The Top Ten Television Moments of 2007 (Part One)

This almost certainly gets said every year, but 2007 was officially the year in which British television ate itself. So, with no further ado, here are my top 10 television moments of the year.

10. Jeremy Kyle Gets Slated: There are few more satisfying things in life than when a long-held opinion of yours is made in public and is thoroughly debated, and so it was when a high court judge described Kyle’s twenty-first century version of the stocks as “a form of bear-baiting”. Kyle’s response to this was to broadcast a “Brasseye”-esque paedophile special, which promised to investigate what the motives behind paedophile behaviour are, but actually ended up with him shouting, “YOU RAPED YOUR SIX YEAR OLD DAUGHTER” at a sex offender while an audience whooped and hollered behind him. Insightful stuff.

9. Seven Ages Of Rock: As with football, television treats music pretty badly when it thinks that it treats it well. However, with “Seven Ages Of Rock”, the BBC managed to get some way towards tapping into the spirit of how popular music has evolved and how it has evolved so quickly. Well worth catching up on, should you get the chance.

8.  Spooks: At some point in the last couple of years, “Spooks” has become the BBC’s flagship prime time drama series. Though it does tend to cross the invisible line into the territory marked “ridiculous” at little too often, it still beats most of its competition in ratcheting up the tension. It will probably never reach the heights of Lisa Faulkner’s character having her head stuck in a deep fat fryer or Colin The Geek being executed in the woods, but it’s still a cut above anything else that the BBC1 has to offer in its evening schedule.

7.  Big Brother Race Rows: Racism is still endemic within British culture, and this was magnificently demonstrated by the BB race rows earlier this year. In “Celebrity Big Brother”, Danielle Lloyd, Jo O’Meara and Jade Goody all etched themselves into the public consciousness after strangely forgetting that the 24 hour TV show that they on was being recorded, and making some pretty vile remarks about the Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty. All three were eventually removed, and Shetty went on to win the competition. Channel Four’s half-witted handling of the matter whilst under the scrutiny of the world’s media should have seen them stripped of their franchise, but “Big Brother” was back in the summer with another row, when the dopey posh girl Emily was similarly hung out to dry for calling the vacuous Charley a “nigga”. Nothing, of course, gets in the way of the “Big Brother” juggernaut, but it was nice to see Four’s executives squirming.

6.  Jericho: It is now a truth universally acknowledged that American TV knocks seven bells out of British TV, and Jericho was but one example of this. A drama in which America comes under nuclear attack from the perspective of a remote mid-western town that is sufficiently removed from everywhere else to have some idea of what is going on without knowing was a masterpiece of set pieces, tautness and the fine art of slowly disseminating information to the audience through its characters. Strangely, Five (who have, with such series as “CSI” and “House”, set themselves up as the market leaders in buying in American drama) overlooked this, and it ended up hidden away on British television on ITV3. It was inexplicably cancelled at the end of its first season, but is set to return after a sustained protest by fans of the show.

The top five will follow, either later today or tomorrow.