small screen

Turn on, tune in, hurl

Is there someone you really hate? Good, then you can give them the Our Tune video (Paradox Video £10.99, released 20 Mar). Former King of the Coffee Break airwaves, Simon Bates (with liquid friend, right), is famous for this sprinkling of real-life saccharine into our morning beverages, first in his Radio 1 show and more recently with visual dramatisations on Good Morning With Anne and Nick. People are still writing to Our Simes with their heart-wrenching stories of loves lost, babies drowned, etc, and the video stars eight of the best. Two people, (let's call her) Carolyn and (let's call him) Steve, find love and have a baby, Sally, who has a "rare disorder". Carolyn nearly kills Sally through neglect , frustration, guilt, and so on, but everyone pulls through. Our Simes's voice-over drones on about "ladies" and "the power of a mother's love", which is really irritating because you can't hear what the EastEnders-style actors are saying. Kill yourself if it makes you cry.

Revenge of the moral guardians

The ever-watchful Broadcasting Standards Council have released their Monitoring Report for 1994, compiled from the findings of a 450-strong panel of viewers. Key findings on terrestrial telly follow... Instances of "bad language" had increased in frequency to about seven per hour... Two-thirds of "scenes depicting sexual activity" consisted of "kissing with sexual intent" - so how do you ask a fictional character what its intent is?... The rate of occurrence of violent scenes has not increased in the last three years, although their average duration has; mind you, 11 per cent of the violence noted was library footage used in the D-Day programmes... "Under five per cent of programmes included homosexual characters," the report tells us (is it trying to be reassuring?), although "this does represent an increase year-on-year" - we should damn well hope so... And finally, those concerned citizens themselves. Unsurprisingly, the over- 55s were more likely to find quarrel in a straw, but women and parents are also more concerned about content. The report concludes: "Heavier viewers were, proportionately to their viewing, more likely to encounter programmes which caused disquiet." Gosh. We do hope they're not being sizeist, or anything.

The wad is mightier than the pen

He used to be an enfant terrible, did Martin Amis (right), but now he's more of an homme d'un certain age terrible. Yes, middle age seems to be wreaking its hormonal havoc on the piquant pensmith - perhaps that's the cause of all the fuss about him firing his agent and demanding half a million smackers for his latest novel. There's also the fact that upstarts like Will Self have come on the scene to steal his thunder. Amis's new book is The Information, a story about literary envy. Hmmm. When a writer starts writing about writers, it's often the start of a slippery descent into poncey self-referentiality - it happened to Stephen King, it even happened to Don DeLillo. Get the lowdown from the horse's mouth when Amis grants a rare interview with Melvyn "Melv" Bragg on The South Bank Show (Sun 10.15pm ITV).

You're looking at Planet Earth

Ever since we saw the first photographs of Earth from space, mankind has been obsessed with the image. And for all its scary dangling-in-space stuff, it was a strangely cosy image. But our blue planet (right) is not the feel-good squidgy ball it was, the preserve of sci-fi movies and ecology groups. It's become a tough sphere of influence, veined with global communication networks. We are beset with economic and social problems which need global solutions and are on the brink of a frightening technological age. BBC2's Horizon examines the state of the orb with "Icon Earth" (8pm Mon) and looks at how we can deal with the future as we slip into communication chaos. How has its image been affected by the new communications technology? Who will benefit? Who will suffer? Who will send silly messages on the Internet after watching this?

Compiled by Cayte Williams and

Steven Poole