By Sian Brewis

Sometimes, you shouldn't watch nostalgia programmes. "What's the little otter thing?" cries puzzled teenager Steffi, in Electric Dreams (BBC 4, 9pm).

Noooo! She means Gordon the Gopher, the squeaky puppet sidekick of Philip Schofield, before he stopped dyeing his hair and started doing This Morning.

Oh dear. Watching this might have been fun, but it had the potential to age you as fast as the Sullivan-Barnes family were zipping through time. That's a year a day.

It's a neat idea, this; send a family "back in time" by transforming their house and introducing the gadgets of the day and reel in lots of over 30s viewers to watch and go, "ooh, remember that?".

And they were all wheeled out: the ZX Spectrum, the Acorn computer, video recorders and the Sony Walkman.

Dad Adam is spot on when he says: "I remember it all being so cool, and it's all...a bit rubbish."

In 1980 they got a microwave oven complete with a "microwave leakage detector", sold to play on people's fears after a World In Action programme interviewed scientists saying the ovens could kill you.

Adam took a trip in a Sinclair C5. You can see why that didn't take off.

And the boot's rubbish for shopping. He couldn't fit a carrier bag and a bunch of flowers in.

Look! There's Alan Sugar with a hideous curly perm buying out Mr Sinclair when nobody buys his rubbish future cars. I looked for Margaret and Nick in vain. Margaret, you feel sure, would have been a shoulder pad yuppie.

In 1983, they got a synthesizer – complete with musicians from Ultravox to show them how to play it.

Mum and dad were in awe. But as for the kids? It meant nothing to them.

Chuck (Virgin 1, 9pm) is another familiar programme, but not in a nostalgic way. In a kind of "we've seen all this before" American comedy-adventure way.

Chuck is a nerd who after having lots of Government secrets downloaded in his brain, is recruited by the CIA and juggles being a super-spy with a job in the US equivalent of PC World.

It's a shame, because it's not a bad premise, but it's spoiled by cartoonish, cloying cuteness and – and I appreciate I'm not the target audience here – lots of gorgeous women who are top spies, wearing not much at all. I'm sure the CIA would make their female agents put some clothes on, even occasionally.

From the "where are they now?" files...Lucy Lawless, formerly Xena: Warrior Princess. She's now a judge on reality TV show Rupaul's Drag Race (E4, 11pm) to find America's best drag queens from luminaries with names like Shannel, Angina and Rebecca, whom no one likes.

Camp as a field of Brownies it is, if nothing else, grammatically correct.

"Now remember," says Rupaul to her little charges, "Sisters are doing it for whom?"