The week on demand (15 February)

iPlayer

What the blue green heck is going on in Casualty? You know Casualty. Appalling spot-the-accident set-ups. Character development that would embarrass Balamory. The occasional attempts to improve things by becoming more like ER, and failing miserably. That may typically be true, but it isn’t this week – aside from the medical clothing there was literally not one reminder of what the programme used to be. Instead there were characters with motivations, original filming techniques and a subtle script, following a lonely junior doctor’s last hours before she kills herself. If I’ve convinced any of you to watch the current episode, which I admit is something of a long shot, it’s available til the end of Saturday. (It will properly be rubbish again by next week, so do get a move on…)

Elsewhere: Pulling continues to be fantastic (“I think I’m having a breakdown. I’ve been shitting into a Corn Flakes packet”).

For morbid tellywatchers, BBC Three’s relaunch is proving to be a prolonged car crash. If you haven’t seen the channel they have ditched the massively popular blobs, and replaced them with user-generated intros. Brrrrrr. Programmes-wise, Phoo Action, the new kung fu police show set in a mutant-populated future London, has turned out to be rubbish, made up largely from off-cuts of Power Rangers but without any of the class. It looks kind of pretty but doesn’t quite have enough visual imagination to make up for the crayon-scrawled plot.

And lastly, Lily Allen has lost all of her charm in creating her talk show-cum-social networking migraine, so that’s a miss as well, unless you want to see what a terrible wreck Cuba Gooding Jr has become.

ITV.com

I’ve been quite seriously ill this week, which explains why I watched Jeremy Kyle on Tuesday. I’m not recommending it; I merely mention this to emphasis what a frankly Herculean task it has been to find programmes on ITV to recommend the past few weeks, especially now that I can’t find Harry Hill to watch. There’s Primeval still knocking around. I wouldn’t bother, personally. We can now consider ITV relegated to ‘And elsewhere…’ because pulling teeth is easier than trying to pick something to watch in their schedules.

4OD

Skins! Skins is back! There’s something to recommend on 4OD! Yes, the ever-lovable Skins has finally returned to our screens, and features Bill Bailey as a dog-dancing hairy builder in Bristol. Wizard.

That’s it from the linear schedules (it’s a term we used to call ‘stuff on telly this week’ when I worked in ‘on demand’. Did you know I used to do ‘on demand’ work? That makes this an expert column!) There’s Shameless and Reaper as well, but I wouldn’t.

And elsewhere…

So far I’ve only been able to recommend Skins, Pulling and Casualty, the last of which none of you are going to trust me and watch anyway. So, instead head over to blip.tv for the wonderful Geek Entertainment TV. Amid a hit-and-miss range of shows available from the site, it offers up geeks in their rawest form to gawk at. Aside from the fact they are named a bit too much like us, it’s worth a look.