PICK OF THE NIGHT

The Friday Night Project

10pm, Channel 4

IT IS new, it is much-hyped and, if you believe Channel 4, it is going to be big.

But, sadly, it is far from clever. In fact, this comedy entertainment show makes you wonder what is it about the schedules late on a Friday night that compels TV executives to ditch any sense of quality and opt for the most banal and juvenile of programme formats? Ah yes alcohol.

Presumably the programming executives assume that anyone watching TV after 10pm on a Friday has either been sitting in his or her armchair consuming a rapidly dwindling alcohol supply or swaying in a pub, drinking its plentiful stock of alcopops until compelled to stop by nausea. Our heavy-drinking culture may be causing a furore among the politicians, but it clearly works well for some TV shows.

Anyway, here's another programme to add to the long and undistinguished list of alco-TV.

It features comics Jimmy Carr (right), Rob Rouse, Sharon Horgan and Lucy Montgomery.

Each week they are joined by a celebrity guest host - tonight's is Vinnie Jones, Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels star and ex- footballer.

Music is provided by Charlie from Busted's new band, Fightstar.

The celebrities all have to perform set tasks, with supposedly hilarious consequences. One of their tests is to open the show with a monologue, and other games include taking to the streets to use the power of their celebrity to get people to do funny or stupid things. Wow, we've never seen that before.

As if that were not enough, there's also Abi Titmuss making a special appearance in her Mystery Sex Tape Challenge, using her powers of seduction on a celebrity.

There's so much good stuff on Channel 4, isn't it about time we had some decent shows late on a Friday? There would be no losers. Most viewers would welcome the change and the people who've been pickling themselves in alcohol all evening wouldn't notice the difference.

A Dream Home Abroad

8pm, Five

There are no surprises with this new series, during which George Clarke (right) will follow 10 families for a year as they take on massive house renovation projects on the Continent. You know the format: choose the people most unlikely to succeed so viewers get some dramatic entertainment out of watching the participants face one calamity after another.

Tonight we pick up with Yorkshire couple Geoff and Joanne, who quit their UK life and buy a property in Normandy to turn into a bed and breakfast. So far so good, but here's the bit designed to create the drama. The couple, who are on their second marriages after a whirlwind romance, do not speak French, and move to a tiny village where no one speaks English; they have no experience of renovating a house but the property needs completely revamping; and in a stroke of genius they decide to use a builder recommended by the local baker.

Then, of course, there's the French bureaucracy. "We will do it, because that's the plan," Geoff says, as if this sort of Churchillian defiance is all he will need to succeed. Could third marriages be on the way for Geoff and Joanne?

In Search of Myths and Heroes

9pm, BBC2

"God made man, so the Africans say, because he loved to hear stories," historian Michael Wood (left) says at the start of this programme.

And few tales could be more fascinating than the Queen of Sheba story.

With clips from classic films, such as MGM's 1959 epic Solomon and Sheba, and interviews with experts, tonight's programme kicks off what promises to be a magical series on the world's greatest myths.

Was Sheba fiction or is her story true? Wood starts his journey in Jerusalem, looking back 1,000 years before Christ, and his quest takes him to Ethiopia, Egypt and what one expert calls the start of globalisation.

Enchanting.

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