This Year's Worst TV

I wouldn't say it's "horrible, nasty and manipulative" at all - but it is seriously flawed and nowhere near as good as The Enemy Within from a few years ago.

ITV's disastrous Tycoon deserves a mention, as does most of ITV Play's line-up.

The Lifetime Achievement in Suckitude Award goes to Deal or No Deal , which has gone from a game show to a hug-fest. It's sickeningly sweet!

Could we not just nominate things that were actually good on ITV1 this year? It would take up less time...

I'll agree with that, almost everything bar one or two decent one-off dramas which is popular on ITV1 usually is the dross only lunkheaded fools could find entertainment value within without resorting to thinking of new ways to wipe smug smirks off presenter's faces or indeed removing the arms, legs and if necessary the mouths of over-enthusiastic auidences.

Why can't they give Brian Conley something better to do than these cheap talent or gameshows. He's better off going back to ITV imo.

And talking of Dirty Rotten Cheater - I saw a bit of it the other day and the cheater turned out to be that tanned peroxide blonde bloke called Mike who used to always appear in the Big Brother's Big Mouth audience with Russell. Who is he? Some kind of actor?

If I remember there was a big debate on this forum pre-Baby Ballroom Dancing. Never watched it so I can't really comment, but it did spark some arguments.

Vernon Kaye and Family Fortunes .... please stop giving us celebrity in the shows and just have ordinary families and an more normal presenter?

Celebrity Big Brother, and all those phone in scandals that have given tv companies a bad name are probably the worst shows this year IMO.

Best show - Harry Hill's TV Burp (goes to ITV there)

IIRC, celebrity editions only happened at Christmas or on Cup Final day, until the charity events got going in the 80s.

(It's been, generally, down hill for British TV since early '77, I'd say.)

Don't you start too.

It's about right though.

IMO, ITV at least started the slide when ATV lost its franchise. Central were never an adequate replacement for the flamboyant company who was never afraid to experiment.

When it was time to say bye-bye to Thames as well, that just sealed it. That left only Granada left (YTV and Central being generally lacklustre, and LWT was always LCD from the early 70s onwards). Granada were taken over by the accountants, and became a pale shadow of its former self, with no real internal competition in the originality department.

That said, I do feel that the BBC is as good as ever. Uneven, yes. A lot of rubbish produced, yes. But still, a large number of genuinely stimulating and original programming is still being produced by the corporation.

Oh god yes.

An absolute abomination of a programme, hours of my life that I'll never get back, and quite possibly a candidate for "poorest execution of a reasonably decent idea" of all time, never mind 2007.

I agree with the Thames thing, sure they weren't perfect (Fresh/French Fields anyone?) but on the whole they were great (Minder, The World At War, The Sweeney, Shelley, Rainbow, just a few of their highly regarded programmes). Once they dissapeared it left a noticable big chunk missing out of the network.

To this day I still wonder if the decay of ITV would have been less severe had Thames survived as an ITV contractor.

Also Central were rather good as well, I wasn't born when ATV were on air so can't comment on their output compared to Central's but I would hardly say Central were crap. Infact once Carlton got hold of Central that really was the end.

Also agree with the one of the posters above, Harry Hill is definately the best thing on ITV1 amongs a sea of crap.

I'm sorry but you can't insult crap by comparing it with ITV1. I crap every day and I tell you, it is much more interesting and watchable than ITV.