Gareth Roberts

Gary Lineker is to leave Match of the Day at the end of the current football season, and to exit the BBC entirely after the 2026 World Cup. It was 1999 when he took over Match from Des Lynam, though in a strange discord with the usual swift passage of time, it feels much longer.  Because despite his close association with it as a player and a pundit Lineker is really nothing much to do with football. His punditry, as we all know, is far wider in its scope than such enjoyable trifles.

‘Kindness is like marmalade – a little goes a long way,’ Paddington Bear tweeted recently. But it isn’t only imaginary talking bears who take this approach on social media. The News Agents’ Emily Maitlis was inspired by the rather sickly – and given the seriousness of current events, rather inappropriate – chummy love-in between Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer at their final Commons encounter last week. ‘Just imagine if PMQs was like this every week,’ she tweeted wistfully, ‘Conciliatory. Helpful. Bipartisan. Passionate and compassionate.’ Paddington’s thoughts on social media are enthusiastically greeted by the kind of grown-ups who feel tewwibly sad about Brexit Thankfully, as it turned out, Rishi Sunak was faking.

Halloween is approaching. The Americans, who go very big on it normally, are distracted this year by the election, so it feels like we have it more to ourselves than usual. And nobody in Britain will be having a happier Halloween than Danny Robins, a former comedy writer and journalist who has cracked the big time with his extremely successful spooky BBC podcast Uncanny (which became a TV show last year), and his play 2:22 A Ghost Story, which had a four-year run in the West End and was taken up in productions around the world. This year the podcast is running an advent-style Halloween event, serving up a fresh, bitesize experience sent in by a listener every day throughout October.

Paddington has an official passport. The makers of the new Paddington film Paddington in Peru revealed this in passing to the Radio Times today.  They needed the passport for scenes in the new movie, presumably showing Paddington clearing customs on his journey back to darkest Peru. So they approached the Home Office for a facsimile, which is odd in itself, given that any decent prop hand on a film set can rustle one up for you – one that will fool a camera, anyway – in half an hour.

Quiz shows on TV – the kind you can join in with at home by shouting the answer at the screen, rather than panel games or tests of skill – seem to be surging with renewed popularity. At its peak last year, Pointless drew in over 7 million viewers, while The Chase averages 3 million viewers an episode and as recently as last week 3.8 million people tuned in to watch The Weakest Link. Although they’ve been an embedded fixture of television since its inception, quizzes with at least a component of general knowledge involved are taking up more and more of the schedules.

The BBC's daytime soap Doctors will soon vanish from our screens after 24 years. But while the final episodes make for excruciatingly bad television, they are worth watching for a simple reason: they encapsulate everything that is wrong with modern television. The BBC's obsession with ramming progressive storylines down viewers' throats is plain to see in each episode of Doctors. Take the character of Dr Graham Elton (Alex Avery); he's a rotten bigot and, in case you didn't realise it, viewers are reminded of just how awful and unsound his views are in almost every scene. From BBC medical soap opera Doctors. A new doctor, Graham, has joined the surgery. He's ableist and clumsy about homosexuality.

Carol Vorderman has given a speech to the Edinburgh Television Festival, in which she complains that the TV industry is too middle class. This is a bit like rocking up at an Elvis convention and saying that Elvis was overrated rubbish. But she still got a standing ovation. Vorderman has merely reoriented herself to where the money is – performative spluttering about the Tories ‘After 14 years of austerity and lying by the privileged political class,’ she told her adoring throng, ‘this country is in an absolute mess and the TV industry must accept part of the responsibility for that too, including the riots.’ Who knew that the TV industry was responsible for people running amok and setting fire to public property?

I have to confess that, like many other commentators, I thought that the coming of the Labour government would mean – at least for a bit – that things might get a little quieter, at least on social media. I was quite looking forward to that. But it all seems to have got even madder.  This century has brought many wonders, but the sight of Carol Vorderman criticising somebody else for being overpaid for their TV work – that’s surely the most stupefying of them all When Twitter first materialised in the late noughties under a Labour government, it was – honestly, straight up – a quite sociable place. People pottered about on it, in an innocently affable manner, despite the pressing issues of the day.

The horrific murders in Southport earlier this month were followed by horrific riots and horrific counter-riots. But fear not. Because then the official account of Paddington Bear tweeted, ‘Perhaps it’s time for a little more kindness’. At times of wickedness, disorder and the worst of humanity, what do we 21st century moderns look for to save us, to bring comfort and hope? The redeeming power of Christ’s eternal love? Maybe the enduring core of human dignity in the face of human evil? Nope. We have a whimsical, passive-aggressive CGI teddy tweeting with furry opposable digits. What next, posters reading ‘Less arson, more yummy scones’ or ‘Don’t turtle a cop car – it’s wine o’clock’?