THE GOLDEN AGE OF TV: Stop getting all nostalgic about how great telly was in the 1970s. Back then, there were only three channels, programmes were broadcast in black and white and your TV screen was smaller than your PC monitor at work is now. And don't start moaning about how nowadays there is nothing on except repeats, reality shows, West End musical auditions, 'celebrity' promotothons or compilations of slapstick home videos. If that's all you can find in the viewing schedules you need to exercise your thumb on the remote control more often. Television in 2008 is a creative force worth celebrating. We love TV right here, right now

1 REALITY TV
Considering the basic ingredients, you'd think all reality shows would be pretty much equal. But as George Orwell, the man behind the original Big Brother, pointed out, some are more equal than others. Most reality shows are tacky and embarrassing, but there are exceptions. Current BBC Two arm-waving hit Maestro relies on its highbrow subject matter - classical music - to give it a patina of class. Dragons' Den is another show for which reality need not mean banality. Here everything takes place on a tastefully art-directed set, with proper camera set-ups and decent lighting; wannabe entrepreneurs can still embarrass themselves by stumbling over crackpot ideas, but the whole thing is framed beautifully. Similarly, the climactic boardroom showdowns in The Apprentice are staged with the meticulousness of a Michael Mann movie: real people reacting in a hyper-real situation. So maybe that's the secret to improving reality shows: start with a better reality.

2 CORONATION STREET
When it first arrived almost 50 years ago, Coronation Street was a radical proposition: a series about working-class lives, and from the North no less. Writer Tony Warren, who created the show in 1960, was coming from much the same kitchen-sink place as the Angry Young Men. Corrie kicked down the door, but in British soaps since, only Brookside, in its initial miners' strike era, has set out with a similar agenda - and Brookie quickly dropped the ball to chase ratings with increasingly spectacular storylines.

Corrie, of course, is hardly grim realism. It does its own spectaculars, and is often called a pantomime - it's rarely quite that, but it is one of the funniest shows on TV, and its slow-burn humour has inspired some of the best sitcoms. Its best moments are rarely found in the big, headline-making storylines, anyway, but in the throwaway interactions between characters, the unexpected, weird, but entirely ordinary things they say. It's like a modernist novel, and it's like everyday speech.

Underneath it all, though, Coronation Street still feels, almost uniquely, about real people, something no-one, surely, has been able to say with a straight face about EastEnders for almost 20 years. It all comes down to the writing: Jack Rosenthal, Jimmy McGovern, Paul Abbott, Russell T Davies, Frank Cottrell Boyce, to name but few, all learned their craft on the Street. There's no reason to doubt the key figures of tomorrow's TV are currently toiling in the Coronation Street writers' room. And happy to be there.

3 DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES
Back when the show first started it would have been easy to write off this Stepford throwback as too much of a pre-Betty Friedan 1950s caricature to ever quite cut the mustard on the long run of a big American series. Yet by April 2007, it was the most popular show in its demographic worldwide. And it is the character of Marcia Cross's flame-haired house-Barbie, Bree Van de Camp, that gives the show its vanilla-frosted bite. Susan, Gaby and Lynette may add realism and darkness, but it's sociopathic Bree, who turns to alcohol and fakes a pregnancy while creating a continuous production-line of nearly perfect pies, that gives it its giddy edge. Nothing beats watching a character so sure of their own rightness being wrong. Yet here's the thing about Bree: she is not just someone we laugh at, but someone we relate to. And as season five prepares to air on Channel 4 next week, who among us isn't caught up in the desire to control our world and defy constantly impinging reality?

4 DVD BOX SETS
Where once there were book groups, now there are DVD box sets and the people who watch them. The overwhelming choice on TV in the satellite age is reduced to a very definite statement in the box set (ie that this show or this documentary series is exactly what you want to watch). The benefits? Well, no advert breaks for a start, but also the opportunity to binge gluttonously on one or more series in a single weekend. And sometimes the box set gets it right where broadcasters fail. HBO's acclaimed drama series The Wire has for years been ignored by mainstream UK broadcasters, but found its wider audience on DVD. The first season, aired in the US in 2002, is still the number-one best-selling box set at online retailer Amazon, with all five series in the current top 12.

