IT can be tough without any TV at all for two weeks. My wife was reduced to watching Moonlighting with Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis gabbling away in French having collapsed on a sofa after an exhausting day's sight-seeing in 100 degree temperatures (look, we were abroad and didn't know how grim it was back in blighty).

As the choice was Spanish, German and French channels - which has an unnerving amount of Gerard Depardieu on show - in our rented apartment my tele-addicted mate admitted she was looking forward to good old British programmes minus advertising breaks of 15 minutes.

Sadly, the first major effort we ran into was Who Killed Saturday Night TV? (C4, Saturday) where clips of Bruce Forsyth and the bumbling Larry Grayson reminded you of the days when BBC1's Generation Game was watched by 22m viewers.

As we'd just escaped from the disjointed Sport Relief 2004 on BBC1, where my wife complained "I hardly recognise any of C4 and five's celebrity contestants", interviews featuring yesteryear's embittered show hosts were a haunting experience.

annon And Ball, who will be propping up Darlington's panto season this year, reminded us that the Generation Game is now the Generation Gap with older viewers missing variety show entertainment while younger ones have been brought up on reality gameshows offering everything under the sun... and a few things that should have stayed under a stone.

Then along came a series straight out of the past. Island At War (ITV1, Sunday) is a carbon copy of Enemy At The Door (ITV, 1978) apart from the original Channel Island names being switched to a fictional German-occupied place called St Gregory.

"Maybe it's one of the islands we don't know about," said my wife in all innocence before it became apparent that Granada is operating under pressure not to irritate the islanders of Jersey, who were invaded in 1940.

There is a lot of sensitivity about people in this part of Britain again being labelled collaborators and a drama focusing on the "Jerrybags", the women who had relationships with German soldiers. A total of 90 illegitimate children were born, which a Jersey resident dubs "remarkably low" after 12,000 lonely young men were sent to occupy the islands for five years.

I think I'm on much safer territory discussing When Will I Be Famous? (BBC1, Thursday) which looked at the Sylvia Young Theatre School in London and 11-year-old Perry somehow studying while starring as Gavroche in West End musical Les Miserables.

"A precocious bunch," muttered my foreign TV correspondent as we moved across to the horrors of Theme Park (ITV1, Thursday).

My daughter featured briefly in a previous study of holiday camp entertainers and this look at Flamingoland in North Yorkshire, showed that standards are definitely in decline, unlike the mad-eyed intensity of Sylvia Young's little charges.

"Not one of the people auditioning can sing and that dancer is overweight," snapped my other half, who supported years of song and dance graft.

The creation of the theme park's safari white knuckle ride seemed in less danger than finding someone who could string a song together. Perhaps it might help if they moved the series to Saturday nights?

Published: 17/07/2004