'HERE, looking wonderful tonight, is the beautiful Rachel.' The introduction is from Chris Evans, the host of the trendy TV gameshow Don't Forget Your Toothbrush. A drum-roll and applause follow. Camera switch, and there she is. Rachel Tatton-Brown, smiling, waving enthusiastically in her air-hostess outfit.

----------------------------------------------------------------- TOP 10 COMEDIAN GOLFERS ----------------------------------------------------------------- 1 Jimmy Tarbuck 2 Bruce Forsyth 3 Peter Cook 4 Mike Reid 5 Bobby Davro 6 Roger de Courcey 7 Stan Boardman 8 Tom O'Connor 9 Jim Davidson 10 Paul Shane ----------------------------------------------------------------- Information from the Comedians Golfing Society, London -----------------------------------------------------------------

Derivative', ''Blind Date revisited'. Such were the criticisms levelled at Don't Forget Your Toothbrush (Sat 10pm), Channel 4's new game show hosted by Chris Evans. Seamus Cassidy, Channel 4's commissioning editor of light entertainment, thinks otherwise.

Age: 22. Bruce Forsyth first struck the 'Thinker' pose at the top of the stairs on Saturday 18 December 1971 in an adapted version of a Dutch show, Ein van de Acht ('One Out of Eight'), which had been spotted by Bill Cotton, then head of BBC light entertainment. Larry Grayson took over the series in 1978 (when it, perhaps unsurprisingly, became known as Larry Grayson's Generation Game). It was during this period that the show gained its highest ever audience - a monstrous 23.9 million (Saturday 20 October 1979). Grayson continued saying 'Shut that door' until 1981, when the show took a nine-year sabbatical. At the instigation of Jim Moir, then head of light entertainment but also a former Generation Game producer (1971-75), Brucie bounced back in 1990.

MONDAY: This morning the Pipeline Radio people were pressing me to accept a ticket to the Sunset Boulevard premiere. They saw 'Andrew Lloyd Webber: has he pulled it off again?' as the number one issue for Thursday's phone-in.

The bizarre NIGHTINGALES (10.30pm C4) flutter back onto our screens for a second series. The talented trio of Robert Lindsay (last seen on C4 as the paranoid politician Michael Murray in GBH), David Threlfall (in a Michael Bolton-style hairdo) and James Ellis (Z Cars) play three nightwatchmen from hell who while away the hours talking about Harold Pinter and smoking a lot. In tonight's episode, 'Silent Night', directed by Only Fools and Horses veteran Tony Dow, they are visited on Christmas Eve by a pregnant woman called Mary, who proceeds to give birth to several goldfish and enough cuddly toys to keep The Generation Game's conveyor belt stocked for months. Much discussion about allegories and parables ensues. Paul Makin's sitcom is certainly surreal; but is it funny?

The trouble with 25th anniversaries is that the next generation has usually taken over. For the London Sinfonietta there's an unfortunate extra twist: it reaches its quarter-century just when, in the eyes of the world, the music it grew up with - never widely appreciated at the best of times - is passing into the realm of the deeply unloved. Can we still believe that in another few decades, listeners will 'catch up'? Hardly: the world of steady progress and advance that this assumes has been gone for years.

AS THE debates about the BBC's future rumble on, the Corporation's bright and shiny autumn schedules concealed an unconscionable number of retreads behind the New] stickers in the Radio Times. Hyacinth Bucket, the product of some nightmare mating between a foghorn and a bulldozer, was back Keeping Up Appearances (Sun, BBC1) as were Birds of a Feather (Sun, BBC1), flapping along lamely in the wake of the programme's Friday night repeats. Barry Norman was trailing a new series of his cinema magazine as Film '92: Part II (tonight, BBC1), as if we weren't already well fed up with big-screen sequels. And Bruce Forsyth invited us to relive a hilarious highlight from last season's Generation Game (Sat, BBC1) in which a doorknob lodged in his hand.

SIR MICHAEL Checkland, the Director-General of the BBC, said yesterday that the troubled soap Eldorado, would not be scrapped, contradicting reports in Sunday newspapers.

AND you thought they didn't make then like this anymore.