Another one bites the dust

So farewell then to The Event. Another great US import that started out promisingly, only to disappear up its own convoluted backside before being ignominiously cancelled by ruthless network executives. In a few months' time you'll buy able to pick up the inevitable DVD boxset, but you'll still be left dangling by the cliffhanger ending.

But who's really to blame when these high profile shows bite the dust in their first year? Is it the fairweather fans, or the lack of a well-planned story? Personally, I blame Jack Bauer. CTU's favourite agent didn't just transform the way the world perceived torture, he also revolutionised the way we watch TV. Well, maybe not personally. He was always far too busy using jump-leads to restart his heart, or ramming a damp hand-towel down an Iraqi's throat to extract a confession. But the makers of 24 ushered in a new era of complex plotting and season-long story arcs that changed our viewing habits altogether.

Think back to the most popular shows of the eighties. Knightrider, The A-Team, CHiPs, Airwolf - the one element that characterised all those era-defining programmes was the formula. Morally upstanding heroes solving problems for the downtrodden and put-upon, usually in indecently tight trousers. It was all slickly produced and deliberately unchallenging, largely because of the way that American shows were always broadcast.

Traditionally, a season runs from September through to May. That's around 35 weeks, and with 22-24 episodes per season, it leaves a lot of dead time to fill while new episodes are being filmed and edited. Every few weeks the shows take a break, leaving network schedulers to dig out old episodes to air until the new shows are ready. Standalone episodes therefore work much more effectively, since they can be aired out of sequence without causing fans to wonder where they hell they are in the overall story. So it works fine for shows like Desperate Housewives, where fans can easily pick up the fact that this is the episode where they all act like venal, conniving harridans, before having a change of heart in the last five minutes. It's a lot harder when you actually need to pay attention to what's going on.

By the time 24 reached year four, its popularity was on the rise, but traditional scheduling was causing ratings to dip whenever the show took a break. So the producers took a big risk and held off the season premiere until January. That way, they had enough episodes in the can to run the whole series uninterrupted, as they finished off the outstanding chapters of the story. Not only did this mean that audiences were able to follow all the double-crossing and deceit, the writers were able to maintain their focus much more effectively, giving it a sense of momentum that had been lacking in previous years.

The showrunners over on Lost were clearly taking notes, since they took a similar decision in its fourth year. Although the ratings continued to decline on the island-set time hopper, they didn't completely drop off, since loyal viewers were at least able to follow the multi-dimensional adventures of our curiously well-groomed survivors.

With Lost and 24 now consigned to the groaning DVD shelf in the sky, executives have commissioned new shows like Flash Forward and The Event to offer viewers compelling new season-long narratives. Unfortunately, they seemed to have missed the importance of scheduling in mapping out their 17-hour epics. Flash Forward made an impressive debut, with an explosive, effects-filled premiere that made Lost's first episode look like a Dogme 95 outtake. But the regular breaks, and a three month hiatus half-way through the season saw viewers desert the show in droves. Attempts to rebuild the writing team and reboot the show failed miserably, leaving the show to limp across the finish line at the end of its first and only season.

This year, The Event made the exact same mistakes, leaving almost four months between the two halves of its inaugural outing. By the time it returned, fans hadn't just forgotten the most recent twists, they had trouble remembering the characters' names. The Event became a non-Event, even though formulaic police procedurals like the CSI franchise managed to breeze into yet another season of forensic tomfoolery without breaking a Botox-inhibited sweat.

As Ross and Rachel found out in Friends, the words "we need to take a break" invariably spell disaster for any relationship. It's just a shame that TV producers couldn't learn that simple lesson from one of the nineties' most successful shows.

Lost and confused

With just two weeks to go, p0pvulture is now counting down the days to its much-needed (and well-deserved) holiday. But as my thoughts turn to itineraries and days out, I'm reminded just how different some people's idea of a dream holiday can be.

The sun worshippers will be packing a bag full of cooking oil and heading to the Canaries, more adventurous types will be stocking up on scorpion venom antidote for a trek up Machu Picchu, and nerds will be looking for a week-long sci-fi event that will shield them for the light of day for 90 hours.

So they'll be gutted to find out that they missed just such an occasion last week, as the Prince Charles Cinema in Leicester Square played host to a Lost viewing marathon to celebrate the final season's release on DVD. Although 100 foolhardy fans were there for the inaugural episode (widely believed to be TV's most expensive pilot), only 21 remained as the series stumbled to its confusing and largely disappointing conclusion. It's not clear whether the missing 79 people gave up, expired or slipped through a wrinkle in the space-time continuum. I suppose anything's possible.

Apparently short breaks were taken every four hours, and paramedics remained on-site throughout - presumably to deal with outbreaks of alopecia triggered by excessive head-scratching. Or to extricate the larger members of the audience from their seats for sporadic bathroom visits.

One dedicated fan, Donna Lalek, emerged from the darkness to tell reporters that by the culmination of the islanders' adventures, she had "no concept of time any more". Which seems entirely apt, given the show's propensity for flashing back, forwards and sideways.

Donna took a week's holiday from work as a bank administrator to attend the event, claiming that "most people think I'm absolutely insane." After enduring 121 back-to-back episodes, her friends' judgement might not be so far off the mark.

Lost without you

Well, it's finally here. After six years, 114 episodes and more flashbacks than Lindsay Lohan after a bank holiday weekend, Lost is finally coming to an end.

