The Top of the Pops Christmas Special and New Year Special will be presented by Radio1 DJs Fearne Cotton and Reggie Yates.

Cotton said, “I am beyond excited at the thought of a return to the mighty TOTP studios for these one-off shows. Reggie and I feel truly honoured to be able to introduce this year’s number one - both shows are going to be huge.”

The BBC had previously rejected calls to bring the long-running show, which was axed in 2006, into this year’s Christmas schedule. However, yesterday the corporation announced a Top of the Pops comeback with not just one but two shows over the festive period.

The news was welcomed by Jimmy Saville, who presented the show when it first went on air in 1964. “Let’s try it for Christmas, see how it works…,” he said. “When it started in 1964 it was a good programme.”

Jay Hunt, the BBC1 controller said “With shows on Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve, Top of the Pops has never been bigger. The shows will form the centrepiece of a massive musical offering during the festive season that we hope viewers are really going to enjoy.”

The BBC’s decision to reinstate the show was made following pressure from pop stars and politicians including Culture Secretary Andy Burnham, who said the show had been a good vehicle to promote new music and Mancunian pop duo The Ting Tings.

“The Christmas special is a fantastic thing, but it’d great if it came back for good next year,” said the band’s Jules De Martino.

The return of Top of the Pops comes a few weeks after Simon Cowell said he would like to buy the show and put it on ITV. “If the BBC wanted to do a deal, and I can get ITV to buy it and broadcast it, I’d put it on ITV,” he said.

However the BBC said the show was “not up for sale” but neither would it return for a new series.

Stelling is best known for his knowledge of match day statistics on the Sky Sports programme Soccer Saturday, and has been named Sports Presenter of the Year for three years running. His appointment ends months of speculation as to a replacement for the Countdown host Des O’Connor, who announced his resignation in July.

“I am delighted to be hosting Countdown and follow in the footsteps of such great broadcasters as Richard Whiteley, Des Lynam and Des O’Connor,” he said.

Riley who beat 1,000 applicants to the post, also expressed delight at landing the co-host role. “This is the best graduate job in the world. There’s only one cool maths job around and I was lucky enough to get it so I’m absolutely thrilled,” she said.

Riley was tested on her maths skills and abilities in front of the camera before being offered the job. Channel 4 said that her “on-screen presence, easy going nature, coupled with fantastic maths skills meant she excelled in all rounds of the auditions.”

Stelling was originally shortlisted for the presenting job along with Alexander Armstrong, but reportedly turned it down before the screen auditions. After Armstrong pulled out at the eleventh hour, having received a contract from Channel 4, it is understood that the programme makers approached Stelling again with better terms, which he consequently accepted.

A new series of the TV quiz show presented by Stelling and Riley will kick off in January.

Sergeant, 64 and the oldest contestant on the show, sparked mixed reactions from the audience and judges. Despite consistently finishing bottom of the judges’ rankings after a series of lamentable performances, the public kept voting the so-called “dancing pig” back into the show.
He said that he had decided to call it a day because his continued popularity with the general public was beginning to “irritate and annoy people”.

Today the BBC said that it had received over 2000 complaints from Strictly fans since Sergeant announced he would be quitting the show yesterday. By contrast only 377 people complained about his continual involvement in the sho before the announcement.

Messages of support for the corpulent political correspondent have also been flowing in from some of the biggest names in politics and media, including Jeremy Paxman and Peter Mandelson.

In a statement yesterday, Sergeant said “It was always my intention to have fun on the show and I was hoping to stay in as long as possible. “The trouble is that there is now a real danger that I might win the competition. Even for me that would be a joke too far,” he continued.

“The reasons for leaving; well it is like when do you leave a party? You leave before the fighting starts and I think that is what has happened on this occasion.

“We had fun dancing and dancing is a wonderfully enjoyable thing, but if the joke wears thin, if people begin to take things very seriously and if people are getting so wound up that is very difficult to carry on the joke, then it is time to go.”

Sergeant’s decision to leave the show will prevent a potential row between BBC bosses and the show’s judges, who were becoming increasingly frustrated that the general public were repeatedly going against their professional judgement. Len Goodman, the normally avuncular head judge, had complained that Sergeant’s success “made a nonsense of the show”, while earlier this week, judge Arlene Phillips accused Sergeant and his Russian dance partner Kristina Rihanoff of messing around while the other celebrities worked hard at perfecting their moves.

Bruce Forsyth, the show’s co-host, described Sergeant’s departure as “a bit of a shock” and said: “I feel sorry for John because he was put in the most awkward position. He looked at all the other dancers and knew they were better than him.”

The BBC has said that Sergeant and Rihanoff will appear one final time on Saturday’s live BBC1 edition of the show, in which he will give a farewell dance.

Unless you’ve not already done so, check out the video above for Sergeant’s plodding moves.

