LORD REITH can stop turning in his grave, smooth down his legendary dinner-jacket and rest in peace for another year. The Reith Lectures (R4) are over and they weren't so bad after all. Fears that the Rupert Murdoch Professor of Language would storm the mighty citadel of proper English dissolved into nothing, empty and unfounded.

I promise not to bang on again too much about the enjoyable Peter York's Eighties (Sat BBC2), suffice it to say that the flak has been flying all week, to the point where York is appearing on Right to Reply (Sat C4) to defend his series against being "a waste of the licence-payers' money", for goodness sake. "Style over content" is the critical consensus (that mysterious process, like the growth of mould on cheese) - and this from people who praise Homicide to the rooftops. Oh well. I think there are two lessons to be drawn from all this: a) people don't like Peter York in the way that people don't like Loyd Grossman; and, more interestingly, b) that - despite the decade's reputation as a dizzy good-time gal - most people actually hated the 1980s and everything they stood for.

`EastEnders' tops the complaints ratings

For Robbie Coltrane's tough shrink they stand for hours and eat mud. Jim White mingles with extras on the set of 'Cracker'

MATHEW HORSMAN

The ITV companies have promised a formal letter of "explanation" to the Independent Television Commission in the row over the rescheduling of News at Ten next Monday.

You have delayed the start of News at Ten to make room for Cracker. Good move. So how about dumping the programme's sensationalist news values while you're at it?

MATHEW HORSMAN

Television's new gurus of market research claim that success is a formula. Meg Carter wonders about, ahem, creativity

If the sun comes out in summer, music, like food, can benefit greatly from the open air. If the acoustic is right, instrumental colours shine more brightly, rhythms gain added spring; even the elemental thrill of an evening breeze lifting the awning at a crucial moment can add to the experience. On Monday, nearly everything natural conspired to make Garsington Opera's new staging of Strauss's Daphne a success.

French, Saunders, Sayle, Coltrane, Mayall: without Peter Richardson where would they be? James Rampton on a comedy kingmaker's return

Jimmy McGovern drew on the passion and growing disillusionment of his o wn teaching days to write the TV series Hearts and Minds, writes Tom Sutcliffe. But how true to life is his drama? Below, Roger Perks, a headmaster in Birming ham, passes judge ment

Cracker, the popular ITV drama series starring Robbie Coltrane and made by Granada Television, was censured by the Independent Television Commission yesterday for starting an episode at 9pm with a scene of sexual intercourse.

THE MOST familiar writers' gripe at the moment is that if you're going to arrest the attention of a commissioning editor you have to call in a policeman to do it. Like all gripes, it's an exaggeration, but this is a bad week to try and refute it, a week which has offered three police dramas in as many days. The gripe also assumes, as a given, that genre fiction puts handcuffs on the imagination of the writer. With Wycliffe, Wexford and A Touch of Frost fresh in the mind you wouldn't hastily deny that, but again, it's a bad week for the theory. As Jimmy McGovern proved with Cracker (ITV), and J C Wilsher with Between the Lines (BBC 1), it isn't the genre that matters so much as what you do with it. Now both series are back on our screens again.