5 THE MIGHTY BOOSH
Ever since Newman and Baddiel played Wembley Stadium in the mid-1990s, comedy has flirted with becoming the new rock 'n' roll. In 2008 it finally did when The Mighty Boosh (aka Julian Barratt and Noel Fielding) leapt from the day-glo confines of BBC Three, hijacked the cover of the NME, put on their own festival and pretty much confirmed themselves as TV's finest comedy double act.

Barratt's anal-retentive jazz-nerd Howard Moon is the (relatively) straight man to Fielding's moon monkey Vince Noir. They arrived on BBC Three in 2004, splicing together eight shows based upon their three Edinburgh Fringe stage acts. By the time of the most recent series last year they had eels coming out of their ears, travelled across Arctic tundra, through limbo, to the bottom of the ocean, and even inside Barratt's body, searching for mcguffins like the spirit of jazz. Terry and June it ain't.

The Boosh's universe is on a drip-feed filled with the same distinctly British brand of psychedelia that gave us The Beatles' I Am The Walrus and the works of Lewis Carroll and Roald Dahl. And the kids love them. Another national tour and album of music from the shows is expected in the autumn.

6 THE NEW MAN BEHIND DR WHO
WHEN Steven Moffat was offered his dream job as the executive producer and lead creative on Dr Who, the Scottish screenwriter took a strangely long time to mull it over. "It doesn't sound like a difficult thing to decide," he tells me, "but when somebody calls you up and offers you the job you wanted when you were a 14-year-old - not a job a bit like it, but the exact job you imagined yourself in when you were young - then it's a big thing."

Moffat, unveiled last May as Russell T Davies's replacement, could be forgiven for feeling a little reluctant. The BBC were asking him to fill boots so big an extra dimension might have been needed to store them. Davies was the writer behind the show's 2005 relaunch; the man who had taken a fondly remembered TV legend and made it appointment television for the 21st century.

Dr Who made the BBC cool again. So when the time came to pass on the sonic screwdriver, Moffat - already the author of acclaimed episodes The Empty Child, The Girl In The Fire Place and Blink (which beat Jimmy McGovern's The Street to a Bafta earlier this year) - was more than a little apprehensive.

But how could he turn the job down? It certainly wouldn't be through lack of experience. Moffat's Press Gang, the story of a school newspaper which ran on ITV from 1989 to 1993, was adored by teenagers for its mix of gritty story, drama and laughs. Romantic sit-com Coupling was another success, from 2000 to 2004. But it wasn't the prospect of another smash hit; it was the call of true fan-boy love that Moffat couldn't resist.

A Paisley upbringing is the link that binds Moffat to the show's star David Tennant. Although, Moffat says, the town will have little direct bearing on the Time Lord's adventures, the shared background can lead to confusion. "David - when he's not doing the Doctor's voice - sounds not too dissimilar to myself," says Moffat. "One morning, I listened back to a message on my answer machine. I'd been at a wrap party the night before and had been a little drunk. When I listened to it back, I thought I'd left myself a message congratulating myself for winning an award - not something that was out of the realms of possibility. Later on, I found out it was in fact David."

Spooky, but not as scary as the Doctor's adventures could now become, Moffat being widely known for the show's more spine-tingling efforts. However, on the most frightening prospect of all - the departure through regeneration of audience-favourite Tennant - he remains tight-lipped, except to say: "I don't think he will stay there forever. In the end, people expect it Tennant leaving the programme to happen. The fact the Doctor regenerates into a different actor is what makes the show unique. It makes the show both simultaneously ancient and brand new. When that dreadful day comes, the audience will be ready for it."

He must know that when it comes, that "dreadful day" is likely to result from an act of Steven Moffat's own creation.

(Interview by Peter John Meiklem)

7 CHARLIE BROOKER
If every age gets the television critic it deserves, the programme makers must be doing something right, because Charlie Brooker is the best ever. His late night BBC Four review show, Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe, may have played like a quirky YouTube blurt, but you'd be hard pushed to find a more astute critique of the medium. It was also poisonously funny and, if Brooker sometimes over-reached himself in his quest to disappear up his own metaphor, you knew it was always with the best of intentions: namely to skewer, puncture, parody and - occasionally - praise.

