Martha's next move

As Freema Agyeman returns to Doctor Who, she tells Andrew Pettie about her character Martha’s evolution, saucy fan mail and her designs on Hollywood...

One of the fringe benefits of owning a Tardis should be that it allows you to duck out of sticky social situations. On Saturday, however, Doctor Who (David Tennant) uses his Tardis to materialise right in the middle of one of the stickiest imaginable, as he and his new companion Donna Noble (Catherine Tate) come face to face with his former assistant Martha Jones (Freema Agyeman).

The Doctor hasn’t seen Martha since the end of the last series. But series creator Russell T Davies has kept her busy by transplanting her character to Doctor Who’s BBC2 sister show, Torchwood. Thanks to the experience, Martha, says Agyeman, is a changed woman. “Martha left the Doctor to be with her family and complete her medical training,” she explains. “But because of all the experience she had battling aliens as his companion she also works for [paranormal investigation agency] UNIT. That’s made her tougher and more independent from the Doctor. In the last series they had a kind of student-teacher relationship, whereas now she knows how to tackle dangerous aliens on her own. In a way, she’s outgrown him.”

Martha has also moved on romantically, allowing her unrequited feelings for the Doctor to fade into friendship. In fact, Agyeman reveals, “Martha’s got someone new in her life. She’s engaged – to another doctor as it happens.”

Martha Jones’s career is going from strength to strength. But what of Freema Agyeman’s? It has been rumoured that she was replaced as the Doctor’s companion because of a backstage rift with David Tennant. “Oh my God, I’d never heard that!” she exclaims, taken aback. “David and I are very different people – we listen to different music, we like different things – but I think that can be a good thing, and was part of the reason I got the job. David was always someone I could learn from, somebody I could ask questions. He made me feel completely welcome from day one. I’m really upset that people think we didn’t get on.”

Agyeman believes Martha’s transfer to Torchwood has also helped her to develop as an actor. “Although there’s obviously an overlap between the two, Torchwood is a very different show from Doctor Who – it can be much darker. As a genre, sci-fi gives the writers freedom. Playing Martha in Torchwood has given me a great opportunity to stretch my acting muscles.”

Martha has been an instant hit with Doctor Who’s notoriously obsessive – and picky – fans. “I get lots of letters from six, seven and eight-year-olds telling me how they want to be Martha Jones,” she says. “Even grown-ups shout out ‘Hey Martha!’ to me in the street. And at the DVD signings, by the time some fans get up to the desk to meet the Doctor and Martha they can hardly breathe they’re so excited. They just stand there shaking. It’s one of the amazing things about Doctor Who that it touches people on such a grand scale.”

Despite all the attention, though, Agyeman has taken overnight celebrity in her stride. Even slightly alarming romantic overtures from fans haven’t fazed her. “I’ve yet to receive a marriage proposal,” she says with a chuckle, “but I did get a rather, erm, suggestive letter. The writer was saying how he’d love to be my assistant and obey my every command, which I guess was flattering. It certainly made me laugh.” (Note to potential suitors: Agyeman has a boyfriend, Jamie. They met shortly before Agyeman won the role of Martha when her “bread and butter job” was working as a theatre usher.)

Whenever her time on Doctor Who and Torchwood comes to an end, Agyeman has designs on Hollywood. She’s a devoted fan of comic-book adaptations such as Spider-Man and the X-Men franchise. “I really enjoy the crazy action sequences and pace of those films,” she says. “I suppose in that way comic-book adaptations are quite like Doctor Who. Those are the films I enjoy watching, so I imagine I’d also enjoy acting in them.”

For now, though, Agyeman is very happy with life as Dr Jones, and delighted by her return to the Doctor Who fold. Initially, she was worried that her first day of filming would be “like your first day back at school, when you worry that everything will be different”. But thanks to all the familiar faces among the cast and crew it was “like [she’d] never been away”.

“Being part of Doctor Who is like being a member of a club,” she says. “Whether it’s sending someone a text, or meeting up to go out for dinner, everyone stays in touch. When you’re in the Doctor Who family, you stay in the Doctor Who family. It’s like a nice version of the Mafia.”

Doctor Who is on Saturday, 26 April on BBC1 at 6.20pm

Johnny Byrne- Made on film

With its graphic descriptions of the rock lifestyle of the 1960s, the bestseller, Groupie, written in 1969 by Johnny Byrne and Jenny Fabian, was, briefly, a London media succès de scandale. Yet within a decade, Byrne, who has died aged 72, was well set on the path which, through various twists and turns, sealed his reputation as a reliable source of comforting Sunday evening television. He wrote 29 episodes of All Creatures Great and Small (1977-90) and, from 1992, 23 episodes of Heartbeat.

Byrne started life in a tenement in Dublin's Northside, the eldest of 13 children born to working-class parents. Arriving in Britain in 1956, he cut down Christmas trees in the Lake District, worked on the Liverpool docks and was a guide on the river Thames in Oxford, before teaching English as a foreign language around European capitals.

By the 1960s, he was a tour manager for the American Shel Talmy, who was record producer for the Who and the Kinks - and Byrne's agent. The Irishman began writing poetry and edited several small-circulation magazines. His short stories appeared in the British magazine Science Fantasy (renamed Impulse in 1966). One of his stories was selected by leading Canadian critic Judith Merrill, for her The Best of Science Fiction 1965-1966. Byrne also featured at the Edinburgh festival and at underground happenings, as part of the Poisoned Bellows, alongside poet Spike Hawkins.

Then came Groupie and, in 1970, Byrne's first TV script, for one of the last BBC Wednesday Plays. Made on film, Season of the Witch starred Robert Powell, Paul Nicholas and singer Julie Driscoll as dope-smoking exponents of the counterculture. The early 1970s found Byrne living in a commune, and contributing scripts to Thames TV's children's series Pipkins.

In 1972 came the first of Byrne's two excursions into film, adapting Spike Milligan's book Adolf Hitler - 'My Part in His Downfall'. Jim Dale was an annoyingly chirpy Spike; the genuine article had a cameo, as his own father. The other, To Die For (1994), was once described as a gay version of Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), and not to be confused with Gus Van Sant's film of the same name.

In his 1960s science fiction, Byrne had dealt with mature themes, but he found that in TV the genre was categorised as juvenilia. He was script editor on the first series of Space 1999 (1975-76), for which he also wrote 11 episodes. Regretting increased American involvement, he observed: "Over-produced series have the smack of death when they finally fetch up on our screens."

From 1981 to 1984, he wrote three Doctor Who stories, including Tom Baker's penultimate performance, and two 1980s ITV series, the daytime drama Miracles Take Longer and the children's series Dodger, Bonzo and the Rest.

Following the initial All Creatures Great and Small, he contributed to the BBC's One By One (1985), a similar series about a trainee vet, then returned, as script consultant, for All Creatures' late 80s revival. Noah's Ark (1997-98), created by him in the Heartbeat mould and starring Anton Rodgers, was less successful. He had a keen interest in Celtic mythology, incorporating themes and character names into sci-fi scripts. He also lectured on former Yugoslavia.

His wife Sandy, whom he married in 1975, and their sons Jasper, Barnaby and Nicholas, survive him.

Money madman who declares capitalism is crazy

To celebrate international Earth Week, the television empire NBC has asked America's favourite share tipster to infuse his daily Mad Money broadcast with a green theme. As the minutes tick down to showtime in his chaotic New Jersey studio, Jim Cramer is anxious for props. "Do we have jungle music?" he demands. "How about a pith helmet? Can you find me a pith helmet? It's like an upside down round thing - and it's hard!" As the cameras flicker into life, Cramer begins his prime-time hour by crouching, crab-like, in an indoor tree and gesticulating vigorously with the branches as he urges viewers to invest in natural gas. Every so often a snippet of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" blares out.

His shambolically cluttered set includes a Wall Street sign, an oil painting of himself, a picture of Che Guevara, a packet of Uncle Ben's rice bearing a photo of the Federal Reserve's Ben Bernanke and a large collection of squeezy plastic pigs. "The notion of teaching through entertaining is something that you don't find a lot of," says Cramer after the show. "There's a very big entertainment component - and I don't mean that to say it's not rigorous."

Cramer, 53, has a vast following among America's millions of armchair investors. His act, in which he hurtles dementedly around his studio on the business channel CNBC yelling stock tips, moves share prices daily, and his angry rants routinely become viral videos on the internet. During a phone-in segment, Cramer delivers on-the-fly advice to William from Oklahoma, who holds shares in Chesapeake Energy, and to Steve in Florida who gets tips on hydrocarbons. Each caller greets Cramer with his catchphrase - "boo-yah!"

It is brash, tacky, greedy and flashy. Yet after the cameras shut down, Cramer is unapologetic. "I call myself the most sincerely insincere man in North America," he says. "But I've been given a great thing which is an hour of national TV that I can use to affect people and make them interested in the market. I'm a kind of a televangelist for money."

A Harvard law school graduate who made a fortune as a trader, Cramer is more than just a clown. He co-founded the news website TheStreet.com, where he is paid a salary of $1.3m (£650,000), and he is arguably America's best known financial commentator. Off-camera, an encyclopaedic mind is evident as he sprinkles esoteric historical references into his rapid-fire analysis of America's economic crisis - for which he holds laissez-faire policies in Washington partly responsible.

Cramer says that under Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower, there was a proud tradition in the US of regulating capitalism to ensure it was fair - until the neo-conservative era dawned. "Capitalism is supposed to be regulated," he says, citing the need to protect the public against dodgier hedge funds and sub-prime mortgage brokers. "The marketplace is really stupid, rapacious at the margins. It's a remarkably inefficient and brutal world."

