TV Review: Desperate Housewives, Channel 4 - Bond: The South Bank Show, STV

A WEEK is a long time on Wisteria Lane – one series (having skipped straight past the American break between the fourth and fifth series of Desperate Housewives) and five years. For, as the epilogue to last week's episode revealed, the programme has unaccountably jumped forward in time, presumably because the writers couldn't think of anything more to do with their dizzy characters that didn't involve drastic changes.

And so, Bree's obsessive home-making has now turned her into a professional obsessive home-maker and cookbook writer, Lynette's troublesome children are now troublesome teenagers, Susan is having an affair with a young house painter and Gaby has – cue the hilarity – gone "frumpy" (ie, is wearing a padded stomach and has slightly messy hair).

This was all very disconcerting, even to someone heartily sick of their witterings, as if they'd all somehow cheated on us. From having to follow every twist of their affairs, how could they just go on living their wacky lives without us?

So the housewives (an even sillier title now only one of them actually is a housewife) have survived five years without – presumably – any neighbours with a mysterious secret that takes 12 months to unravel. That does help to ground a programme that had become increasingly unreal.

But is there enough in their domestic troubles to carry the show without any of these hidden murders or switched-at-birth children? I'm not sure: this new episode seemed rather flat, with the only mystery being what had happened to Susan's husband Mike – who was revealed by the end, anyway, not to have died, but just left her after they were involved in a car accident which killed someone else. Perhaps some new hidden drama lurks within the creepy new husband of Edie – the cartoonish vamp played by Nicollette Sheridan – or Susan's painter, who's apparently been redecorating her house for four months but is still only at the stage of stripping off.

But the only thing really worth wondering is why the tedious Mary Alice is still around, narrating smugly, years after she supposedly died.

Another mystery: what does Melvyn Bragg have in common with Fearne Cotton or Sarah Cawood? Not much, but those cheerful rent-a-presenters did come to mind during Bond: The South Bank Show, as it resembled a glorified version of those Behind the Making Of… clip shows that are purely promotional fluff jobs for a blockbuster movie, with an enthusiastic host telling us all about how great it's going to be.

Perhaps that's unfair, as this wasn't entirely commercial: there was no footage of the red-carpet premiere and the SBS crew filmed their own interviews instead of relying on the PR dept's pre-recorded snippets. There was also a little more background on the history of the franchise, with Sean Connery, Honor Blackman, John Barry and co wheeled out to relate their anecdotes again.

And it's hardly new that a South Bank Show profile just happens to coincide with the launch of its subject's latest project. But still: there wasn't much attempt at critical depth or objectivity in this programme and it came across as a fannish celebration of the movies, centred around a fawning interview with Daniel Craig to promote the new film.

As well as claiming that his infamous tiny trunks moment in Casino Royale – camper than anything from Roger Moore's era – was an accident, he droned on about doing his own stunts in the boring way that actors like to do to prove they're macho and not preening luvvies. Yes, OK, good for you, but who gives a quantum of solace?