Tune in, switch off - They're desperate and fruity

I can't believe the thought police let Desperate Housewives through. Even the title puts the cause of women's liberation back a century. I mean, what is a housewife, for feminism's sake?
Gabrielle certainly has some ideas. In the episode called "A Spark. To Pierce the Dark" she rips off her clothes the moment weary husband, Carlos, returns from work, enticing him into the bedroom for some action. Only he tells her that "little Carlos" isn't ready. This is the wrong answer.

Big Carlos, desperate for a way out, pretends he wants "the spicy menu" after all and ties her to the bed. Once secured, he leaves, taking his shy little friend with him. Marriage counselling or murder have to follow.

Edie's death is even more dramatic. Half strangled by husband Dave, she drives off into the night, only to hit the proverbial tree. But strangulation and a major car crash aren't enough to knock out a Wisteria Lane resident.

As she steps out of the wreckage of the car into a flash flood, she's electrocuted by a fallen power cable. Cue lightning and dramatic music.

But you still can't put a desperate housewife down. In the next episodes, Dave has only his gun to cuddle and Edie appears larger than death as her five friends each recall a story from her life to fill in the time on the four-hour journey to scatter her ashes. Well, it's original. Actually, it's not - Chaucer used the technique more than 600 years ago in The Canterbury Tales. The only difference is that his plots were incredible. On reflection, make that no difference.

But Desperate Housewives is at least worth watching for the jibes. Even the Vicky Pollards in my school would find it hard to beat these taunts: "When you jump up and down the room moves more than your boobs." Ouch! And friend to apparent friend: "The upside of small boobs is that they're real." I'm making no comment.

Teachers of PSHE will find more moral issues here than in any set of curriculum guidelines. For example: "He's committing adultery; I'm getting laid." That's an ethical dilemma for an RS class. As is: "I love him enough to let him hate me." Discuss.

In assembly, you could look at the fact there are friends with a little f and friends with a big F. But they all screw you up in the end. That's screw with a big F by the way.
After three episodes, it was a relief to turn to something normal. In My Life as an Animal (BBC3), a group of intrepid volunteers learns more about animals by living as they do. This episode it was dogs.

Ed, on all fours, tucks into his meal, complaining that there is too much jelly on the meat that he has to eat to get to the biscuits. That's dog biscuits, not custard creams.

In his final day as a dog, his challenge is to sleep with the dogs. It's not what you think. Watch out for when they turn this surreal reality TV on its head, with My Life as a Human or even Desperate Dogs.

Ray Tarleton

Tune in, switch off - Don't mess with a classic

Back for its 37th series, Have I got News for You is reassuringly familiar. There were three great jokes - two visual and one verbal - in this first episode hosted by Frank Skinner.

First, our dear Prime Minister (that's dear in the monetary sense) was shown grinning inanely on YouTube. It reminded me that just because you can see the tiger's teeth, it doesn't mean it's smiling at you.

Next he's following President Obama into Number 10. The President graciously shakes hands with the policeman guarding the entrance. Well the guy's there to single-handedly prevent terrorists from breaking down the door. He deserves a break. And he's a London tourist attraction after all. Mr Brown copies the Obama gesture, policeman holds out his hand, and the PM changes his mind at the last minute and goes inside. The timing is perfect Chaplin. Or should that be Mr Bean? It's definitely a clip for citizenship classes.

Best of all is Mr Brown's public apology for the Damian McBride email affair: "I take full responsibility for what happened; that's why the person responsible went immediately." Just run that past me again. With this logic I can stop sweating about the GCSE results this summer. "Yes, governors, I take full responsibility for what has happened and have sacked the teachers responsible." No more sleepless nights for me.

However, the show also illustrates that revamping a format that works is totally unnecessary.
I can remember the mesmerisingly mirth-inducing programme The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin starring Leonard Rossiter and weep that David Nobbs and Simon Nye have wasted their talent on a remake.

Instead of enjoying the comedy, I was furious about the alterations. Now I know why classes, especially exam groups, get so wound up about teacher changes.