Citing rocketing food prices while crops are diverted to ethanol production, he compares the US Treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, to the 19th century British prime minister Lord John Russell, whose free market policies were blamed for exacerbating the Irish potato famine in the 1840s.

Cramer reserves his greatest ire for the Fed's Ben Bernanke, who, he maintains, was complicit in fuelling the housing boom. "Anybody who looks at his legacy will see he's laissez-faire, laissez-faire, laissez-faire," says Cramer. "If you go back and look at his speeches in 2004, 2006, he was very much in favour of the kind of exotic home equity mortgages which are now part of a $400bn morass."

There were 14m homes sold in the US between 2005 and 2007, Cramer points out, of which a large chunk were on sub-prime mortgages. In the meantime, the Fed kept raising interest rates.

"Where was Bernanke? Did anyone sound the alarm on the rapacious strategies of the mortgage brokers? No - because they thought the market was terrific and the market could handle it," says Cramer, gathering a head of steam. "The market was so out of control that it almost destroyed capitalism as we know it but these guys thought it was just fine because the market's never wrong.

"It's that hubris - that belief in the market, that Ayn Rand 'Fountainhead' nonsense that became our mantra in our country. It's embarrassing!"

His disdain for Bernanke has become a long-running campaign. One of Cramer's top ten predictions of the year is that Bernanke will lose his job. In a red-faced on-air tirade last August which became required viewing on Wall Street and beyond, Cramer let rip about the mild-mannered Fed chief, yelling: "Bernanke is being an academic! It is no time to be an academic ... he has no idea how bad it is out there! He has no idea! He has no idea!"

With hindsight, Cramer admits that his agitation can occasionally become "cartoonish", adding that he briefly feared that he had suffered some kind of aneurysm with the aggression of his outburst which has been viewed more than 2m times on YouTube.

Back in his days running a hedge fund, Cramer's temper was legendary. A former employee, Nicholas Maier, wrote a book recounting how a difficult trading session once prompted his boss to smash a phone on his desk and heave a computer monitor across the room.

Fiercely competitive, Cramer has since run into trouble by acknowledging his familiarity with some of the more dubious methods of hedge funds - such as shorting stocks and then spreading rumours to push down the price. This practice, known as "fomenting", is illegal - but "you do it anyway, because the securities and exchange commission doesn't understand it" he told one interviewer. He later insisted that he was not talking from personal experience.

Cramer acknowledges that he behaved like "Stalin" when he was running a fund: "I had a huge chip on my shoulder, I didn't have a lot of money. I felt that in order to get it right, we had to work 18 hours a day. I couldn't tolerate yawning, I couldn't tolerate sneezing because that meant somebody was going to be ill and off work."

That chip on his shoulder may have been to do with a turbulent early career. He worked as a newspaper reporter in Florida and California before suffering a series of catastrophic mishaps in which his home was burgled and his bank account was emptied. In his autobiography, Cramer recounts being homeless for nine months and sleeping in a car in California with a gun for protection.

A father of two young daughters, he rises at 4.15am every day to stay on top of the stockmarket. But critics have questioned whether his track record is actually any good. Cramer's website, TheStreet.com, has a bewildering database of thousands of his stock tips but doesn't keep a running total. Barron's magazine worked out last year that he was broadly in line with the market, but concluded it was almost impossible to judge because of the variety of his on-air exclamations. Does pressing a button which emits a bull-like sound effect count as advising viewers to buy?

Cramer reacts to scepticism by pointing out that as a hedge fund manager, he returned 24% annually after all fees over a 14-year period: "Over a very long period of time, I made a lot of people a lot of money."

Recently, Cramer faced catcalls over remarks about Bear Stearns in response to a viewer's email just days before the bank went bust. "No, no, no. Bear Stearns is fine - do not take your money out!" Cramer thundered on his show.

Defending himself, Cramer points out that the viewer was asking about Bear's liquidity, rather than its shares - and that he was advising those with deposits at the bank not to withdraw their funds, rather than to hang on to the stock.

"It would have been better if I'd said 'sell, sell, sell' - that would have been a home run call," he admits. "But it could have maybe wiped [the bank] out because some people say the show's that powerful."

Just how responsible is it for an avowed Democrat to be urging the public to put money in stocks?

"They're watching this network because they want to do it," he says. "Man, if you don't like me, it's a gosh-darned TV show, turn it off for heaven's sake."

'People really needed convincing that they wanted me'

We know him as Don Draper, the misogynistic, chain-smoking, hard-drinking Sixties advertising man at the centre of the brilliant TV show Mad Men. But it took Jon Hamm seven auditions to land the part and he'd been toiling in Hollywood bit parts (and worse) for years, reports Chrissy Iley

There are many things to love about Mad Men. Its impeccable style - the suits, the martinis, the ashtrays. The lighting (fluorescent office, amber nightclub), the permanent halo of smoke, the way women wear corsetry to work and are revered and despised in equal parts, the sexualised selling of ideas - all are period-perfect. It's a Polaroid of the advertising world of early Sixties Manhattan on Madison Avenue. It is politically incorrect and recreates an era where great change was about to happen but had not happened yet. It has the repression of the Fifties more than the swing of the Sixties. At the heart of the drama is Don Draper, rarely without a chunky glass of bourbon in one hand and a cigarette in the other. He has a Grace Kelly-style wife, a beatnik mistress and another lover, a gorgeous Jewish woman from the Upper East Side.

Draper is played by Jon Hamm. This year, he won the Golden Globe for best actor ahead of Hugh Laurie (House) and Jonathan Rhys Meyers (The Tudors). He is 37 and is being compared with George Clooney, who was about that age when he got his ER break and had similarly been toiling unnoticed in lesser-known US series.

I am waiting for Hamm in a cafe in Silver Lake, a boho-chic part of LA, wondering what he is going to look like without the suit and Brylcreemed hair. And here he is, as tall, lean and buff as could be in jeans, battered navy polo shirt, all unshaven and solicitous. How is my jetlag? How is my life? He recommends Devil's Nest, a scramble of avocado, sour cream, spicy sausage. Hamm is not self-consciously Hollywood, showy or full of himself, which probably comes from several years working at the coalface of showbusiness and before that as a waiter and a teacher. 'I taught daycare when I was in college. I taught after-school stuff for little kids.

'I was a theatre major in college and they didn't prepare you for the massive amount of rejection you have to go through. Most people who are successful, like George Clooney and Brad Pitt, had to eat shit at a lot of auditions and still not get the parts. So you have to develop resilience. Especially for Mad Men, where it took seven auditions to get the part. People really needed convincing that they wanted me.'

The show was created and written by Matthew Weiner who was a writer and producer on The Sopranos. He pushed for Hamm despite the cable network's nervousness because this was the cable channel AMC's first foray into drama series and it wanted the security of a star name.

Hamm had been a regular for three years on a show called The Division. 'It was on a network called Lifetime, which is soft programming for women. It was a cop show, five women and me, but the women got to be much more macho than me. I was the slightly emasculated cop; now I get to be a little more masculine,' he says. But, he shrugs, he's no alpha male. 'I was raised by a single mother and I've been in a 10-year relationship with my girlfriend. My whole life I've been surrounded by women.'

Does he at all resemble the slick but haunted ad man Don Draper? 'The closest thing I have in common with Don is that I'm looking for something. If you look at the literature of the early Sixties, like Cheever and Updike, it's existentialist. People sitting around smoking, thinking 'what am I doing with my life?'. Postwar America was riding as high as it's ever ridden. It had an incredibly paternalistic sense of its place in the world. America was the good cop. It healed Japan after it had utterly destroyed it, protected the world from communism. Americans had money, ability to travel and see the world. And at the core of it was: I'm still not happy. What Don Draper is doing is trying to sell happiness because he can't buy it himself. I think that resonates.'

The eggs arrive and he eats heartily. Does he smoke as much as Draper? 'I gave up 10 years ago when I started teaching kids. I don't miss the hacking cough in the morning or the mouth that tastes like cat litter, but I miss it when I'm on this show. It's glamorous, I got to tell you. [They smoke a non-nicotine herbal blend.] In the show, we know smoking kills, but we don't give a shit. These guys had three-martini lunches... I appreciate alcohol. I love the place that alcohol holds in our society, but I'd never attempt to drink as much as Draper.'

Hamm may relate to the smoking and the drinking, but not to the way the women are treated. He is devoted to his girlfriend, the actress and writer Jennifer Westfeldt, while Draper and his colleagues spend most of their time humiliating women when they are not sleeping with them and even when they are. They refer to Peggy, his frumpy secretary, as 'a lobster. All the meat in the tail'. At one point, Draper says to one of his inamoratas: 'What you call love was invented by guys like me to sell nylons.'

Draper sells lies for a living. He cheats. He is emotionally withholding, morally ambiguous, with a past he can't face up to, yet we can't help rooting for him. There's a genius in this portrayal. Hamm stares into his Devil's Nest. 'There's a vicarious thrill in it. When we see people misbehave, sometimes we want them to get away with it. I've gotten away with a lot in my life. The older you get the more you realise you're not getting away with it, it's taking its toll somewhere. So you try not to put yourself in those situations. Part of the mysterious process called growing up. Some people do that better than others. It's a daily struggle, especially in this city where everyone is a child and often rewarded for it.'

I tell him I cannot imagine him as a child. 'Well, I was forced to grow up very early because I lost my mother when I was 10. So that tends to take a lot of childhood out of the equation and you become very aware of adult things.' Hamm's parents divorced when he was two and he lived with his mother. 'She died suddenly over the course of about three months. A stomach ache one day turned out to be an advanced cancer that spread rapidly through her internal organs. She had two-thirds of her colon removed and it killed her.

