Watching the first episode of Shameless US is disarmingly like bumping into old friends.

One late Christmas Eve Ebenezeer Scrooge was visited by three spirits who showed him things from the past, the present and the Yet To Come. This is like that, but with three reviewers & Shiny’s usual pop culture nonsense. Merry Christmas.

… they take up most of our time: recent UK TV crime series ‘Whitechapel’, ‘Moses Jones’, and ‘Red Riding’ hit DVD.

Start with the sex.

E4 has given ‘Skins’ a massive hyping campaign in the last couple of weeks, to the point of irritatingly inserting a permanent reminder of how many days were left until the premiere just underneath its top-corner ident…

“SCATTER!”

It’s semi-remarkable in itself that a Channel 4 sitcom made it to a third series only two years after the first…

Here at Shiny Shelf we’ve come up with the wheeze of doing a sort of reviews advent calendar, building up to the festive period by writing about a Christmassy movie or TV episode for each day of advent…

‘Modern Toss’ is an occasional comic book, of the sort that seems at first glance to be designed for the Nathan Barleys of East London, all excessive swearing and low-fi design.

The lower overheads of producing DVDs are creating a world of joy for cineastes and TV-astes, as it becomes more viable for obscure material to get a commercial release…

It’s a peculiar state of affairs when the most noteworthy thing about a new Channel 4 comedy is considered to be that it takes place largely on one set and is performed in front of a studio audience…

An admittedly slightly belated entry into our series rounding-up the state of British TV in 2005…

Have we now gone so far down the ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’ route that we’ll cheer something that’s manifestly dreadful because it might hurt someone we don’t like?

For some reason Channel 4 has decided that the optimum time to broadcast Matthew Collings’ authored documentaries about art is early on a Saturday evening…

With E4 now available on Freeview, it could do to be a little more than just a place to see the latest American shows marginally before they come on Channel 4…

If you missed Channel Four’s recent drama ‘Sugar Rush’, here’s a few reasons why it’s worth catching on DVD…

Last week it was reported that Ofcom had fined Five (the channel, not the defunct boyband) for broadcasting an unnecessarily loud commercial break…

I’m well aware that ‘The Simple Life’ is old news, being on its fourth series or whatever in the States, but the general consensus on this show seems to be that it’s vacuous fun…

The concept behind this programme is so catchily banal that it’s easy to see how it got commissioned…

Watching ‘Nathan Barley’ involves a sort of self-reflexive masochism that eventually drives you insane…

I can’t recall the last time Channel 4 pushed a new US import so hard, but ‘Desperate Housewives’ is getting the full treatment…

Over the course of four series ‘Teachers’ has replaced every member of its core cast. This kind of turnover just doesn’t work, especially in such a character-driven series…

What felt a bit hit-and-miss at first is now producing far more hits than misses…

Last night, digital TV live streaming came of age, and it’s all thanks to Big Brother…

A glance at the BBC’s list of the nation’s favourite sitcoms demonstrates that Channel 4 has struggled to produce a genuinely enduring comedy…

Channel 4’s ‘back in time’ entries into the reality TV genre are certainly some of the best thought out, and they also produce some quite interesting results…

At last, horror novelist Garth Marenghi’s infamous ‘banned’ TV series, ‘Darkplace’, can be revealed to the world. Can you face the horror?

Ordinarily we wouldn’t cover a repeat screening here, but I’ve been waiting for Channel 4 to give ‘The Armando Iannucci Shows’ another airing for more than two years…

‘The Salon’ is awesomely, sickeningly without merit and everybody involved should be deeply ashamed of having been part of the making of a vacuous, charmless, witless, badly put together and utterly objectionable programme.

Dear Mr Blaine: I HAVE ABSOULTELY NO INTEREST IN YOUR STUPID STARVATION IN A PERSPEX BOX STUNT…

This year ‘Big Brother’ has been truly mind-numbing from the get-go…

Flawlessly produced, funny and well acted, ‘Teachers’ is what all British Television should be like, but pretty much none of the rest of it is…

Whether reports of a series lost in its own cleverness, and increasingly trapped by the incompatibility of its agenda and worldview with those of America at large these days, are true I have no idea right now.

Channel 4 is in a miserable, disheartening decline and as director of programmes Tim Gardam moves on, this seems like a good time to examine what has gone wrong…

Chris Morris’ BAFTA-winning short film arrives on a unique DVD…

You can tell that the first series of this was an award-winner after about two minutes of the first episode of series two. It practically screams, ‘BUDGET! THEY’VE GIVEN US A MUCH BIGGER BUDGET!’

In which comedians Kim Noble and Stuart Silver accompany an old lady as she attempts to place a park bench at the North Pole to commemorate her dead husband. Some other things happened, too.

I’ve only recently become the sort of person who reads fashionable contemporary novels, and White Teeth is my first experience of watching the TV adaptation of a book I’ve actually read. This did beg the question, why was I watching it?

Who would have thought it – a commercial release for one of the most controversial comedy series of the 90’s, including last year’s even more controversial special for good measure.

As soon as the present run of Black Books ended, Channel 4 seemed to feel that it was very important to have another book-related home-grown sitcom to replace it, and writer/director Annie Griffin’s The Book Group fits the bill.

8.1 – A strong season opener, following on directly from last season’s cliffhanger – obviously. Don’t expect any answers just yet, but this does forward the storyline of Rachel’s baby effectively,