How I Met Your Mother: Thursday 8pm, E4
How I Met Your Mother has returned for a seventh season, and yet despite the show having picked up an impressive five 
Emmy Awards, we don’t seem to have made a great deal of progress concerning who exactly the elusive Mother is. While the group dynamic is holding up well in spite of Lily and Marshall’s move to the suburbs, it’s starting to fall short of E4’s promise that it’s ‘like Friends but without the boring Ross bits.’ The Barney-Robin-Ted love triangle is fast approaching Ross and Rachel levels of frustration, and Ted is every bit as boring as Ross ever was. Luckily Neil Patrick Harris as Barney makes up for all manner of sins with his brilliant comic timing, ensuring that HIMYM fans will keep watching until the mystery of the yellow umbrella is finally cleared up. With Katie Holmes scheduled to don the legendary ‘Slutty Pumpkin’ costume in a bid to win Ted’s heart, this series promises to be both fun and frustrating.
Big Fat Gypsy Weddings: Tuesday 9pm C4
Channel 4’s highly publicised Big Fat Gypsy Weddings has returned to our screens for a second season. Apart from 
weddings, the show has begun to focus on the importance of communions as a practice run for their wedding day. I was struck by how similar the young girls were to the ones on Toddlers in Tiaras. In both situations, the children are competing to look the best; they are made up to the extreme with fake nails, spray tans and buckets of makeup, except these girls don’t win a prize for all their efforts. These girls are obsessed with beauty; Nangirl, nine, thinks it’s “important to look good for God”. We also begin to take a deeper look into the men’s world with illegal horse racing and the prejudice gypsies face from both the police and law. Will this series bring a deeper investigation into the ideas that mainstream society has of gypsies? Or will Channel 4 continue to exploit our ignorance of this secretive community by playing up to stereotypes and entertaining us with girls dressed as neon marshmallows and boys as uneducated thugs?