Screenwipe returns to BBC Four this autumn, but there's more Brooker to be had over on E4 and this time he's writing for television rather than pouring scorn on it. His Big Brother satire Dead Set forms the centrepiece of the channel's autumn season and stars Jaime Winstone and Riz Ahmed as BB contestants who are unaware that Britain has been taken over by zombies ... at least until eviction night.

If it's half as good as Nathan Barley, the (frankly bizarre) Channel 4 satire Brooker co-wrote with Chris Morris, E4 has backed a winner - and yes, Davina McCall does make a guest appearance.

8 CBEEBIES
Nothing presses the nostalgia button like children's television: Watch With Mother, Trumpton, The Clangers, Rainbow, Mr Benn. But from our own parents' point of view, it probably wasn't such a godsend - merely a tiny oasis of quiet in between sibling shouting matches. Today entire channels are devoted to keeping older kids off the streets (of Vice City as much as the local neighbourhood) while CBeebies brings the gift of sanity to those full-on toddler months. Broadcasting every day from 6am to 7pm, CBeebies is the televisual equivalent of a dummy, if not your own living-room creche: an on-tap service to be used discriminately during normal waking hours. And it's not just sit-down time: exercise and activities slip in amongst the cartoons and puppet shows. Soon, however, new parents realise they know more about Igglepiggle and Upsy Daisy's friendship in In The Night Garden than any soap opera liaisons. Then they discover that Junior has crawled off unnoticed while they're absorbed in the comedy genius of Bafta-winning Charlie And Lola. Cbeebies - it's not just for kids, you know.

9 MAD MEN
From its set design and costumes to its eerie animated title sequence of a falling man - an homage to Saul Bass's famous poster for Hitchcock's Vertigo - Mad Men so perfectly captures the look of 1960s New York that it's hard to believe it isn't actually from that era. A pitch-perfect take on the travails of fictional Madison Avenue ad agency Sterling Cooper, the genius of the format is twofold: it treats recent history as a prism through which to view modern-day America; and it allows the writers to examine the sexual and social mores that prevailed at the time.

Politics intrudes when the agency lands a new client - one Richard Nixon, apparently a shoe-in for the White House but concerned about the progress the Democrat candidate is making. His rival's name? John F Kennedy. The executives drink at work, everyone smokes and it's okay to slap a plaid-skirted backside if the fancy takes you. What's not to like? Series two is currently showing in the US and will be screened on BBC Four next year.

10 BBC iPLAYER & HARD DISC RECORDERS
You're lying on the beach in a far-off country, enjoying the sun, sipping a drink. Everything is idyllic, until you remember - no! - that you forgot to set the video recorder. Relegate that particular nightmare to last century, because technology has caught up with viewer demand. If the favourite programme you've missed is on the Beeb, and it was shown within the last seven days, you can catch it on your home computer via the BBC iPlayer by streaming or downloading it (some other channels offer similar services that aren't quite as snazzy yet). If you were organised enough before you left home, you might already have set your hard-disk recorder to store every episode of an entire series at the press of a single remote control button.

In either case, the point is that now you - not the broadcaster - is in control of your viewing schedule.

11 HAZEL IRVINE
The licence fee-payer took 437 BBC staff to Beijing - to cover just 313 British athletes - so it is little wonder that securing the juiciest presenting jobs should be an Olympian struggle in its own right. At a time when Dougie Donnelly has been squeezed from the running order at The Open, Scotland should take heart in the rise and rise of a certain Hazel Irvine. Knowledgeable and well-liked, the 43-year-old's sixth summer games since Seoul in 1988 saw her profile higher than ever before as she shared the couch each morning with Adrian Chiles and dispensed breathy voiceovers to the opening ceremony.