Attempts by Jen to ingratiate her charges with the rest of the company and secure them dates with real life 3D humans fail miserably, as do their attempts to bring their manager’s knowledge of modern day IT up to speed – Roy jokingly tells Jen that Googling ‘Google’ will ‘break the Internet’ – she mistakenly believes him, to her eventual embarrassment during a head office meeting.

Despite being considered outcasts and social misfits by the rest of the company despite their dependence on them to keep the computers humming, the feeling is mutual; Moss and Roy have set up looped recordings of basic suggestions such as “Are you sure it’s plugged in?” and “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” on their answer phone, which seems to do the trick most of the time…

Even though the cast reads like a ‘who’s who’ of edgy comedy The IT Crowd (see, it’s not just a clever name…) features BrassEye and The Day Today star Chris Morris as Denholm Reynholm, the head of Reynholm Industries (who returns, despite his characters apparent suicide at the beginning of series two) and Noel Fielding and Richard Ayoade of The Mighty Boosh fame – the first episode of the second series also saw Nicholas Burns, aka Nathan Barley from Nathan Barley make an appearance (Fielding and Ayoade also appeared in Barley as Jones and Ned Smanks respectively).

It’s a whole lot less dark and acerbic as you’d think, given the above information, although one episode concerns Moss being invited over to the flat of a German gentlemen for dinner… only to later realise that the chap is a voracious cannibal intent on literally having him for dinner.

Most of the humour is slapstick, such as when Jen vainly tries to squeeze into a pair of shoes she knows are two sizes to small for her, with painful results, or Moss’ inability to put out an office fire resulting in the extinguisher itself catching ablaze (”I’ll just put this down here… with the rest of the fire”).

You can catch The IT Crowd by logging on to Channel 4 this Friday, at 10:00pm

The first series drew in 3 million viewers at its launch in September, featuring the Hughes family from Canterbury which was filmed around the clock for six months. The second series, to be made for Channel 4 by independent production company Firefly, will feature a different family, since the Hughes family is no longer “ordinary”, having spent so much time in front of the cameras, said Channel 4’s head of documentaries, Hamish Mykura.

“The Family is coming back in some form. I don’t know what the new family is going to be like but it is not going to be the Hughes as they are no longer an ordinary family. The new family will be contrasting and different,” said Mykura.

While the new series will address similar issues to the current series – “those things that are important to all of us - whether it’s parents trying to get their kids into the right school or teenagers negotiating their independence” – it will also explore “the different perspectives that make up today’s Britain, be it the extended family, the step family or a family of Afro-Caribbean or Asian descent,” according to the programme’s website.

Channel 4 is currently advertising for the next series, and is looking for “a loving family with a busy household and lots going on day to day - ideally with three or more children, at least one of them a teenager”.

The series is due to be aired in September 2009.

The new 30 minute feature film, A Matter of Loaf and Death, sees the scatty, cheese-loving inventor and his astute pooch open a punningly-named bakery at their home - Top Bun - only to find a ‘cereal killer’ is targeting all bakers in town. Much to Gromit’s consternation Wallace becomes preoccupied with his new love interest, a former bread commercial star named Piella Bakewell (*rolleyes*), and once again the canny canine is left to uncover the murderer.

The film reunites Oscar-winning animator Nick Park with Bob Baker, who co-wrote A Close Shave and The Wrong Trousers.

A Matter Of Loaf And Death took Park and his team of animators two years to make altogether, each second-and-a-half of screen time the result of a whole day’s painstaking work. The film had originally been given the name Trouble At T’Mill, but this was changed after executives decided that international audiences may not get  the northern accent.
However, Park expressed relief that his film was aimed principally at a British audience: “It’s nice to be out of that feature film pressure now,” he commented. “I don’t feel like I’m making a film for a kid in some suburb of America – and being told they’re not going to understand a joke, or a northern saying. I’m making this for myself again and the people who love Wallace and Gromit.”

Peter Sallis will again provide the voice of Wallace with Coronation Street star Sally Lindsay playing Piella Bakewell.

The show will form part of a fairly traditional BBC1 Christmas lineup which includes Doctor Who, To the Manor Born and various Strictly Come Dancing spinoffs.

The programme, called Rupert Everett – In Search of Byron, will retrace the steps of the romantic poet during his travels through Portugal, Greece, Albania, Turkey, Switzerland and Italy, exploring Byron’s personal life and examining his relationship with the countries he visited.

Considered by many to be the first modern celebrity, from 1809 to 1811 Byron embarked on the grand tour of Europe customary for a young nobleman of the era. Avoiding the Napoleonic Wars, Byron headed for the Mediterranean, the birthplace of the Classical antiquity, hoping to follow in the footsteps of his Homeric heroes. The documentary will mark the 200th anniversary of his travels.

