The Best On The Box This September

Chosen by: John Balfe

Here's a choice of viewing for the month of September (incl. late August)

Reading Festival Coverage - 29th + 30th August. Various Times. BBC3
Edith Bowman and Reggie Yates bring viewers more live coverage and all the atmosphere from this year's Reading and Leeds Festival. The presenters are on site at Reading from Saturday onwards, with interviews, stories and gossip from the festival and great music from headliners Arctic Monkeys (9.45pm show), Maximo Park and Ian Brown (both 7pm show), as well as The Prodigy, White Lies and Gossip. Sunday's coverage will feature Radiohead, Bloc Party, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Vampire Weekend and more. This is the perfect way to get as full a festival experience as you can from the comfort of your living room, without having to put up with rain, expensive beer in plastic cups and drunken 19 year olds doing 'questionable' things outside your tent.


What Katie Did Next. 3rd September. 9pm. ITV2.
What Katie Did Next? Is 'Alex Reid' the answer to that question? This new series follows Katie Price's life since her split with husband Peter Andre earlier this year. The show chronicles Katie's story as she starts a new phase in her roles as model, businesswoman and now single mum. Awesome, this should be good. In this series we'll get to see Katie as she wants us to see her - as an independent, single mother with a love of horses. Okay, so she's repackaging herself as a sort of upper class female Chris Eubank? Riiiight. This episode also goes behind the scenes of Katie's emotional interview with Piers Morgan where she revealed that she lost Peter's baby just weeks before they split up, and features a photoshoot for OK! magazine which Katie set up herself. Must see TV? Hmmm…



The Cube. 5th September. 8.15pm UTV
Phillip Schofield hosts another instalment of this brand new game show which tests contestants' skill, nerve and determination to win. The Cube challenges members of the public to attempt apparently simple tasks under the spotlight in a large Perspex cube - intensifying the pressure. With each task worth a cash prize, the challenger will have to keep their nerve in this high pressure game of skill and strategy to move higher up the board and closer to the top prize of £250,000. In the third show of the series, boxer JJ Bird from Peterborough and Norman Bennett a mini bus driver from Hove are each hoping to walk away with the top prize – But do they have what it takes to beat The Cube? Does anyone care? Let's hope this proves more entertaining than TV3's The Box..



Storyville - How The Beatles Rocked The Kremlin. 6th September. BBC4. 8pm
Beatles Week continues today with this Storyville film, which tells the story of how The Beatles' music may have contributed towards the collapse of the USSR. In 1962, director Leslie Woodhead made a two-minute film in Liverpool's Cavern Club with a raw and unrecorded group of rockers – The Beatles. He arranged their first live TV appearances in Manchester and then watched as the Fab Four phenomenon swept the world. Twenty-five years later, while making films in Russia, Woodhead became aware of how – even though they were never able to play in the Soviet Union – The Beatles legend had soaked into the lives of a generation of youngsters and changed their lives. In the Sixties, the Soviet authorities were deeply alarmed by the seditious potential of rock 'n' roll. Their smuggled records were destroyed and their music was banned. Fans were thrown out of jobs and university, but The Beatles myth blossomed. 



Watchdog. 10th September. 8pm. BBC One
After an eight-year break, Anne Robinson returns to present a new series of Watchdog, with a brand-new prime time, hour-long show on BBC One. Against the backdrop of a global recession, TV's "Queen of Mean" takes to the stage in her new studio to quiz big businesses and test claims made about some of their best-selling products. For the first time on Watchdog, an audience will join her in the studio to ask their own questions, too. Anne will also be joined by some well-known faces who will make guest appearances to report on topical issues. Together, they will shock viewers with big exposés relating to topical news stories. Can we really take financial advice from the most condescending woman on television? I don't know how many more of her winks I can endure before I just get it over with and put my foot through the television.

Best of The Rest



Framed. 31st August. 8.30pm. BBC One
Trevor Eve and Eve Myles star in Framed, a brand-new, one-off family drama based on Frank Cottrell Boyce's best-selling children's novel. Set almost entirely in Wales, the drama tells the story of 10-year-old Dylan Hughes and his family's struggle to keep their small petrol station afloat, which sits at the foot of a mountain in North Wales. Trust me, it's more entertaining than it sounds.

Outbreak. 3rd September. 10.35pm. UTV
Outbreak is the story of the events which took place on September 3rd 1939, a day which would change the world forever.  It was the day that saw the bombing of Warsaw, the birth of Britain's first war baby, the shock of the first air raid sirens and the torpedoing of innocent civilians aboard a passenger ship.  Famous Brits with vivid recollections of the day include Dame Vera Lynn, Richard, Lord Attenborough, Tony Benn, George Cole, Betty Driver and Sir Peter Blake.

The X-Factor. 5th September. 7.35pm. UTV
Simon, Cheryl, Louis and Danni are back on our screens now and the show has (somewhat) of a new format in which the auditions take place in front a live studio audience, rendering the whole experience just that much more humiliating for the contestants who are, how do I put this, vocally challenged. The judges seem to take a backseat to the public gallery, who make their mind up about 7 seconds into a performance with a favourable cheer or an immediate boo - such as the loud chorus of jeers when those poor Lithuanian girls attempted to sing 'Angels' by Robbie Williams in episode 1. It is public mockery at its most shameless, but tremendously entertaining at the same time.

Last Chance To See. Week 36 (between 5th and 11th September) Time TBA. BBC 2
This show hasn't been officially placed into the BBC schedule yet but seeing as we love Stephen Fry so much here in Entertainment.ie Towers, we feel obligated to at least give you some warning to keep an eye out for this. Twenty years ago, writer Douglas Adams and zoologist Mark Carwardine set off in search of some of the most endangered species on the planet to produce the timeless classic book Last Chance To See.  Now Stephen Fry - who, by chance, house-sat for Douglas while he was on his epic adventure - is realising the dream himself, as he joins Mark in what could be the final outing to capture some of these species on camera in the TV version of Last Chance To See.

The Inbetweeners. 11th September. 11.05pm. Channel 4
The BAFTA nominated sitcom about a group of teenage schoolfriends has been receiving rave reviews since it first aired. This episode involves Simon getting ready to sit his first driving test. You can be sure that things won't go completely according to plan though.

Story by EI Team | 09:00 | Tuesday 25th August 2009 | Other

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