What’s really lovely about the show is the way the celebrities’ reactions to the process help us to understand what’s actually going on when the conductor waves that little stick. They’re all evidently in awe of the power and responsibility orchestral conductors own and also of the competence and passion of the musicians they guide. If you’ve ever sat behind a conductor—even a famous one with his name above the title—sort of vaguely wondering what he actually does, this series is really going to help.

Listening to the BBC Concert Orchestra bumping and grinding along hilariously under the baton of cheerful-but-hopeless Peter Snow is all you’ll need to convince you of the centrality of the conductor to the orchestral experience. Very good value. I’m going to watch the whole series. There’s a lot of extra stuff at the Maestro web site and here’s a story about it from the BBC press office.

Her reality TV show is great stuff: a version of Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares for boutiques (with less swearing). Like all the best reality TV it’s got all the elements of the folk tale in the right order and winds up nicely through conflict (the shopkeeper is usually a bit of a berk so there’s plenty of potential for a fight) to a narrative climax followed by a really satisfying resolution (with some learning and some tears).

Peter Bazalgette, boss of the firm that makes the British version of Big Brother and member of the following Wikipedia categories: Alumni of the University of Cambridge, British television executives, Living people, Old Alleynians, Alumni of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, Presidents of the Cambridge Union Society, Year of birth missing (living people), was on the TV the other day saying that all those people who whinge on about reality TV are just going to have to get used to it: reality is just one of the ways in which we make TV now. Mary Queen of Shops is first class entertainment and proof that he’s dead right.