This will not be the first time that Everett has presented a history programme on Channel 4. Earlier this year the actor fronted a Channel 4 documentary examining the life of the infamous Victorian explorer Sir Richard Burton, called the Victorian Sex Explorer.

Everett said: “I love anti-heroes, and Byron is one of the 19th century’s great misfits. His story has everything: incest, sodomy, drugs, scandal, madness and war. But would we have found Byron as electrifying and seductive as his contemporaries did? Is his genius still relevant? Are his poems fresh or are they dried flowers?”

Infamously described as being “mad, bad, and dangerous to know”, Byron was a libertine of Herculean proportions, and his name is as synonymous with promiscuity as it is with poetry. Production assistant Auron Tare said that the Everett developed an understanding of the role after spending five days travelling by mule in Albania.

“Everett understood why Lord Byron had come to Albania, where he said he found ‘a Scotland with mosques’ because of the similarity of nature, steep mountains, folk costumes and people’s character.”

The documentary is being made by independent production company Blast! and will be produced by Ed Coulthard and Grant McKee and directed by Michael Waldman.

Despite finishing bottom of the judges’ rankings, the rotund 64-year-old and his dance partner Kristina Rihanoff were voted back into the next round by a doting public, whilst the actress Cherie Lunghi became the latest celebrity to leave the show.

Sergeant may be popular with the viewing public, but his continued presence on the show is beginning to irk his fellow contestants, who have given their support to Lunghi, a professionally-trained dancer who had been tipped to win the contest. Breaking with protocol, Lunghi’s dance partner James Jordan yesterday expressed exasperation at the result: “I think Cherie had a lot more to show. This is supposed to be a dance contest. Please, please, people at home, vote for the dancing.”

On camera it was all smiles, but off stage celebrities and their dance partners commiserated with Lunghi, whilst barely exchanging a glance with Sergeant and Rihanoff.

Sergeant finished bottom of the judges ranking for the third week in a row with his interpretation of the American Smooth. The dance, which scored just 25 out of 40, was greeted with rapturous applause by the studio audience, but failed to impress the judges. Arlene Phillips offered the greatest compliment, describing Sergeant as “quite endearing,” but urged voters not to vote him into the final. Len Goodman was less tolerant, saying last week that Sergeant’s continued success “made a nonsense of the show”.

It would seem that an online campaign is partly responsible for Sergeant’s sustained popularity. Twelve Facebook groups have been created in support of Sergeant, including one named John Sergeant to win Strictly Come Dancing 2008! which has over 500 members.

The Sky Player was set up in 2006 and currently caters to Sky TV customers only, offering a selection of on demand content from Sky branded channels. The broadcaster also offers third party content from ESPN Classic, History Channel, National Geographic and Baby First, and recently added access to the BBC iPlayer to its online services. The new subscription based package will offer a similar service to the BBC catch up service, and comes with its own electronic programme guide. There are predicted to be a number of online subscription packages when the service launches in the next few months, but prices have yet to be announced.

The planned subscription service sees Sky aiming to appeal to the YouTube generation of viewers, and to emulate the success of the BBC iPlayer.

Mike Darcey, Sky’s Chief Operating Officer said “We want to make it easy for customers to enjoy great TV on their terms. Sky Player already gives more flexibility to Sky TV customers and soon we will offer some of the most popular pay TV channels through a standalone subscription to a secure online platform.”

Before signing up to an online subscription service it is worth checking the download limit set by your ISP. Broadband TV uses an exceptional amount of data, and unless you have a very high or unlimited data usage allowance you may end up paying through the roof for the programmes you watch.

Tens of thousands of viewers in South East Scotland were affected by the move, as Analogue BBC2 was switched off at 12.31am in the first stage of the nationwide programme. Engineers from the broadcast technology firm Arqiva turned off the analogue signal at the main mast in Selkirk and its 11 relay transmitters - smaller transmitters which take the signal into more remote places. The BBC’s digital channels were up and running by 5am. The remaining analogue channels are due to be switched off in three weeks’ time.

The Border region, which encompasses South East Scotland and Cumbria, will be the first in the UK to become fully digital in a nationwide digital switchover programme which is expected to finish in 2012. A previous trial was carried out in the west Cumbrian town of Whitehaven last year.

Paul Hughes, Scotland national manager of Digital UK, the independent body overseeing the switcover, hailed it as “a massive programme that will transform Scotland’s television service”.

“Scottish Borders residents have really responded to the information campaign and they’re well prepared to lead the first, full-scale digital switchover,” he said.

Digital TV lauched a six-month awareness campaign and advice service in May, with particular provision for the elderly and disabled. The initiative appears to have worked: at the time when the first analogue transmitters were turned off 99% of residents in the border region were aware of the switchover, while 97% had digital television plugged in or the equipment ready to go.

To receive digital television signals, viewers will need to purchase either a digital ready TV or a set-top box for their current TV.