Why some people are mourning the departure of Desmond Lynam from presenting Countdown is beyond me. He’s not very good at it, much like Richard Whitely wasn’t very good but at least he laughed in all the right places when Richard Digess spoke and thought Barry Norman’s comic soliloquy on tarmac worth a chortle. Lynam sits there looking shifty, the rlection from his glasses shrouding his eyes so as to make them unreadable, his moustache getting in the way of his words.
And so to the repalcement, someone i championed for the job before Lynam got it. Tom
O’Connor is one of my favourite Dictionary Coner guests, he’s quick, inoffensive and tells jokes well and listens to what other people would say, he’d often wait with baited breath as Whitely replied to a gag by O’Connor in a wholly unsatisfactory way. He made Crosswise nearly bearable as a programme, i honestly believe he could turn his hand to nearly anything on telly and it is a mystery as to why he hasn’t had more work. He is the man for Countdown, it is very hard to hate Tom O’Connor, as good a reason as any that he should get the job. If Dave
Benson-Phillips is booked.
A room of people all ages camped round the telly watching Patch Adams, grown-ups smiling at the whimsy, children ensconsed in the moving pictures. For the head of Saturday entertainment on BBC1, this image is for the wank-bank.
Dr. Who was such an alarming success it bred a spin-off and they were even contemplating doing another spin-off as well. It was aimed at getting son/daughter and father together on the sofa, watching something they both love i.e. Billy Piper. The suggestion is that the crapness (cheap sets, poor acting, rubbish scripts, poor acting, cheap sets) is excused by the father-he’s seen how bad it is but peers at his offspring’s saucer like eyes and excuses the crapness as whimsical-and not noticed by the dumb Tweenie-fiddling youngster. 
And the BBC can channel all the other money on a huge and overblown hype campaign. For Dr. Who to be true to itself it has to look crap. This is one of the failings of outr retro society, we are incapable fo separating ourselves from contemporary technological innovations and find it hilarious that wobbly sets and poor dubbing ever existed without realising that a lot of it at the time was rather cutting edge. So Dr. Who gets made as poorly as possible, the crapness hailed as a tradition of Dr. Who and the-way-telly-should-be. I hate this sitaution. It demeans adults into believing that their children are so gullible they’ll be impressed by a green-painted Peter Kay and it demeans the children by saying that you’re so young you won’t notice the crapness. Youth is blind.
The kick-off of new series ‘Robin Hood’ is in the same vein as the very successful Dr. Who. Starring a nobody as 