'When you are 10, you just don't have the tools to process it. You're coming home from playing kick-ball to talks about how they've got to set you up a trust fund [which paid for his high-school education]. I do have very good memories of being a kid running around, but that all pretty much got lost. It was hard to bounce back from losing my mum. It's an incredibly tough process and you see a lot of that in Don as well. His childhood was... ' He searches for the word. Tortured? 'Yeah.' This would be the moment where Don Draper would light a cigarette and smoke the pain away. Hamm dips his sourdough into his eggs and swills it about.

It must have been strange suddenly to go and live with his father? 'Sort of. Though I loved my dad and I would see him every other weekend. It wasn't like he was a guy I didn't know. He had not remarried, but he had two children from a previous marriage, one of whom was living with him, as well as my 80-year-old grandmother. My dad was in many ways essentially Don Draper. A businessman in the Sixties, very powerful, self-assured. I didn't find out about that when I was a kid. He passed away when I was 20. We didn't have a chance for many adult discussions or to deal with each other as adults. He was sick for several years. He just degenerated over the last couple of years until he passed away. He packed a lot into his 63 years. It was a hard life.'

Hamm came west to LA from St Louis in 1995, prepared for hard work. 'I tried to get my affairs in St Louis in order the last year I was there, but I was never very good with money and by the end of the summer I had saved only $150. Fortunately, gas was cheaper then and I made it here in my car. The car died an interesting death. I had $1,600 of parking tickets accrued in my first four or five years here and the good people of Los Angeles decided to take the car back on their own.'

In Los Angeles he lived in a big house, just down the road from where we are having breakfast, with four other guys. In those days, the eastern district of Silver Lake was not cool or sought-after. It was rough. 'It was a crazy house and it was so cheap even I could afford it. An 85-year-old woman owned the house. She was a soap actress who lived in New York and we were four guys, my size and bigger. But we broke so many pieces of furniture, these little-old-lady chairs you would sit on and they would crack. Plus we would have parties and the keg would leak. It was my job as the diplomat of the group to say to her, "Marilyn, we love you" and make her feel good. I was always the one who was behind on the rent. I was very proud that once I started working I was able to pay her back completely.'

Hamm now lives just down the road in his own place with his girlfriend. 'We met through some mutual friends at somebody's birthday party. We didn't really hit it off immediately. She thought I was a cocky asshole.'

Soon after, she called him from New York to ask if he would come over and work on a project with her. It started off as a sketch. She thought maybe it would be a play and it turned into the critically acclaimed movie Kissing Jessica Stein in 2001. 'I was working downtown as a set dresser for some very bad softcore porn when I got the call from New York. I was making $150 a day and my friend was the electrician, so we would share a ride to work. I would carry my little bucket around and move what needed to be moved, but I would be terrible at it. I would fall asleep in a corner and they could never find me. So when I got the call, even though we had not particularly hit it off, I was like, yes, anything but this. I had no money, no car and all these parking tickets. Anything to get out of here.

'I borrowed the money from a friend and went to New York and we did this cool little play which turned into Kissing Jessica Stein. That's when Jen and I became really close. A year after that, we started going out and that was 10 years ago. We just had our anniversary in Mexico. We had a blast. We very much complement each other in this insane industry. We live and we work it out together. It's been great.'

It sounds as if she was a grounding force in his life? 'It's hard when you move cities and don't have a lot of friends and you're just trying to keep your head above water and trying not to get caught up in all this bullshit, to go out on auditions and not be totally soul-crushed when you don't get it. Especially out here, especially in the television industry where they dangle all this in front of you...

'And then they pull it back at the last second every time. How many more times am I going to be like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football and have them pull it away again? A lot of people after five or six times think, this is not for me, I'm done. It is so arbitrary and capricious.'

'Eventually I got there. Everybody on Mad Men is at the top of their game and it feels great.' And is he happy? 'Absolutely I am. I have a pretty stable relationship that brings me love and happiness and comfort. I have a great house and a great dog.' He shows me a picture of a dog wearing a baseball cap. What about babies? 'I don't necessarily want kids. A lot of our friends are having children and I don't know if it's for me. I haven't come down hardcore on either side of the argument. I think when people come from a stable family having children becomes a celebration and I'm not sure it would be that way for me.' And perhaps, for the moment, being the main guy in the best show on TV is enough. 'It doesn't suck,' he admits.

With that, he picks up the bill for breakfast as if that's perfectly normal when, in fact, it's unheard of. No Hollywood actor has even bought me a chai latte before. And then he offers to drive me home, as he doesn't want me to wait and call a taxi. I live half an hour away. We sit in his car listening to Steve Jones on the radio. How much better can it be?

Slices of Hamm: His life story

Early years
Born 10 March 1971 in St Louis, Missouri. His mother died when he was 10, his father when he was 20.

Career
1995 Moves to Los Angeles.
2000 First TV role, as a firefighter in NBC's Providence.
2001 Starred alongside his girlfriend, actress Jennifer Westfeldt, in Kissing Jessica Stein.
2008 Wins best actor Golden Globe for his role as Don Draper in Mad Men.

He says: 'I'm not the kind of actor that craves attention 24-7 - but it's part of the deal. You're the leader on the set.'

They say: 'The sexual politics are remarkable; the sex is even more interesting, and the hot centre of it all is Jon Hamm.' Salon.com, which last year voted Jon Hamm the sexiest man alive.

Born to lose

Fractious flatmates Mark and Jez are back, still going nowhere fast in a fifth series of the darkly hilarious Peep Show. Ben Marshall joins our favourite no-hopers on set, jumping for Jesus...

Oscar Wilde is often misquoted, in reference to his novel The Picture Of Dorian Gray, as saying, "People say I am Lord Henry, I wish to be Dorian but I am Basil."

This is only worth mentioning because standing in a muddy field on the set of the new, fifth series of Peep Show, watching the three main actors chat with one another, something similar occurs to me. It should occur to anyone who has watched the show. Or, at any rate, any man who has watched the show. People in general think men are Jez, Peep Show's shallow self-styled libertine; men themselves wish they were Super Hans - tall, confident, elegantly wasted, utterly amoral; but men are really Mark, a highly moral, but sexually repressed conservative whose idea of a good date movie is the four-hour German submarine epic, Das Boot.

Jesse Armstrong, who together with Sam Bain writes Peep Show, laughs. "We all wanna be Super Hans," he agrees with a mischievous smile, "but the fact is that most of us are, as you point out, just pathetic old Mark." It's depressing little realisations such as these that help to make Peep Show the most immaculately realised, hard-hitting and painfully funny sitcom of the last decade. Not that there is much that is original about the actual premise of the show.

The two main protagonists, Mark (played David Mitchell) and Jeremy, or Jez, (Robert Webb) are locked in a purgatorial, can't-live-with-him-can't-live-without-him, relationship. Mark, a tweedy, fogeyish loans manager shares his Croydon flat with Jez, a self consciously cool, wannabe musician. So far, so normal. This sort of destructive male dynamic has been a staple of sitcoms for the past 50 odd years. But there are several things that distinguish Peep Show from all that has come before it.

To begin with there are the internal monologues, filmed in such a way as to allow the audience to not just see, but hear what the characters are going through. The thoughts of Mark and Jez are often savagely and hilariously at odds with their actions. By the end of series four Mark had abandoned the woman he purported to love after their wedding at a lovely country church, as Jez, full of cheap lager, was forced to piss against the side of the church. "Richard Dawkins can talk the talk, but does he walk the walk?" he pondered triumphantly.

Both characters can look touchingly, almost heartbreakingly, sincere while harbouring the most excruciatingly self-serving of feelings. This may be why Peep Show worries so many women. Girls simply don't want to know what men might really be thinking. "Fucking hell," says Jesse Armstrong, "We think way worse things than that." It's a very Jez moment. There's a perfect example of this in the forthcoming series (which they're filming today) where Mark, Jez and Super Hans, attend a Christian rock festival. Jez is seen wandering through fields while beatific-faced Christians discuss imminent salvation.

"Look at how happy they all are," he muses, smiling back at the youthful believers. "I could be as happy as that if I only believed in a load of old shit." Jez then quickly agrees to a full body submersion in order to become born again. Not, you understand, because he has enjoyed any sort of epiphany. Jez is just a very modern sort of pragmatist. He won't allow his innate atheism to prevent him from screwing a pretty young evangelical. Cynical? Yes. Accurate? Horribly so.

Fruitless genital gratification, the endless consumption of narcotics (mostly by Jez and Super Hans) and ignorance as bliss; these are just some of the very contemporary themes Peep Show explores. Occasionally, at its very best, it comes over like Eliot's 'The Wasteland' rewritten as slapstick.

It is to the enormous credit of writers Armstrong and Bain that the show's contempt for modernity is coupled with a near-forensic understanding of contemporary culture. Otherwise, Peep Show could resemble a particularly bitter Daily Mail editorial. That said, there is plenty in Peep Show that would infuriate Middle England. For example, when I admire Matt King's trainers, the actor who plays Jez's drug buddy, Super Hans, he replies: "Yeah, good aren't they? I think Super Hans won them after giving the Orgazoid (a techno DJ) a blowjob."

There is a good deal of very unpleasant and extremely cynical sex in Peep Show. In one episode Jez asks a desperately shy girl how many men she has slept with. "Six," she replies coyly."Fucking hell," thinks Jez, "I've slept with more than that, and I'm not even gay."

