Linda Herrick: Desperate and Dateless

COMMENT

Part of my job at the Herald is to liaise with our team of reviewers and decide which television programmes we will cover in the week ahead. This week, frankly, we are stumped. It's not as if the reviewers want to turn down the freelance fees they receive for writing their critiques which, out of consideration for those who don't have pay TV, are generally devoted to free-to-air channels.

But this week, we literally cannot find anything worth writing about. The scheduling always flattens out over the Christmas-New Year season - but mid-October?

It's not completely hopeless. We are happy to see Michael Palin back on screen in his new Himalaya series. The man could make a programme about fridge factories and still entertain. However, the Himalaya review is for later, not the first episode.

But there's not much else to get excited about, certainly no "date-TV", you know, make a date to stay home to watch a show because you simply HAVE to see it. Like The Sopranos.

While I hate paying the exorbitant price, it's times like these that I appreciate Sky's digital channels.

A real find has been CNN's 7-8pm News Night, hosted by the silver-tongued Aaron Brown. Emmy Award winner Brown is a gifted broadcaster who uses a keen intelligence to ever-so-politely deflate the bloat of American politics. Our current affairs broadcasters could learn from him.

But politics, even at a time of elections going off all over the place, are not always palatable after a hard day's work, so The Simpsons on TV3 at 7pm is a boon, and free.

No matter how many times you see repeats of Homer and Co, it's always delicious, with layers of meaning.

What good news then that creator Matt Groening wants to keep going until he has 20 seasons in the can, taking it to 2009 in the United States.

There's a way to go — in the United States, series 16 is about to screen. Here, TV3 is running repeats of series 14, which have already been on TV2, before the CanWest network cunningly snaffled the rights. D'oh!

The first 330 episodes of The Simpsons earns Rupert Murdoch's Fox network $3.7 billion a year in syndication fees, which is quite revolting in the global context of poverty and war.

On the other hand, George H.W. Bush (the old guy) once condemned The Simpsons as detrimental to family values, proving how detached from reality that one-term president was.

Now Groening plans to make a Simpsons feature film which could be some people's idea of heaven, as long as he doesn't fall into the trap of the South Park team, who did the same with less-than-desirable results.

So too is the more adult news that the great British drama Cracker is on the way back. Writer Jimmy McGovern and actor Robbie Coltrane are joining forces for a one-off special to be made by ITV and if that succeeds, there could be another series.

The special won't screen till late next year in Britain so lord knows when we'll see it, but 2006 is looking good: Cracker, the next series of The Sopranos, and a new series of The Simpsons. It's a long time to wait, though.

Meanwhile, for those pining for the brief fix recently provided by Ricky Gervais' The Office Specials could do worse than read a book. Gervais has just published one, for children, Flanimals, which has already shot to the top of Amazon's pre-order chart. Many of the customers are adults, Amazon reports. As with The Simpsons, the line between children and adult entertainment can be indiscernible.