High Fidelity at 20

Stephen Frears' smart adaptation of Nick Hornby's novel of stunted growth remains as compelling as ever with one of John Cusack's best performances.

How a crossword setter appeared on State of the Union

Having used a puzzle by Arachne as part of a plot in his recently televised novel, Nick Hornby discusses the temptation to set one himself.

It has been eight weeks of nervy drinks and relationship therapy for our couple in crisis and now it's time to look to the future as Nick Hornby's endlessly entertaining series concludes. The typically dry dialogue continues, considering the prospect of yet more counselling. If that means another season, count us in.

Nick Hornby delivers a caustic take on a marriage in crisis in this short-form series following a couple trying to salvage their relationship through counselling. The first 10-minute episode sees Chris O'Dowd and Rosamund Pike skittishly working their way up to attending their first session from the pub opposite. Hornby's dialogue is on top form as they drily compare the relative merits of cancer to Ebola and dissect their nonexistent sex life. It's an engaging single-setting watch delivered in micro-form.

Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch to be adapted into an opera

Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch is to be staged as an opera, premiering later this year.

Minnie Driver to star in US TV version of About a Boy

Actress Minnie Driver is to appear in the American comedy version of Nick Hornby novel About A Boy.

Hugh Grant is impossibly perfect casting as an eternal bachelor boy in this Oscar-nominated adaptation of Nick Hornby's unusual coming-of-age comedy-drama. He's Will, a happily superficial chap whose inherited wealth (from his dad's Christmas novelty pop single) means he never needs to work again. Will is disconnected from the world until a chance encounter with a depressed single mum (Toni Collette) and her precocious son Marcus, played by a pre-hottie, pudding-bowled Nicholas Hoult.

Being described as "quite good" has, one suspects, always been a secret ambition of Jonathan Creek. He has been knocking around, on and off, for 13 years now. Thirteen years, you say? Really? Wow. If natural selection exists within television, then switching on to discover Alan Davies is still pottering around solving murder mysteries in a duffel coat is like finding some chubby, blind flightless bird on an island that is populated by hungry tigerraptor hybrids with lasers for eyes. It just shouldn't be there. It shouldn't stand a chance against the evolved predators of slick, intelligent, compelling, boxed-set-friendly television we're all addicted to now. Thirteen years of some swollen tongued Nick Hornby offcut solving mysteries via his understanding of stage magic? It just doesn't make sense. It's one for the Creationists.

Anyway, this 90-minute episode, The Judas Tree, lurched along as if the plot had been cooked up via a game of consequences. The lift in which the story was pitched must have been stuck between floors as Mr Jonathan Creek Man tapped his boss on the shoulder, took a gigantic breath and blurted: "OK, a nubile but haunted housemaid gets a job working for a successful murder-mystery writer in a house that witnessed the unexplained and still unsolved death of a Victorian doctor who jilted his own lover-slash-housemaid who was Egyptian and may have been a sorceress and is now somehow haunting the new housemaid who ends up charged with a murder." That's the opening, anyway. It goes on. At one point, someone bleeds what looks like runny Marmite for no apparent reason. It's that kind of show.

It's not that it wasn't occasionally fun; it was just mostly nonsense. OK, Doctor Who is nonsense, but it's supposed to be. But this was nonsense by accident, which isn't as good. If there was an adjective somewhere between "camp" and "crap", this episode would be that, in the way that anything featuring a death scene with someone pointing a finger and screaming "She did it! She murdered me!" sort of has to be.

Nick Hornby is arguably an accomplished writer, but as his new book hits the shelves and his screenplay for An Education reaches the silver screen, this comedy series co-written with journalist Giles Smith shows signs that he is spreading himself too thinly. The tale of an idiotic, ageing rock drummer who has inadvertently become the richest man in Britain, it relies too heavily on one-note gags about his wealth, while ignoring any potential to explore deeper themes. The talents of Mark Williams, Russell Tovey and Lynda Bellingham are wasted as the rock star, his personal manager, and his dotty mother. Shame.