Ross Kemp: Return to Afghanistan made its début this week on Sky 1 and Sky 1 HD.  Last year Kemp travelled to Helmand Province with the Royal Anglian Regiment and now, almost a year on, this five-part series sees him return to the area and the fighting around the town of Musa Qala, which has been in and out of the Taliban's control over recent years.

As was the case with the original series, Ross Kemp is a brave, insightful and sensitive reporter who conveys the fear, bravery and hardships of the British soldiers of 16 Air Assault Brigade who are based in the region and comprise 1Delta Company, the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders and the 1st Battalion of the Royal Irish Regiment.  He has clearly earned their respect and as such is treated very much as one of the team, which only serves to heighten the emotional impact the programme has on its viewer, whether that be excitement, disbelief or just plain horror.

Sky describe the series as “unmissable”, and they're right.  In the first of the series Kemp was joined by almost a million viewers, a five-fold increase on the average number during 2008 for the same slot, and I'd expect equally strong figures for the remaining parts, airing at 10pm each Sunday.

In a recent documentary, a member of a Liverpool gang who was too cowardly even to even show his face, told Kemp that “it sh*ts on Afghanistan 'round here,” before running away at the first sign of a police car.  I'm sure our men out in Helmand could teach that boy a thing or two.

Jade Ewen will represent the UK in the 2009 Eurovision Song Contest after she was chosen by viewers of the BBC's Your Country Needs You ahead of The Twins, Francine and Nicola Gleadall.  Shoehorned into the finals at the last minute having side-stepped the audition phase and personally championed by creepy Andrew Lloyd Webber, Jade seemed to be the favoured choice the moment she first appeared on the programme, and of course, as is inevitable, this has resulted in claims that the whole competition was fixed.  But honestly, do we really care?

Written by Andrew Lloyd Webber (music) and Diane Warren (lyrics), It's My Time, the song Jade will perform in Moscow, had been built up for months to be the UK's magic bullet, a wondrous composition that would shock the entire Eastern Block with its brilliance and once again make us masters of all we musically survey. Null points and finishing last would be a thing of the past.

Well forget about that.  After just the first rendition we knew It's My Time was truly dreadful.  A clichéd power ballad, it goes nowhere musically and is dogged yet further by lyrics that are repetitive and bland.

“Tonight, tonight, it's my time, it's my time, my moment... My time, it's my time, there's nothing I'm afraid of, I'll show you what I'm made of, show you all it's my time now.”  It is instantly forgettable, tragically dated and the screeching climax is just asking for trouble from an amateur performer.  That last point really doesn't matter though, roll out the Beatles, Pavarroti, Elvis, nobody could turn such an awful song into a winner.  According to Lloyd Webber as quoted in the Daily Mail: “I'd had an idea for it and I played Diane what I thought was the chorus. She said, 'No, I don't think you've got a chorus, I think it's a verse.' I thought, 'Oh dear, this is a bad start.' But once I got over that we had pretty much done it. So the whole thing took about two hours.”  And it shows, horribly.  Ironic that it has taken literally months to find a performer, but their song was hastily written on the back of a napkin.  A cynical viewer would think that the whole thing was just another vehicle for the BBC to earn yet more revenue from a show geared around telephone voting.

But let's look on the bright side, here's Jade Ewen being announced the winner, reprising the song, and cracking up completely whilst doing so.  Let's hope she does something similar during the Eurovision Song Contest itself, then at least it would have some added comedy value.

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Attractive!  Buckets of tears, runny nose and hysterics, it can only be yet another TV talent contest winner.  This time, it's Jade Ewen, who will attempt to win the 2009 Eurovision Song Contest with a dreadful composition by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Diane Warren.  Good luck with that one!

Thaila Zucchi's 'How Hard is Your Thing?' strand in the most recent series of Sky One's Brainiac has to go down as the finest example of innuendo for many a year.  Not since we last saw Mrs. Slocombe's pussy have so many double entendre been loaded into one programme.

Thaila has cornered the market when it comes to brunette sex-bombs, her recent credits include a lap-dancer in the cult comedy Not Going Out, as Balls of Steel's bunny boiler and as a model in FHM's Do You Think I'm Sexy?  Her list of commercials include Pepsi Max and, of course, Setanta Sports with Des Lynam “look, it's Setanta, not sultana or Santana...”  We like the way she never seems to take herself too seriously, and in case you were wondering, Thaila Zucchi is pronounced “tai-la zoo-key”.

For Brainiac, Thaila has been testing the “hardness” of various objects, then placing them in order.  “It looks pretty hard, what is it?” “It's my cast-iron cockerel.”  So you can see where this is going!  “How hard do I rank it?  Hard... ish.”  It's jaw-dropping 1970s smut, albeit with contemporary, sparkling high definition gloss.  You try not to laugh and you know Mary Whitehouse wouldn't have approved, but it's really funny all the same.

If you're a Thaila fan, keep an eye on the new series of Skins on E4 and Channel 4, in which she plays a character called Cheryl, and the upcoming fourth series of Hotel Babylon, both of which will be broadcast in HD.

