Ashes To Ashes - Update

So, looks like they've dispensed with the bearded "friend-of-the-family" character from the first series - probably a good thing, as it was getting a bit psychosexually complicated, what with Alex having erotic dreams about her godfather, while he flirted with her adult self and comforted her 10-year-old self. Hmm.

And instead of the Bowie clown, there's a masked doctor who knows the future (can't think of a Dame song with a doctor in it...). Anyone else get the Pont D'Alma reference before Lady Di appeared on TV? And anyone else think "Doctor Death" sounded like Elvis Costello, and had the right specs too? They didn't play Watching The Detectives, so maybe not...

Tonight's 80s classics:

The Lunatics Have Taken Over The Asylum - Fun Boy Three

Rio - Duran Duran

Love Plus One - Haircut 100

The Look Of Love - ABC

Centrefold - J Geils Band

Working For The Rat Race - The Specials

You Sexy Thing - Hot Chocolate (yeah, not so classic)

Mirror Man - The Human League

New series tonight

Ashes To Ashes

BBC1, 9pm

The second tranche of the Life On Mars follow-up begins tonight. The first series took a lot of criticism but a lot of it was Extras Syndrome – a knee-jerk backlash. OK, it was far more cartoonish than Life On Mars, but then the whole thing is supposed to be happening in the imagination of Alex Drake, so it makes sense. There were some great touches, such as a young Tom Robinson at a gay rights rally, and the plot twist with the father finished off the series with a punch. Advice to viewers: fire up the Quattro, don't fasten your seatbelt (not a legal requirement till 1983, ahem) and just enjoy the ride.

The Omid Djalili Show

BBC1, 10.35pm

After a gap of 18 months, the London comedian gets a second series of his stand-up and sketch show. I say London comedian because that's what he is – a Chelsea-supporting West London boy with an Iranian background. So let's hope that there's a bit less of his earlier "only Iranian comedian" material, especially as he no longer is (Shappi Khorshandi et al); and a bit more general stuff. One thing 's for sure: when Mad Dog met Djalili recently, the comedian was complaining about the predominance of blue material in stand-up routines, so don't expect Horne & Corden.

Whither comedy? Withered comedy, more like

Last night...

Testees

FX, 9.30pm

A half-hour set-up for an entirely predictable fart gag. That was the entire show. Oh, wait, I beg their pardon: there is the title (and in case you don't get it, the company that performs medical tests on the loser protagonists is called Testico – phnaar, sounds like testicles); plus a sub-plot with an enlarged penis joke and a premature ejaculation punch-line. That was it. FX has one of the finest comedy minds in the world, Stephen Colbert, hidden away at midnight, while this (and its lame predecessor No Signal) gets a prime time slot. Testees - utter bollocks.

Tonight...

Genius

10pm, BBC2

Dear BBC, it has come to our attention that you have failed to notice that Dave Gorman is not actually a comedian. He comes up with concepts which, in the right hands, could be funny. That is what TV producers do. Then they find someone to present their show who doesn't have a rat-like gnawing quality to them, who doesn't sneer at the public, who comes up with jokes during the broadcast. Someone, like, say, a comedian. If Gorman insists on presenting the Radio 4 show he came up with now it's switched to TV, put him on BBC4, instead of the far more entertaining and charming Marcus Brigstocke and his show, I've Never Seen Star Wars, which is actually – and this is a word you may not remember – funny. 

AD BREAK

Honda Insight

The latest bit of cleverness from Honda (after the live skydive) sees the headlights of a thousand hybrid vehicles, lined up in a car park, producing moving smileys. Very impressive - but is it that wise to draw attention to the number of unsold cars sitting in car manufacturers' lots?

PLEAT-BLOCKER UPDATE: Miracles do happen

Anyone watching the Bayern v Barça game to avoid Pleat will have been shocked to have heard the nasal incantation, "Evening everyone". Yes – he's been banished to Bavaria and for Chelsea v Liverpool, ITV Sport has paired Jim "I played in a European Cup Final with Liverpool, honest" Beglin with Tyldesley. Small mercies...

WARNING: No Pleat-Blocker tonight!!!!

Fans of Chelsea and Arsenal have a regular gripe about Champions League coverage... both Sky and ITV consistently prioritise Liverpool and Manchester United games. That means the London clubs are always shown on the secondary channel - ITV4 or Sky Sports 3. The coverage is poorer, you miss out on highlights from other games, sometimes it's hard to find the game on in pubs. But Barking at the Television correspondent Nick Fleetwood has an alternative viewpoint...

"I understand Arsenal and Chelsea fans' gripes about being shunted across to lesser channels on Champions League nights. I, though, am one Arsenal fan who you won't find complaining: watching on ITV4 suits me just fine. You see, United serve as our Pleat-Blocker. As long as our games clash, the Manchester club gets ITV1 and therefore are lumbered with chief pundit David Pleat, possibly the worst co-commentator ever to put a hairy, palsied hand around a mic. 

"This is the man who once said, "There's Thierry Henry, exploding like the French train that he is" and "a game is not won until it is lost". He pollutes a game by sticking as many cliches as possible into one sentence and he wrote Jens Lehmann Law (saying "Lehmann's having a great game", before the then Arsenal keeper conceded three in 10 minutes). 

"So yes, Arsenal and Chelsea games might be a bit harder to find, but to be denied Pleat's Bleating (Pleating) is a blessed relief.

"Tomorrow, Man U will also step in as a Gray-Blocker. While Andy Gray is a division below Pleat in the Irritation League, it's still a relief not to hear his name-mangling and 'tikaboo, son' catchprases."

