At the end of the first season of New Girl, we were largely left where we started, with the four central characters all back in the apartment. Nick had decided to stay rather than move out with his ex-girlfriend Caroline. Jess was recovering from her break-up with older man Russell. Schmidt had ended things with Cece and had his penis broken. Yes, that’s right. He broke his penis.

Several months down the line and we rejoin the friends after a period of healing. In the first episode, Relaunch, Schmidt decides to host a danger-themed party to reaffirm his ‘personal brand’ now that his penis cast is off. Jess is made redundant from her teaching job and tries her hand at being a shot-girl for the evening, to limited effect. Schmidt goes out of his way to impress Cece, who arrives at the party with new boyfriend, Robbie. 

The seeds for some of this season’s key narrative arcs are established in the first episode. In the next weeks, Jess will have to come to terms with her unemployment, Schmidt must suppress his infatuation with Cece, and Nick’s protective instinct towards Jess will continue to grow. This is a season in which many supporting cast members will come and go. But the core of New Girl is immutable: Schmidt, Nick, Winston and Jess muddling along in their warped little loft world. 

My relationship with the New Girl characters is difficult to define. Frequently they annoy me: they’re overly loud, melodramatic and barely believable. Yet I have an affection for them which keeps me tuning in. Many criticisms of the show seem to stem from Zooey Deschanel’s image as a manic pixie dream girl, and while this does appear to be her default setting, it is an unfair judgement. Her character, Jessica Day, is more nuanced than that. Sure, Jess is super optimistic and ‘quirky’. But she also gets low sometimes, is wholly dedicated to her profession and is a reliable friend. Could I tolerate her company for more than thirty minutes? No. But she’s an almost-plausible human.

The biggest laughs, however, come from her male flatmates: Schmidt, Nick and Winston. Schmidt is a corporate narcissist whose overinflated sense of his own brilliance manifests itself in naivety. Winston is an anxiety-riddled ex-professional basketball player who mediates the group. Nick is a grouchy barman with crushingly low self-confidence. Every time he and Jess have an intimate conversation, I fear that they will end up kissing. This has seemed like a foregone conclusion since the pilot episode, and I desperately hope New Girl can resist the fulfilment of this romantic cliché.

Although it would be impossible to definitively say which of the characters is the lead, the show certainly does not favour Winston, who for the most part continues to be restricted to subplots. In a moment of introspection, Schmidt analyses the characters’ unique brands. ‘Winston,’ he says, ‘your brand is Winston.’ Although I have appreciated how New Girl’s gradual development of Winston’s character has made him a more complex and intriguing persona, I think it is a shame that he remains the character we have got to know the least. Lamorne Morris is a talented comic actor, and deserves greater attention from the show’s writers. 

The opening episode of season two of New Girl is on a par with the quality viewers had come to expect from the first. It’s certainly still amusing, if not always laugh-out-loud funny. The fact is, there is almost no distinction between the first and second season of New Girl, and disappointingly, Relaunch falls back on New Girl’s staple devices: Jess talks like an old time gal, Nick gets shouty, and some combination of the cast break into ridiculous song and dance. Rather than treading new ground, the coming episodes reinforce the lacklustre but comforting repetitivity which New Girl has by the bucketload. 

In what is being hailed as the year of the guitar band (yes, we know, that happens every year), the music world has been rocked by the announcement that the greatest guitar band in history will be returning to centre stage. Last night, Sir Paul McCartney announced that The Beatles, the best-selling musical group of all time, will be re-uniting for one last world tour.

Sir Paul said he was “overwhelmed and inspired” by the positive reaction of the recent Nirvana reunion of which he was a part, and that it was a combination of that and the success of the Let It Be West End musical, which features actors playing songs by The Beatles, that compelled him to reform the band. “It just felt like the timing was perfect, you know? What with it being the 50^th anniversary of our first record” said McCartney. Just as Sir Paul filled in for Kurt Cobain, The Beatles now have two new members. Matt Bellamy, frontman of the hugely successful British rock band Muse, has been drafted in on lead guitar.

Sir Paul was gushing in his praise for the manic rockstar, saying “he’s a wonderfully talented musician, and a brilliant performer. His stage presence as much as anything will make this a great success”. Replacing the iconic figure of John Lennon was always going to be a struggle, but after months of soul-searching, McCartney opted for Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker, whose forceful personality and cult hero status makes him, in McCartney’s eyes, a perfect fit. “A lot of people might be saying ‘why didn’t you pick someone from your era, wouldn’t they fit into the band better?’” he admitted. “And you know, I thought about Eric Clapton, I thought about David Bowie but in the end I decided that The Beatles have always been about reinventing ourselves and moving forward and I think Jarvis and Matt give us more relevance to the music scene and how it is today”.

Bellamy, never one to show overt modesty, claimed he was unsurprised to be chosen. “Look,” he said in a brief interview. “I’ve been called the Hendrix of my generation, and of course Sir Paul’s gonna want the best. Still though, it’s a huge honour. The Beatles redefined pop music, and I think it’s safe to say that Muse would not be what they are today without them”. Bellamy’s band certainly followed in the footsteps of The Beatles as they became another guitar band to leave British shores and become loved all around the world, and Bellamy’s prowess on the guitar has been lauded everywhere he’s been. Total Guitar named him “guitarist of the decade” in 2010 and Gigwise placed him at #19 in a list of the greatest guitarists of all time so it really shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise for him to be chosen to play lead guitar for the best band in history.

