Gareth Roberts

The current series of I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! has been a big contrast to the previous two. The 2022 and 2023 camps contained politicians, and they were two particularly hot – in the potato sense – politicians. Matt Hancock and Nigel Farage carried baggage with them into the camp. In Hancock’s case, radioactive baggage. None of that this year. Ant and Dec opined last year that they were a little sick of politicians on the show, and ratings took a small tumble. There was a feeling that Celeb was a place viewers went to escape from the sturm und drang of current affairs, and that it needed to return to drama between the standard variety of reality TV bigheads – pop stars, presenters and models.

There’s no need to be afraid, but 40 years since the advent of ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’ by Band Aid there is a dispute raging about the commemorations. There is to be an ‘ultimate’ version of this haunting ditty – haunting in the Borley Rectory sense – in which vocals from across each of the four versions of the star-spangled roundelay are combined, including those of the sadly deceased. For me, the release of Band Aid was the day the music died Perhaps inevitably, given the fraught cultural world we now live in, even at the frothiest end, ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’ has sparked rancour this time around. Given that it hits several boiling hot spots – international politics, racial and cultural difference – how could it not?

Gary Lineker is to leave Match of the Day at the end of the current football season, and to exit the BBC entirely after the 2026 World Cup. It was 1999 when he took over Match from Des Lynam, though in a strange discord with the usual swift passage of time, it feels much longer.  Because despite his close association with it as a player and a pundit Lineker is really nothing much to do with football. His punditry, as we all know, is far wider in its scope than such enjoyable trifles.

‘Kindness is like marmalade – a little goes a long way,’ Paddington Bear tweeted recently. But it isn’t only imaginary talking bears who take this approach on social media. The News Agents’ Emily Maitlis was inspired by the rather sickly – and given the seriousness of current events, rather inappropriate – chummy love-in between Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer at their final Commons encounter last week. ‘Just imagine if PMQs was like this every week,’ she tweeted wistfully, ‘Conciliatory. Helpful. Bipartisan. Passionate and compassionate.’ Paddington’s thoughts on social media are enthusiastically greeted by the kind of grown-ups who feel tewwibly sad about Brexit Thankfully, as it turned out, Rishi Sunak was faking.

Halloween is approaching. The Americans, who go very big on it normally, are distracted this year by the election, so it feels like we have it more to ourselves than usual. And nobody in Britain will be having a happier Halloween than Danny Robins, a former comedy writer and journalist who has cracked the big time with his extremely successful spooky BBC podcast Uncanny (which became a TV show last year), and his play 2:22 A Ghost Story, which had a four-year run in the West End and was taken up in productions around the world. This year the podcast is running an advent-style Halloween event, serving up a fresh, bitesize experience sent in by a listener every day throughout October.

Paddington has an official passport. The makers of the new Paddington film Paddington in Peru revealed this in passing to the Radio Times today.  They needed the passport for scenes in the new movie, presumably showing Paddington clearing customs on his journey back to darkest Peru. So they approached the Home Office for a facsimile, which is odd in itself, given that any decent prop hand on a film set can rustle one up for you – one that will fool a camera, anyway – in half an hour.

Quiz shows on TV – the kind you can join in with at home by shouting the answer at the screen, rather than panel games or tests of skill – seem to be surging with renewed popularity. At its peak last year, Pointless drew in over 7 million viewers, while The Chase averages 3 million viewers an episode and as recently as last week 3.8 million people tuned in to watch The Weakest Link. Although they’ve been an embedded fixture of television since its inception, quizzes with at least a component of general knowledge involved are taking up more and more of the schedules.

The BBC's daytime soap Doctors will soon vanish from our screens after 24 years. But while the final episodes make for excruciatingly bad television, they are worth watching for a simple reason: they encapsulate everything that is wrong with modern television. The BBC's obsession with ramming progressive storylines down viewers' throats is plain to see in each episode of Doctors. Take the character of Dr Graham Elton (Alex Avery); he's a rotten bigot and, in case you didn't realise it, viewers are reminded of just how awful and unsound his views are in almost every scene. From BBC medical soap opera Doctors. A new doctor, Graham, has joined the surgery. He's ableist and clumsy about homosexuality.