Laura Mackie, controller of drama at ITV. Photograph: Martin Godwin

What a weekend for good news. Dead Wife has been kicked off The X-Factor and Phoo Action has been cancelled. After the all-singing, all-dancing, all-mindboggling EastEnders extravaganza on Children in Need, you may be forgiven for thinking Christmas has come early.

According to The Herald, Phoo Action – piloted on BBC3 earlier in the year and commissioned as a series alongside Being Human - has been axed because "during the course of pre-production, it became clear that, creatively, Phoo Action was struggling to fulfil its ambitions as a television drama."

Which is code for: it was an appalling pile of crap. Continue reading...

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Does anyone else get cinema anxiety? With the weekend upon us, the possibility of being asked if I want to go to the cinema looms large and already I can feel my nerves jangling. I have been honing my excuses ("My legs have fallen off" or "I'm protesting outside Strictly HQ demanding that John Sergeant go now") and practising swift exits. I have also been wondering what it is about the cinema that so unnerves me.

I wasn't fiddled with in the back row at any point and I've never been beaten up by bullies in a foyer while waiting to see Police Academy 4; so what explains my reluctance? Continue reading...

Nun better ... Siobhan Finneran as Sister Ruth in BBC1's Apparition

Often when I'm watching a drama, I think "Oh no. Not them again". The reaction occurs when an actor I last saw what feels like 20 minutes ago once again pops up, like the proverbial bad penny, to taint my viewing experience. I won't mention any names at this point as the last time I bemoaned the shallowness of the casting pool, one of those I mentioned wrote in to complain and I got my wrists slapped. Suffice to say, my gripe is not that these over-used actors are necessarily terrible – though some of them certainly are – it's just that their ubiquity and the decisions to cast them are so unimaginative that to see them lurching into view is enough to have you reaching for the remote.

And then there are the actors in the opposite situation – the performers who are underrated and, to put it simply, underemployed. You know the sort: the performer whose appearance in something makes you go "Yay!" Continue reading...

Can he win it? X Factor contestant Daniel Evans. Photograph: Ken McKay/Rex Features

WTF? Daniel Evans lives to sing another day. Again. Are X Factor viewers so soft, so pathetic, so easily swayed by sympathy that a mere mention of his deceased spouse gets them voting for him in their legions? Apparently they are. Continue reading...

Where were you? Obama supporters gather in Chicago. Photograph: M Spencer Green/AP

Questions raised by coverage of the US election:

Are Jim Naughtie's sentences the only things longer than his road trip through America? Truly, the man's purple prose knows no bounds - and few full stops. ("The real America, the America with Americans in, where Americans work like Americans, live like Americans and die like Americans …") It's a wonder he hasn't strangled himself with his own verbosity. Continue reading...

A rare creature ... Spooks' Ros Myers. Photograph: BBC/Kudos Productions

Not only is Ros Myers the best character that Spooks has ever had - she could beat the crap out of Tom Quinn, that's for bloody sure - she's also the best female character currently on television. Now you might think awarding such an accolade is to damn Ros with faint praise. After all, it isn't as if telly is awash with formidable females, at least not on first-run shows being broadcast now. Buffy and Sophia from the Golden Girls are excluded on the grounds of being seen only in repeats, Damages' Patty Hewes is otherwise engaged and Battlestar Galactica's Kara Thrace and President Laura Roslin are, until Sky One shows Caprica next year, lost in space. Continue reading...

What's not to find annoying about Vernon Kay? Photograph: Andy Butterton/PA

First Weatherfield's Liam and now Walford's Max. After two car accidents in a fortnight – not to mention the death, earlier this year, of Hollyoaks' Max in a speeding car/unfortunate pedestrian interface - now might be the time to start a campaign to introduce speed bumps to soaps. I would start the campaign myself (initiate a petition, make badges, record a charity single) but I am a little pre-occupied, perhaps on account of it being Halloween, with establishing the identity of the creepiest man on television.

Now that Jonathan Ross is off the BBC until January at least (though he will present the British Comedy Awards on ITV1 on December 6th), a vacancy has arisen. Continue reading...

