Back in a Bit

Casualty? Really? Well, fair enough - hospital dramas seem to go down well on BBC One. Not my thing at all, but for this and Holby City to run for so long and still be getting viewers, I can only assume it’s good at what it does. Always strikes me as cheesy nonsense to me, but then I suppose if you’re scripting a hospital drama and you put a couple of kids playing by a railway line, it’s hard to keep finding ways for them to hurt themselves. I would love there to be a single BBC medical dictionary, with the various afflictions already covered by either hospital drama crossed out, and the various writers frantically searching through for something interesting that hasn’t yet broken out on the ward.

More baffling still is the idea of taking a taking a successful and long-running panel show, and creating an extended version that runs the following day. Such is the case with Have I Got a Bit More News For You on BBC Two. I mean, fans of the show will watch it the first time round, but why would they watch it again for an added five to ten minutes? Maybe the hardened fans are now skipping the first airing just to watch the second, but why then would you create an airing show that pulls viewers away from another airing of the same show? I have tried to watch this extended repeat, but found myself watching a repeat, and little else.

BBC Three is very proud of having quite a few successes when it comes to commissioning comedy, probably the most famous example being Little Britain. Trouble is, here it is again at just after 9pm. Yes, it’s still very good, but we all know it off by heart. Some of us have the DVDs you made. So how about dropping the continual repeats and go out and commission someone just as ground-breaking? Hmm? I mean, if you’re so good at commissioning ground-breaking comedy, why not go out and find some ground-breaking comedy, and then commission it? Do you see what I’m getting at? Before it becomes Last Of The Summer Wine or, indeed, BBC Porridge?

BBC Four takes a short break from white, middle-class drama for a strange mix of white, middle-class but feminist and left-wing comedy stroke interviews, with Dawn French. This thing they call Girls That Do seems like a much better idea than it is. You think it’s going to be worth watching, but it never is. Still, it’s only a brief pause between dramas.

The marauding beast swings back to ITV1 for The X Factor results show, but will swing back within the hour. ITV2 fills the gap with Good Girls Gone Bad, which seems to examine a handful of female stars whose skilfully-crafted public image proved no match for their own stupidity, magnified under lashings of money. Hardly worth describing, let alone watching. Meanwhile ITV3 gets its head down into an episode of Taggart, which was popular first time round.

Meanwhile, just as everything seemed to be going so well, something strange happens to all four Fours at 9pm. E4 buries itself in three hours of relentless talking heads The 100 Greatest TV ADs - they’ve been peddling this same show for, what, five years now? Of course, the true beauty of a three-hour show about television advertising is the 45 minutes of actual television advertising it will doubtless contain. Plus I suspect you don’t need to pay to reshow any of the ads in the list. Genius. Film 4 plays out Broken Arrow, which would be fine had they not played out the very same movie only a few days ago. Meanwhile More 4 goes with yet another rerun of The West Wing. Most cringeworthy of all has to be Channel 4 itself, though, which needs no excuse at all to repeat one of the films it helped to fund. Tonight it picks possibly the most of these, Four Weddings and a Funeral. I’m sure they don’t, but it certainly feels like they put this on every six weeks.

Five goes with a double-bill of the imported police procedural drama NCIS, which opens a bit of a theme for the rest of the night. If it’s police-related and it’s imported, it’s a candidate for the line-up. Five US has all-action no-plot martial arts attempt The One, while Five Life has 13 Going On 30 - which might be a chick-flick but about which I know nothing.

On Sky Three, another pattern is emerging, with Road Wars, to be followed by Street Wars and then more Street Wars… after all, the best telly comes via a camera bolted to the bonnet of a police patrol car, doesn’t it? Yet another pattern occurring on Dave: episode after episode of The Catherine Tate Show right through until shutdown in the wee small hours. Do these single-show marathons actually work, I wonder? I’m fairy lukewarm about Catherine Tate, so I wouldn’t sit and watch five consecutive hours of it, but if it were between another couple of things I fancied watching, I might not switch over.