Irvine has certainly served her apprenticeship. From Radio Clyde, to STV, then the BBC, she has graduated to report on four World Cups and become the regular presenter of Ski Sunday and the World Snooker. Irvine may have prospered from the departure of high-profile events and presenters from the BBC to its commercial rivals, but this summer there was a reminder of the BBC's ability to harness the communal power that sport on TV has always held. Amongst 2750 hours of Beijing coverage, few moments were more worthy of crowding around the nearest TV than the 9.69 seconds it took Usain Bolt to break the 100m world record.

12 THE DAILY SHOW
American television news channels rarely question the words of wisdom emerging from White House press briefings, far less poke them with a satirical stick to see what slimy truths are hidden on their underbellies. Hail to the chief of the political gag, Jon Stewart, whose half-hour of weekday irreverence, The Daily Show, has been a beacon of light in the wilderness of the Bush years. Broadcast on More4 over here (and Comedy Central in the States), the show's format - commentary monologue on topical tidbits, spoof "expert" reports, guests with something to plug - works not only because it's laugh-out-loud funny in a way that Michael Moore's documentaries rarely are, but also because it channels righteous indignation and open-mouthed disbelief at the hypocrisy of our political leaders into the positive force of "investigative comedy". With another US presidential election in full swing, we need The Daily Show more than ever.

13 GAVIN & STACEY
Billericay and Barry Town, a boy (Mathew Horne) and a girl (Joanna Page), their respective best mates and a long-distance relationship that proves the old adage: the course of true love never did run smooth. That, in a nutshell, is the plot of 2007 sleeper hit Gavin & Stacey, written by James Corden and Ruth Jones, who met on the set of ITV1 drama Fat Friends. They also play Gavin and Stacey's ne'er-do-well best friends Smithy and Nessa, a couple who enjoy a love-hate relationship of their own.

The second series screened on BBC Two earlier this year with a four-fold hike in audience figures. Meanwhile, series one started transmission on BBC America this week and may yet go the way of The Office - American network NBC is working on pilots of a US version. No news yet on a third series, but there is a one-off Christmas special planned for BBC One. However, Jones can be seen in upcoming BBC One drama Tess Of The D'Urbervilles, while Corden and Horne have their own comedy sketch show starting soon on BBC Three, called Horne And Corden Have Come. A Newman and Baddiel for the Noughties?

14 24-HOUR NEWS
Granted, too many bulletins comprise a reporter standing in front of a police van in the north of England where something happened - that they missed - just a few hours earlier while details of fairly irrelevant "breaking news" stories zip past at the bottom of your screen. But since launching in 1997, BBC News 24 has proven that, when the big stories happen, we instantly tune in to rolling news services en masse: the September 11 attacks in the US, the 2004 train bombings in Madrid and the July 7 London tube bombings in 2005 were depressing but illustrative examples. The ubiquity of rolling news stations also provides an opportunity to compare and contrast, whether it be Sky News, CNN or Al Jazeera (which now also broadcasts in English from Qatar).

15 JEREMY CLARKSON
Who would have thought something so nerdish as a motoring programme could have been engineered into high entertainment? Powered up by the one-man turbo-boost of Clarkson, Top Gear has attracted 385 million viewers worldwide and become the ultimate watching experience for middle-aged boys (and some girls). Forget Richard Hammond, forget James May: Jezza, and his irreverent personality, are at the root of the show's silliness, and its success. Can you imagine a programme in which two caravans were clunked together like conkers that didn't have Clarkson at its helm?

He has the spirit of a six-year-old inside the body of a forty-something who is going through a mid-life crisis while already also a grumpy old man. People either love him or love to hate him. Indeed, there are many reasons why you might want to join the Norfolk-based We Hate Jeremy Clarkson club: his drink-driving while careering across the Arctic; his disrespect for the environment; his sartorial taste in belted jeans. Yet he has a gift as a showman, a hilarious talent for going where few dare while keeping his tongue so far inside his cheek it would take an ear, nose and throat surgeon to prise it out. That's why Top Gear plays almost continually on the TV channel Dave. Because, like Dave itself, Clarkson is the everyman almost every man out there would love to be.