At its heart though Peep Show, despite its extraordinary innovations and its alarming familiarity with modern mores, is a deeply conservative show. Christopher Hitchens once coined the term "reactionary modernism" in order to describe the work of Evelyn Waugh, TS Eliot and Ezra Pound. The phrase might just as well apply to Peep Show. Jesse Armstrong grins, apparently delighted that a show that has incurred some controversy, should be compared to Eliot and the Daily Mail. "I think we get a lot of different views in Peep Show. But if you are talking solely about Mark, then yes he does seem to come from that perspective. He also shares that prurient, but moralising curiosity about what other people are doing with their own lives and particularly about what others might be doing together in bed."

David Mitchell, who plays Mark and who the Mail On Sunday once described as "a posh ex-public schoolboy and a natural-born conservative" agrees that he and his character share a certain well-founded horror of the new. "I do think Mark and I have certain things in common. But hopefully I am a less worried, less angry and less upset person overall. I entirely agree that the show itself exhibits a horror of the modern world. My own personal knee jerk reaction is that novelty, which everyone else seems to embrace unquestioningly, should be at least questioned. One of the all-embracing themes of the show is that Jeremy utterly and unquestioningly embraces novelty. And Mark, perhaps equally as unquestioningly, rejects novelty. Neither is absolutely right, but I certainly feel more affinity with Mark than with Jez. You see, we live in a society where no one is allowed to say that change is bad. Now maybe it's a waste of breath to say that. But I think it's pretty important. For instance, the internet seriously threatens the media. Now there's not really much that can be done about it. No one can actually stop it, no matter how desirable that might be. So the fact that the dross on YouTube may kill off established channels does not make it a good thing simply because it's new."

So is Mark Peep Show's moral centre? David laughs: "When you see what he gets up to in series five, I think you'll seriously doubt that."

"That's the thing about Mark," says Webb. "People assume he is moral because he's always worried about things. But in fact he's just a moral coward, someone who simply doesn't have the courage to behave like Jez and Super Hans."

Matt King concurs: "Both Jez and Mark are cowards to differing degrees. Super Hans is just a nihilist. And when you believe in nothing it's actually very simple to be self-contained, to be at ease with yourself, to be happy in fact. Super Hans is the only character who is pretty much free of moral neurosis, because he doesn't actually give a shit about anything. He is a very, very modern man."

So everyone does want to be Super Hans? David Mitchell shakes his head. "It comes back to what I said about YouTube. There is nothing that really can be done about it. However does that really necessitate all the CEOs in broadcasting gleefully declaring that they are desperately excited by all the new challenges presented?

"What transparent nonsense! Why shouldn't they, and the rest of us, just scream in rage, 'Make it stop, make it stop, make it stop.'" Which, in a sense, brings us back to Lord Henry, Dorian, Basil and Peep Show. Mark it is then. Mark we are.

With great power comes great responsibility

Last night's TV reviewed: Heroes, The Baron, Strictly Baby Fight Club

There aren't many stories that wouldn't be improved by the addition of a few superpowers, preferably in conjunction with skin-tight costumes and masks, but I'm not going to be dogmatic about that. All that "from his mother's womb untimely ripped" nonsense at the end of Macbeth, for example: much more satisfying for Macduff to pull out a hunk of green kryptonite, thereby depriving Macbeth of the super-strength and invulnerability that have got him where he is. Wouldn't it be a breath of fresh air if Mr Darcy disclosed that the reason he's been acting so cold is that he had to protect his secret identity, and was wary of Elizabeth Bennet cottoning on to the fact that he has the proportionate strength and agility of a genetically modified spider? And there isn't a single short story by Raymond Carver that doesn't scream for the presence of a band of costumed mutant vigilantes, preferably ones who've been trained in a lost oriental martial art.

Heroes (BBC 2), though: Heroes sometimes feels a mite cluttered, superpower-wise. Returning viewers may recall that some winnowing seemed to have gone on at the end of the last series, when sensitive, brown-eyed Peter Petrelli (secret power: can copy everyone else's powers) inadvertently turned himself into a human atomic bomb and then went off, apparently taking his smoothie-chops brother Nathan (secret power: flying) with him. But nothing is ever that clear-cut in the world of superheroes. When you've stripped them of their powers, dropped a building on their heads or sent them hurtling into the heart of the sun, following it up with a full-page illustration of their headstone complete with roses wilting atop a mound of fresh earth, that's when they're at their most dangerous.

As the hit US sci-fi series Heroes (BBC2) returned, the biggest question was this. Now that the ever expanding gang of superheroes have fulfilled their brief to “save the cheerleader, save the world”, just what is there left to do? Not a lot, was the answer, if last night’s disjointed season two opener was anything to go by. Tim Kring, the creator of Heroes has apologised for this second season of the hit show about a group of people who discover, for good and bad, that they possess special powers. Kring says the imminent romantic storylines are not “a natural fit”, and that the pacing of this 11-episode season is amiss. His mea culpa, the TV equivalent of doing a Ratner, is an acknowledgement of how winning the first season of Heroes became — especially to those who would normally balk at a science fiction show. The light and shade of the characters intersected with a plot cleverly constructed to be as simple or devilish as your brain could cope with. As with sprawling predecessors such as 24, Lost and Prison Break, the price of a second series appeared to be the complete abandonment of coherence.

The new season had barely started when Nathan, the ruthless politico, turned up; but this is a new, sadder and possibly wiser Nathan – you can tell because he now hangs around in bars with a really bushy beard. Which is, I ought to clarify, attached to his face. He is consumed by grief over his brother’s presumed death and seems to have inherited Niki the stripper’s penchant for seeing doppelgangers in mirrors. So, what, we're supposed to believe that a small thing such as blowing up in a cloud of radioactivity would hurt Peter? Sure enough, there he was, chained up half-naked and not obviously irradiated in a freight container in Cork, surrounded by mean-looking men with rubbish Irish accents; they suspected him of having made off with a cargo of iPods they were planning to half-inch, returning to the scene of the crime to chain himself up and feign amnesia. The whole superpower bit is by no means the least plausible part of Heroes. Their mother, crackling with malevolence, is facing the threat of death. Just after warning her to disappear, Hiro’s father himself was rushed off the roof by a mysterious figure (a roof characters regularly fall off and pick themselves up from, it should be noted).

Meanwhile, Claire, the cheerleader (secret power: amazing body...sorry... amazing self-repairing body), has gone into hiding with her family in some nondescript town in California. But her latest beau seems to be able to fly; and, after a nasty fall, she clicked everything back into place. Dad Noah (secret power: can say lines such as "I love you more than anything in the world, Claire-bear" without puking) is working as assistant manager at a copy-store, which, by the way, looks like a pretty sweet deal, what with the big house and the big car it's paying for, and plotting against the evil, superhero-enslaving Company.

Mohinder, the earnest geneticist who knows how to wear linen (secret power: ability to intone appallingly sententious voice-over), was in Cairo complaining that nobody would take him seriously, yet somehow giving well-attended lectures to fellow academics on the subject of the heroes and a mysterious new disease he claims they are heir to. He is also fending off the attentions of a nerdy Company rep (secret power: can turn teaspoons into gold, which makes you wonder why he needs a job with the evil guys). Nice Matt, the copper (secret power: reads minds), is retraining with the New York police, and caring for troubled Molly, the little girl he saved, (secret power: can find people with superpowers). She is now being targeted by the evil Sylar.

Everybody's favourite character, Hiro (secret power: can bend the space-time continuum), has accidentally transported himself to 17th-century Japan, where he met his samurai hero, Takezo Kensei, who turned out to be a profiteering scoundrel. And English. Hiro’s new quest is to actually make a hero out of a crooked coward. “You must save the swordsmith and make the swordsmith’s daughter fall in love with you,” he told Kensei — only to receive a punch in the face. Back in the present, Hiro's father (secret identity: Mr Sulu from Star Trek), and Nathan's mother (secret power: is a real bitch) are receiving death threats...

This is, by any standards, enough to be going on with. But no, we also have to follow the panic-filled, faintly incestuous relationship of mysterious Latin American twins Alejandro and Maya (secret power – look away now if you didn't cheat and watch episode two on digital: bleeding from eyes while those in vicinity keel over dead). Somebody out there has the secret power of being able to generate limitless numbers of ludicrous plotlines, and they've forgotten the great lesson taught us by The Amazing Spider-Man many years ago: with great power comes great responsibility.

The storytelling was still taut and the zest of season one remains largely intact. “How long can they dwell in the shadows?” Mohinder asks at the beginning. Not long: the “heroes” had to save New York the first time round from a fiery apocalypse, and now have to contain a virus. One could be generous and say that everything will get clearer once things are under way again. But I’m not so sure. Heroes never had much of a guiding principle beyond its characters’ vague quest to save the world from unspecified evil. Now they’ve done that one gets the impression the show was only recommissioned for the sake of it – or for the sake of its heroic power to generate advertising revenue, in America at least...

After this profusion of stories, The Baron has an appealing high-concept simplicity: celebrities woo a village for votes to win the genuine hereditary title of Baron of Troup. The programme was in direct competition with Question Time on BBC1, where London's mayoral candidates were doing precisely the same thing. The complication for the show is that the best they can do in the way of celebs is Suzanne Shaw, a veteran of ITV talent contests, Mike Reid (who died of a heart attack aged 67 last July leading to the series being shelved), and the punk Svengali Malcolm McLaren – all a disappointment to the folk of Gardenstown (no relation whatsoever to Gordonstoun) a small fishing village in north-east Scotland, who were thinking in terms of Sean Connery, and who are an unusually devout set of people. It is silly and exploitative in several ways, but Malcolm McLaren being told by his hosts how much joy it would give them to see him accept the Lord Jesus in his heart: you cannot put a price on a sight such as that.

