s fd sdfsdfsdf sdf sdf sdf

sdfsdfsdfs sdf sdf

sfsdfsdfdf

f fgh fghfhfhfghsdadads

f fgh fgh fgh fgh h

sdasd asd asd asd asd asd asd

aasdasd asd

asdasdasd ads asd asdasdasd

sdsdasdas

asdsdasdklj asdlkja sdkja sdjasdk laslkdj aklsdj aklsdj askldj asd

this is a test

Tough as it is to admit, there's something about Hell's Kitchen USA (ITV2, Monday night) that makes it much more fun to watch than the British version. Now, I know it's wrong to admit this, considering it's a British format and all, and that far too much praise is thrown at US telly imports at the moment, seemingly at the expense of home-grown stuff (what home-grown stuff, you might justifiably ask), but it's simply a better show.

First up, HKUSA (as we'll call it, for kicks) retains original host Gordon Ramsay, who ramps up his pantomime-villain act to hugely silly levels, seemingly simply because he can. On this side of the Pond we may have tired of his "f**k me" sighs of exasperation and bouts of shouting, but the Americans lap it up. Second, the contestants are "real" people, rather than celebs, each with a point to prove, a bucketful of emotions on tap and no qualms about behaving in openly bitchy/ridiculously tearful/full-on stroppy fashion in order to get themselves more camera time.

And HKUSA's third trick is that we don't see much of the front-of-house stuff. Maybe they *do* get to see this in the States but we are spared it because we wouldn't recognise any of the guests (just like the British one, then... ho ho); maybe it's simply not seen as a key part of the show, but the lack of phone-voting, over-the-top "disgruntled" diners and nonsense links from a once-witty host give the programme stacks more appeal.

Oh, and trailers for future episodes seem to imply a big fight's going to happen...

When does autumn officially begin? When the leaves turn brown? Nah, it's when much-hyped series finally appear on the box and you find a reason to turn on the telly again. So October is proper bona fide autumn, it seems. And a few choice items stand out.

Honestly, I don't think I'm going to be able to cope with the heavy drama of BBC2's megabucks import The Tudors, but try to catch The Riches on new channel Virgin 1 next Monday -- Eddie Izzard and Minnie Driver are really good value, and the stealing-the-American-dream storyline is quirkier than you might expect. Elsewhere, Jennifer Saunders pretends to be Jeremy Kyle (or something) in her new series, set behind the scenes of a fictional daytime-chat show (4 October, BBC2), and Stephen Fry is also back that week (2 October, BBC2) with a moving two-parter about HIV.

Something even makes me think I should sit through Sky One's version of an American quiz, Are You Smarter than a 10 Year Old? (7 October), although I think this feeling might soon pass.

The point is, it's OK to watch the box again without having to pretend to be gripped by rubbish plots about Ian Beale's family in EastEnders. Rejoice.

Be honest — when you read about a celebrity getting upset that their privacy has been invaded by photographers or fans, how sorry do you really feel for them? Not much, probably.

Now, while I plainly have no idea what it feels like being papped in my dressing gown putting the bin bags out, I'm starting to empathise with the idea of becoming public property. You see, at almost eight months pregnant, it turns out my belly is fair game for a strange tribe I'll call Strokers.

Alas, no free-with-a-newspaper wallchart will help you to identify a Stroker. In fact, the key weapon in the Stroker's armoury is surprise. Without warning, a Stroker's hand will start prodding your belly and it will shove its face in yours, asking how you are feeling. Er, mildly violated? Mind you, I'm never really properly cross — not enough to override my polite-smile reflex, anyway. Being Stroked doesn't seem to prompt me to come out with witty retorts either — although it undoubtedly would, were I in a Richard Curtis film.

Of course, Strokers mean well — and drunk Strokers can prove tremendously good value. Playing the straight woman to a tipsy Stroker's frequently repeated cycle of belly-feeling and slurred questions can perk up the enforced sobriety of a party no end.

Besides, if Strokers got together, they could really benefit society. Imagine if Transport for London passed an edict demanding that every rush-hour Tube carriage contained a Stroker. Overnight, pregnant women could kiss goodbye to hoping-for-a-seat misery.