Pleat-Blocker – good point. Only one problem tonight... Liverpool can't be Chelsea's Pleat-Blocker, because they're in the same match. Is it too late to become Catalan? "I know nothing, I from Barcelona! Let me watch ITV4!"

EASTER SPECIALS - THE VERDICT

Red Dwarf

Oh, that was why it was taken off air 10 years ago. Only managed the first of the three episodes (which, due to series linking on Sky+, ended up buggering up all other Friday night recordings by saving everything else on Dave that night). Gave up after a woeful bit of pantomime where the crew wrestled with a giant tentacle while another character failed to see the danger on a monitor. The sort of scene that would be rejected by Lazytown producers for being childish. When a spoof sci-fi "comedy" delivers fewer laughs than the sort of show it's parodying, you know it's drifting lifeless in space...

Doctor Who

Much better than expected - a simple race against time with a sprinkling of portent to get Whoies twittering and a movie reference every few minutes for laughs. It looked fantastic – Dubai was somehow more convincing as a desert planet than Penarth. The aliens were a great mix of old-fashioned blokes-in-monster suits (the fly-people) and top-quality CGI (the flying metal manta rays, which must have upset a few Steve Irwin fans). And, apart from thankfully minimal interruptions from Lee Evans, the lack of shrieking is so welcome. The first Tate-free episode, with David Morrisey, was moving; this one was a romp. And Michelle Ryan's cool and sassy character had it right when she said "We could have been so good together" - the campaign to write her in as a companion for the 11th Doctor should start now. 

Skellig

Sorry, The Masters was too exciting.

EASTER SPECIALS – Oh the Eggs-itement (shut up)

FRIDAY

Red Dwarf: Back To Earth
Dave, 9pm (& Sat, Sun, plus outtakes, making of etc – see Dave)
A sci-fi cult classic off the air for a decade, loved only by nerds in the meantime, returns reinvented… could Red Dwarf be the next Doctor Who? Well, unless the “smeg” and punch-in-the-nuts gags are replaced with arch humour, the laddishness gives way to ambiguous sexuality and Rimmer becomes some quasi-Jesus, probably not. Still, the scripts of early series were often clever and funny (Star Trek moral/logical connundrums solved by loaded readers), so it’ll be interesting to see how this turns out. Plus, they’ve pulled in Sophie Winkelman (Big Suze) for the Peep Show crowd.


SATURDAY

Primeval
ITV1, 6.15pm
Nah, don’t be ridiculous; we'll all be watching…

Doctor Who
BBC1, 6.45pm (see BBC: Doctor Who)
Of course it’s sad that David Tennant’s last few appearances as the Doctor have to be scripted by Russell T Davies, while Stephen Moffat (the man behind all the best episodes – "The Empty Child", "The Girl In The Fireplace", "Blink", the Library episodes) concentrates on the 2010 series. However, let’s just enjoy the romp. Here we have giant flies in boiler suits, a double decker bus on a desert planet, spaceships with mouths, and (God help us) Lee Evans as a mad professor. There’s also the unbionic woman, Michelle Ryan, who’s described as “mysterious” and set to have a major impact on the Doctor”. Worryingly, those are the same words used to describe River Song, who’s been left in limbo (and is surely set to stay there, as Alex Kingston is surely too MILFy to pair up with Matt Smith’s Timelord). Ryan seems a far more workable future companion for the 11th Doc. If she survives "The Planet Of The Dead"…


SUNDAY

Skellig
Sky 1, 7pm (see Skellig)
Sky 1 have basically abandoned the rest of the weekend, putting all their choccy eggs in this basket. It’s got elements of ET, Stig Of The Dump and The Iron Giant – lonely kid finds strange, ailing creature (Tim Roth as a sort of magical birdman/angel), friendships are built, spiritual awakening is awoken… It promises much, with the naïve kid from the excellent Son Of Rambow playing the boy Michael and even the minor parts filled with talent – John Simm and Kelly MacDonald as the parents (seems like only yesterday that she was Trainspotting jailbait).

Exclusive Horne & Corden sketch

Hilarious antics as the fat one and the pretend-gay one lark about on the golf course in a new skit from their... Oh, sorry, it's Lee Westwood and American Zach Johnson playing in the Masters. My mistake.

Watching sport in Foreign

Apologies for a lack of postings but Mad Dog has been pursuing his other passions - skiing, eating cheese and drinking heavily... in the Alps.

So, no TV, except for BBC Prime (the cream of British TV for expats - Red Dwarf, Tittybangbang, you get the picture...); German late-night shows that appear to be nothing but adverts for dirty phone lines ("Oooh, ich bin geil, ruhf an nul nul acht drei drei drei funf. Geil!" - what? It's research. I had to watch for half an hour to write the words down); and today Formula 1 in French.

I can highly recommend Sport in Foreign. You can still pretty much follow everything but you learn new words like "le box" for the pits and "pneus" (think that's tyres, but the commentator may have had a sneezing fit). It works best for football - watched the Chelsea v Juve game in Bar Italia a while back. The Italian commentators were just like Andy Gray; they refused to pronounce foreign names correctly. They were OK with Bosingwa (unlike Gray) but they wouldn't accept that not everyone has a sounded vowel at the end of their surname. Thus Lamparda and Ashli Cola.

I'll make this a mission: I want to watch cricket in Punjabi, skiing in Swedish (where everything sounds like a dirty word); and rugby in the language of its champions: Gaelic.