Throng

Hey everyone! This is seriously great news!

Harry Hill has signed (a multi-million pound two-year) deal with ITV to make more series of TV Burp and You've Been Framed.

This new agreement will see TV Burp on our screens until 2012.

There's been a lot (beyond the usual murmurs... it was more like a loud shouting fest) that Hill was going to jump ship to Sky and thereby, deny all us cheapskates who don't have a Sky subscription our Burp fix.

As well as keeping TV Burp on our screens, ITV also has an option to extend the deal and order two more series as well as keeping Hill doing his withering voiceovers on You've Been Framed.

More crucially (in terms of the deal), ITV have agreed to develop new programme formats for Hill.

He has already won several Bafta awards for the long-running ITV1 show TV Burp and won big audiences.

You know Professor Brian Cox? He's one of the finest scientists ever to grace our screens. He's fun and stupidly interesting.

Don't agree? Well, we're all entitled to our opinions I suppose, even though a naysayer is obviously wrong.

This Sunday at 9pm, the BBC will be showing a series called Wonders of the Solar System, and it's spellbinding.

And we've got a trailer!

Over five episodes, Professor Brian Cox visits the most extreme locations on Earth to explain how the laws of physics have carved natural wonders across the solar system.

Professor Brian Cox, a particle physicist, has an impressive track record in TV. He was the science advisor for the sci-fi film Sunshine, and has been involved in the BBC Horizon series (Large Hadron Collider and the Big Bang) and the BBC Bitesize revision programmes.

Heard of Iron Chef? If not, then you're in for a treat because it's one of the most ludicrous TV shows ever made.

"A delectable Japanese tradition takes root on UK soil"... which means Channel 4 will show a programme that's somewhere between Ready Steady Cook and Gladiators.

The competition takes place in "Kitchen Stadium" an amazing pressure cooker of an arena and the battle is presided over by "The Chairman" an enigmatic Japanese ring master who embodies the "ancient heritage" of the competition.

Our four Iron Chefs will represent the best of global culinary expertise and will be awesome, intimidating experts in their field.

Just when I'm ready to kill every single TV chef on the planet... sod it... I'd dig up the corpse of **** Craddock just to insult the bones... along comes someone so cheery, so down to earth and so skilled that I (nearly) fall in love with the format all over again.

Yep, Raymond Blanc's Kitchen Secrets arrived on our televisions last night and slapped a great big stupid grin on my face.

Most cookery programmes really grind my gears because, behind the pantomime 'passion' there's a feeling of judgement. The constant talk of organic this and locally sourced that, underlines that any other way is Doing It Wrong.

Praise be! Television has finally answered one of my prayers!

Friends has been dumped by Channel 4! That's right! After a million years on our screens, Joey, Chandler, Phoebe, Ross, Rachel and Monica will no longer clutter up our screens!

What an absolute joy this will be.

As someone who isn't... nor has never been a fan of Friends, it thrills me to the marrow to know that from now on, endlessly re-runs of the show will no longer be lurking in the listings to bother me with "we were on a break!", 'Smelly Cat' and "How you doin'?"

Repeats of the show will now be found on Comedy Central from October 2011.

You'd be forgiven for thinking that the only good thing shown on TV recently is Doctor Who and The Wire. Everything else is staggeringly crap. Right?

TV continues to scrape the barrel with format reality shows and things featuring Amanda Holden and/or Piers Morgan. It's an insult. However, there's a show airing currently that's so classy that it should come with an olive on a cocktail stick.

The Good Wife stars Julianna Margulies (who you'll remember from ER and subsequently has become someone I rather fancy) and is a show about... well... legal stuff.

Don't run away!

Before I even start... the image above should in no way suggest that Dinner with Portillo (BBC Four) is a forum which allows the former Tory MP the chance to eat children. It's an image from another show. Get over it.

So, what is Dinner with Portillo?

Well, the official line is this - Michael Portillo gets a bunch of people to yap about some hotly debated topic or other around a dinner table. That's it.

It sounds terrible doesn't it?

