Top 40 Greatest TV Moments of 2006 #30-21

21) Screen Wipe
Charlie Brooker is without a doubt, the most truthful TV critic there is. His Screen Wipe book is offensively hilarious and his TV show, buried away on BBC4, is just as colourful. There are so many moments on Youtube that I could have chosen to illustrate this, but this introduction to British TV to a group of Americans sums up how his observations can be both funny and rather depressing at the same time.

22) Silvia Night's Eurovision tantrum
Eurovision was OK this year - a different winner, a half-decent UK entry and Terry Wogan on top form as usual. However, it's someone who didn't even make the final that makes this list. Silvia Night, who makes Bjork look like Dido, didn’t make the final, getting eliminated in the rather new idea of a semi-final. Not exactly the most gracious loser, she then decided to exact her revenge by slagging off the other contestants, calling an innocent journalist a slut for no reason at all and telling the press she will sue them and they will all go to jail. This was the funniest showbiz strop of the year. I don’t know anything about her but I’m assuming she’s some elaborate joke which some people aren’t quite in on.

23) 7 Stupidest Things To Escape From

I usually find the kind of shows where people deliberately inflict pain on themselves (Jackass, Dirty Sanchez) the most utterly moronic and unfunny shows on TV. The difference here was that escaplogist Jonathan Goodwin actually gives himself a chance to prevent injury, by setting himself timed tasks which he must complete in order to avoid both pain and embarrassment.

Unfortunately Goodwin isn't the world's most prolific escapologist and so more often than not, ends up nearly having his nipples ripped off, being burned by an iron or worst of all, being seen naked and in full bondage gear in front of his immediate family. It’s still moronic but it’s done with a sense of humour, a nod to Harry Houdini and Goodwin comes across as a very likeable if someone who’s a glutton for punishment.

24) Numberwang
That Mitchell & Webb Look was inconsistent as a series, far too clever for its own good and many sketches forgot to add anything resembling humour. But it could also be hilarious at times, none more so than the piss-take of daytime quiz shows, the nonsensical Numberwang. Adam & Joe did it better on Quizzlesticks but this was still silly parody at its best.

25) US Apprentice
Not as enjoyable as the UK one but still ridiculously over-the-top entertainment, mainly due to seeing how many times the preposterous Donald Trump can shamelessly self-plug in one episode.

The contestants, were on the whole, pretty hateful people. Arrogant, cocky, no sense of self-awareness, they made the UK’s Syed look like a shy, retiring wallflower. It was hard to care who actually won they were all so unlikeable but it was fun watching them bitch and backstab their way to the top. In the end , Kendra, the most deserving contestant ended up the winner, beating the slightly neurotic Tana in the series’ first all women final.

26) The Hollyoaks Fire
Maybe I’m too old to still be watching this but I’ve actually found Hollyoaks far more watchable than any other soap this year. Yes it’s still terminally bad at times - the Irish cross-dresser is perhaps the most irritating character in soap history and some of the acting is never more than school play-standard. But when it goes ridiculously over-the-top, it does it in style.

The whole plotline may have been totally ludicrous - a mild-mannered guy gets lured into date-raping by his best friend and then becomes a mass-murdering psycho all within a few months. But it resulted in a spectacular finale which showed Emmerdale how to do an explosion, killed off several characters in one go and managed to be both moving (the twins deaths) and funny (Joe’s mobile ringing from a body bag) at the same time.

27) The Madness of Boy George
The madness in the title should be referring to him agreeing to take part in this often bizarre profile of one of the most colourful characters in pop music.

Trawling Gaydar for one night-stands, making odd home-made video diaries, slagging off the likes of Madonna and Elton John at any given opportunity, this Channel 4 show, following his community service for cocaine possession, only showed what a rather tragic and bitter if still very entertaining person he had become.

28) Girls Aloud: Off The Record
Who'd have thought it. A warts and all documentary about a pop group which did show every wart possible rather than a sanitised version the record company wanted you to see. Off The Record followed Britain's #2 girl group around for a few months and revealed exactly what they're all like. Nicola and Kimberley are lovely, Nadine couldn't look less bothered if she tried, Cheryl is a stroppy cow, and surprisingly, Sarah was the biggest diva of them all.

29) Shipwrecked
Sun, sea, sand, scripted reality TV – what more could you want for your Sunday afternoon viewing. The original castaway show returned but this time with a competition element which may have been a good idea on paper, but ultimately led to the most blatant scripting of a reality show I can remember.

The idea - two islands both start off with five castaways each. Each week, a new castaway would spend three days on each island and then choose which island they wanted to live on for the remainder of their stay. The winning island would share a rather paltry sum of £75,000 between them.

So how convenient then, that after 20-odd weeks, each island was even on the very last show. People joined islands for no given reason at all, fights were started with no provocation, every conversation started with a “So, how are you etc.” as if they were reading them off an autocue - everything was so utterly contrived. So why have I put it in? Well, it was still genuinely entertaining, there were several highly likeable and dislikeable characters and it helped to pass a couple of hours each Sunday for a few months.

30) Boys Will Be Girls
I’m not sure whether to include this in the Best or Worst list as it’s one of those jaw-droppingly bad ideas that somehow compels you to watch but leaves you feeling rather dirty after having watched it.

The concept – to find a new girlgroup, but with a twist – it had to be made up of ex-boyband members. You weren’t sure whether to feel contempt for them for doing absolutely anything for a bit of fame, or to feel sorry for them for being exploited by their cretin of a manager, Nathan Moore.

The band was made up of Austin Drage, a member of an unsigned boyband (that’s how low down the boyband food chain they had to go) who was the term “little shit” personified, Russ from Scooch, who’s about as feminine-looking as Geoff Capes and Martin from Fast Food Rockers, who looked worryingly good in drag and indeed, you get the feeling he'd be carrying on this little experiment long after the show finished.

The fact that this group couldn’t score a top 200 hit in their own gender didn’t seem to phase them and they bravely went for it culminating in the show’s climax, a gig at Butlin’s. Surprisingly only half of the audience guessed they weren’t of the fairer sex. Like a slightly warped Faking It, this was compulsive viewing and the actual song they recorded wasn’t bad at all. But considering it never got released, you have to ask what was the point of it all.