“An exquisitely middle-class, middle-aged domestic situation comedy set in north London – maybe Crouch End or Tufnell Park – and starring one of those bloody stand-up comics who now festoons every network, it really should be hated before it is even seen…but Outnumbered is very funny indeed: despite its current bout of self-flagellation, the BBC still knows how to make people laugh”

pretty much nails it.  Just look at the screen grab above for confirmation of the former.

The set up for this episode which is about parents struggling with the outcomes of banning their kids from using the TV and computers on a Sunday. “Spongebob is educational because it tells you how to make crabby patties and what goes on under the seas” pleads the youngest daughter when its taken away wasn’t far off my ludicrous attempts to impose a weekday Wii ban. I mean what’s the bloody point ?

The kids especially Daniel Roche who plays 8 year old Ben are astonishing, I can’t quite bring myself to take my eyes of Clare Skinner (Life is Sweet scarred me for life), and incredibly you might even warm to the sympathetic portrait of a confused 40something parent by Hugh “Now Show” Dennis.

Best sitcom of the year, alongside the underrated The Cup and Gavin and Stacey of course.

* This is  one of those “stacked” series on iPlayer so if you’ve missed em you can go back and watch episodes 1 and 2 as they’re available longer than just yer 7 days.

And it’s really a kind of war memorial, the kind of war memorial we make now in the television age. The programme’s got quite a lot in common with those older war memorials too. It’s a granite slab of a programme—over three hours long—and it records every single British death (so far) in Iraq and Afghanistan in a kind of mesmerising ribbon of grief and memory.

War memorials, of course, don’t expire after seven days so I find myself wondering if The Fallen will disappear along with all the other iPlayer shows in a few days, which would seem wrong.

If Panorama was rubbish or just irrelevant nobody would care if it went out in primetime or not. The trouble is that the BBC’s current affairs flagship is excellent—so everybody cares about it. And for that reason it must stay in primetime and it must continue to attract the budget and the resource that it always did. Hooray for Panorama!

Art therapy was demonstrated by a couple of easels in a corridor, a couple of exterior shots of a lawn told us it was an opulent facility. But best of all was Lola’s response to her new environment from rolling her eyes at the cuts on the arm of a self-harmer, to laughing at an ex-colleague and victim of a mental breakdown because he wanted to be called by a different name to responding with a “God no!” when asked if she’d ever worked in a place like this before. You don’t have to be mad to watch it but…

The genius of Last Choir Standing is to roll in lots of real human drama with the natural vocal fireworks. You’ve got ordinary people overcoming circumstance and nerves and history and mercurial judges to progress round-to-round, plus all the phony drama of the verdict with the long pauses and the tears and the elation. I’m going to bet two or three quid that, unless you’re a block of wood, you’re going to find yourself spontaneously crying about a dozen times during this show. Really, you will.

4.6 million people watched Last Choir Standing right after the Doctor Who finale last week. That sounds pretty good for a choral music programme but it’s actually below the average for BBC1 in that time slot. It trashes ITV’s offer (You’ve Been Framed) nicely but now that Doctor Who’s finished I reckon it’ll fall away sharply and that means we’re unlkely to see Last Choir Standing again after this series, which is a pity.

At the show’s web site you can watch full-length performances, including the remakable Dreemz and (my favourite) the Hereford Police Male Voice Choir.

As it was all on in the last seven days all five parts are currently available in the ever-so-brief window of opportunity. It makes you realise what was lost when they stripped series-stacking out of iPlayer. Shame.

I really don’t know. But either way, here’s a show you probably wouldn’t have seen (unless you live in Northern Ireland, of course) without iPlayer. It’s a doc about the long delayed introduction to the North of the Dangerous Wild Animals Act and the tribe of borderline nutters affected by it. The narrator has plenty of deadpan lines like: “finally Wildlife Northern Ireland get a call to investigate an alleged unlicenced wolf”

This, by the way, is the charm of Watchification. I could have linked to an interview with Bill Gates or an amazing Doctor Who but no, I linked to a programme about Wildlife weirdos in Northern Ireland.