With Doctor Who and Torchwood both finishing, it was looking like I would have nothing to watch except for a few quiz and comedy shows and various music programmes. By chance I noticed two new series starting: Terra Nova on Sky 1 and Hidden on BBC1.

Terra Nova is likely to be a bit of a televisual guilty pleasure. It is fun to watch but utter nonsense, derivative in places, predictable in others and with scientific aspects you don’t want to think too hard about or you spend the whole hour picking it to pieces. So far I am managing not to dwell on why the dinosaurs seem to be bulletproof even with 22nd-Century weapons, how cars can be powered by a battery the size of an A4 box file, or why the moon looks 5 times bigger even though it was only a couple of hundred miles closer to the Earth 65 million years ago. As long as the annoying teenagers don’t get to be even more annoying I’ll stick with it.

Hidden is just a four-parter which I am finding watchable even if half the time I haven’t a clue what is going on. I felt the same way when I started watching the Red Riding programmes an ultimately enjoyed them. It helps that Philip Glenister is there playing a version of Gene Hunt which is always worth seeing.

I guess the problem with finding new programmes to watch is that you only seem to find out about them from trailers in other programmes. If you don’t watch other programmes except on V+ recording where you always skip through the ads and trailers it is a bit of a Catch-22. More or less the only time I watch TV live is Sky News so I loads of trailers for stuff on Sky Atlantic which we don’t get.

The list of ‘essential’ programmes that I have never seen grows every day (Sopranos, West Wing, the Wire, Battlestar Gallactica, Deadwood, Boardwalk Empire, 24, CSI… hell I haven’t even seen Peep Show) because I don’t like to jump into something halfway through or spend 18 hours with a box set catching up. Next time something starts up will somebody do me a favour and tip me off about it?