When it first started, confused audiences thought they were getting a remake of Gilligan's Island but with better effects and a hotter cast. Then we caught sight of the smoke monster, the shark with a Dharma Initiative tattoo and a rogue polar bear, not to mention ghosts, galleons and a hatch that seemed to lead to the centre of the Earth. Clearly, this was not the further adventures of the crew of the SS Minnow.

Part of the show's unique appeal was its time-bending structure. Taking its cue from 'grown-up' shows like The Sopranos on HBO, ABC's daring new timeline-jumping thriller challenged audiences to sit up, pay attention, and sometimes refer to Wikipedia for an explanation of consequentialism and temporal displacement. You never got any of that in Manimal.

What none of us realised at the time, was the fact that the flashbacks were more than just a way of padding out every episode (there are only so many arguments about "beach vs cave" that audiences can reasonably be expected to sit through). In fact, the entire show has always been about the flexible nature of time and the philosophy of predestination.

Of course, it didn't help matters that halfway through the show's run, the format changed and we jumped forward in time, instead of back. By this point, half the audience was scratching its head so often that there was a global outbreak of alopecia.

Now in its final season, the producers have pushed audience comprehension to its limit with an alternate reality timeline running alongside the on-island adventures. Having said that, the writers have kept a tight hold of the reigns and confidently disproved the early theory that they were making it up as they went along.

Obviously, there were elements that were improvised on the spot, but it's clear that from day one, the creative team knew where they were going. Even if most of the audience were as clueless as Paris Hilton reading 'A Brief History of Time'.

Although many fans dropped out at the mid-point of the show's run (five episodes set in an abandoned zoo pushed viewers' patience to the limit), the die-hard devotees have stuck with it throughout, and are now hoping that the climax will deliver the answers they so desperately need. Chances are, they're going to be disappointed, since Lost threw out more questions than a three-year old with ADD.

Here in the UK, the show will be broadcast 'live' at 5am tomorrow morning, coinciding with its West Coast debut. That way, they can avoid any unwanted spoilers or revelatory reveals, as well as pissing off those prodigious pirates.

It remains to be seen what the enduring legacy of Lost will be. Long-running narratives, complicated timelines and morally conflicted characters are now all far more commonplace on network TV than they were before 'the island'. But more importantly, the show managed to find a way to give viewers a regular dose of shirtless action in pretty much every episode. No complaints here.

In celebration of the most innovative American TV programme of the noughties, here's Lost's best bits (don't worry, Hurley kept his XXXXXL shirt on throughout the show's run)...

Slipped discs

There's been controversy in radio land this week, with Radio 4 listeners up in arms over the bastardisation of one of their best loved broadcasts. All over the country lips were pursed and half-knitted jerkins set aside in disgust, as long-running show Desert Island Discs became the latest casualty of the BBC's downwards trajectory towards the lowest common denominator.

The source of all this antagonism? Gok Wan - the pencil-thin motivational stylist who focuses his efforts on a bunch of overweight, depressed housewives who've spent the best part of the last decade moping about in grey sweatpants. In case you've missed it, his show 'How To Look Good Naked' is a makeover programme that rejects Trinny and Susannah's straightforward bullying, in favour of a more passive-aggressive approach.

Playing the instant gay-best-friend (just add water), he calls every woman he meets "girlfriend", snaps his fingers like he's constantly trying to attract the attention of a deaf waiter, and shakes his head like he's in the audience of the Ricki Lake show. Of course, it's easy to dismiss his technique, but he can get self-conscious women to shed their clothes quicker than a bottle of vodka and a fistful of rohypnol.

Although the show is about as intellectually nourishing as the Hot Stars supplement that comes free in every issue of OK! Magazine, it's hugely popular and has made Gok Wan a household name. Ordinarily, that should be enough to warrant an appearance on Desert Island Discs, but not according to the die-hard fans of the radio favourite who voiced their disgust on the BBC messageboards.

With comments such as "I was disappointed to hear Kirsty talking to Gok Wan. Is this an attempt to attract the "youth" audience?" and "What he has achieved I consider slight and unimportant." it's clear that older listeners are unwilling to move with the times. And presenter Kirsty Young asking Gok to describe his outfit was the last straw for some of them, with Valerie Hudson claiming that she "considers this sort of castaway a sort of dumbing down".

What these disgruntled geriatrics seem to be forgetting, is that Desert Island Discs never been much more than a celebrity interview format, with a music playlist twist. Just because some of its past guests have chosen Ode To Joy from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, doesn't really make it any more worthy than the Celebrity Takeover Playlist shows that litter the MTV schedules.

If anything, the show is guilty of pandering to celebrities' inherent sense of superiority - are we really supposed to believe that they all exclusively listen to classical music and enjoy nothing better than leafing through Foxe's Book of Martyrs? Wouldn't it be fantastic if Germaine Greer had admitted that one of her eight selected pieces of music was Axel F, or that Ned Sherrin was a fan of Mel & Kim's F.L.M?

At least there's a chance that this new generation of 'downmarket' celebrities will have fewer pretensions, and therefore volunteer more truthful answers. Having said that, if I was stuck on a desert island and had to choose between Margaret Thatcher and Gok Wan, I think I'd be running off to join The Others before the plane's fuselage had even finished smouldering.