Gardenstown is very devout. It has no mobile-phone reception so it may, in fact, be heaven. Not, however, to McLaren, the former manager of the Sex Pistols ("What a dreary, forsaken place! Even the fish have left"). Has Malcolm McLaren seen The Wicker Man? Let’s hope he survives without becoming a sacrifice of the people of Aberdeenshire. Highlights of next week’s episode of this peculiar show showed McLaren jumping into a car, fearing the imminent arrival of a “lynch mob” just after he had informed a mainly religious gathering that “God is a sausage”. McLaren is dry and posh, ex-pop star Shaw predictably perky, and Reid avuncular and forever Frank Butcher. You knew that McLaren would be magnificent trouble from the moment in the minibus on the way from the airport when he gestured miserably to the surrounding countryside and said, “I suppose Aberdeen is behind us . . .”

While the trio campaign to become Baron, the producers have housed them with locals. Reid turned Frank on at full volume. Shaw went to stay with the town butcher. “The godfather of punk” scored the earliest hit with the town’s children by telling them the title of the Sex Pistols album, 'Never Mind the Bollocks'. They carried his suitcase to the home of a couple of evangelical Christians who didn’t recognise him. “That doesn’t sound like our kind of music,” the husband said. “We serve the Lord,” added his wife. McLaren rolled his eyes and slept in. He spent a lot of time sleeping, like a dormouse transplanted to an unfamiliar flowerbed. He knows where the spotlight is and misbehaves accordingly. This was becoming diverting fun. Reid discovered that Frank wasn’t welcome everywhere. In the Spar, he told a lame joke and faced a mini-batallion of pursed lips. McLaren shook off his hosts and made instant friends with the only other punk in the village. He was happiest around outsiders, he said, as he cheerily swapped gossip ("Rodent's left Carol, you know"). Frankly, I am not amazed. If Carol wanted commitment, she shouldn't have shacked up with someone called Rodent.

The three candidates made their first speeches at one of the six churches in town in front of 200 people. Shaw told everyone she hoped the experience would be positive and smiled a lot, despite previously forecasting she would be assailed by “psychotic Tourette’s and say ‘Fuck you’”. Reid lumbered up to the microphone and issued a gravelly “Paaaat” and said he loved the taahhhn. McLaren, tired of their “gushy love”, informed the mainly Christian gathering “to be good at being good is boring” and launched into a wonderful, halting soliloquy: “My father was Scottish and something of a drunk. I only met him when I was 45. My mother was Spanish/Portuguese and a Jew.” He said he didn’t have religious beliefs but had a belief “in art”. The audience looked on stonily; Reid and Shaw said he had lost them. Suddenly you thought: Go Malcolm.

Afterwards, the townspeople filled out response forms: “Only Lord Jesus will save him” read one of McLaren’s. Reid was offended by people thinking “Is it just an act?”. And Shaw’s response to someone saying she had no substance was to (wrongly, I think, I paused it) claim they had misspelt “substance”, then dismiss her potential voters as a “fucking bunch of knobheads”. Even the producers seemed a touch fazed by Gardenstown. The candidates were later invited to Yeller Fish Night ("Which pretty much sums up what happens," the commentary explained, a touch desperately. "A simple meal of smoked fish and boiled potatoes"). It had clear religious overtones so was not, perhaps, the best place for McLaren to declare "Evil be thou my good". When McLaren dies, he will come back as a spoon, having an infinite capacity for stirring it. He is perfectly polite in private but seems hell-bent in public, which is unfortunate in a candidate. Just ask Ken Livingstone. Next week, watch him run for it, pursued by angry Christians.

Controversy hummed around this week’s Cutting Edge (Channel 4), Strictly Baby Fight Club, prior to transmission. Anyone who saw the trailers, featuring a semi-apoplectic bullet-headed dad baying “Go on Princess, kick ’er” at his five-year-old daughter in a boxing ring, could be forgiven for thinking this would be a programme about the 2008 equivalent of bear-baiting, with babies taking the place of bears. But Kirsty Cunningham’s intelligent film soberly highlighted a disturbing trend – the growth of Thai boxing among young children – and the frighteningly bug-eyed support of their parents.

Sohan's father, a fork-lift driver, put it most poignantly. His son is nine. "My dream is for Sohan to become the world champion. I always wanted people to look at me and say, 'There's the champ!' but it's as good as. I've never had the opportunity to become a superstar, but my son has. Sohan's living the life I should have lived. It's so real for me. When he's punching, I'm punching. When he gets hurt, I'm hurt. The clouds are going to open and the gods will be looking down on a champ." Sohan lost.

Five-year-old Miah was sobbing as she was put in the boxing ring. "Aaah!" said the audience, charmed. Her father, Darren, trains her. Her mother, Lisa (or "nail technician, Lisa" as the commentary put it), makes up her face. "We've not to cry, have we?" she said, brushing on the blusher. "Otherwise what comes off? Your sparkle comes off." Miah wept sparkling tears. "Come on, princess, kick 'er!" yelled Darren, while Lisa filmed the fight. Miah lost, too.

As it transpired, Cunningham’s film offered a more balanced view of Thai boxing and what it offers the children who participate in it. With the exception of the above-mentioned Miah (whose plaintive pre-bout sobbing blew apart her father’s claim that “she wouldn’t fight if she didn’t want to”) the youngsters featured appeared on some level to enjoy the sport. And with contestants swathed in protective gear, and no blows to the head allowed, it looked at lot safer than traditional boxing. But any judgement was left to the viewer: the parents, while feverishly aggressive when their children were in the ring, explained their children’s involvement in the sport and how seriously they took safety. It still wasn’t palatable. The sight of nine and 10-year-olds kicking each other for sport was unpleasant. The children’s bodies seemed too little and fragile to take it. What are those parents doing, you thought. How can they put their child in a ring and scream at them to hurt another child? And there was always the suspicion that many of the watching adults were getting a nasty voyeuristic thrill from it. Why else would an audience have paid £35-a-head to watch two 10-year-olds fighting in a cage, as they had in one case?

Well done, Thai boxing looks like fleas fighting. The children's skinny limbs cartwheel as they whirl. Connor and Thai (destined for the sport from the font) were 10-year-old veterans with shelves full of trophy glitter. They fought in the cage for the Junior British Cage Thai Box Title. Connor wore a helmet; Thai didn't. There was some parental acrimony about who had kicked whom in the head. Connor's pencil-thin hips could hardly support the massive belt he won. His mother had signed a waiver not to sue if he died. In some ways Connor seemed the only boy to be doing it for himself. Having won his fight, and speaking from under an outsized tweed cap, he cockily announced that with his desired future earnings of £10 million he would buy “two Bentleys and a massive house”.

It is said that one can judge a society’s level of civilisation by what it does for sport. In this case you’d have to say we’ve taken a backward step. All told, this was a powerful piece from Kirsty Cunningham. The proud parents did not see it coming up from the floor. Anyone can fail to see a kick coming. That's the point.

ITV ponders public service options

ITV is "running the numbers" on the cost of handing back some or all of its ITV1 licences to regulator Ofcom.

The move would mean ITV giving up its status as a public service broadcaster and switching from analogue to digital-only transmission of its main network ITV1 earlier than expected. According to sources, weighing up the pros and cons of doing away with its public service obligations follows pressure from ITV investors.

With the share price in the doldrums at around 65p and rumours of potential bidders circling such as RTL and Haim Saban, all options for the future of ITV are being considered. The 11 ITV1 licences, for regional franchise including Granada, Central, Yorkshire, London weekday and London weekend, give the broadcaster some special privileges such as its prominent position on the digital TV electronic programme guide, which is decided by Ofcom.

If ITV were to hand back any licences it would lose those privileges and have to pay what the Communications Act 2003 calls 7% "of the qualifying revenue for the last complete accounting period of the licence holder falling within the period for which the licence is in force".

Currently, under predictions for the ITV family of channels for 2008 that would mean it paying out between £100m and £112m. One of the biggest fears is the impact of switching to digital on loyal ITV viewers, particularly older audiences who do not have digital television.

However, it is only just over a year until a key part of ITV's heartland – the Granada region, where Coronation Street is made – is due to switch from analogue to digital television anyway. Next autumn, 3 million viewers in the Granada region in north west England will go digital at the flick of a switch.

It is no secret that ITV has become frustrated in its plans to cut back some of its public service obligations – from children's television to regional news. Over the last year or two there has been a steady trickle of requests to Ofcom. At the moment ITV has to clear it with Ofcom if it makes a "significant change" to ITV1's programming mix, as a result of which the channel would in any year be materially different in character from in previous years.

Most recently the regulator told ITV to re-think its plans to make cutbacks in regional news that could save around £40million a year. To ITV's frustration, Ofcom is not due to resolve that issue until the autumn. One source told Mediaguardian.co.uk that although ITV is "running the numbers", executive chairman Michael Grade is loathe to be the man who oversaw the end of ITV's history of public service broadcasting.

The source said: "Michael has brought back News at Ten and championed news. He's under pressure from investors though, so ITV has to evaluate what the opportunity cost of handing back licences is." Another commentator pointed out: "There is a declining value of the licences. At what point is the value lower than the cost of handing them back. What do you do with the licences at that point?"

It is not clear whether or not ITV could hand back a single licence or would have to give all 11 back to Ofcom all at the same time. An ITV spokesman said: "We're currently looking at all of the options set out in Ofcom's public service document."

In the first stage of Ofcom's latest public service broadcasting review, published earlier this month, the regulator set out four likely scenarios for the future, only one of which included ITV retaining its existing PSB status.