The very idea of a prequel to Only Fools And Horses is a staggeringly awful one. You could almost picture it couldn't you? Terrible knees-up-muvver-braahning and watching the birth of a clutch of catchphrases, all crowbarred into a clunky retrofest, filled with Carry On style looks at swinging London and all that rubbish. However...

Rock and Chips (BBC One, Sunday, 24 January, 9pm) was indeed a prequel to Del Falling Through The Bar. It was supremely cock-er-nee and definitely an idea of a London gone-by, essentially, the Capital shot through the memory of Peggy Mitchell - all close-knit families and everyone looking after their own.

However, as much as I braced myself to hate Rock and Chips, I couldn't. You see, what actually unfurled was a show that wasn't particularly funny at all and was all the better for it.

This is an inspiring account of how intelligent news media can be when traditional forms of news gathering aren't available.

Emily Purser is a journalism student working at Sky News and provides an inside account of how Twitter, Facebook and YouTube were used to enable them to be the first broadcaster with images from the devastated area.

Read the account for yourself and be inspired and see why Emily believes she'll never hear someone scoff at Twitter again.

The easiest thing to do as a TV critic is to slag Big Brother off. It's easier than trying to kill mice in a mug with a claw-hammer.

More difficult is finding nice things to say about it. In a media-scrum that fights itself to say the nastiest thing about a TV show, sometimes, it's easy to lose site of aimless fun... and yes, I am guilty of it in the name of cheap laughs.

On that note, Celebrity Big Brother 7 is all about cheap laughs and, as a result, I've been doing the most un-TV critic of things and finding myself actually enjoying myself.

This week, CBB7 has, naturally, been filled with listless moments, with people bickering about eggs and snoozing a lot. This is when Big Brother doesn't work. Long gone is the weird voyeuristic glee of being able to watch someone nod-off without getting arrested.

Back with a bang after an incredibly successful first series, this sleeper hit comes back with wheels rolling and balls to the grindstone, continuing where the infuriating cliffhanger left us: a kidnapping, a shooting and the Survivors facing their most dire of straits yet.

Quite often, I find myself so irritated by the Top Gear team as a whole, that I dream of making a cockentrice out of them, with Hammond being inserted into May, May inserted into Clarkson... and the whole thing roasted and served up to simpleton men in chinos holding River Island gift vouchers.

However, despite the combined irritation, the show does have moments of fun and, occasionally, truly insane television.

I think that it's fair to say that Top Gear is neither fish nor beast. It's not really a car-consumer show, and neither is it wholly Jackass for middle aged men. Sometimes, in the grey area, we get good TV. If it veers too far one way or the other, it can baulk.

That said, the one thing that always saves the show is the Top Gear Special.

Maggie Jones, matriarch and sour tongued pensioner of the Barlow family on Coronation Street died this morning at the ripe age of 75.

The Queen of the cobbles, way ahead of Rita Sullivan and Liz McDonald, will always be remembered for her patronising and demonising one liners and the comedy that she injected into the show, lofting it from the snoozefest that it can sometimes turn into.

Coming hot off the heels of the recent documentary, delving into the sparsely recorded life of Victoria Wood, the newest Christmas special came blasting hilariously onto the screen last night. Luckily the advent of iPlayer means that you can watch hundreds of times until it expires.

Taking the cue from the surprise hits of the century; Cranford and Larkrise To Candleford, The Apprentice (where Wood and an actor playing Nick to her Margaret dance their way around the boardroom between appearances of Surallan) stopping off at a slew of reality TV shows on the way.

The latest series of The Restaurant (BBC Two) failed to capture my affections like previous years, solely because I had other stuff to review. It's a shame because, once again, it looked like a real humdinger.

While it's fair to say that food shows have been driving me to Prozac in 2009, The Restaurant could never make me angry. That's because it's got something that the rest of foodieville has... and that's class.

In Raymond Blanc, the show has someone so impossibly likeable that I often wonder if someone grew him in a petri-dish as a PR exercise between England and France. He says all the right things and have a lovely Gallic drawl that makes everything sound cooler than anything my monkeyish Northern tongue could muster. He says "munnay", I say "munnie". Blanc wins every time.

And so, to last night's finale.