Manchester Passion eh? Who thunked of that? The story of Jesus told with some Madchester classics. And 10cc. And M People. And Robbie Williams who, in many ways, is from Stoke. But that's not the point.

 No, MP (as it shall hence be known) actually worked. It had some John Simm lookalikey as Jesus, the doctor chap out of Eastenders as Peter and Tim Booth of James as Judas. Plus some gospelly woman who murdered Cast No Shadow and Keith Allen presenting the whole 'extravaganza'. I'm more atheist than most, but it was a good way to tell an old sotry. Certainly better than the rubbish that Mel Braveheart dished out to us a few Easters ago.

Perhaps it could be the dawn of a whoel new spin-offs. A musical might break the West-End and why stop at Jesus? We could have the the Great Gatsby told with bling-heavy hip-hop or Dracula sountracked by Norwegian death-metal.

Who knows? But at least it shows there are some people in TV-land coming up with original ideas. Which is more than can be said for the makers of Beauty and the Geek.

 Finally, and with reference to John Harris, I must ask why the producers of MP didn't give Pontius Pilate the Happy Mondays' Kinky Afro to sing. All together, 'yippy ya ya ya ya yay hey, I had to crucify some brother today'.

 And so on.

This is the most ridiculous thing I have ever witnessed. Surely BBC2 have something better to stick on a Saturday night than some old zoophile tripping up over her colly while dancing to ‘All That Jazz’? Then again, Just The Two Of Us…

Tonight’s “‘Enders” saw the introduction of a new character called Burt. Burt isn’t any old character y’see. No, Burt is from The North.

Introduced into Walford by young Bradley mistaking him for a tramp, Burt is a friend of Pauline’s new bloke. Burt, y’see, is a stereotype.

Dressed in scruffy old clothes (armed with a flatcap and whippet one presumes), Burt waltzes his way onto the square and proceeds to use his ‘northern charm’ to try and seduce Yolande Trueman.

What Eastenders’ hapless producers have tried to do here is introduce a character from the distant land of ‘Up North’ (he said where he was from, but I think, like Walford, it was some made up generic-sounding mill town) in order to try and win the huge audience share that has been snagged, like a lamb to barbed wire, to Coronation Street.

Unfortunately, the trick they’ve copied out of Corrie’s book (ie. introduce some characters not born within spitting distance of a cotton mill/Upton Park) doesn’t quite work. Corrie’s southerners, Bradley Walsh et al. sort of work. Even if they’re not that interesting, their appeal lies in the fact that they’re personalities rather than simply ‘southerners’.

Burt, is a sad attempt at winning over a lost audience. And one that is more likely to alienate any Northern audience than endear them. This dead horse needs flogging.

Guess an proper update will arrive on Wednesday.

The fact is that students aren’t supported. We all remember what it’s like to go into college or university during Fresher’s week. Having tons of paper thrust into your hands; booklets about this and that. Sometimes the information is important and the aim of this campaign is to see that students get the right information about referencing and how to avoid plagiarism. Why not give students this information throughout the year, with refresher sessions at the beginning of exam times and prior to the main assessment period?

At the other end, where students are accused of plagiarism we are calling for greater support and independent advice for students. Often students aren’t directed to their students’ union for advice and representation and when it comes to the courtroom style judging panel there is rarely any students’ union representative who sits on the panel. We are calling for better support for all students throughout this process.

So get involved in the campaign, take the survey, which is on the front of officer online, and help NUS to get better fairness for all students.

And the Sun’s front page, which they won’t let me take the picture of can be found here. Guess what their headline is?

Cheers,

Will

There is no better Valentine’s present than season two of Arrested Development on DVD.

Not content with a normal series run of smashing cars up and wasting petrol, Clarkson, May and Hammond used the extremely tentative excuse of the Turin Winter Olympics to race Jaguars across frozen lakes, 4x4s through icy forests and the coup de grace – sending a Mini (possibly a Mini because the Italian Job, like the Olympics, was set in Turin) down a ski-jump. Brilliant.

Oh and they played ice-hockey using cars and a big inflatable puck. Where are they getting the money for this?

I want to hate it. I want to. Want to. Want to. But how can anyone have anything but the upmost respect for doing the things teenage Max Power readers have only ever had wet dreams of. Bastards.

Here’s a maths problem that’s been troubling me: Take Graham Lineham (writer of Father Ted, Black Books and others) add Ash Atalla (producer of The Office) and multiply by a Chris Morris bit-part.

In normal circumstances this ought to be the comedic equivalent of the Theory of Relativity or Pythagoras’s Theorum (yes, I don’t know any others). In reality though, Channel 4’s The IT Crowd is more like the Travelling Wilburys or Real Madrid circa 2004 – an underachieving production notably less than the sum of its vaunted parts.

Obviously the show has the team behind it; Lineham alone is partly responsible for two of the best sitcoms ever. The situation is there, anyone who’s ever worked in an office must wonder where the guys who come up from the IT helpdesk actually dwell. The audience ought to be there, you can see from the many billboards that Channel 4 have put their might behind the show and sticking it in a Friday night primetime slot doesn’t help either.

The problem, and remember that for a comedy this is a pretty fundamental problem, is that the show is painfully unfunny. I really, really wanted to love The IT Crowd. The news that Peep Show is not to be re-commissioned has left a hole in Channel 4’s record for brilliant sitcoms. Unfortunately, Polyfilla wit this isn’t.

The cast don’t help much either. Roy, played by Chris O’Dowd is an inverse Bernard Black (Dylan Moran in Lineham’s Black Books). What the writers have missed though is that Bernard’s misanthropy was what made him so appealing, Roy just comes across as a happy-go-lucky nerd. Moss (Richard Ayoade – whose credentials include the brilliant Mighty Boosh and Nathan Barley) is a revisionist geek – the kind of caricature of loserdom you’d expect from 1950s high-school movies, or at least Eugene in Grease. We didn’t see anything this lazy in either Lineham or Atalla’s pervious works, so why should we expect it now. Finally, manager Jen’s stock-in-trade seems to be screaming loudly. A comedy technique last practised by Janet Leigh in Psycho, and we all know how funny that was.

Victoria Wood recently claimed that the success of The Office and The Royal Family has made that the traditional sitcom has become and endangered species, with anything set in a studio with a laughter track appearing too contrived. Well, good. If the choice is between Dinnerladies and Friends or Arrested Development and The Thick of It then we can appreciate that audiences have moved on from generic rent-a-gag fare that dominated the best part of three decades.

Disturbingly though I think she’s wrong. The dogged treatment of the aforementioned Peep Show and Arrested Development hints that audiences have got sick of the post-sitcom. Channel’s 4 brilliant new More4 seems to have given them licence to push any quality programming onto the outer reams of Freeview whilst using their terrestrial arm to aim squarely for the lowest common denominator (witness the abysmal Friday Night Project). BBC2 haven’t produced a sitcom of note since The Office.

The IT Crowd may be a small nail in sitcom’s coffin. But at least it’s better than Dancing On Ice ad infinitum.