Film and TV

Richard Hammond and Amanda Byram return for a new series of All New Total Wipeout
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TV Choice: Total Wipeout, Episodes & Ski Sunday

By Mike Pyle
January 06, 2011

Every week our square-eyed reporters take a look at what’s on TV – the highlights and the lowlights – and pick what they think you should watch or avoid.

Live FA Cup Football, ITV1, Saturday, 12.20pm, Sunday, 1pm

This weekend the average football fan’s living room will be flooded with clichés about David vs Goliath, giant-killings and suchlike because it’s the third round of the FA Cup.

For the uninitiated, that’s the stage when the big teams enter the competition and you get epic mismatches which very occasionally earn their places in football folklore if the tiny side from the back of beyond manage to scrape a win.

It’s also the weekend when my beloved Nottingham Forest tend to lose to Digglethwaite-on-Sea Rovers.

The first televised match of the weekend is Arsenal v Leeds. Leeds will be looking for a repeat of last year’s third round when they beat Manchester United.

Arsenal will be hoping to do better than last year – they went out in the fourth round to Stoke.

Sunday’s game is Manchester United v Liverpool.

All New Total Wipeout, BBC One, Saturday, 6pm

This is TV at its simplest, featuring willing participants who are up for a bit of humiliation and make them do battle with a near-impossible obstacle course.

All New Total Wipeout is back for a fourth series and the format hasn’t changed. Twenty men and women start off with the fastest few through the first course moving on to the next stage and so on until three bedraggled contestants go head-to-head on the final course.

The beauty of the show is the obstacles. Massive, spectacular and, crucially, almost impossible – so you get plenty of replays of people falling from great heights into pools of mud. If that’s not top-class entertainment, I don’t know what is.

UK ‘elf-and-safety would have a field day with this, which is probably why the course is out in Argentina.

Richard Hammond presents from the studio while the lovely Amanda Byram is with the contestants out in the sun.

Ski Sunday, BBC Two, Sunday, 5pm

Even if you don’t like skiing, snow, mountains, cable cars or fondue, Ski Sunday is worth watching because the theme music – a lively tune called Pop Goes Bach – is guaranteed to make you happy.

This week it makes its annual winter visit to our screens – this is its 33rd season on the slopes.

The main feature is the World Cup from Adelbolden in Switzerland and there is also coverage from the Big Air snowboarding event in Beijing where people who dress in very baggy trousers look as if they’ve lost about 15 stone in weight and then go on to flout the laws of gravity.

Episodes, BBC Two, Monday, 10pm

The concept for this new sitcom is interesting. The show is about Brit screenwriters Sean and Beverley Lincoln (both of whom you’ll recognise from Green Wing) who are riding a wave of success from their hit TV show Lyman’s Boys.

At an awards show they’re approached by a producer for an American TV network who says he wants to remake of the series for the Stateside audience.

Excited, the couple ship out to Hollywood to help but everything soon starts to go derriere-about-face starting with the network’s decision to swap the leading man, a Shakespeare-loving thesp played by Richard Griffiths, with Friends star Matt LeBlanc.

Commissioned by the BBC, Episodes has been co-written by David Crane who also co-wrote Friends which was fairly successful meaning this could be pretty good.

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