The best (and worst) music of 2011 has been comprehensively covered over in the Music Room, but what about the best - and worst - TV of the year.
It was a patchy year this year I thought, especially with no Mad Men. I found myself watching less and less TV.
But there were highlights - the fabulous new C4 comedy that was Fresh Meat, and the general awesomeness of Frozen Planet most of all.
There have been some great BBC one-off docs, the best of which had to be Ben McIntyre's spiffing Double Agent; The Eddie Chapman Story, a story so bizarre that well, to quote Richard Littlejohn, "you couldn't make it up". Storyville, Timeshift and Despatches have all, on occasion, been excellent too, with super docs on trams, Bobby Fischer, and Life magazine. Mark Cousins' epic series The Story of Film was another highlight - thanks to this series I discovered a lot of films I'd never even heard of - and I speak as a bit of a movie buff.
The old faithfuls have also been reliably good watching too. In The Apprentice nice guy Tom won, while The Hotel Inspector,Young Apprentice and Come Dine With Me provided plenty of deliciously car-crash moments.
But the best of the "reality" shows was Masterchef; The Professionals which just oozes class (the same's true of Grand Designs). Old Laser Eyes Roux and scary Monica are bang on form - if only other reality judges had their style and class! And in Ash and Claire, you have two talented contestants you can really root for and care about. A massive contrast to the vapid sob stories, hype and lack of talent you get on X-factor and the like.
Biggest disappointments? Pan Am, which was nothing like Mad Men - it was superficial, vapid, poorly-written with deeply unlikeable and/or dopey characters and smugly in love with its own glossiness. A pity they didn't put as much effort into the scripts as they did the sets and the ladies' foundation garments.
And, much as I am loathe to jump on the Ricky Gervais backlash bandwagon, Life's Too Short is, er, patchy, to say the very least.
The Hour, the BBC's 1950s TV-studio-set spy saga was a tad disappointing, but still hugely enjoyable, and much better than it was given credit for - and it did feature the gloriously lovely Romola Garai. And Anna Chancellor as a chain-smoking foreign corresondent
Channel of the year? BBC4, again.
Roll on next year, and the return of Mad Men. Oh wait - I haven't got Sky. Shit...
What about you, fellow Naimees?
PS - I've really been enjoying the 1976 TOTP reruns. A guilty pleasure I know, but although there was some utter dross (Wurzels, JJ Barrie etc) '76 perhaps wasn't so bad after all. I mean, any year that contains Fox's "S-S-Single Bed' can't be all bad, can it?
It was a patchy year this year I thought, especially with no Mad Men. I found myself watching less and less TV.
But there were highlights - the fabulous new C4 comedy that was Fresh Meat, and the general awesomeness of Frozen Planet most of all.
There have been some great BBC one-off docs, the best of which had to be Ben McIntyre's spiffing Double Agent; The Eddie Chapman Story, a story so bizarre that well, to quote Richard Littlejohn, "you couldn't make it up". Storyville, Timeshift and Despatches have all, on occasion, been excellent too, with super docs on trams, Bobby Fischer, and Life magazine. Mark Cousins' epic series The Story of Film was another highlight - thanks to this series I discovered a lot of films I'd never even heard of - and I speak as a bit of a movie buff.
The old faithfuls have also been reliably good watching too. In The Apprentice nice guy Tom won, while The Hotel Inspector,Young Apprentice and Come Dine With Me provided plenty of deliciously car-crash moments.
But the best of the "reality" shows was Masterchef; The Professionals which just oozes class (the same's true of Grand Designs). Old Laser Eyes Roux and scary Monica are bang on form - if only other reality judges had their style and class! And in Ash and Claire, you have two talented contestants you can really root for and care about. A massive contrast to the vapid sob stories, hype and lack of talent you get on X-factor and the like.
Biggest disappointments? Pan Am, which was nothing like Mad Men - it was superficial, vapid, poorly-written with deeply unlikeable and/or dopey characters and smugly in love with its own glossiness. A pity they didn't put as much effort into the scripts as they did the sets and the ladies' foundation garments.
And, much as I am loathe to jump on the Ricky Gervais backlash bandwagon, Life's Too Short is, er, patchy, to say the very least.
The Hour, the BBC's 1950s TV-studio-set spy saga was a tad disappointing, but still hugely enjoyable, and much better than it was given credit for - and it did feature the gloriously lovely Romola Garai. And Anna Chancellor as a chain-smoking foreign corresondent
Channel of the year? BBC4, again.
Roll on next year, and the return of Mad Men. Oh wait - I haven't got Sky. Shit...
What about you, fellow Naimees?
PS - I've really been enjoying the 1976 TOTP reruns. A guilty pleasure I know, but although there was some utter dross (Wurzels, JJ Barrie etc) '76 perhaps wasn't so bad after all. I mean, any year that contains Fox's "S-S-Single Bed' can't be all bad, can it?