CNN presenter Quest goes into rehab

CNN's UK-born presenter Richard Quest has embarked on a course of drug rehabilitation following his arrest last Friday in New York.

The US news broadcaster today issued a statement confirming that Quest, a familiar face on the network, had entered a "drug rehabilitation facility" on the orders of a judge following his arrest. "At this time, CNN's primary concern is for his health and wellbeing. We look forward to Richard returning to CNN International," the broadcaster said in a statement.

A CNN spokesman declined to "speculate" on when Quest would return to the network he joined in 2001. He began his career as a BBC news trainee in 1985 and spent 16 years at the corporation.

Quest was arrested in Central Park last Friday, April 18, at 3.42am local time for what a New York Police Department spokesman described as "criminal possession of a controlled substance, believed to be methamphetamine and for being in Central Park after closing time". During a court arraignment early on Saturday, he agreed to undergo drug counselling and therapy for the next six months in order to avoid a prison sentence.

At CNN Quest has made his name as a business reporter and presenter. He also hosts the monthly specials CNN World Business Traveller and fronted the Quest series of shows on diverse subjects. Past programmes have included Quest For Spirituality, Quest For Culinary Success and Quest For Rock 'N' Roll, in which rock star Alice Cooper put the reporter in a headlock.

Quest is regarded as a popular figure at CNN where he reports with a distinctively enthusiastic style and gruff voice. Writing in the Mail on Sunday last year Michael Holden described Quest as "a kind of manic nerd with a head for figures and a voice like Yoda struggling to impersonate Barry White".

As a business travel specialist, Quest has become a voice of authority on subjects such as the launch of the Airbus A380. He also travelled across the US to gauge public feeling in the build-up to the 2004 presidential election and anchored CNN's coverage of the funeral of Pope John Paul II, live from Rome.

Sermons row resurfaces for Obama

Barack Obama, under pressure to demonstrate his electability against the Republican presidential nominee John McCain, today faces a potential re-run of the controversy over the fiery sermons of his former Chicago pastor.

Reverend Jermiah Wright appears today in his first televised interview since the row over a sermon in which he said Americans bore some responsibility for the 9/11 attacks. The appearance could prove awkward for Obama ahead of hard-fought contests in North Carolina and Indiana on May 6. Though still the undisputed Democratic frontrunner, he faces some doubts about his ability to connect with white working-class voters following his defeat in the Pennsylvania primary.

In early partial transcripts of the interview, Wright defended that sermon as well as others in which he accuses the US government of deliberately spreading HIV. "I felt it was unfair," Wright told PBS. "I felt it was unjust. I felt it was untrue. I felt for those who were doing that, were doing it for some very devious reasons." Obama denounced Wright's controversial sermons in a much-praised speech about race last month. But his 20-year attendance at Wright's church in Chicago has continued to be an issue.

In the PBS interview, which is the first of a number of public engagements by the pastor in the coming days, Wright argues that there was an organised attempt to smear him as "some sort of fanatic" as well as pull down Obama. "I think they wanted to communicate that I am unpatriotic, that I am un-American, that I am filled with hate speech, that I have a cult at Trinity United Church of Christ. And by the way, guess who goes to his church, hint, hint, hint? That's what they wanted to communicate."

The prospect of a second chapter in the Wright story has been greeted like a gift by rightwing television hosts who have been hammering Obama for weeks about his membership of Wright's church. Republicans in North Carolina also sought to capitalise on his relationship to Wright, using footage of the pastor's fiery sermon in an attack ad. The advert says Obama is "too extreme" for the state.

Doug Wilder, the first African-American to be elected a state governor, yesterday acknowledged that race would continue to be a factor in Obama's campaign. He argued Obama faced "ingrained difficulty" winning over some white voters. "He's struggling with them in terms of the nomination," he said, but added: "I don't think that struggle will emanate through the general election because they have far more in common with him than they do with the Republican candidate."

Obama's perceived vulnerability to such attacks has caused concern among the Democratic superdelegates who will probably determine the party's nominee. Despite his overwhelming lead in delegates, the popular vote and fundraising, a number of delegates remain undecided about his prospects against McCain. "I'm not buying the Clinton argument that Senator Obama is unelectable, but I certainly intend to continue to watch his performance to [determine] just how strong a candidate he will be," Keith Roark, the chair of the Idaho Democratic Party, told the Los Angeles Times.

Hillary Clinton's battered campaign won a new lease of life with an infusion of $10m (£5.1m) and some signs of hesitation among superdelegates about Obama. Her campaign claimed to have broken all previous fundraising records by bringing in that amount in the 24 hours following Tuesday's strong win in Pennsylvania - and followed up by sending out a new email appeal to supporters yesterday.

A Heroes star leading a far from ordinary teenage life

Hayden Panettiere is the poster girl of hit television show Heroes. The plot of the series about ordinary people who suddenly discover they've got superpowers could almost work as a metaphor for the life of the 18-year-old. Overnight she was thrown into the global limelight by the phenomenal success of the show. Every word and action of this girl from upstate New York became newsworthy, including her wardrobe, the men on her arm and, perhaps more surprisingly, her politics.

In Heroes, which returns to BBC2 tonight, Panettiere plays Claire Bennet, a 15-year-old cheerleader, who, in the first episode, discovered that she could heal instantly from any injury. The indestructible high-school student is forced to hide her ability from her peers and maintain a relationship with her father, a man who is keenly interested in people with special powers.

The first series won plaudits and awards but the start of the second series was met with a backlash when it aired in the US. Fans complained that the show had become lacklustre, the new characters were uninteresting, the trademark episode cliffhangers were noticeable by their absence and the story was unfolding too slowly. Show creator Tim Kring even went on record to apologise for the mis-steps and just as the season got back on track, the writers' strike ensured that the second series only had 11 episodes rather than the expected 24. Arguably it was a blessing in disguise.

However, just as interest in the show was beginning to wane, media interest in Panettiere went into overdrive as it emerged that she was dating her co-star Milo Ventimiglia. The news was met with consternation among her fans, with a consensus that the 12-year age gap between the pair was too large.

The blonde teenager has complained about the judgmental attitude of the criticism, but believes that she is now mature enough to handle it. One of the reasons for this is a holiday to Europe that she took with Ventimiglia and fellow cast members Jack Coleman and Adrian Pasdar: "About five days after I turned 18 [in August 2007] I took off to Europe with them. It was the first time that my mother hasn't travelled with me and we went to Munich, Paris and London. It was such a different experience being on your own and it just changed me dramatically. My mom says that one person walked on that plane and another person walked off."

She talks of having a family at home and a family on set. She describes the cast of Heroes as being her surrogate fathers, brothers and sisters; revealingly, there is no room for a surrogate mother. Her mother is Lesley R Vogel, a former soap actress who put her daughter into her first commercial when she was just 11 months old. At the age of four, Panettiere had landed her first part in a soap, and by the time she was nine she had appeared on Jay Leno's talk show. Aged 10, she was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album for Children for A Bug's Life Read-Along. She has sung songs for soundtracks including Bridge to Terabithia, and later this year her debut album is due to be available for download.

It seems that it's impossible not to talk about her wardrobe. When we meet she is wearing a blue Cynthia Rowley dress that, given its length, could easily be mistaken for a T-shirt. Her face is splashed with ready-for-television make-up and her hair is immaculately curled. She looks like the archetypal all-American prom queen. She is being spoken of in the same breath as Lindsay Lohan and Mischa Barton. However, unlike both those stars, who have both been arrested for drink-driving, Panettiere's arrest record is one that she is proud of.

On 31 October 2007, she was part of a group of protesters involved in a confrontation with Japanese fishermen. The group tried to disrupt the annual dolphin hunt in Taiji, Wakayama, by swimming towards dolphins that were being herded to a cove where they could be killed. In the confrontation, Panettiere paddled out on a surfboard before being forced back to shore as the fishermen used their boats' propellers and harpoons to block the protesters. On the beach, television cameras caught the actress in tears before the group of surfers headed straight to Osaka Airport and left the country to avoid arrest by the Japanese police.

The protest established her as the poster girl of the Save the Whales Again! campaign. She recalls: "I was absolutely beside myself the whole time. They wanted to arrest me, but it created such a wonderful stir in America and around the world that it was the biggest step forward we've ever had with the problem. At the end of January, I spent four days in Washington DC visiting the embassies of Japan, Norway and Iceland, the whaling nations. I spoke to the foreign minister of Japan and I think that they've lifted the arrest warrant, because I was at the embassy and that would have been interesting locked in a jail cell below the embassy in DC, but he welcomed me back so unless it's a trap I think I can go back to Japan now."

She recounts the tale with a glint in her eye: "He was so polite, respectful and kind and told me: 'You are the most welcome guest that I've ever had.' I was like, 'Shit, really! Thanks. I don't know how much I believe you, but thanks.' We spoke about how Japan looks at Sea Shepherd as if they are a terrorist organisation, and about how whaling can be stopped."

Whether she will turn out to be the Hanoi Jane of her generation or not, American politicians are as eager as the whaling nations to get her on side. I'm struck by how nonchalant the actress seems as she talks about being tapped by both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton: "I've had conversations with both of them. Actually, it was with Obama and Chelsea Clinton rather than her mother. The reason I was having meetings with them was to ask about their opinions and views on whaling, which dramatically impacts my opinion on who I vote for." Only just old enough to vote, the actress would not divulge which of the two camps won her over.

The Heroes star is even turning the media infatuation with what she wears into a way of helping save the whales. She has set up a website (www.panettierecloset.com) that sells clothes and accessories from her wardrobe, with the proceeds donated to animal-rights campaigns. When purchasing from the site it will pay to remember that the actress is only 5ft 1in.

