Pondering what to put on the box this evening? Tired of soaps? Fear not – there’s plenty of good stuff on tonight, mostly on BBC’s Two and Four.

19:10-20:00
BBC Four: The Avengers (episode “A Surfeit of H2O”)
I expect Alex will fill you in on the detail (et voilà), but look out for Talfryn Thomas (Mr Cheeseman from Dad’s Army) and Geoffrey “Slam in the lamb” Palmer.

20:00-21:00
BBC Two: Dragon’s Den
New series with a couple of new dragons.

21:00-22:00
I’ll probably put a DVD on for this hour, but there’s plenty to keep you entertained: Extras on BBC Two, The League of Gentlemen followed by the first half of Paul Merton’s Silent Clowns on BBC Four, The Two Ronnies on ITV3 or, if you like that sort of thing, Bad Girls on the ratings disaster that is ITV1.

22:00-22:30
BBC Two: Time Trumpet
Armando Iannucci‘s new comedy series, a kind of “I Love the 2000s” from the future. (Watch a preview.)

22:30-23:00
BBC Four: Charlie Brooker’s Screen Wipe
Ascerbic columnist and comedy writer Charlie Brooker says funny stuff about TV.

There you go. Who needs the Radio Times…?

Despite what I thought was a good showing in the regional heat, I didn’t make it to the final of the Independent‘s sudoku championship – the eventual winner was 27-year-old Becky Hewitt, last year’s winner Edward Billig having erred in the semi-final. (Reassuringly, the runner-up was a 16-year-old – we were disappointed by the lack of a teenage prodigy last year.)

My own number puzzling is on hiatus as I’ve stopped buying a newspaper in order to concentrate on reading books during my daily commute.

The competitive streak is still there, though, so I have a couple of auditions for TV shows in August. It’s been a few year’s since I was last on a quiz show so hopefully I’ll do well enough to get another go. Fingers crossed.

Nearly two years ago, I watched the third series of 24 in 24 hours. I’ve not seen any since and, thanks to a colleague, find myself in possession of the series 4 box set. I couldn’t resist the temptation to watch the whole thing today.

I don’t fancy staying up all night, so I’m aiming to watch in 17-18 hours, just over the actual length of the series – despite being in real time, they have to allow for ad breaks and recaps.

Two episodes in and there’s been a clumsy infodump; a CTU PowerPoint display full of nonsense apparently designed to impress the viewers while presumably baffling those in the meeting; the dreadful line “Looks like someone’s trying to corrupt the internet”; a first twist you could spot a mile off; and about 11 deaths, averaging 6.5 5.5 an hour.

It takes itself terribly seriously but in some ways is as much hammy hokum as Sunset Beach. Great 🙂

Update: Halfway through and the confirmed death count is around 58 (just under 5 an episode) but potentially much higher if you include character not seen on screen. Only one episode with no killings – this is not a quiet show. Several significant twists, and one big “Yay!” moment.

Update II: Finished around 2.30am last night. Worth watching with plenty of exciting bits, although, as always, some scenes stretch the suspension of disbelief and there were a few too many moments of frustration where you could see a twist coming and wished the characters would notice. There were the obligatory 24 ingredients: a token English actor; a CTU mole (rerun of Day 1); constitutional politicking (rerun of Day 2); some family plots you just didn’t care about (rerun of anything with Kim Bauer in); product placement (and I mean you, Cisco Systems); computer screens showing impressive nonsense; and characters from previous series prised into the plot.

There was one funny line in the 24 episodes and, like the series as a whole, I suspect it wasn’t supposed to be funny. There is one more “Yay!” moment before the end.

The folks at CTU are declared the best agents there are, and yet the organisation continues to display dysfunction that would put The Office to shame, and every field agent other than Jack Bauer is rubbish.

An actor turns up who’s been in The West Wing (RIP) and Lost, the other two American shows I watch. There’s a lot of crossover between The West Wing and 24 (not least Jim Robinson from Neighbours who was a Cabinet member in both), but Evan Handler is the first actor I’ve spotted in all three. (Mid-update update: Look! Jim Robinson from Neighbours is in Lost too! Hurrah!)

Favourite line: “I was inappropriately blunt, wasn’t I?”

Most similar Doctor Who story: The Mind of Evil.

Final death count: around 106 characters shown on screen, with at least several hundred others referred to.

Verdict: Good. If the first three were your sort of thing, you’ll enjoy Day 4.

Back in the day, long before he was reviving Doctor Who or writing Queer as Folk, Russell “The” Davies wrote a couple of BBC children’s drama series, 1991’s Dark Season and 1993’s Century Falls. Both were excellent pieces of kids’ TV.

Dark Season, which featured a young Kate Winslet among the cast, was, in many ways, Doctor Who in disguise. It featured an eccentric lead character with a couple of sidekicks investigating mysterious goings-on in suburban England. There are two distinict plots: the first involves computers being used to take over schoolchildren’s minds (c.f. new Who episode School Reunion); the latter features a troop of Aryan archaeologists led by Servalan off of Blake’s 7 attempting to obtain a powerful machine buried in the school grounds. These six episodes were, at the time, some of the best CBBC had to offer. It’s a little dated now – some of the clothes are shockingly eighties despite this being the nineties – but still good value. Oh, and it features Brigit Forsyth from Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? and Doctor Who legend Cyril Shaps.

Century Falls was made two years later by largely the same production team. I only saw it on first broadcast so my memory of it is 13 years old, but it was notably darker than its predecessor, using the fantasy medium to deal with issues such as teenage pregnancy. The cast includes Who alumni Eileen Way and Bernard Kay, plus Mary Wimbush from K-9 and Company and The Archers.

I’m looking forward to seeing both series again, because – and this is the reason for this post – they’re coming out on DVD next month, having never been released on VHS. Both Dark Season and Century Falls are released on Monday 17th July and I heartily recommend them.