On the box: The Live Hogmanay Show | STV Hogmanay | Shooting Stars: The Inside Story

Published on Friday 2 January 2009 18:47

THE LIVE HOGMANAY SHOW STV Hogmanay, 11.45pm DEMONS STV Saturday, 7.20pm SHOOTING STARS: THE INSIDE STORY BBC2 Tuesday, 9pm

ONE minute to midnight, and it seemed that Scotland had been taken over by terrorists. The pictures coming from my screen were jittery, fuzzy and desperate, of the kind associated with the most hellish corners of Iraq, and all that was missing were the black hoods and the automatic rifles. But this wasn't al-Qaeda TV, it was STV, and I was watching The Live Hogmanay Show.

Presenters Vicky Lee and Gerry McCulloch tried to call up other parts Scotland to illustrate why we're reigning champs at ringing out the old, but in Stonehaven the cameras froze. Cut to a ghostly Edinburgh and what appeared to be a library image of a much quieter day, with no evidence of the world's biggest New Year party. Cut to Glasgow, where the reporter – approx age 13 – voxpopped local swankers before introducing some "music". Paolo Nutini was definitely on stage in Glasgow, but the microphone was sited in faraway Stonehaven. Not a moment too soon, we were returned to the studio, where – asked how she'd remember 2008 – Vicky refused to be cowed by the worst economic crisis for 80 years and announced: "My little doggie."

Sadly, The Live Hogmanay Show came too late to be included in STV's Top 30 Best-Loved Shows. A list programme with a difference – 30, not the usual 100 or even 50, and apparently featuring everything produced by STV, the good, the bad and the 100 years' sleep-inducing – it ended, predictably enough, with Taggart squatting atop the hillock.

Sometimes it's easy to forget that STV is part of ITV, and last night was one of those occasions when our little outpost seemed peelie-wally and pipsqueak next to what happens Doon Sooth. Top 30 Best-Loved Shows was immediately followed by Demons, the kind of big, whizz-bang number where the network chucks money around and lures a much-loved BBC star over to the dark side. ITV has always done this, and good actors and actresses, not knowing how long their fame will last, have always grabbed the cheque. The latest is Philip Glenister from Life On Mars, a darksider in every sense.

Your reviewer is not among the target audience for Demons. Buffy re-worked by ITV should be guffy and, by heck, that's what this drama is. As well as jousting with all manner of freaks above and below the streets of London, Glenister has to grapple with an American accent. The honking script hardly helps, requiring him to pronounce: "The truth is I'm a warrior… in the coldest of cold wars: the struggle between human and inhuman, Us and Them." Sadly for our favourite, there is no irony in Demons and precious little humour. Twelve short months ago Glenister was all sarky one-liners; now he stands bereft in a silly fedora.

As Rupert Galvin, he's the long-lost godfather of the last surviving Van Helsing. "Bram Stoker stole your name," he informs Luke Rutherford (Christian Cooke). The lad started out a reluctant vanquisher of the forces of darkness but seems willing to doff his shirt at every opportunity. ITV must hope this will endear him to all the teenage girls at a loose end on Saturdays now The X Factor is finished. Maybe, for the sake of continuity, that's why the first monster to present itself – a toothy, monkey-like creature – bore a strange resemblance to the singing show's resident Irish gonk.

Two nubile females complete the team battling the forces of darkness. One is called Ruby for no other reason than it allows ITV to use the Kaiser Chiefs' 'Ruby' on the soundtrack and demonstrate how "now" it is. (There's no truth in the rumour the channel's Head of Drama assumed the song was a tribute to 1950s entertainer Ruby Murray.) The monsters have dull technical names, such as "type 3" (not to be confused with Britain's channel 3, home to a different strain of the undead). And, equally disappointingly, the first episode didn't venture much beyond ITV's HQ on the Big Smoke's South Bank. Maybe Glenister drove a hard bargain and there was little money left over for a locations budget. If so, good for him.

Beeb stars who don't change stations may opt to hang around long enough for the state broadcaster to honour them with a retrospective. I say "long enough", but Shooting Stars: The Inside Story was only commemorating the 15th anniversary of the quiz which, we were told, revolutionised TV by poking fun at celebrities.

Weren't Morecambe & Wise first to do that by inviting Glenda Jackson to appear in the plays "what Ernie wrote"? Numerous M&W retrospectives during the festive season confirmed this. But no matter, Shooting Stars, fronted by the surrealist Eric and Ernie, Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer, was great fun, and this programme was a tribute to Reeves and Mortimer's deep love of corny showbiz and their attention to comic detail, then and now, as they donned daft wigs to play grumpy cameramen and bitchy make-up artists only too keen to slag off the "young, pencil-faced kid from Swindon" Mark Lamarr and his fellow team captain Ulrika Jonsson, a "Norwegian nympho with rickets".

Oh, Ulrika-ka. In the tremendously blonde 1990s, you were the fairest of them all. But who were Alice Beer and Jo Guest and Gail Hipgrave? I forget. Roland Rivron? Hang on, that name's coming back to me: he first appeared on telly alongside a young, pencil-faced Jonathan Ross. Now what do you mean Jonathan who?

I don't have enough space left to do justice to Prog Rock Britannia (BBC4, Friday, 10pm), and especially not the clip of Arthur Brown, he of the Crazy World, sneaking in a side door of an oak-panelled library to perform in front of the squarest men in the world in his legendary flaming headdress. What, I hear you ask, has your telly critic glimpsed 2009's top show already? Very possibly. Happy new year. Hope you didn't over-indulge on the larks' tongues in aspic.