Her film career is about to take off, too. She will soon be seen in Fireflies in the Garden, in which she stars alongside Julia Roberts, Ryan Reynolds and Emily Watson. In the family drama, Panettiere appears in the flashback scenes playing the young incarnation of the no-nonsense character that Watson plays in the present. Fireflies' director, Dennis Lee, has no doubt about her star quality, "Hayden is spectacularly talented. People know her through Heroes but she is the real deal. I'd love for people to understand that and not lump her in with her generation of actors who tend, for a lack of a better phrase, to get themselves in trouble. She has her head on straight."

Whether or not she is the most talented actor of her generation is a moot point; what is in no doubt is that she is the most dynamic teenager to have come on to our screens in a long time.

Heroes starts tonight at 9pm on BBC2; Fireflies in the Garden will open later this year

Cash-strapped Channel 4 pays boss £1.21m

Channel 4 chief executive Andy Duncan almost doubled his salary to £1.21m in 2007, despite a run of lurid headlines that began with the Big Brother racism row and ended with a fine over premium phone line scandals on Richard and Judy's You Say, We Pay.

The hike in pay, largely a result of a £450,000 loyalty bonus, came as the broadcaster claimed financial pressures were beginning to bite, with yesterday's annual report showing the core channel had made an operating loss for the first time since 1992.

Growth in advertising revenues and improved financial performance by its digital channels, including E4 and More4, helped it to record an overall profit after tax of £500,000, down from £14.5m last year.

Duncan said the broadcaster was "running out of road" as advertising revenues this year declined and it would soon need public money to plug the gap if the amount it spent on programming wasn't to go "seriously into reverse". He said new funding measures needed to be in place by 2010. Overall turnover was flat, but chairman Luke Johnson warned that it would never again be able to afford the record £624m it invested in programming and content across its channels in 2007.

But while Channel 4 spent more on content overall than ever before, the figures show its spend on original programming on the main channel went down slightly and the amount it spent on acquired programming, such as Desperate Housewives, went up by £21m. "In response to market conditions, we are already having to cut editorial budgets and a new public funding solution is now urgently required if we are to maintain such levels of public service plurality to the BBC," said Johnson.

Ratings for the main Channel 4 service fell 11% to 8.7% during the year, although this was offset by growth for its digital TV channels. Its overall share of viewing across all its channels dipped just slightly to 11.9% from 12.1% the previous year.

Johnson defended Duncan's pay packet, saying consistency of leadership was vital to secure Channel 4's future, and the decision to arrange a new two-year loyalty scheme that will pay out £450,000 in 2009.

BBC3 picks up Being Human and Phoo Action

BBC3 controller Danny Cohen has ordered six more episodes of Being Human, the one-off drama pilot about a flatshare between a ghost, a werewolf and a vampire broadcast earlier this year.

Cohen has commissioned the full series of Being Human from independent producer Touchpaper Television, part of the RDF Media group, after the one-off episode was shown in February as part of the channel's drama pilot season and peaked at nearly 450,000 viewers. Filming on the series, which will once again be written by Toby Whithouse, will start later this year for transmission in 2009.

The BBC said it would confirm casting at a later date. Russell Tovey, Andrea Riseborough and Guy Flanaghan starred in the pilot. BBC Wales head of drama Julie Gardner, who was one of the show's executive producers, said: "BBC drama is always looking for diverse and surprising pieces, and Being Human hit the spot with its irreverence and wit."

Cohen added: "Of all our recent drama experiments on BBC3, Being Human struck the most powerful chord with the audience. At its heart is a bold and adventurous concept and I'm looking forward to seeing how this is realised across a series."

Another of the series of pilots to win a full series commission on BBC3 is the kitsch kung-fu drama pilot Phoo Action. The drama, which starred actor Ray Winstone's daughter, Jaime, as a high-kicking futuristic crime fighter, will return for a full six-part series next year. Phoo Action pulled in 232,000 viewers and a multichannel share of 1.1% between 9pm and 10pm in February and was recommissioned before it was broadcast.

Whitehaven repeat may be ruled out

The body responsible for digital switchover is considering turning off the analogue signal for all the UK's terrestrial channels in one go instead of continuing with the existing two-stage process.

Digital UK said there had been mixed feelings in Whitehaven, the Cumbrian town where the five-year switchover project began in October, about the decision to switch off BBC2's analogue signal four weeks ahead of the other terrestrial channels. The switchover body said the process had created confusion for some people and had forced viewers to "toggle" between analogue and digital services to access all channels during the transition period.

Some 49% of respondents to a survey in the Whitehaven area said they would have preferred a single switchoff date. Just 23% favoured the way it had happened, with another 28% neutral. Digital UK has decided to reduce the transition period to 14 days for the switchover of the Selkirk transmitter in the Scottish Border region in November, and for two transmitters in the West Country region that will be switched in spring next year.

"We are considering whether it is appropriate to similarly adopt 14 day transition periods at other transmission sites, and whether in some regions with high DTT [digital terrestrial television] coverage a single switchover might be possible," the organisation said in a report on the Whitehaven experiment published today. But Digital UK urged caution, pointing out that for older or vulnerable consumers the "grace period" offered by the two-stage process had been beneficial.

Digital UK identified three other "areas for review" following the Whitehaven switchover, which saw 25,000 homes in the area of the Copeland transmitter in Cumbria lose their analogue TV signal. The body said some viewers in Whitehaven had been disappointed that they were receiving just 20 digital terrestrial TV channels, not the full complement of 40 offered by Freeview in other areas of the country. This will be the case for the 10% of the UK's households that will not be able to receive all three of Freeview's commercial multiplexes.

Digital UK also identified problems for viewers in rented accommodation, with one housing association in the Whitehaven area imposing a £24 surcharge for upgrading a communal TV system. And the organisation said it had encountered some "misunderstanding" about the targeted help scheme, which allows the over-75s, disabled people and blind people to apply for help in choosing and installing digital equipment. The scheme costs £40 per household but is free to those on income support.

As MediaGuardian.co.uk reported earlier this year, only a third of people in Whitehaven eligible for assistance accepted help from the programme. David Sinclair, the head of policy at the charity Help the Aged, said take-up of support and advice in Whitehaven had been "nowhere near high enough".

"The report highlights evidence of confusion by consumers over who would receive free help or how someone would benefit from paying the £40 fee for support," Sinclair added. "This confusion probably contributed to fewer older people having the help that would benefit them. Lessons must be learned here to ensure that all vulnerable older people receive the help they need."

A reminder of what TV can be

Voting was individual and private, but there seems to have been some communal thinking among the electorate for this year's Bafta Television Awards (Sunday, BBC1), with a strong sense of messages being given, thinks Mark Lawson.

For example, a telegram was clearly sent to the newspapers and media outlets that dragged Paul Watson's documentary Malcolm and Barbara: Love's Farewell into last summer's scandal over TV fakery. The presentation of a special prize to Watson signalled that the television industry sees a difference between robbing phone-in callers of their cash and finessing a press release. Intriguingly, the Daily Mail, which began the attack on Watson, also seemed to relent by commissioning him to write a post-victory piece.

Balloting in the fictional section can also be seen as partly an anti-war march, with the honouring of two post-9/11 pieces. Peter Kosminksy's Britz (Best Drama Serial) and Tony Marchant's The Mark of Cain (Best Single Drama) are both high-class pieces of drama but, in choosing them over the thriller Five Days and the Down's syndrome play Coming Down the Mountain, voters may have given extra weight to political topicality.

Channel 4, which broadcast both, is often described as troubled. But the network also took five of the other major categories, including wins for the brilliant sitcom Peep Show and Molly Dineen's searing rural documentary, Lie of the Land. This is vindication for a policy of concentrating budgets on a low number of high-profile shows.

No admirer of factual film-making could argue with Dineen's award and, indeed, this ceremony was probably unique among handouts of cultural gongs in identifying and rewarding the year's best work, with the prize for Best Entertainment Programme actually going to the most entertaining programme: Harry Hill's TV Burp.

After a period of the worst publicity in the medium's history, this list of winners was a proper reminder of what TV can be.

Gavin and Stacey stars pen sketch show

BBC3 controller Danny Cohen has commissioned Bafta award winner James Corden to make a new sketch show which he has co-written with his Gavin & Stacey co-star Mathew Horne.
The six part comedy series, which has the working title Horne and Corden Have Come, is being made by independent producer Tiger Aspect and will be directed by Kathy Burke.

According to the BBC the new series will be "designed as a traditional comedy entertainment show in the style of Morecambe and Wise" and will see the duo perform as themselves in front of a studio audience.

"Their intention is to make it like a traditional comedy entertainment show," said Tiger Aspect's head of comedy, Sophie Clarke-Jervoise. "They're moving away from the Little Britain and Catherine Tate formula where it's all character-led," she added. "In Gavin & Stacey, Mat and James have proved themselves to be Britain's best new comedy partnership and we're very much looking forward to presenting their brilliant new characters on BBC3."

Corden and Horne will trial their material in front of audiences in a tour starting next week and may bring in other scriptwriters, according to the BBC. The series will be executive produced by Clarke-Jervoise and her Tiger Aspect colleague Geoffrey Perkins and is planned for broadcast in early 2009. This commission completes a good week for Corden, who won the best comedy performer Bafta for Gavin & Stacey, the comedy he co-writes and co-stars in, and which also won the Sky+ audience award at Sunday's ceremony.

