Britain's love affair with wittering, breathless, sexless, woeful chantreusses continues. After Katie Melua and Sandi Thom, step up Kate Rusby and her cover of The Kinks' The Village Green Preservation Society. This record neatly combines the meandering, dopey lists-as-lyrics of Melua with mind-shatteringly irritating Thom style "nostalgia for a time I didn't actually live in". The thing that gets my goat most is the inclusion of "Donald Duck" along with all the imagery of a WI-ran rural England long since lost. The invocation of a character belonging to one of the most rapacious megacorporations in the world is bad enough, but that they should pick one who is typically seen lathered in a beligerent, incoherent, violent frenzy of misanthropy... Wait. Actually, he's perfect. I can't think of a cartoon character that more closely resembels the Daily Mail-reading yahoos at whom this release is aquarely aimed.

Has anyone else noticed how the plot of pretty much every episode of "adult" Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood is either predicated or at least partly depends upon how stunningly attractive the main characters are, despite the fact they are played by a typically pasty troop of sub-Casualty jobbing actors? For example, in the first show of this second series guest villain James Marsters straight-facedly referred to this bloke as "eye candy". Last night, on BBC 3, Freema Agyeman turned up for a spot of inter-series nod and winkery. A genuinely attractive woman, by the internal logic of the drama all narrative should have ceased as our bunch of bi-curious alien-busters greeted her like a paragon of female sexuality, falling to the floor in paroxysms of orgasmic joy. Meh. Bring on Dave Ross, says I.

Speaking of hit-and-miss BBC 3 drama, did anyone else bother with Phoo Action? Jamie Hewlett's work is poorly served by live action adaptation; just how shitty the ill-fated Tank Girl movie is becomes clear when you consider the last ninety seconds of it, which constitute one of the most thrilling and well-executed pieces of animation seen on cinema screens in the nineties. Shame they had to be preceded by as many minutes of unfunny, lazy film. Based on his Get the Freebies comic strips, Phoo Action came off like a love child of The Banana Splits, the sixties Batman tv show and Kill Bill. On paper, that sounds like tv made for Tel, especially when you factor in the cartoonist author and presence of Spaced's Jessica Hynes (nee Stevenson) on the writers' list. In practice the hour long show was in need of liberal use of the red pen; the observations on celebrity culture and mass media- Hewlett's original target back in the day- were welcome. But it was overloaded with non-sequiters and half-assed jokes. The show looks fantastic, but it's not up to Hewlett's simian-themed best (be it Monkeys or Gorillaz). I note six more episodes have been commissioned sight unseen, all to be filmed in Glasgow. If nothing else, the increased chance of encountering a basketball-headed goblin on Buchanan Street is a reason to be cheerful.