16 RED BUTTON INTERACTIVE
Even couch potatoes can be in two places at once. With just a flick of the thumb over the red button on your remote control a whole interactive universe opens up in this age of digital telly. Well, maybe not a universe but four extra stages at the Glastonbury Festival, four other courts at Wimbledon, the full set of Champions League footie fixtures and up to six different events at the Olympics. So you don't even need to trek through the mud or pay touts for overpriced tickets in order to sit in the front row at the year's big events. There are plenty of other gimmicky red button functions on offer, but it's this one - the opportunity to choose your own on-screen alternatives to the main broadcast option - that rockets your remote into the 21st century.

17 HEROES CREATOR TIM KRING
BY the time it first touched down on BBC Two last summer, a certain strait-laced science fiction drama had seemingly acquired yet another superpower - being critic-proof. The British press universally hailed all-conquering Heroes and its scattered tales of ordinary people discovering they had extraordinary powers. The series had already emerged as the victor in US television's annual autumn smackdown in 2006, despite an unknown ensemble cast, tangential plotlines and a big question mark squatting at the centre of the story.

With no capes, cowls or kapows, it was the superhero show for people who didn't like superheroes. For series creator Tim Kring, it was something else: the capstone of a long career in an onerous industry. Spider-Man was famously bitten by a radioactive spider and gifted his powers in an instant. Kring is more of a Batman: sombre, driven and the product of years of thankless training.

Kring, 51, paid his dues writing episodes of the original Knight Rider before graduating to perishable TV movies. His big break came in 2001, when his female-led, Boston-set crimebusting series Crossing Jordan got picked up by NBC and became a reliable ratings performer (it eventually ran for 116 episodes over six seasons, and occasionally turns up over here on ITV3).

Heroes would never have got off the ground but for Kring's hard-won knowledge of how to feed the insatiable beast that is American network television. When the original pilot was greedily picked up by NBC - which meant another 21 episodes were required, and fast - Kring could spin his stuffed Rolodex to tap up reliable writers from shows such as Alias and Smallville to round out his vision in the pressurised timescale.

But if the first season of Heroes was a global triumph, the second stumbled. Shortened to a mere 11 episodes because of the US writers' strike - during which Kring was on the picket lines, essentially boycotting his own show - season two clumsily introduced new characters, tacked on some unconvincing love stories and seemed meandering instead of enigmatic. A fan backlash ensued: Heroes had found its Kryptonite.

After the strike was resolved, Kring promptly decided to bin the further dozen episodes he had planned for season two. "We assumed the audience wanted season one - a build-up of intrigue about these characters and the discovery of their powers," he explained. "They wanted adrenaline. We made a mistake."

Speaking this month at the Edinburgh International Television Festival, Kring promised that the imminent third season would hit the ground running with adrenalised plotting and a new emphasis on villains. Heroes might be Kring's baby, but he's happy to tweak it to keep the fanbase - and the network - happy. If he needed a superhero name, he could do worse than The Canny Realist.

Heroes returns to BBC2 in late September. Interview by Graeme Virtue

18 ROSS KEMP
With his shaven head, muscular bulk and favoured apparel of jeans and tight black T-shirt Ross Kemp could be just another soccer hooligan waiting for a rumble. In fact he's anything but, though the thuggish appearance does have its advantages: since leaving EastEnders the man we used to call Grant Mitchell has turned roving reporter to front Ross Kemp On Gangs, an award-winning documentary strand for Sky One.

The title is self-explanatory. Kemp and his intrepid crew travel the world making contact with gangs and have some fairly hair-raising adventures along the way. Series one saw him dodging gunfire in the slums of Rio de Janeiro, hanging out with New Zealand's Mongrel Mob (a Maori gang), and infiltrating the Orange County Skinheads in California. Two subsequent series took him to Moscow, Cape Town, Kingston and Bogota, although if the scenery is ever-changing, the sense of threat and danger is constant. It's no surprise that last year the show won a BAFTA for Best Factual Series.

Tomorrow on Sky One at 9pm Kemp returns for a fourth trip into the arcane world of gangs. Stops include Bulgaria, where he meets a Roma gang, and Belize, where he is given a gift of a live hand grenade. The series starts in Los Angeles, the gang capital of the world. "Latino gangs are on the rise," Kemp booms as he steers his SUV down an LA street, "and I've come to meet them." How can you resist?

