Are you saying all the schools this government has improved are knife-addled rape sheds?”

Perhaps the problem lies in the exposure of MPs as even more corrupt and inhumane than was previously imagined, and that in trying to keep pace with the surreality of Parliament the narrative has become detached from the besieged pathos exhibited by the characters in the previous series. The plummet isn’t yet terminal, but we would savour someone in the show with whom we could identify, someone we could actually like.

The TV Week - Saturday Oct 31st - Friday Nov 6th

Saturday
9.45pm The Impressions Show with Culshaw and Stephenson BBC1 - Sketch show featuring the impressions of Jon Culshaw and Debra Stephenson.
9.45pm Life Stories with Piers Morgan ITV - Piers chats with Dannii Minogue.
Sunday
9.00pm Garrow's Law: Tales from The Old Bailey BBC1 - Four-part legal drama set in the late 18th century which follows young idealistic barrister William Garrow who given his first criminal defence case at the Old Bailey. Starring Andrew Buchanan and Alun Armstrong.
Monday
2.00pm Dickinson's Real Deal ITV
7.00pm Michael Jackson's Private Home Sky1 - Four-part documentary featuring footage of the late singer's home and personal home movies.
8.30pm Into the Storm BBC2 - Drama-documentary sequel to the Emmy award-winning The Gathering Storm, charting Winston Churchill's rise to power, his determination to lead the country to victory in World War II, and his devastating loss of power in the 1945 general election
9.00pm The Great Escape: The Reckoning Channel 4 - Documentary looking back at the people involved in the iconic WW2 film.
9.00pm Naked Britain Sky1 - 3-part documentary series exploring Britain's perceptions of nudity.
Tuesday
9.00pm The F Word Channel 4 - 12-part new series of Gordon Ramsay's food magazine series. Janet Street-Porter tries to rear not one but three different meats for the chefs to cook. Katie Price takes on Gordon in the Recipe challenge.
9.30pm Ross Kemp Remembers Gangs Sky1 - Ross Kemp returns to Kenya.
Wednesday
9.00pm Spooks BBC1 - Eighth series of the spy drama. Section D discovers that Harry thwarted a clandestine operation to smuggle weapons-grade uranium into Iraq to justify the war.
9.00pm The Family Channel 4 - Second series of the landmark documentary series which puts cameras in a normal family's home. A British Indian family opens its doors to viewers in a new observational series, documenting the universal themes of family life. The Grewals are a fun-loving and lively family with three generations all living under one roof. For two months they were filmed by cameras placed in every part of their house during the most dramatic and exciting months of their lives.
9.00pm The Noughties Was That It? BBC3 - The opener of a two-part journey through arguably the most influential time of historical change since the Renaissance, ten years of social upheaval, celebrity, art, sex, politics and new technology that has set the template for the next hundred years.
10.35pm Black Widow Granny? BBC1
Thursday
9.00pm Cutting Edge: The Boy Who Sailed the World Channel 4 - Documenting the extraordinary journey of 14yr old Michael Perham, who in 2006 became the youngest person ever to cross the atlantic solo.
9.00pm The History of Christianity BBC4 - First of a six-part series in which professor Diarmaid MacCulloch goes in search of Christianity's forgotten origins.
9.45pm Wonderland: I Won Univerity Challlenge BBC2 - Quirky documentary catching up with winners of the popular gameshow
Friday
9.00pm Peter Kay: Raider of the Pop Charts Channel 4 - Repeat of the documentary charting the comedians success in music.
10.00pm Comedy Showcase Channel 4 - Second series of comedy pilots which could lead to a full series. Campus set in the fictitious Kirke University and explores the lives and souls of a handful of people that work there: some as academics and others involved in the general running of the place. Made by the team behind Green Wing and Smack the Pony.
10.00pm Michael Jackson: The Live Seance Sky1 - Hosted by Derek Acorah