Gareth Roberts

‘As a gay man...’ is a handy signal; in 99 per cent of cases, it tells you that whatever follows is going to be irrelevant rubbish. This certainly held true during the excruciating appearance on Iain Dale’s LBC show the other day by Zack Polanski, one of the candidates in the current campaign for leadership of the Green party. Polanski had been ambushed by phone-in caller Dr Shahrar Ali, who isn’t just a random member of the public. In fact, he is the former deputy leader of the Green Party, who last year won a legal case against them for discrimination without following a fair process. The Greens had removed Dr Ali during a row over his ‘gender-critical beliefs’, which is the posh way of saying he is unafraid to state that there are two sexes.

Can the BBC do anything right? Just days before it messed up spectacularly by failing to cut away from Bob Vylan's offensive performance at Glastonbury, it released a podcast in which activist Munroe Bergdorf told listeners 'how transitioning allowed her to discover love'. The BBC, the former broadcaster that’s now a HR department with some channels attached, is increasingly ladling up such tatty ‘content’. But this podcast episode – part of the ‘How To Be In Love’ series – marks a new, desperate low. 'We are constantly told that trans people are an abomination,' says Bergdorf. Really?

Few things are more delicious to watch than an uneven battle of wits – and it is hard to imagine a more uneven fight than one between Boy George and JK Rowling. 'Which rights have been taken away from trans people?', Rowling asked her followers on X this weekend. 'The right to be left alone by a rich bored bully!', Boy George responded. 'I’ve never been given 15 months for handcuffing a man to a wall and beating him with a chain,' wrote JK Rowling We waited with bated breath for the inevitable response from the Harry Potter author. When it came, it didn't disappoint.

Like all of you, I’m sure, I’ve got accustomed to celebrities – particularly actors and comedians, but also pop stars and sporting luminaries – sharing their unsought opinions with the public. My eyes have gone grey from it, to the extent that the brows above them no longer so much as twitch when a celeb ‘drops’ some ‘content’ of this kind, unless it’s one of those very rare occasions when they don’t take the approved line. So I thought I was immune to such rubbish. French has form for getting carried away Enter Dawn French, who managed to induce in me a flinch response that I thought had atrophied in about 2002.

Twenty years on from its spectacular revival it looks like Doctor Who might not be returning to our screens again in the immediate future. I haven’t actually watched Doctor Who for a long time, but because I wrote an awful lot of it for years – on TV, but also books, comics, radio plays, yogurt pot labels, you name it – people always ask me what I think should become of it. My answer? I’d cancel it and flee for the hills. Doctor Who was born in an age when we didn’t need to rabbit on about our ‘values’ Twenty years is an incredible run, almost equalling its original marathon from 1963 to 1989. In TV parlance, it needs to be ‘rested’. Stepping back from a thing enables you to see it from the outside, which has been quite a jolt.

‘The UK’s first ever gay dating show is louder, prouder, and more irresistible than ever,' says the BBC about I Kissed A Boy. But things on the BBC Three reality dating show aren't what they seem. Amongst the gaggle of young gay men this time around is Lars: a 23-year-old hotel receptionist from Wolverhampton, who is, in fact, a woman. Yes, what was basically Love Island without women in its first series is now, in series two, like Love Island. Can't the gays just be left alone to have a dating show of their own? 'I‘ve been through 16 years of my life as a girl. It's aged me, but in a good way,' says Lars, who says they/them 'felt like a gay guy trapped in a woman's body.' What on earth that means, and how she could possibly know, is anybody’s guess.

Ian Hislop has found someone to blame for Have I Got News For You's failure to tackle the Supreme Court's gender ruling: the programme's editors. After the BBC show ignored the big story of the month on its Easter edition, Hislop launched into a rant on the latest episode – insisting that he had spoken about the subject: ‘A lot of people said Have I Got News For You was pathetic, because last week nobody answered this question (on the gender ruling). It was asked, actually. And I answered it at some length. I gave my views about John Stuart Mill’s clash of different rights and competitive demands on a legal system. And I talked for some time about what I thought was a very rational solution of the two parliamentary acts which the Supreme Court had been asked, and they cut it out.

Like most people, I haven’t tuned in to Have I Got News For You for years. But when I heard of a staggering omission in last Friday night’s edition, I just had to see it – or, rather, not see it – with my own eyes. The biggest news story of the week – the momentous ruling by the Supreme Court on the meaning of sex in the Equality Act 2010 – was not covered at all, even obliquely. You’d think that the absurdity of the highest court in the land being called to adjudicate on one of the most basic facts of observable reality – that there are two sexes, and that the words man and woman mean, er, man and woman – would be a rich source of mirth, the kind of glorious nonsense that’s a satirist’s meat and drink. But no. Not a word. Zilch.

The slow death of ITV makes for painful viewing. In its glory days of the 1980s and 1990s, the channel had a salty naughtiness, a thrilling random quality. Its kids’ shows were raucous or even scary, its crime dramas were raunchy, its quizzes and games were sparkly and crass and its highbrow offerings were spicy. The channel had an edge to it; watching ITV was aspirational and fun. It was cool. ITV has swapped any distinctive offering for constant retreads of the same generic thrillers But ITV has swapped any distinctive offering for constant retreads of the same kind of generic gloomy thriller; at the moment it’s tempting us with Red Eye, Protection and Grace.