The year is only three days old, but already the TV bosses have attempted to give us more entertainment than we saw over Christmas and New Year.
Elsewhere on Organ Grinder you can tell us what you think about the return of This Life, but last night also saw the Festive (?) special of The Thick of It (minus Chris Langham).
Most reviews of The Thick of It seemed to focus on the frequency of the swearing, but they were also mostly full of praise. Ian Johns in the Times loved it: "This one-off special continued the series' portraual of politics as an extended, ulcer-inducing anxiety attack...Indeed the whole process seemed entirely circular and one wondered how Armando Iannucci and his writers could take his sitcom anywhere else. Last night they showed how."
Plus yesterday also saw Des O'Connor's debut on Countdown - dismissed by Jim Shelley in the Mirror as "Boring...but at least he's not Des Lynam."
The BBC also last night brought back its grindingly awful celebrity karaoke show Just the Two of Us last night (9pm, BBC1) - in which Brendan Cole appears to have been promoted from being the professional (in a dancing show) to being the celebrity (in a singing show). The duetting show returned to our screens just days before ITV brings back its Soapstar Superstar (Friday 8.30pm).
ITV meanwhile launched (8pm) its Fortune: MIllion Pound Giveaway (featuring Jeffery Archer, Crystal Palace owner Simon Jordan and Ann Summers boss Jacqueline Gold giving away their own money to the worthiest contestants). Any similarity to Channel 4's Secret Millionaire (final episode was at 10pm) was, we are sure, entirely accidental.
ITV clearly surrendered the 9pm slot to the BBC last night with a repeat of a Denis Norden collection of clips, although they dressed it up as a very best of the best of the best of TV slip ups in the veteran host's final ever best of clip show. (To be fair to ITV, Denis got 200,000 more viewers than This Life).
Channel 4 gets its big guns out tonight. At 8pm there's the return of (Celebrity) Big Brother (we will, of course, be blogging live for opening night): this year said to be featuring Paul Michael Glaser (aka Starsky), Robert Kilroy Silk, Danielle Lloyd (ex-Miss GB) and Jade Goody (of, er, Big Brother fame).
That will be immediately followed by a double bill start for the third series of Desperate Housewives. Those nice people at 4 will follow up with the return of ER on E4 tomorrow (9pm) and the last ever special of Green Wing on the same evening (10pm).
Channel 4 further follows up with the launch of its big new hope for Friday nights, Ugly Betty (Friday, 9.30pm).
Now, not all of these shows may be to your taste, but there is surely more to choose from here than could be found in the whole of the Festive schedules.
