"Let me chew on your weird hair..."

° I hate to say it, but Friday Night with Jonathan Ross (Fridays, BBC1) has been really disappointing recently. I've always defended Jonathan Ross against accusations that he's overly reliant on vulgarity, but for the last two weeks the show has actually been slightly uncomfortable, crossing the line from roguishly brash to obnoxious and lecherous. First it was making a point of staring at Kirsty Gallagher’s cleavage all night and the next week it was telling Gwyneth Paltrow - verbatim here, but without the awful frankness - "I would fuck you". Woo! Respect for women. It's actually becoming a small problem with the show. So many of his recent interviews have started with "you're a very attractive man/woman", and each time the pattern follows: for a man it turns to celebrating his sexual prowess and for a woman it only turns to highlighting her sexual value to men. It's like TV from the 70's but without the standards.

And I know I probably sound like I'm taking things too seriously and that it's only meant for a laugh, but the biggest problem I actually have with it is that it's just not that funny. It's one of those "And this offends you as a Jewish person?" / "No, it offends me as a comedian" type things. Ross is a funny and intelligent presenter; slipping into this base routine reeks of laziness, and that’s the disappointment. All we’re really learning about recent guests is how tolerant and good-humoured they can be, and that’s not enough.

° I really enjoyed BBC2’s Am I Normal? with Tiny Tearaways queen Dr Tanya Byron. The four-part documentary sought to explore what constitutes “normal” behaviour in the areas of addiction, body image, spirituality and sex in a series that intelligently avoided asserting any standards of normality. The most fun part, though, was the way that Byron felt the need to add “but don’t have sex with children!” to her “do what you like” closing monologue. Hah. Britain thanks you for the reminder.

° Remember Dana White talking about the need for The Ultimate Fighter (Saturdays, Bravo) to be freshened up and saying that there would be plenty of changes this year? So far I'm not seeing it. Sure, people had to fight their way on to the show this time, but since then everything has been exactly the same and personally I'm not even convinced having these guys fight their way on to the show has helped to improve the calibre of fighter in any way. So yeah, it's same old, same old and you either like it or you don't.

The funny thing to me is that when looking at ideas to change the show they didn't look at the format of the reality side of the show. The fighting isn't top drawer, certainly, but the very nature of the sport means that with each fight you see something different. Watching the guys coexist in the house, however, has gotten tremendously stale. Each season it's the exact same story of naturally aggressive and restless guys playing ill-advised pranks, trashing the house and generally pissing each other off. If they could just find a way to break that particular tedium the show would be as good as new.