Who Dr. House used to be...

For devoted fans, WPT's 8 p.m. Saturday night presentations of Jeeves and Wooster are a welcome return of one of their favorite British comedy shows to the broadcast air. But, viewers who are unaware of the show's comic brilliance who might stumble upon the show often have another question -- "Hey isn't that guy Dr. House?"

Indeed, Hugh Laurie does play an unorthodox physician on a wildly popular show elsewhere on your television dial, but it was his off-the-wall comedy stylings, often paired with Stephen Fry (the Jeeves half of the Jeeves and Wooster equation), that made Laurie a household name in his native Great Britain.

Sure, Laurie's character of Bertie Wooster is much different from the American medical persona for which the actor won a Golden Globe, but the much earlier British show on WPT is a great way to take a look at the actor's talented comedic side from before becoming a well-known celebrity in the United States. To help you get acclimated to the world of Jeeves and Wooster, Be more Tuned In has pulled together some resources on the Web to get you started. To check them out, click here, here or here.

Bringing spring back...

Two weeks ago, the sun was shining, crocuses were popping up in the garden and people were walking around in short sleeves. And, it was January!

Leave it to Wisconsin to bring us all back to reality in a heartbeat. Now, most places have snow on the ground, there's a thick paste of salt residue on everyone's cars and the thermometer this morning registered a brisk four degrees in Madison. After just a few days of winter, Be more Tuned In is ready for spring.

So, since Wisconsin's probably not going to give it to us anytime soon, WPT is coming to the rescue with the 14th-annual Garden Expo, Feb. 9, 10 and 11 in the Exhibition Hall at the Alliant Energy Center in Madison. Prepare to smell, see and touch all of the wonders of spring with more than 200 exhibitors offering the latest and greatest in gardening, lawn and landscaping merchandise, services, advice and technology. Walk through an amazing central garden display that brings a bountiful landscape inside. Take part in any of the more than 100 educational seminars or dozens of hands-on workshops. Also, take the opportunity to meet Shelley Ryan, the host of The Wisconsin Gardener.

Tickets will be available at the door for $7, but if you act soon, you can save money by purchasing your tickets in advance from this secure Web site or any of these retail locations.

There also are still some volunteer opportunities available for the event. to learn more about how you can help out, visit this page.

As we get closer to the event, keep your eyes on Be more Tuned In for a special behind-the-scenes look at how much work goes into creating a land of plant, grass and landscape pavers inside a giant 100,000-square-foot hall.

WPT thanks it's event funders -- WLCA and Blain's Farm & Fleet.

Finding the right path...

At 9 p.m., Friday, WPT will air the Seattle episode of Eden's Lost and Found, a program that explores many of the ways regular folks are helping to improve the environment of the cities they live in. Like many public television show, this one has a very generous Web presence that is definitley worth taking a look at.

Visitors to the program's Web site can gain a better understanding of the ways we all can make our own hometowns a better place to live, both now and for the future. There are pages that take you behind the scenes of the television program, links to outreach opportunities (like how to spearhead a tree-planting initiative in your town), and even current and past newsletters with all kinds of useful tips and hints.

Locally, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources' site houses a wealth of information about ways we can all work together to maintain this state's environmental promises, while we enjoy it's natural beauty.

Be more Tuned In podcasts -- Rick Bayless...

We caught up with award-winning chef and public television personality Rick Bayless via telephone at his restaurants in Chicago for our inaugural Be more Tuned In podcast. The mp3 podcast can be downloaded here and can be enjoyed on your personal computer or loaded onto your personal mp3 player for on-the-go listening.

Bayless is an interesting guy. An Oklahoma native, he has gone on to become one of the country's premiere Mexican chefs. Through his years of culinary exploration, Bayless has brought public television viewers along for many of his journeys. Stretching all the way back to the late 1970s, Bayless hosted a series simply called Cooking Mexican. After that program, he and his wife, Deann Groen Bayless, truly devoted their lives to Mexican flavors as they worked in that country in preparation of their 1987 book, Authentic Mexican: Regional Cooking from the Heart of Mexico, a tome that has been lauded as one of the best collections of Mexican cuisine ever written. Around that same time, they settled into a new home in Chicago and opened the Frontera Grill. The fine dining Topolobampo would follow, along with a line of specialty foods.

Bayless also created a new television program, Mexico: One Plate at a Time With Rick Bayless. In the show, Bayless takes viewers into Mexico's wide ranging regions to look for traditional foods and then returns to his own kitchen to teach viewers how to bring the flavors of Mexico into their own homes. His most recent cookbook, Mexico Everyday, teaches readers that home cooking is an important part of healthy living and doesn't have to be a chore. His fifth season of Mexico: One Plate at a Time With Rick Bayless comes to WPT at 12:30 p.m. Saturdays.

Turning the viewfinder around...

Wednesday night's premiere of American Masters "Annie Leibovitz: Life Through a Lens"-- the show airs at 8 and is repeated at 10:30 p.m., Thursday -- is one of those programs that has received quite a bit of buzz in the mainstream press. Be more Tuned In has pulled together some of the most interesting pieces.

An insightful look into how an artist ultimately confronts life and loss through a lens, Barbara Leibovitz's smart documentary on her sister Annie follows her evolution from bubbly art school student to denizen of American photography's upper echelon. ... Her mind's eye and the lens have melded into one for her -- an occupational hazard? -- and what others carry as memories, she possesses as snapshots and portraits, in which hues and lighting are discussed as much as the emotions that enveloped a death or a day at the pool."

-Phil Gallo, Variety

"Last year, the American Society of Magazine Editors voted on the 40 greatest magazine covers of the past 40 years.
Their No. 1 choice was the Jan. 22, 1981, cover of Rolling Stone, featuring a photograph of a nude John Lennon curled infant-like around a fully clothed Yoko Ono - an image made almost unbearably poignant by the fact that, just a few hours after it was taken, Lennon was shot and killed.
The No. 2 choice, the Aug. 1991 cover of Vanity Fair, bears a nude photo of a very different sort: a lustrous, very pregnant Demi Moore, one hand shielding her opulent breasts and the other supporting her globe of a belly.
If there's anything more striking than the pictures themselves, it's that both were taken by the same woman."

-Joanne Weintraub, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

"Ms. Leibovitz has a great deal of fun with her camera but never biting, seditious fun. Her pictures do not denigrate or disparage. Instead they document the celebrity circus with an acutely literal vision, submitting the famous to playfully acrobatic postures and various acts of clownishness.
Profilers and portraitists are not generally among society's most forthcoming, and so it is refreshing to witness Ms. Leibovitz speak openly about her life."

-Gina Bellafante, New York Times

Inauguration day -- Online and off...

On Wednesday, WPT will present live coverage of Gov. Jim Doyle's inauguration both on the air and online. As Doyle begins his second term in office at noon, WPT's stations around the state will bring the ceremony to viewers' television sets. For folks away from their TVs, the coverage will be available via a live stream that will be available at wpt.org.

This event is just one of many upcoming live streaming coverage of state events on WPT's Web site. Keep your eyes here at Be more Tuned In for information about coverage of the annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration from the State Capitol on Monday, Jan. 15, as well as the Governor's state of the state and budget addresses in late January and early February.