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...

Viewers already know a lot about her: Dawn Porter. Photograph: PR

"I'm Dawn Porter," says Dawn Porter at the beginning of every episode of Dawn Porter: Extreme Wife. "And for the last four years I've been single. It's not that I don't want a relationship. I do. But, before I take the plunge, I plan to experience some of the most extreme ways women find love and live with men." 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...

Brilliantly bullyish: Harvey Keitel as Lt Gene Hunt. Photograph: Bobby Bank/WireImage

Last Thursday night, the first episode of the American remake of Life on Mars aired in the US. Fans of the BBC version had been looking forward to it - albeit with crossed fingers and memories of so many other transatlantic reinterpretations gone wrong. With an enormous campaign of adverts and trailers, the buzz for the first episode was considerable, the kind of buzz a big bee on a Vespa waving hair clippers might make. Continue reading...

Bunk (Wendell Pierce) greets Omar (Michael K Williams) outside prison

The latest of our post-Wire, Wire blogs looks at the attributes and achievements of one of Baltimore's finest pOlicemen

What am I? Henry Kelly in the early days of Going for Gold. Photograph: Ros Drinkwater/Rex Features

Like a proto-Amy Winehouse, Baroness Thatcher once said "No, no, no!" to creeping European federalism. We didn't heed her warning. Now God, in the form of Channel 5, has punished us by reviving the Europhile quiz show Going for Gold. 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...

Oh, what an atmosphere ... the cast of the US Life on Mars

Due to the writers' strike last year, America's ever-flowering tree of remakes is currently heavy with televisual fruit. These range from the perplexing (Worst Week? Really? Why?) to the daunting (Life on Mars. Fingers are being crossed, wood knocked that this isn't going to be a complete travesty). Whichever way you look at it, there are a lot - and not just remakes but reimaginings, resurrections and reincarnations. Because why come up with a brand new idea when there is so much meat left on the bones of the old ones? Gosh, I'm all about the food metaphors today. It must be time for lunch. Continue reading...

JJ Abrams. Photograph: Tracey Nearmy/EPA

Welcome to our live webchat with JJ Abrams, the award-winning American writer and producer behind hits such as Lost, Felicity, Alias and Cloverfield and his new drama Fringe

Join us from 6pm BST (that's 10am LA time, folks) when the Emmy and Golden Globe winning writer and producer, will answer your blog questions from his Los Angeles base.

Samantha in Ninety Naps a Day. Photograph: Channel 4

Since I wrote an article for the Guardian on my narcolepsy, I've been approached by no fewer than four major TV networks looking for sufferers to appear in documentaries. Channel 4's Ninety Naps a Day was one of them, but while I was willing to get involved, I was told I just wasn't sick enough to make good TV. Continue reading...

Stephen Fry: 'Google-like breadth of knowledge'. Photograph: PA

The mood of excitement around the production staff and crew was palpable. Somebody had finally managed to talk national treasure and greatest living Englishman Stephen Fry into appearing as a relief captain on the whimsical, if spiteful, TV pop quiz Never Mind the Buzzcocks. Continue reading...

Tony Gordon in Coronation Street. Photograph: Ian Cartwright/ITV

Close the door, put out the light. No, they won't be home tonight. In a move that sees Britain's biggest soap offering no quarter to its television rivals, Coronation Street has announced the unprecedented arrival of ... Murder Week. Continue reading...

Wakey-wakey. Photograph: Esteban Felix/AP

There are two aspects of lions that I can vouch for personally. One is that they are fearsome. When you live next door to them, they have a habit of jumping the fence and eating your dog. Paradoxically, the other is that they are boring. They are the laziest life form I have observed at any length (and I now live in the hippie epicentre that is Brighton). The typical indolent housecat is a whirlwind of energy compared to a lion. A sloth is a dynamo.

By turning their lion-centric Big Cat Diaries into the on-the-spot broadcast Big Cat Live – effectively Springwatch on the Savanna - the BBC Natural History Unit has made life difficult for itself. Things don't necessarily happen when you'd like them to: nightly, between eight and nine o'clock UK time. If not, to fill the slot they are obliged to fall back on earlier, edited footage, which may be great stuff, but undermines the promised immediacy. As a result most of the live time is taken up by the presenters, bonding over the campfire, daytime chat show-style, in a cosy fug of over-emotive anthropomorphism. They are, if anything, more enervating than the immobile lions. Continue reading...

Banned from TV ... the Oasis Cactus Kid 'hospital' advert. Photograph: PR

Happy day! That Cactus Kid ad has been banned. Weirdly, it has been banned for condoning teenage pregnancy rather than for promoting sex with a half-plant man and being really, really creepy - which is why I would have banned it. (Not that I'm in favour of banning stuff willy-nilly. Only stuff I don't like.) In fact, it recalls nothing more than the film Splinter, which I had the misfortune to catch a trailer of the other day. It doesn't look as if it has a happy ending. But that trailer – and an advert for Saw V that was on during, possibly, Richard and Judy's New Position – got me thinking: Why is it that TV doesn't really do horror? Continue reading...

Ethics, schmethics ... Robin Tunney and Simon Baker. Photograph: Time Warner

How many times can you reinvigorate the detective show? I am constantly amazed by the ability of US TV to come up with new twists on a familiar theme. Just when you think they must have run out ... no, no, there's something brilliant and original and new. Or at least mainly original. Well, new, anyway.

This season? Fighting crime has been made the easiest it ever has been - I think there must be literally someone of every profession, lifestyle and level of mental instability on the job. Hopefully by this time next year there will be no crime whatsoever - because anybody who could possibly be solving it, is. Continue reading...