Bbc

God, it must be awful to have been at school with James Corden. As he sat fatly at the back of the class farting and flicking bogies and distracting the teacher with his relentless smartarsery, you’ll have consoled yourself with the happy thought that at least this repellent, maddeningly irritating waster was never going to make anything of his life... Then, years later, you’ll have opened the papers to read rave reviews of his hit sitcom Gavin & Stacey. A fluke, you’ll have thought, till you saw the similarly impressive notices of his West End triumph One Man, Two Guvnors. And any schadenfreude you might have experienced over the recent panning of his dismal Christmas appearance in Esio Trot will have been cruelly dissipated by the news of his £1.

1. Fargo, Channel 4 In a particularly strong year for thrillers (Line of Duty, The Missing and Homeland ­among them) this was for my money the best of the lot, with a fantastically sinister central performance from Billy Bob Thornton, and story-telling that remained entirely sure-footed throughout, no matter how weird the events became. 2. Detectorists, BBC4 When it comes to sitcoms, the words 'gentle' and 'idiosyncratic' are often euphemisms for 'not funny' - but not in the case of Mackenzie Crook’s affectionate and affecting story of two metal-detecting friends in small-town Britain. 3.

The fuss may now be over, the last episode of Serial revealed. But if the global success of WBEZ Chicago’s latest weekly podcast is a portent, then the future of radio lies not in static daily programming but in the fleeting pursuit of the latest internet download. No scheduling necessary. Listeners can just choose what they want to hear (based on what’s trending online), sign up for the podcast, and listen to the episodes any time they want, once they have been released for download. Just imagine how much easier and cheaper this could be for production companies. Non-stop, live, on-air programming would become redundant. The listener would no longer be dependent on the whims and prejudices of those malfaisant programme controllers.

If ever my near-neighbour William Sitwell is killed in a bizarre shooting accident and I end up taking his place as one of the guest critics on MasterChef: the Professionals (not likely, I admit, but you never know), here are some tips for competitors who wish to avoid a stinking review. 1. Don’t serve me salmon. Salmon is the fish of the devil, which is why Satan coloured it that particularly vile shade of pink. It is evil because it is almost certainly farmed and therefore pumped full of antibiotics to destroy all the parasites with which it would otherwise be pullulating. If it’s not farmed, well, it still tastes of salmon, doesn’t it? 2. Don’t serve me anything cooked sous-vide. Yeah, maybe to you chefs it looks all cutting-edge and technical.

The two trendiest words in classical music are ‘El Sistema’. That’s the name for the high-intensity programme of instrumental coaching that turned kids from the slums of Venezuela into the thrilling Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra (SBYO), conducted by hot young maestro Gustavo Dudamel before he was poached by the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Or so the legend goes. When the SBYO was booked for the Proms in 2011, the concert sold out in three hours. Sir Simon Rattle, no less, declared El Sistema to be ‘the most important thing happening to classical music anywhere in the world’. Audiences wept at the sight of former street urchins producing a tumultuous, triumphant — and virtually note-perfect — performance of Beethoven’s Fifth.

Newsnight's decision to interview misogynist comedian Daniel 'Dapper Laughs' O’Reilly has been slammed as a cynical ratings grab, a descent even from the depths plumbed by devoting 15 minutes to Russell Brand’s latest booky-wook. The criticism is misplaced, however. In both interviews, the respective hosts, Emily Maitlis and Evan Davis, dissected their subjects’ work and challenged their arguments. It’s in Newsnight's coverage of high culture, not popular culture, where the rot has set in, with a proliferation of glossy advertorials that have no journalistic purpose.