Alan Davies

H is for hero - which is what Stephen Fry has become to millions of TV viewers and Twitterers who hang on his every tweet. And it's also the letter that'll be the theme of the brand new series eight.

Regular panellist Alan Davies - who admits the endless repeats of this show on Dave even get up his nose - resumes his role of The Thudding Voice Of Ignorance. And he'll be joined by Phill Jupitus, Jack Dee and Ross Noble who'll all be aiming to come up with Quite Interesting answers to the show's posers.

But QI would be nothing without its genial headmaster Fry who sits atop this mountain of knowledge like an erudite genie. His trivia lessons often end up being quite a lot more interesting than the brave stabs at comedy.

Stephen Fry fans, prepare to hug yourselves with glee - RT's cover star is going to be everywhere this autumn and winter. The second, eagerly anticipated volume of his memoirs, The Fry Chronicles, is published this week (it's been too long since Moab Is My Washpot in 1997), he's doing gigs at the Royal Albert Hall and elsewhere and, of course, he's hosting this new series of QI. At last! We no longer have to survive on endless re-runs on Dave, so endless that we devotees know all the questions and all the correct answers and aren't caught out by the klaxon any more. So let's welcome the newness. As always, expect an erudite, if occasionally unnecessarily smutty delight, as we reach the letter "H". Genial perpetual QI loser Alan Davies returns, along with another regular, the cheery Phill Jupitus. Making up the quartet are the dolorous Jack Dee and Geordie comic Ross Noble, wild of hair and even wilder of imagination.

The closest you'll ever be to diving into an encyclopaedia and then surface, drenched in knowledge and needing to wipe facts about the Periodic Table from the corners of your eyes, is by watching this still-spiffing comedy panel show. Tonight Stephen Fry will set Alan Davies, Ross Noble, Jack Dee, and Phill Jupitus questions relating to the letter H, which means obscure questions on hacky sacks, the Roman soldier Horatio, and H out of Steps.

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James Corden's World Cup Live. I haven't even seen it yet. To be honest, I'm not sure I need to. James Corden's World Cup song. I haven't heard it yet. To be honest, I'm not sure I want to. James Corden's World Cup Diary, in The Times. I haven't even read it yet. To be honest, I look forward to it like a family funeral.

Why is it that World Cup 2010, regardless of what happens on the field of play, will now always be irrevocably-tainted by Corden's omnipresence? Was his Sport Relief skit at Sports Personality of the Year that good? (No. No it wasn't). Was Gavin and Stacey that good? (No. It was a c-list British Friends. And not even the good series. The ones where it was just a soap opera.) Was Horne and Corden that good? (Ha.)

So why the World Cup ubiquity? No one really knows. The Times column, at least, can be explained. The Thunderer gives out football-writing jobs to comedy dead zones (Giles Smith, Alan Davies, etc.) like Corden increases the profit margins of his local bakeries. (Ha! Have that, Corden, I'm stealing your best material, too). But the rest? "Entertainment" executives are forever trying to re-plough once successful furrows. In their tiny, bean-counting minds, major international football tournament = Euro '96 = Baddiel & Skinner = Fantasy Football = 3 Lions = enough money to buy every Ukrainian woman in Dubai.

Baddiel and Skinner are out of commission, so Corden's their go-to guy. He's funny (to them), he likes football (he's been on Sport Relief and he supports West Ham - which is also like football) and he's available.

So, there it is. Suck it up and deal with it. In 2034 when we're watching repeats of Rooney being sent off in the second round, Lampard missing the crucial penalty against France in the quarter final, and Terry crying so much that he single-handedly irrigates the entire Sahara, it will be Corden's gurning face bookending the clips. There, forever more, like the dog weeing on Jimmy Greaves in Chile, like the stink being wiped off Bobby Moore's hands before meeting the Queen, or Frank Rijkaard's saliva dripping from Rudi Voller's face. Only with less charm.

So enjoy it. Enjoy it all. James Corden's World Cup Come Dine With Me. James Corden's World Cup Big Brother's Little Brother. James Corden's World Cup Derek Acorah's Ghostbusters.

Video - Tonight's TV preview: QI

The underlying 'homo-erotic' tension between Stephen Fry and Alan Davies shoots to a new level tonight in this fabulous show.

Few things are guaranteed to make you panic quite so much as someone telling you not to. That's certainly the case in the last episode of the current series as Jake has to break news of a very worrying phone call to his dad.

With Pete and Sue's marriage rocky this week after he drunkenly kissed another woman, the Brockmans are really going through the mill. But thanks to the resilient skin of young boys all this is water off a duck's back to Ben, who is occupied elsewhere re-enacting his latest battle and attempting to become the first man to scale Everest (or the stairs at any rate) backwards without oxygen.

And Jake is about to discover that even family disasters can have a silver lining of sorts when Kelly - the object of his first serious teenage crush - is recruited to babysit him and his brother. As always though, it's Karen who steals the show during an earnestly hilarious conversation with a nurse in A&E.

As another series ends you can't help but wonder how long Ben and Karen's reign will last and what sort of performers the actors who play them will eventually grow into. Daniel Roche who plays Ben already looks like Alan Davies's tiny stunt-double, while Ramona Marquez would be able to reduce politicians to tears with a line of questioning and logic that would shame Jeremy Paxman.

Being described as "quite good" has, one suspects, always been a secret ambition of Jonathan Creek. He has been knocking around, on and off, for 13 years now. Thirteen years, you say? Really? Wow. If natural selection exists within television, then switching on to discover Alan Davies is still pottering around solving murder mysteries in a duffel coat is like finding some chubby, blind flightless bird on an island that is populated by hungry tigerraptor hybrids with lasers for eyes. It just shouldn't be there. It shouldn't stand a chance against the evolved predators of slick, intelligent, compelling, boxed-set-friendly television we're all addicted to now. Thirteen years of some swollen tongued Nick Hornby offcut solving mysteries via his understanding of stage magic? It just doesn't make sense. It's one for the Creationists.

Anyway, this 90-minute episode, The Judas Tree, lurched along as if the plot had been cooked up via a game of consequences. The lift in which the story was pitched must have been stuck between floors as Mr Jonathan Creek Man tapped his boss on the shoulder, took a gigantic breath and blurted: "OK, a nubile but haunted housemaid gets a job working for a successful murder-mystery writer in a house that witnessed the unexplained and still unsolved death of a Victorian doctor who jilted his own lover-slash-housemaid who was Egyptian and may have been a sorceress and is now somehow haunting the new housemaid who ends up charged with a murder." That's the opening, anyway. It goes on. At one point, someone bleeds what looks like runny Marmite for no apparent reason. It's that kind of show.

It's not that it wasn't occasionally fun; it was just mostly nonsense. OK, Doctor Who is nonsense, but it's supposed to be. But this was nonsense by accident, which isn't as good. If there was an adjective somewhere between "camp" and "crap", this episode would be that, in the way that anything featuring a death scene with someone pointing a finger and screaming "She did it! She murdered me!" sort of has to be.

Times are clearly hard at the BBC. Alan Davies says an important scene in Sunday night's Easter special of Jonathan Creek took place in darkness, "because they couldn't afford to decorate the set - the budget didn't stretch to providing all the props and furniture necessary for it".

Curly-haired Al has already been ordered to take a pay cut to continue playing Creek. "I resisted but it was that or put 75 crew out of work," he says.