In my quest to find somewhere to park my rapidly expanding body on the Tube, I've tried several techniques: hovering expectantly (as it were) next to a seat occupied by a healthy young man; sticking out my belly as close as I dared to the face of a seated commuter; resting my hands on my pregnant tummy and staring around wildly, and even reading from a massive hardback book called The Pregnancy Bible.

But had a Stroker been on duty, no sooner would I have boarded the carriage than the Stroker's magic Stroking instinct would have kicked in. It would have located me, made a fuss of my tummy and thus attracted the attention of fellow passengers (whose rush to give up their seats would be equally motivated by politeness and a desire to put an end to the

Stroker's inane chatter, thus restoring the carriage to its more familiar mode of awkward silence).

So Strokers of the world unite. Alone, you might frustrate the hell out of unsuspecting pregnant women, but together, there could be no end to your power.

Will we never tire of television dramas about suburban, middle-class angst? ITV1 plainly doesn't think so, with The Time of Your Life(middle-class girl wakes up from coma after 18 years) and Little Devil (parenting trauma among enviable kitchens) filling the Monday-at-9pm slot in recent weeks.

And on Sunday night BBC1 gave us The Dinner Party, a new twist on that old telly-drama favourite: the socially awkward gathering in which an apparently run-of-the-mill middle-class home becomes the backdrop to a chain of events where minor boasts and worries morph into life-altering arguments.

Mind you, writer Tony Grounds would probably go to great lengths to point out that the characters in his latest comedy-drama were not in fact middle-class but working-class. They simply happened to find themselves with money and were choosing to spend it in not-traditionally-working-class ways, such as education for their kids and staff to cater their dinner parties.

Three couples living in a neighbourhood riven with social divisions — described as a "village", but it could have been any prosperous British community — took their places around the sumptuous table of the egotistical Roger, a self-made man with pots of cash and a deep-fat-fryer's worth of chips on his shoulders.

But their chummy facades soon gave way to sniping, jealousy and inappropriate flirting. Long-standing tensions between Roger (played by Rupert Graves), his put-upon wife (Elizabeth Berrington) and fellow village denizens Jim and Juliet (experienced purveyors of middle-class angst Alun Armstrong and Alison Steadman) descended into arguments, brawls and some anger-fuelled avant-garde topiary.

Observing all this were newcomers Leo and Jackie (Lee Evans and Jessie Wallace), who had chosen to cash in their London lives for semi-rural tranquility yet rapidly discovered their new home was anything but calm.

Now, the world and its dog has compared The Dinner Party to seminal 70s TV delight Abigail's Party, so I won't do that cos it's lazy. Instead, I find myself asking what is it about the suburban, middle-class milieu that makes it such a rich vein for television drama?

Is it that the familiarity of neat homes and ever-evolving aspirations reflects the lives of the bulk of viewers?

Well, one could argue that the setting for domestic tension doesn't matter.

After all, we lap up Coronation Street and EastEnders, yet most of us don't inhabit peculiarly witty, slightly timewarped Mancunian side-streets or as-yet-undeveloped London squares where weekly personality fluctuations seem to imply some kind of collective amnesia among the residents.

Or perhaps television drama has got itself stuck in a suburban rut — if you prefer, curled itself up on a Habitat sofa with a glass of supermarket-luxury-range wine — happy to ignore vast tracts of society in favour of reliably ratings-grabbing stories of socially-motivated worries and nice napkins.

Perhaps it's time TV series piggy-backed on the success of Doctor Who, Heroes et al and became shamelessly escapist. The next time we see tension around the dinner table, perhaps it should be on space station Mir.

.... truly rubbish lack of posts for the past couple of months. Would love to say it's because I've been hooked on Heroes but unless it picks up its pace I can't see that becoming likely. Any road, autumn's nearly here which means telly will open its treasure chest of exciting programmes and we will be awash with top entertainment.

Er... maybe.

So war is bad, belief in peace is the way forward and Martha decided that sorting out her own life would be more fun than following some bloke around the universe.