In the original, Rossiter's Reggie, reminiscent of H.G. Wells' Mr Polly, flees his job at Sunshine Desserts where life is dull, in search of new experiences. "What shall I call myself?" he muses as he walks, a free man at last, down country lanes. "I know, the first thing I see when I look over this wall. Colin ... Colin ... Cowpat." So simple and so memorable. I saw it 30 years ago and still haven't forgotten.

The new Reggie, Martin Clunes, no longer works at Sunshine Desserts, but at a disposable razor company. It would be the equivalent of Steptoe and Son as removals men instead of rag-and-bone dealers. And we all know the running joke about the whoopee cushion on the seat in the boss's office that featured in the original. Gone. How dare they? The optical illusion of big and little chairs misses the auditory gag. Even Mr Brown could have told them that.
As for the audience, either the responses were canned and someone forgot to turn the volume down, or they'd been drugged with laughing gas. Pure cowpat.

Genius is another make-over from Radio 4. It was a switch-off then and is now. Members of the public offer zany inventions for comment, and this week Germaine Greer offers the feedback. Onion juice and women-only voting rights were the highlights, that's how bad it was. My Year 9s on an enterprise day this week came up with better: expanding shoes and a mobile telephone glove.

Memo to BBC bosses: "Take responsibility for these failed revamps and fire those responsible."

Ray Tarleton

Not nuts, that's the bankers

Overheard in the staffroom: "Now he's pretending to be a television critic." Reply: "What's new? He's been fantasising that he's a headteacher for years." The critic's critic delivers the deadliest dart.

Though TV is often regarded as the lowest form of recreational life, there's plenty to learn out there. So this week's lessons are on economics with the affable Mr Hutton and history with that scary teacher, Mr Starkey.

But first, I got a lesson in dialogue in front of the Mark Lawson Talks to Mike Leigh show on BBC4. Recently, I saw Alison Steadman in the West End demonstrate perfect comic timing as an ageing could-have-been-but-never-was in the Alan Bennet play, Enjoy. In contrast, her youthful, guitar-playing Candice Marie in Leigh's Seventies play Nuts in May was a character out of time. She and her boyfriend were early Greens, appreciating nature on their camping trip, eating healthy vegetarian meals and following the Country Code (as it was then).

"Cigarette smoke it makes me choke, litter makes me shiver," Candice Marie warbles during the disastrous Dorset camping holiday when her husband, Keith, tries to get loutish fellow campers to show proper respect for the countryside. This could have been a series.

From things that flap (tents), to issues that make you flap. Money mystifies me. Niall Ferguson in The Ascent of Money explained that it doesn't really exist - it's only a load of promises. In anticipation of last week's Budget, I entered the economics class in befuddled state, awaiting illumination about these things from Will Hutton in his Dispatches programme Crash - How the Banks Went Bust on Channel 4.

Hutton's book, The State We're In, was a must-read in the Nineties and his recent work on China is gripping. In apocalyptic language, he proclaimed that the biggest financial catastrophe was all about "greed and ambition". This was the greatest story ever told.

The Western economy has been "taken to the point of collapse and then crippled". Lots of unrepentant money-grubbers were wheeled on as witnesses to prove it. One trader told us it felt as if civilisation got flushed down the toilet bowl. It was more like Casualty than economics.

Computer screens of financial projections could have been heart monitors, registering the weakening pulse of the patient, UK plc. Can the economy be saved from the banks? Watch this space.

Speaking of history-making moments, blood spread over the screen as David Starkey introduced one of the greatest love stories ever told - between Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn in Henry VIII: The Mind of a Tyrant on Channel 4.

It all happened a few centuries ago, so instead of living witnesses, Starkey used actors. Artificial and unnatural, they were a silly diversion. For who can beat Starkey the storyteller? Analytical, passionate and precise, he is one of television's joys. Framed in sepia on the staircase of a regal property, he might have been a painting of a historian or king. So which was the greatest story of them all, Hutton's or Starkey's? Which did I prefer?

Not history, nor economics because, important as they are, I think that it's the planet, stupid. For me, Mike Leigh's camping conservation lesson was the one to remember.

Ray Tarleton