Last year Lennon was named as NME’s ultimate icon within the publications own lifetime. He was, therefore, for whoever stepped into his often controversial, but always self-depreciative shoes, always going to be a tough task to replace. In comparison to Bellamy, Cocker was more humble in his reaction to the news characterised by his own iconic drawl and dry sense of wit. The Pulp frontman has previously declared his love for the Beatles going on to say that “I haven’t named any kids after them but I still really love them”. The resemblance between Cocker and Lennon is remarkable, not just in appearances, with both becoming synonymous with their spectacles, notoriously floppy hair and shaggy beards, but also in their working class background and subsequent hero status, immortalised for Cocker most infamously in the Britpop anthem, ‘Common People’.

Talking about Britpop, Cocker remarks that you “cannot do a karaoke version of a social revolution”, in reference to the Beatles. He was, therefore, uncharacteristically, but understandably nervous, in his reaction to the news. “We elevate people to the status of heroes in order to let ourselves off the hook: ‘I’m just a mere mortal – I could never even dream of doing something like that’” he explains in relation to Lennon, but now it is time for Cocker to elevate himself from his already cult heroic status to that of the ‘ultimate icon’ in replacing Lennon. Unlike Bellamy, Cocker has already experienced the reunion tour circuit with his own band Pulp who were hailed as the ‘reunion of the decade’ after their sell-out and critically acclaimed 2011 tour. Hopefully this will aide Cocker in the role that has been placed upon his shoulders in what will surely be soon labelled the ‘reunion of the century.’

Ringo, who infamously called for his fans to stop sending him fan mail, and is known as the ‘quiet one’ in the Beatles, has admitted, in an exclusive interview with Cherwell earlier this week, that he had prophesised and secretly hoped for this reunion tour a long time ago, even amidst the controversial break-up of the band in 1970. The innocence of the Beatles in the early days is widely documented with McCartney reminiscing in a recent interview about the ‘good little band’ he formed, and recruited Ringo to, before Hamberg and the stardom they would inevitably be catapulted into.

Nevertheless, the ‘Fab Four’ were in it for the long haul and, as outlined in a recent BBC Four documentary on the early years of the band “it was too late for them; polite society would never allow them back in”. Pop music in the early 60s was rebellious, unruly and highly uncontrollable. Ringo highlights this sense of longevity present in the band, even in the early years, when he thought they’d “get married, and never split up”.

Even upon breaking up, Ringo was the first to suggest a reunion, another world tour, and a last coming together of what is arguably the greatest collective creative force the world has ever known. “I said let’s all meet up in the year 2000” Ringo remembers, “won’t it be strange when we’re all fully grown”. Although slightly overdue, it seems that the inevitable is here, and we are happy to report in a world exclusive that the Beatles are back, back to where they once belonged…

The Beatles tour commences at the legendary Fairpool Stadium, April 31^st.

We’ve all had one of those nights, maybe in Wahoo, or Parkend or even for those of you with more questionable standards, next to a kebab van, where you make an acquaintance, have a predictable (often slurred) conversation and maybe even swap numbers. But what if you wrote your number down? And what if the piece of paper you wrote it on was worth £72 million? 

This is one of the many dilemmas which Rose, Alan, Becky, Mandy and Tom have to face in the first instalment of BBC One’s The Syndicate. Kay Mellor’s creation has returned for a second series with a brand new syndicate comprising staff from St. Anthony’s Hospital. This isn’t just any old syndicate though, with the likes of Alison Steadman (Gavin and Stacey, Fat Friends), Mark Addy (Game of Thrones, The Full Monty) and Siobhan Finneran (aka O’Brien from Downton Abbey) making this a quality cast with clout. 

As usual, Mellor doesn’t scrimp on character development and the first episode of this series plunges us into the lives of the lucky five, hinting all the while that things are not quite as rosy as they look. Alan is a weed-growing, ex-alcoholic, Becky has a young daughter and too many expenses, and Becky’s mum Mandy, whilst the happiest NHS worker on record, has an abusive husband making her marriage miserable. 

What sets The Syndicate apart from other BBC drama is quite simply the writing. Mellor’s ability to take everyday people, make them convincing, make them interesting, and spin them together in such a way that within the space of an hour the audience are repeatedly and alternately laughing and crying is what really makes this programme the fantastic watch that it is. Don’t be fooled, this isn’t just a snapshot of everyday life. Everyone knows someone like ‘Fat Freda’ who works in the shop, and a laugh will be secured every time, but beyond this there are real questions being asked, like how much would your life really change? Is it fair to give bitter Helen a share in the winnings even though she left the syndicate? Would you still turn up for work the next day? And this is just the first episode!

In a similar way to the last series of The Syndicate, each week focuses on an individual from the group, with the second episode centring around Tom Bedford, who despite winning the lottery has still not got what he desires most: a baby. To complicate matters, Tom doesn’t know the whereabouts of his real father, who walked out on his mother and him when he was ten, and to make things worse, Tom’s closest friends get an attack of the green-eyed monster which reaches boiling point in the local pub. Amongst all of this, some of the gaps start to get filled in from the first episode, with scenes which will question any previous sympathy we might have had for bitter Helen and contain more hints of the extent of Mandy’s violent marriage to Steve. 

At just two episodes in, if you’re not already following The Syndicate it’s well worth catching up. The stage is set but there’s a lot more to come from Mellor’s latest set of winners for whom money certainly isn’t solving everything. I know I won’t be missing a minute…

The Syndicate is on BBC One, Tuesdays, 9pm.