19 NEWS INTO DRAMA
More 4's recent retrospective of the work of British writer-director Peter Kosminsky gathered together some fine dramas, among them The Government Inspector (which dealt with the David Kelly affair), Warriors (set among British peacekeepers in Bosnia) and Britz (the story of two young British Muslims who follow radically different paths after 9/11). But the season also illustrated a broader point: that television is the artistic medium best placed to commentate on the issues of our times.

A good thing? Broadly, yes. But there's danger too. Docudramas may be exhaustively and intensively researched, but they are still necessarily subjective and bound by the basic laws of drama. This season's crop includes BBC One three-parter, The Occupation. Following the lives of three British soldiers from the invasion of Basra in 2003 to the present day, it's based on interviews with serving soldiers. Channel 4, meanwhile, will screen The Shooting Of Thomas Hurndall, a dramatisation of a 2003 incident in which a British student was shot dead in the Gaza Strip by a sniper from the Israeli Defence Force. Serious stuff, but gripping drama nonetheless.

20 DEXTER
Like Patricia Highsmith's Ripley, Dexter Morgan is a bad man - a very bad man - masquerading as Mr Goody-Two-Shoes. Dexter, played with mischievous intent and aplomb by Michael C Hall, is a blood-splatter expert who works for the Miami Po lice Department. Show him blood, whether sprayed across a wall or flowing over a floor, and chances are he'll know exactly how it got there. No-one is better at solving serial murders than him. Nor, as it turns out, is anyone better at committing them. Orphaned in unspeakable circumstances and adopted by a cop, he was soon identified as a psychopath. Suspecting his son might graduate from harming animals to people, his father sanctioned him satisfying his urges ... so long as he concentrated on those similarly inclined. Based on novels by Jeff Lindsay, a Floridian, Dexter is a grossly likeable character, compelling you to hope he gets away with murder even if you can't bear to watch him at work. Telly viewing is rarely a more ambiguous experience. Season two is on FX and season three will be aired in the US next month.

21 DEADWOOD CREATOR DAVID MILCH
AS the 21st century dawned, the greatest American TV drama was being made by a holy trilogy of Davids. The father, David Chase, who shifted the gears of the medium with The Sopranos. The son, David Simon, who, with The Wire, brought a degree of multifaceted realism to TV drama that should make other TV writers hang their heads in shame. And then there was the wild and holy spirit, David Milch.

Milch started on Hill Street Blues and rose to fame as co-creator of NYPD Blue, which smuggled a new richness into American network TV's cop show format. He's now known as the writer behind Deadwood, the snarling, hilarious, filthy, terrifying and beautiful western series that set the new land-speed record for swearing on TV. What tended to be missed in all the discussion of the profanity, though, was the glory of the actual language Milch employed, its poetic strangeness which, when added to the densely woven interplay of the characters, meant it was a programme that, for once, deserved to be described as Shakespearean.

Milch is just as notorious, however, for a mercurial, self-destructive side. While Dennis Franz played NYPD Blue's anti-hero Sipowicz for over a decade, Milch wanted to kill the character off after a year. Milch also had a 30-year heroin habit - in his words, he wrote most of his Hill Street Blue and NYPD Blue scripts "loaded".

That side of his nature was perhaps responsible for him pulling the plug on Deadwood after three years because he had fallen in love with a new idea: John From Cincinnati, a metaphysical drama about a family of washed-up surfers visited by an alien. It was one of HBO's biggest disasters, cancelled after just one series.

The good news is that Milch and HBO are trying again, and striking out on slightly firmer ground. He is soon to return with The Last Of The Ninth, a cop show set in the scuzzy New York of the early 1970s, which he describes like this: "It's about an older detective's mentoring of a young detective returned from Vietnam, in a department which has been brought by allegations of systemic corruption into public disrepute." The fact that Ray Winstone plays the older detective is the cherry on the cake.

Interview by Damien Love

By Alan Morrison, Alan Taylor, Barry Didcock, Damien Love, Graeme Virtue, Jamie Lafferty, Paul Dalgarno, Stuart Fisher, Vicky Allan