Every week our square-eyed reporters take a look at what’s on TV – the highlights and the lowlights – and pick what they think you should watch or avoid.

International Football, ITV1, Friday, 7.30pm

The horrible disappointment of the World Cup is now a slightly harrowing memory and at least we’ve two years until we get worked up about the next big tournament, right?

Wrong. Because the journey to the European Championships in Poland and Ukraine start here, just a couple of months after all the petulance, ineptitude and bitterness in South Africa. The qualifying process is a long, drawn out affair and involves glamorous ties against opponents like Switzerland and Wales.

It starts at Wembley with a relatively easy match against Bulgaria whose best player, Dimitar Berbatov, retired from international football earlier this year and whose second best player plays for Bolton.

Time for England to turn on the style? Or time for huffing, puffing, a goal scored using one of Peter Crouch’s various protrusions and some unfocused tabloid rage?

The rest of the home nations are also playing this weekend with Wales travelling to Montenegro, Northern Ireland going to Slovenia and Scotland facing a journey to Lithuania.

My Funniest Year: 2000, Channel 4, Saturday, 10pm

This series gives comedians the responsibility of taking to a stage in front of a live audience and talking about the interesting, quirky, funny stories from a given year.

In this first episode Rufus Hound takes us back to the year 2000 when we all thought the millennium bug would eat our VCR players and Keith Chegwin thought it was acceptable to present a game show naked.

Rufus also reaches great new heights in comedy by joking about George W. Bush , who became president in 2000, and the first series of Big Brother .

He is helped out over the course of the show by a series of clips and special guests but, at two hours long, I fear this could ultimately all get a bit boring.

Surgery School, ITV1, Monday, 10.35pm

At long last, someone has listened to my requests and commissioned a programme that will teach me how to perform complex surgery on drunken friends.

“Well my hangover’s bad but this triple heart bypass, although unnecessary, feels pretty good.”

Happily for most, my dreams of impromptu surgery will have to remain just that because this is actually a documentary about 10 young doctors being put through their paces at the London School of Surgery. In the first episode of the series one of the junior surgeons gets a dressing down for his shoddy stitching and another bursts into tears before the end of an operation.

This is England ‘86, Channel 4, Tuesday, 10pm

Britain's best filmmaker, Shane Meadows, makes his TV debut with this four-part follow up to the BAFTA award-winning This Is England.

The original was set in 1983. Fast-forward to 1986 and we have the film’s protagonist, Shaun, played by Thomas Turgoose, ready to leave school. But he faces an uncertain future with 3.4 million British people unemployed at the time.

Many of the other members of his gang are still around but time has moved on and more of them face their own problems than in the film.

The Nottingham-based writer and director said he wanted the series to show more about the gang, painting a broader and deeper picture of their lives, and more about the social and political situation at the time.

With Meadows at the helm, this is almost guaranteed to be good.

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