A BBC spokeswoman said today that no decision had been made on whether a third series of Gavin & Stacey would be commissioned. At the Baftas, Corden's co-writer Ruth Jones confirmed that they were currently working on a Christmas special of the show but added: "We never intended to write a second series let alone a third. We don't want it to become predictable. We will see how the Christmas special goes and take it from there." Corden also revealed at the Baftas: "We will write one if we can make it better. We have to be true to ourselves."

Elsewhere, the Gavin and Stacey critical backlash has started- at least from one Guardian journalist who Corden labelled a "fucking twat" at this week's Baftas. In his blog, Gareth McLean responded:

Even if James Corden hadn't called me "a fucking twat" in front of a room full of people, I'd still think Pulling was better than Gavin & Stacey. Indeed, it's because I have the temerity to suggest that Gavin & Stacey is anything other than absolutely brilliant - and is actually pedestrian, sentimental, old-fashioned and schmaltzy and now overrated to boot - that Corden chose to aim his rapier-sharp wit in my direction.

Clearly, I'm devastated.

Judging from his ungracious performance at the Baftas, no one is more convinced of Corden's comedy genius than he and anything less than adoration is considered sacrilege. Accepting the audience award - and having already won an award for best comedy performance - he moaned that Gavin & Stacey didn't make the shortlist for best sitcom. So with two awards, he still wasn't content. Talk about a sore winner.

That Gavin and Stacey has nabbed two Baftas, three British Comedy Awards, a South Bank Show award and a Broadcasting Press Guild award would suggest that a lot of people like it. I can understand why. It's undemanding, inoffensive and at a time when comedy has been dark and dysfunctional, and centred on cynical middle-aged men - from Curb through Extras to Lead Balloon - it's refreshingly romantic and optimistic. Indeed, it's this old-fashioned quality which makes it so new.

This is also one of the reasons I prefer Pulling. Sharon Horgan and Dennis Kelly's infinitely superior, much dirtier and so much funnier sitcom has been as overlooked as Gavin & Stacey has been overrated. From its exquisitely excruciating first episode in which Donna (Horgan) dumped fiancé Karl, it's been so close to the bone you can smell the marrow. Whether it's her outrage that Karl slept with her frienemy little fat Tanya or her disgust that the police don't care that someone stole her kebab - "What if it was a handbag made out of pitta?"- Donna is a raging egomaniac. And though there have been plenty of vile, selfish and unaware male characters in comedy, it's rare to have a woman so awful - the last was, I think, Nighty Night's Jill.

And Pulling doesn't just boast Donna. There are Karen and Louise too. In the first series, Rebekah Staton as Louise went accidentally dogging and become obsessed with internet porn. In the second series, she's become a thrill-seeker shoplifter and almost an entrepreneur with her "cocklolees" - lollies shaped as, yes, cocks. (I know it's juvenile but it's bloody funny). She's part wide-eyed ingénue and part deranged nymphomaniac.

Which brings us to my personal favourite, Karen (Tanya Franks). A "mean, alcoholic slag", according to Louise, she's provided some of the show's funniest moments - mostly when she's drinking, drunk (battering an apple!) or hungover, She's had a mouse on her pillow, countless dreadful men in her bed and, more than once, has woken up in a classroom. She's a primary school teacher, you see. Another stroke of brilliance on a canvas full of them. Why Frank - or indeed Horgan - haven't been applauded for their performances, I have no idea.

As the second series careers towards what seems as if it will be a suitably smashing finale, someone tell me - how is Gavin & Stacey superior to this superb specimen? Hmmmm?

Chiles snubs ITV offer

Adrian Chiles, the host of Match of the Day 2 and The One Show, has confirmed he will stay with the BBC despite ITV offering him a big-money transfer.

The coveted anchor, who also presents Apprentice spin off You're Fired! for BBC2, has been persistently courted by ITV to front its expanded slate of live football from next season. But he confirmed yesterday that he was "definitely staying" with the BBC and is believed to be close to agreement on a contract lasting at least two years.

The West Bromwich Albion fan has made a success of both Match of the Day 2, the Saturday Premier League highlight show's more relaxed Sunday night sibling, and The One Show, an ambitious attempt by former BBC1 controller Peter Fincham to create a daily magazine show at 7pm. "I'm definitely staying," said Chiles at yesterday's launch of the BBC's Euro 2008 coverage. "I'm lucky, I can do lots of things here [at the BBC]."

ITV had pursued Chiles since the turn of the year, offering him a reported £6m pay package to join its sports team. But he said the prospect of having to give up the varied portfolio he enjoys at the BBC had persuaded him to stay. "It's just sitting watching football with a nice bloke, it's not a proper job. Big tournaments, you couldn't possibly call them work," he added.

After winning the rights to live FA Cup football and England's home internationals from the BBC from next season in tandem with Setanta, and recently paying £160m to share the rights to live Champions League football with Sky until 2012, ITV desperately needs to beef up its team of football presenters and pundits.

With Gary Lineker, who yesterday said he was still "quite shocked" at the FA's decision not to award its most recent contract to the BBC, and Alan Hansen secured by the corporation on long-term contracts, it will now have to identify new targets. The value of live football to ITV was again reiterated on Tuesday night, when its coverage of the Champions League semi final clash between Liverpool and Chelsea peaked with more than 10m viewers.

Separately, the BBC also announced that former England manager Steve McClaren, whose failure to reach Euro 2008 cost him his job, had agreed to join Radio Five Live's commentary team for the tournament. His first match as a pundit will be Austria v Croatia on June 8.

Blake 7 returns

Science fiction fans can celebrate the revival of a famous cult hit after plans to revive the BBC series Blake’s 7 were announced. Sky One is to remake the science fiction series following the recent re-imaginings of Doctor Who, Battlestar Galactica and Bionic Woman. The satellite channel has given the go-ahead for the development of two 60-minute scripts with a view to a potential "event series". It is rumoured producers have mapped out a six-part series reviving Blake, his self-serving lieutenant Avon, Servalan, the ruthless Supreme Commander, and the show’s other fondly-remembered characters.

Elaine Pyke, the commissioning editor, drama, at Sky One, Two and Three is working with Andrew Mark Sewell at B7 Productions on the project. "At a time when science fiction shows often discard good storytellng for overblown visual effects and following the lead of Doctor Who and Battlestar Galactica, the time is ripe for a revival of a show that represents the best traditions of the genre, not to mention one of the best-loved and most successful dramas of all time" Pyke told Broadcast.

Created by sci-fi legend Terry Nation, Blake's 7 ran for four series on BBC1 between 1978 and 1981, and followed a band of rebels in their fight against the totalitarian Federation that ruled the galaxy. Blake is the political dissident who escapes deportation to a remote planet by forming a gang which includes a smuggler and a thief. It was launched in the wake of Star Wars’ success, and challenged viewer expectations with its cynical characters, who were eventually massacred in a shoot-out. Although the production values of the original series have dated, the show has proved both influential and enduringly popular. Blake 7 Productions will now have the technology to create the epic space battles which were constrained by the BBC’s budgetary demands in the late 70s.

The new Blake’s 7 will fly on Sky One after the satellite broadcaster asked the rightsholders of Terry Nation’s creation to develop a fresh series. In many ways it's hardly a surprise that Roj Blake and his band of intergalactic renegades are next in line for the remake treatment. B7 Productions is a subsidiary of B7 Media, the company that owns the licence to the show. In recent years it has already developed the brand with a series of Blake's 7 audio dramas, featuring actors such as James Bond star Colin Salmon and This Life's Daniela Nardini.

The prospect of a new Blake's 7 follows Russell T Davies's highly successful reworking of Doctor Who for the BBC, and the new Battlestar Galactica, the fourth and final series of which is currently showing on Sky One. NBC's revival of Bionic Woman, starring former EastEnders actor Michelle Ryan, has been less successful, with the show expected to be axed after just one series. Crucially, the success Life On Mars- with its time-travel scenario- has proved that such concepts can have broad and populist appeal.

Sky One is showing quite a talent for reinvention these days: it's not long before we'll be, erm... enjoying the all-new Gladiators. Blake's 7 represents a great opportunity for Sky One. The channel has enjoyed some success with original programming in recent years, with big-budget adaptations of Terry Pratchett's fantasy tales, but this is still a tiny fraction of its import-dominated output. As imports and sports rights get ever more expensive, it pays to manufacture your own hits. A home-made, high-quality Blake's 7 would also do wonders for Sky One's profile among TV connoisseurs.

But the operative word is "high-quality". According to the Guardian's Chris Tryhorn what lets the old sci-fi series down is the frankly appalling production values - rubbish special effects, wobbly sets and leaden pacing. The somewhat hammy acting style doesn't help either, he notes. To modern eyes this can render a lot of old TV drama, unlike films - and indeed TV comedy - of the same era, almost unwatchable.

Although the UK audience will be limited to Sky subscribers, the series will be sold to international broadcasters - the original was shown in 40 territories. The Blake’s 7 brand also has significant potential for programme downloads and DVD sales.

Battlestar Galactica, praised as a complex allegory about US interventionist foreign policy, has shown that if you give high-concept sci-fi the look of a serious feature film, it becomes credible and gripping in a way that far surpasses its analogue antecedents. It's also hoped the new Blake's 7 can invest money in getting the writing talent, which is the key factor that makes much US TV so entertaining and compelling. In fact, thinks Tryhorn, they should hire Battlestar's Ron Moore if he has time on his hands after bringing BSG to a close.

The BBC will challenge the revival with a new sci-fi show that echoes Blake’s 7. Outcasts follows the race to find an alternative home to Earth in the Universe. In return for their liberty, a group of social misfits and criminals become the pioneers of a large new settlement on a near planet.