Great TV No-one Ever Mentions

The BBC has a list of great TV putdowns. It is all fairly predictable; Basil Fawlty, Edmund Blackadder and so on. But what about those programmes that never get mentioned despite being fucking good. They aren't all comedies, some really aren't well known, but are well worth looking up if you've never seen them:

How Do You Want Me? A surreal British sitcom about a city dweller living in the countryside. It has surrealist elements to it, but is actually remarkably downbeat. There are no easy resolutions to most of the episodes, and it does not romanticise life as so many sitcoms do. It also has people being nasty to each other: not in the exaggerated, Blackadder style way. Just pointlessly petty and shitty.

Oz If you think The Shield is a challenging series, then you'll be shocked by Oz. A prison drama from the US - it pulls no punches and is captivating, if often deeply troubling, viewing. Anyone who thinks that prison is a cushy option should have a look at this drama. Hell, the "relationship" between Beecher and Schillinger in the first season is the stuff that nightmares are made of.

Afterlife A series about a medium and a sceptic, written (largely) by Stephen Volk (who also wrote the terrifying Ghostwatch). It goes off the boil slightly in series two, but it manages to have some very unsettling moments and challenges the viewer to question whether ghosts are bad, good, or a bit of both. It also, for a series that (given the subject matter) is about death, manages occasionally to be both sad and affecting. And some of the episodes, such as lower than bones, sleeping with the dead, lullaby and a name written in water, do linger with you for a long time after the end credits have rolled.

Children of the Stones Ignore the terrible fashion, the often poor special effects and the shrieking instrumental music, and instead drink in the atmosphere. A surprisingly intelligent children's series, it does not feel the need to answer every single question posed by the script, and also hints that (whilst the two protagonists manage to escape at the end of the series) the unsettling events of the series are going to be played out again. Over and over again.

Happiness Written by and starring Paul Whitehouse, it tells the story of a comedian who voices a plasticine bear and who is going through (not least because of his career) a mid life crisis. Like How Do You Want Me? it has people being realistically petty and awful to each other, at the same time as having some laugh out loud moments of slapstick. It was cancelled by the BBC for reasons that defy understanding, but the two seasons that exist are still highly entertaining.

All of the above are not likely to be on the TV anytime soon, but it you ever find yourself in HMV or surfing Amazon and fancy a DVD as an impulse buy, you could do far worse than selecting one of the above.