Oooh, it's here!
Crumbs, say I.
Curious? So incredibly. And cheerful.. Sorry, I - I'm rather distracted. I'll try and keep myself to the job at hand. But come on. I mean, I shouldn't have any difficulty persuading you to stay in and watch television tonight.
It's Tuesday, we're about as far as it's possible to get from both a weekend and a bank holiday without being Wednesday morning or June. And it's vile out there. Cloudy, sunless and icky. Crappy, sullen and insidious. Sorry, I'm getting distracted again. Anyway, no, there's nothing good to be said about the outside world at all.
But for those that enjoy a little bit of crime-ridden, sharp and incisive drama, there's good news in the body of a sixth series, starting tonight. Cripes. Sixth, is it? Yes, sixth - a sixth series of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. The Vegas one. The proper one. It's Cracking news. Superb. Ixciting. Sorry, I couldn't think of an "I" word to go there.
Anyway - ignore me. There's more to life than CSI. And here are the picks of tonight's TV, taken from this week's Guide, including sitcoms, murder, murder, murder, war and divorce. I'll go and crouch sit in a corner, mumbling about my Vegas crime preoccupation. Corking, so it is.
How To Divorce Without Screwing Up Your Children 9pm, C4 Children from broken homes don't fare well in the statistics. Teen pregnancy, academic failure, emotional problems: you name it, kids from broken homes know about it. So how do responsible parents split up? In Houston, couples on the verge have to take a course in parenting before the court will grant them a divorce. Pioneering American counsellor Christina McGhee visits three families in Britain to see if she can help. What's more traumatic: your parents splitting up or them trying to talk to you about it on national TV?
Clare Birchall
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation 9pm, Five A trailer park explosion, a stripper coach tour and a car boot full of decomposing bodies? Yes, CSI's back for a sixth season. After all the office politics last time, Gil's finally got the whole team back -- this week though, the real story is that Warrick's got married. Catherine didn't even know he had a girlfriend.
Richard Vine
Imagine: A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Studio 10.45pm, BBC1 Received wisdom says the British sitcom is dead. Rubbish, say those making British sitcoms, it's alive and well if you simply watch the right shows. It's not like you even need a set-top box to catch, say, Peep Show, The Office or Black Books. Interviewing the likes of Ricky Gervais, Armando Iannucci and Graham Linehan (whose IT Crowd debuts on C4 on Friday), Alan Yentob concludes that the best sitcoms have become taboo-busting shows dealing not with resolving conflict (as with the "traditional" family sitcom), but the darker theme of loss.
Jonathan Wright
The Wire 9pm, FX "We're police, so no lies between us: he wasn't the greatest detective and he wasn't the worst." One of the many things that this show does so well is handle crowd scenes. Tonight's barroom wake for Stairmaster casualty Ray Cole is a case in point, from Landsman's honest eulogy, to Bunk knowing all the words to the Irish songs, and Ray's body lying on a pool table in the middle of the room. On the other side of town, Omar loses one of his crew, Bodie's right to think that Marlo's a problem and Cutty tries to get his old life back.
Richard Vine
Wanted 10pm, ITV4 Gary Cole heads up an elite LA force bent on hunting down the city's 100 most wanted fugitives from justice in this Aaron Spelling-produced cop drama. This week, it's the turn of an especially unpleasant young blonde-attorney-headbutting Korean gangster. Wanted is generic but watchable, blood-pumping fare of the sort that tries to have you up and punching the air at acts of police brutality. A shame it has to exacerbate the action with gratuitous bursts of gritty, hi-tech heavy metal to assure us just how gritty, hi-tech and heavy Wanted is -- or maybe the music's simply to keep us awake when the narrative sags.
David Stubbs
Over There 10pm, Sky One Steven Bochco's series about US soldiers dealing with the endless predicament of the Iraq war continues to grip. This week, they've taken charge of a prisoner, an ardent young bigot who proves quite a handful. There are oblique allusions to the Lyndie England affair and abuse of Iraqi detainees, as well as the practice of "rendition" of suspects to countries with more laidback attitudes to torture. Yet there remains the uneasy feeling that, like The West Wing, this series helps bolster a wishful, fictional faith in the flawed but basic decency with which America runs the world, which doesn't tally with the facts.
David Stubbs
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I'm not as excited as I sound you know. Nononono. Not at all.
Oh, all right, I am as excited as I sound.
I'm really excited.
But shhhhhh - don't tell anyone...