Raising the emotional stakes ... The cast of Criminal Minds

But for a young woman, ideally red hot and blonde, who's been raped, tortured and murdered, there's little crime drama likes more than a dead child. A kid's corpse immediately raises the emotional stakes of even the most humdrum drama, imbuing it with a certain compelling nature it might otherwise lack. For example, Criminal Minds, which is perfectly adequate but still quite rubbish, recently featured a little girl abducted from a mall. As far as I recall, it transpired that her auntie did it, having discovered her husband was abusing the girl. Tonight's Silent Witness begins with the death of a schoolboy whose post-mortem reveals evidence of abuse. This initiates a race-against-time hunt for another missing child and the wheeling out of that other crime drama staple inextricably linked to dead children - killer paedophiles. Continue reading...

No gold stars being handed out here ... Britannia High. Photograph: ITV

While watching Britannia High, I wondered more than once who precisely it was for. ITV must have had some notion of the prospective audience when the green light was given. The question is, who did the broadcaster imagine would watch such an excruciatingly cliched fiasco of a programme? Continue reading...

Plink, plink, fizz? Photograph: Ralph Hemmney/Alamy; Davies and Starr/Getty; James Anthony (montage)

As Thursday has long been the new Friday and the only night that isn't the weekend is actually Tuesday, you may be a bit hungover today.

Of course, you may not. You may be a responsible sort who doesn't get drunk any more and if you do, it's on fine red wine, on the occasional Saturday night. If this is you, move along to Comment is Free.

But for the sake of argument, let us imagine that you are hungover. And so we don't enrage the CBI with the subject of working hours and money lost to hangovers, let us also imagine that it's the weekend. What is your choice of hangover TV? Continue reading...

Fool that I am, I pride myself on being sceptical about most things. I don't think I'm susceptible to hoodwinking and I wouldn't say I was easily swayed by shiny things and prettiness. But it turns out I'm a prime candidate for manipulation. How else to explain my near-uncontrollable desire to pay my tax now that Moira Stuart is advising me to do so? It never happened when Adam Hart-Davis did the adverts – though obviously I paid anyway because to do otherwise would be Wrong – but with Moira, resistance is futile. If she were to turn up in person to collect it or just to remind me that paper returns are due imminently, I would die happy. Or at least wet myself with excitement. Continue reading...

Cheer the Beeb for presenting gay relationships as it presents straight ones. Photograph: BBC/PR

Who are the people that complain about gay kissing in EastEnders? Don't they have anything better to do? Other than sell their daughters into slavery, kill their neighbour for working the Sabbath and stone infidels, I mean. ("Day 44 in the Old Testament House and it's time to burn a witch!"). Every time there's a bit of man-on-man kissage in Walford, the BBC gets complaints that "this filth", or words to that effect, shouldn't be on the telly. "How do I explain this to my child?" runs the gist of some of the gripes.

How about you say, calmly and straightforwardly: "Well, son/daughter, some people like people of the same sex in the way that your mum and dad like each other." Now, that's not difficult, is it? It's really not a big deal – unless you're majorly uptight about sexuality and nervous about the issue (in which case Dr Freud will see you now). Continue reading...

Tonight on ITV1 Griff Rhys Jones is your tour guide to London in Greatest Cities of the World. (He's already done New York, and Paris is next.) While on the spurious side, the tour itself is not an entirely wasted trip, if only because it's packed with facts and figures: number of buses, miles of road, amount of bread consumed using the capacity of the Royal Festival Hall as a unit of measurement. You know, really useful stuff. My favourite fact is the number of construction sites in London (88) as I often wonder if the city will ever be finished. Apparently, it won't. Continue reading...

Would you chug down a pint of Newton & Ridley at a gastropub inspired by the Rover's Return? Thought not

I don't know about you, but I wouldn't be seen dead in a pair of Underworld pants. Who in their right mind would want Janice Battersby anywhere near their gusset? Even with the obligatory three-pint lunch – hers, not yours – it is not a prospect to get one excited. And yet this is destined to become a reality as ITV presses ahead with plans to sell Coronation Street merchandising. Continue reading...

'Singing is my life': Peter Kay as contestant Geraldine McQueen in Britain's Got the Pop Factor. Photograph: Channel 4

Questions arising from the weekend's television:

1. Why does Jessie Wallace have Lego hair? And now that she's been booted off Strictly Come Dancing, have we missed out on her turning up one week with an astronaut's helmet or witch's hat instead of her usual weird bob?

2. Are some things beyond parody? I ask on account of Britain's Got The Pop Factor and Possibly A New Celebrity Jesus Christ Soapstar Superstar Strictly on Ice. Continue reading...