Charlie Brooker

Andrew Sachs probably won't be tuning in for this one. Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand are reunited on television for the first time since Sachsgate. However, this being Channel 4, don't expect a grovelling apology at the beginning but plenty of jokes about telephone calls, Spanish waiters and Satanic Sluts. Jimmy Carr is in the chair for what has become an annual festive highlight, poking fun at the biggest stories of the year. Ross and Brand have been cheekily paired together and up against them will be Claudia Winkleman and Rob Brydon and David Mitchell and the TV critic Charlie Brooker, making his first appearance. Peter Andre is among the celebrity questioners, but rumours that Tiger Woods will be appearing are wide of the mark.

Daddy, I made up the jokes

Suburban sitcom Outnumbered could easily have flopped. Instead its child stars are up against Charlie Brooker for a comedy award.

So Wrong It's Right - Recording Report

Tonight I went to the recording of a new Radio 4 panel game hosted by Charlie Brooker. Titled So Wrong It's Right, it's a celebration of Britain's favourite subject - failure.

Newcomers such as Mock the Week can snap at its heels, but Have I Got News for You continues to operate at the same reliably high comic level that it has done for years. Much in the same way, you could say, as tonight's host. He's had his ups and downs, but Martin Clunes remains a British comic institution - he's currently in Doc Martin on ITV1 - and seems certain to prosper as the latest beneficiary of the show's Sugababes-style hot-desking policy. Also worthy of note this week is guest panellist, the Guardian's Charlie Brooker.

The long-running and consistently funny news panel show returns for its 38th run. Martin Clunes takes the presenter's chair as the series's first guest host. Joining him is Arlene Phillips, whose sacking from Strictly Come Dancing caused a storm of controversy, plus writer and broadcaster Charlie Brooker.

Mock The Week does a sterling job at, er, mocking the week but we still have a special place in our hearts for its televisual older brother, which returns tonight for an astonishing 38th series. Helping Ian Hislop and Paul Merton with the mirth will be satire's latest poster boy Charlie Brooker and axed Strictly judge Arlene Phillips, and Martin Clunes is back as guest host, a role he's made a good fist of before... though it beats me why they can't get someone permanent in the main chair.

I like Charlie Brooker, I like Dara O'Briain and I like Graham Linehan. If those three can't persuade me to take an interest in computer games, nobody can. All three contributed to Gameswipe, a helpful guide to the computer game, with Brooker as host.

Brooker was his usual grumpy, caustic, brilliant self, but the subject matter just left me cold. The show helpfully introduced the uninitiated to the various categories of game available - platform, shoot 'em up, role play, combat - and provided a brief history of each. By far the best bits featured archive clips of anxious teachers, concerned parents and fretful community leaders getting all hot under the collar at the latest screen outrage, of which there have been many over the years.

But even with sumptuously realised and immaculately detailed graphics, the games under review appeared infantile and repetitive. Especially the modern shoot 'em ups, which have somehow contrived to make the act of mass murder appear very dull indeed.

Charlie Brooker's Gameswipe gives videogames good name

Television's relationship with videogames has been bumpy over the last 20 years, but Charlie Brooker's new show might herald a happier future.

Most children I know would have been in deep mourning for their video games, the very first of which was demonstrated in footage from a Yuletide Tomorrow's World in which the old-school presenter Raymond Baxter played tele-tennis from his sofa with a non-speaking woman who may have been his wife, daughter, housekeeper or secretary (darker theories still crawl around my head). The same clip was shown on Gameswipe with Charlie Brooker, a blissfully archive-heavy history of computer games in which Brooker attempted to marshal a defence of them. The trouble is that if Tony Blair as a Prime Minister had no reverse gear, Brooker as a critic has no praise mode and the more he talked the more hellishly pointless the games seemed. As always with Brooker, however, the documentary contained more original ideas in 50 minutes than most of us have in a career.

TV Review: Charlie Brooker's Gameswipe

Aside from the serious(ish) stuff, it was great just to see Brooker talking about games that have been forgotten and for a gaming geek like me, it was wonderful to see the segment from the Consolvania crew talking about the wild array of utterly mental games you could get on the ZX Spectrum.