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If Danielle Nagler and her cohorts at BBC HD are intending to annoy viewers, then they're going about it the right way.  The channel's scheduling is a catastrophe and no amount of half-baked excuses can explain away what are often, completely nonsensical programming decisions.

Carols from Kings is for many, the start of their traditional Christmas celebrations and as a result, holds a prominent place in the BBC's schedules every Christmas Eve.

The only live broadcast from King's College Chapel on Christmas Eve, is at 3pm on BBC Radio 4, a Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols.  The service shown on BBC Two (at 6:30pm this year) is actually recorded, often some weeks in advance.

Having gone to the trouble of recording the service in HD, why then, wasn't it shown on BBC HD at the same time as the BBC Two broadcast?  Well, the channel was tied up with a simulcast of BBC One's Toy Story 2, and for a change, that's was a sensible choice.  However, clear thinking is only available in small measure at the BBC and they have a ridiculous rule of not showing anything in HD before the SD broadcast, so instead of shuffling the schedule around and avoiding yet more repeats - of Wind in the Willows, Jools Holland (not again?!), Shrek the Halls and The Electric Proms - anyone wanting to see the carols had to wait until 11:45pm or for the repeat at 3:10pm on Christmas Day... just when the channel should be showing Shark Tale, the BBC's big afternoon movie for Christmas Day.

At Christmas the schedules are full and it's difficult to combine the output of two SD channels – BBC One and BBC Two – into one HD channel, but come on, the endless repeats have to stop and some flexibility be introduced.  Carols from King's wasn't live, so who would have complained had it been shown in HD at 4:15pm and in SD at 6:30pm, other than the old farts at the BBC Trust?

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Disney Cinemagic HD launched today via the Sky platform, but the output is blighted by the most obnoxious digital on-screen graphic (DOG) of any of the UK's high definition channels.

Disney's standard-definition channels are widely considered the worst offenders when it comes to on-screen logos, with their intrusive positioning and screen-burning, solid primary colours, but their HD version is even more offensive, what with it being both huge and super-imposed upon what is supposed to be their premium offering.  Sure, it has slight transparency, but imagine going to see Snow White at the cinema and finding a huge pair of green Mickey Mouse ears occupying the lower left hand portion of the screen.

Here's the logo over a programme called Kim Possible.  That girl could have somebody's eye out, but I digress, click for a version at the original broadcast size...

...and just when you thought things couldn't get any worse, the same DOG repositioned in the 4:3 frame for the upscaled SD cartoon series, Tarzan. Well, at least it is in the correct aspect ratio.

There's a good chance that Disney's classic films (old and new) will be shown with this logo, in which case we'll be boycotting the channel.

UPDATE: This weekend's HD première of Pixar's Ratatouille was broadcast with a repositioned, slightly smaller and more opaque version of the logo. An improvement so perhaps someone at Disney is listening, but it's still far too distracting and intrusive.

If, like me, you feel like complaining, here are a couple of useful links:

E-mail Disney Cinemagic in the UK: feedback@disneycinemagic.co.uk
Sky Viewer Relations: Website Form (it's not really Sky's fault but every little helps)

NASA’s Greatest Missions commemorates NASA’s fiftieth anniversary and presents potted highlights of the organisation’s finest hours.  The series of six programmes broadcast on Discovery and Discovery HD in the UK from 28th September onwards, charts the progress of early American space exploration from the Mercury program and X-Planes of the 1950’s, through to the first moon landings in the 1960’s, complete with re-mastered archive footage and interviews with the likes of John Glenn, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.  The later episodes will focus on the Space Shuttle, first flown by John Young, NASA’s missions to Mars and scientific tools such as the Hubble Space Telescope. The series was shown as When we Left Earth: The NASA Missions in the US and that’s also the packaged DVD/Blu-Ray title.

The series provides an excellent – if somewhat hurried – insight into NASA’s achievements, but benefits greatly from the use of restored archive footage, a lot of which presented here in high definition for the first time.  Apart from the occasional pristine clip of President Kennedy, earlier programmes aren’t particularly exciting from a visual standpoint given the age of the source material, but as the series progresses, some of the footage is quite jaw-dropping and could certainly qualify as demonstration material.

Unfortunately, like a bad smell you just can’t escape from, each episode is blighted by some of the most intrusive and overbearing music you’re ever likely to hear.  Composed by Richard Blair-Oliphant and presented far louder in the mix than it should be, it gives the whole programme a “hurry up, get on with it, we’re all about to die” atmosphere that’s both distracting and downright annoying.  The unrelenting breakneck soundtrack that in some instances hasn’t even been edited to match the video, is completely out of place.  This isn’t a forty-minute trailer for a Vin Diesel movie but a considered appreciation of the beauty of space and of man’s ingenuity and bravery, something Oliphant appears to be hell-bent on trampling all over.

However, we have come up with a partial cure for viewers of Discovery HD, and that is to engage the 5.1 Dolby Digital mix and turn down, turn off or unplug your front left and right loudspeakers.  Doing so creates an anti-Oliphant mix that eliminates most of the music while retaining the dialogue and effects.

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Don’t let Richard Blair-Oliphant’s dreadful score distract you from the glorious imagery on show in NASA’s Greatest Missions, currently airing on Discovery and Discovery HD.