Yes, Doctor Who is over and frankly I was in floods of tears, but that could be my pregnancy-addled brain. More to the point, though, how brilliant to see two of the country's best TV actors, John Simm and David Tennant, together on screen and hamming it up to just the right extent as the series drew to a close. I suppose the Christmas special will be a gimmicky guest-star affair but Doctor Who is still probably the best-put-together show on the box. It's a shame Martha apparently won't be in it any more, considering she showed us that brains are more important in a sidekick than big eyes, but who knows? Perhaps the Doc's next companion will be even more fun...

Oh. My. Goodness. What the ruddy heck was News Knight with Sir Trevor McDonald all about? Part Have I Got News For You, part watching your dad trying to dance to the Killers at a wedding reception, News Knight was watch-through-your-fingers embarrassing, and that's before we even get to the Bernard Manning bit.

You can maybe guess Sir Trev's motivation for doing the show; he's a respected news figure and perhaps it's about time he had some fun, and also his "I'm not precious" side recently reappeared in the public consciousness following the Tiswas revival. But the mix of apparently-nicked-off-YouTube video clips and seemingly overscripted banter never quite gelled. Last night's show was saved only by panellist Clive Anderson, who thankfully has enough experience at that kind of vaguely newsy telly/radio to give proceedings a kick along when they seemed to be flagging.

Would the show have worked better sans Sir Trev? Maybe not. Marcus Brigstocke did a similar programme on the BBC with Anne Robinson and that was pretty... er... variable, as well. And there's no denying that the shock value of Sir Trev saying some of his comments was enough to keep you watching — as you might rubberneck a car crash on the other side of the motorway, perhaps. But if ITV1 is to try to reclaim the Sunday-night-satire crown it once enjoyed with Spitting Image, News Knight needs something of a rethink. (Perhaps they could get in some puppets?)

Here it comes... the Apprentice final. Of course, the candidates with the ability to generate the most confrontational telly have gone, but that was probably to be expected considering the format of the penultimate episode. Are those grillings from sirallan's mates really job interviews, or simply an exercise in catching people out? Were they briefed to find out something dodgy about each candidate, then dig and dig and dig until they could dig no more? Thinking about it, Tre was probably the ideal candidate for sirallan's role because he's obviously adaptable. Yes, he was stroppy and egotistical, but look at the way he threw himself into every task. Besides, the show is called the Apprentice, not "the boss of an Amstrad subsidiary company"; surely contestants don't expect to be given their own division to run straight away. And what of the henchmen themselves? Did the director yell "try to look studious when you sit around the boardroom table, even if you don't really agree with, or know, what's going on"?

Anyway, it's all over now. Kristina and Simon fight for sirallan's approval, and Katie has seemingly done OK out of the News of the World. It's been a blast.

In a world where recycling and waste-management are key, have you thought how much extraneous matter could be removed from the modern TV schedules with one simple manouvre — bringing back That's Life?

Mind you, returning Esther Rantzen's bizarre mix of bad jokes, odd-shaped vegetables, consumer reports, undiscovered talent and serious child-related news to telly would eradicate so many programmes, we'd run into danger of having to fill the holes with Pages from Ceefax.

We could get rid of Watchdog, for a start, what with Esther's consumer crusades. Then the singing dogs and kids bit could take the place of Britain's Got Talent, Any Dream Will Do et al. Oh, and the saucy-vegetables section might remove the need for BBC2's Grow Your Own. And we could axe the whole of BBC Breakfast -- its staple diet of medical scare stories, hospital-parking-charges scandals and film of wacky animals from around the world, bound together by in-jokes between grinning presenters, sounds exactly like a bumper episode of That's Life. (The morning-news show's preoccupation with parenting stories is also right up Esther's Street.)

Of course, there would be a few problems. For starters, casting Esther's sidekicks (although the Britain's Got Talent judging panel might fit in ideally). And considering That's Life finished in 1994, it hadn't yet succumbed to the ubiquitous viewer-vote stunt. But that could surely be worked in very easily... "Do you think carrot A, B or C, most resembles Mikhail Gorbachev? The lines open now!!"

It's surely a winning idea... unless of course UKTV Gold are already in talks to bring back a revamped version of the show...