The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 48

The Guardian Monday September 13 1999 17 Choices 19 I Cinema 20 I TV review 22 I Satellite, cable, digital 23 Sky One depends heavily on tried-and-tested hit shows from the US for an audience. Just as well, really, given the standard of its latest at home-grown programme making. By (un)P rotessionals Jacques Tati in Jour De Fete. See Watch This, page 23 Mark hours per day over several months. But Seaman and the team are simply interviewed in the style of news programmes.

Restraints on time and money mean that no talker is ever caught unawares, which is what a series like this needs. It must be balanced against this that Sky One's premieres include what is almost certainly the best new programme of the month. Unfortunately and characteristically the channel's creative input extended only to writing a cheque to buy it in from America. Futurama (Tuesdays, 8pm) is the new work from Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons, and is a joy to watch. Life-changing success makes some artists lazy but in oth- rs prompts a joyous exploration of the possibilities of their talent.

It is clear from this cartoon that canonisation as a creative great has had the second effect on Groening. Futurama begins on the last day of this century, when a bored pizza delivery boy (visually a close cousin ot Bart Simpson) falls into a cryogenic freezer and wakes a thousand years later as a future society begins the countdown to the fourth millennium. What first impresses is the visual confidence which fame has given the animator. In one bravura sequence, the cartoon scoots around the world showing people of different nations celebrating the millennium. In another, the hero tours a ruined underground city which turns out to have once been New York.

The realisation of the future includes one accidental bad-taste joke there's a JFK Jr Airport but otherwise Groening again shows his talent for split-level wit which caters alternately to adults and children. Futurama will never match the international impact of The Simpsons but shows a remarkable talent darkening and deepening. Regrettably for Elisabeth Murdoch, the show also has the effect of making Sky One's home-made programmes look eveishoddier. mm i imm tm mm nm'i attempts good quick way of assessing the quality of a young television channel to ask whether it is i ibest-known for the programmes it shows or the way they are shown. When Channel 4 was launched, for example, it would have been considered odd to get excited about the fact that it beamed moving pictures to a box in the corner.

But digital channels are discussed purely as what Birlists call a "delivery system" (people say: "I've got digital." rather than: "I watched this and notoriously the programmes of Sky television are celebrated not for the height of their achievement but the height of their transmission source. The case against Rupert Murdoch as a provider of television has always been that whereas BBC 1 and 2, ITV and Channel 4 all pioneered at least one form of programming Sky is merely a copycat channel. It has prospered through a strategy of chequebook and blackmail, buying in American hits (The Simpsons, ER, The X-Files) or forcing viewers to pay substantially more for sport they used to see elsewhere. In newspapers, Murdoch has been for good or ill an innovator The Sun and The Times were transformed by his purchase of them but in television he has been merely an expensive impressionist. Elisabeth Murdoch, now running Sky One, seems to be more sensitive to the charge of artistic sterility than her father was, and much fuss is being made about the autumn season which begins this week.

This year, Sky One has new programmes -neither imported from America nor kidnapped from terrestrial television in much the way that a traditional channel would. Admittedly, the leading drama -CI5: The New Professionals (Sundays, 8pm) is not entirely a new idea, being a turn-of-thc-niillennium remake of the 1970s ITV series in which Lewis Collins and Martin Shaw played agents Bodie and Doyle in a government security, farce so. Th As television channels multiply and divide the potential audience between them, ever more attention is paid to the tricks of making a viewer choose your programme from the hundreds on offer. And so -for much the same reason that Reg Dwight became Elton John or Harry Webb is better known now as Cliff Richard the name of a programme becomes a key part of these theories of attraction. An example of shameless naming is House Of Horrors (Tuesday, 8.30pm, ITV).

At first sight, most viewers would expect a crime documentary involving Fred and Rose West. In fact, the series is a cross between Changing Rooms and The Cook Report Secret cameras record the work of contractors hired to renovate a house. An interesting nominal oddity crops up on BBC2 on Monday. The chat show Ruby establishes Ms Wax as one of those rare celebrities assumed to be recognisable from first -name alone. (The Wogan and Parkinson shows would never have become Terry or Michael.) Certain reliable come-on words recur in titles.

A popular c-word is found this week in Celebrity Holiday Memories (Monday, 7pm, BBC1) while the favourite s-word is found in the new Sunday BBC1 drama Sex, Chips And Rock 'n' Roll, which is a particular cringemaking example of the punning title, while the power of -that three-word description of music to persuade the middle-aged to watch is recognised in Channel 4's Mr Rock And Roll (Sunday, 9pm.) Amid all this baptismal invention, it's startling to find a programme called Royal College Of Art (Tuesday, 9.30pm, BBC1), which turns out not to be a sit-com about a bloke called Royal who goes to art college but a documentary series about the Royal College Of Art. Come on. You'd think they might have called it This Is Not A Programme or Programme Number One. But, with all those art students around, the factual blandness of the title is probably post-modern. ML Bad College of Art Top: The New Professionals; above left: David Seaman in Guiding Stars; above right: Matt Groening's new series, Futurama secret it did not officially exist.

During their subsequent careers, Collins and Shaw are thought frequently to have wished that it hadn't existed. This sequel is a classic of unintended comedy. Bodie and Doyle arc replaced by Keel and Curtis. In line with modern thinking in television, one agent is now American, neither has a bubble perm and the blokes hold hands when one of them may be sitting on a bomb. There is a also a third female agent who is smarter than them both.

Edward Woodward as their boss has a speech about "keeping this sceptcred isle clean and smelling of roses" which is so ridiculous you assume it must be some kind of code. It isn't. Risky as it is to encourage creative, economy at Sk)( One, they'd have been better off just repeating the originals. Guiding Stars (Sundays, 7pm) is the best original idea Sky One has had for a programme. A famous professional takes over a troupe of amateurs: so England goalkeeper David Seaman manages a pub team and actor Adam Woodyatl (Ian in East-Enders) directs some village players.

The Seaman programme, though, suggests that even good ideas are undermined at Sky One by low budgets and production values. Seaman is so famous that it's clear he wasn't available for filming very often. Most of his footage consists of similar shots of reaction to events on the pitch. This would work best as an filming Ji.