TV & Radio

The Music That Melted, Radio 4, Tuesday
The Call, Radio 4, Tuesday

Some things just have to be seen to be believed

Inside TV & Radio

The Promise, Channel 4, Sunday
Mad Dogs, Sky 1, Thursday

Sunday, 13 February 2011

Peter Kosminsky's drama recalls how British troops had to beat and herd Holocaust survivors into detention camps

Tings is good for Rastamouse, the TV cult hero

Saturday, 12 February 2011

He’s the skate-boarding, Rastafarian felt mouse who solves crimes with a chilled-out mantra of “makin’ a bad ting good”. Yet it's parents and students who are helping to turn Rastamouse into the biggest childrens’ television cult hit since Teletubbies.

IBM's 'Watson' to take on Jeopardy! champs

Saturday, 12 February 2011

Nearly 15 years after an IBM machine defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov, the US computer pioneer is rolling out another device to challenge mankind.

Simon Cowell confirms role on UK X Factor

Friday, 11 February 2011

Simon Cowell will take part in this year's 'X Factor'.

Last Night's TV: The Hairy Bikers: Mums Know Best/BBC2
The Big C/More4
Marchlands/ITV1

Friday, 11 February 2011

Rather like Ant and Dec, it's quite hard to tell the Hairy Bikers apart. This doesn't seem to matter. They move as one, enthuse as one, chomp and swallow and gurn as one. The only time they distinguish themselves is when arguing. Pretend arguing, that is. "It's tree-cal," hiccuped one (Si?), holding up a can of Lyle's Golden. "It's sirup, man," boomed the other (Dave?).

Yahoo! joins tablet craze with digital newsstand

Friday, 11 February 2011

Yahoo! is building a digital newsstand called "Livestand" that will turn tablet computers into personalized magazines rich with stories, images and video suited to individual tastes.

The Week in Radio: A double dose of daft death and stylish murder

Thursday, 10 February 2011

You could never accuse Classic FM of being po-faced, but you'd go far to find a more irreverent approach than in this week's Saturday Concert, "Sticky Endings", which explored the many hilarious and undignified ways that great composers have died. In a show which must have been great fun to research, Howard Goodall, Classic FM's composer-in-residence, ran through Jean-Baptiste Lully, who died of blood poisoning and gangrene after accidentally stabbing himself in the foot with the conductor's baton; Alkan, who was crushed to death by a bookcase; and Borodin, who collapsed in full national dress on the dance floor. The atonalist members of the second Viennese school had appropriately ludicrous deaths: Arnold Schoenberg, who suffered from a morbid fear of the number 13, died on 13 July 1951; and Anton Webern was accidentally shot in post-war Austria, when GIs arriving to arrest his son-in-law saw him light a cigar and assumed it was a weapon. "Yet another smoking-related death!" quipped Goodall, irrepressibly.

Last Night's TV: Madagascar/BBC2
A History of Ancient Britain/BBC2

Thursday, 10 February 2011

It's a little early to say whether Outcasts is going to be a hit or a space turkey. If it's the latter then nobody's going to have to worry too much about exoplanet locations for science-fiction series, since it will have effectively scorched the Earth for at least the next five years. If it works, though, there's going to be something of a rush on for vistas on this planet that look like they're on another. Might I suggest an early provisional booking for Madagascar, a wondrously unfamiliar landscape that comes helpfully accessorised with an otherworldly ecology. More than 80 per cent of the species are found nowhere else on Earth, which helps to maintain the frisson of alienation, and what's more many of the animals even sound like they've been invented by a science-fiction writer. Anyone for the tenrec, a kind of elongated hedgehog that produces a litter of up to 32 tiny (and spiny) little tenrecs? And if that doesn't take your fancy what about the fossa, a giant tree-climbing mongoose with a pair of vampire fangs? Or the sifaka, a white lemur that gallops sideways through the undergrowth?

Trial of Jackson's doctor to be televised

Thursday, 10 February 2011

Television cameras will be allowed to broadcast the trial of Michael Jackson's doctor on charges of involuntary manslaughter starting next month, a judge has ruled.