No problem. That's what I suspected. Have you reset the "Record" setting for it to "First runs and repeats"? That should get it to at least record the second episode. I can understand the confusion, because the other recent Terry Pratchett miniseries, Going Postal, was not a repeat. Is this the problem for any of the other shows you expected to record, and which didn't?
If you want to watch the first episode of Hogfather, you can view it online on ABC's
iView any time in the next 12 days. iView picture quality isn't all that great, but it's OK for many things. iView bandwidth is about 1Mb/s, so the viewing the whole show will be about 900MBytes. My ISP (iiNet) doesn't include iView in my quota, so using iView is quite handy for me. You may want to see if your ISP has a similar arrangement.
Shows that are "in recess" remain in your My Shows list (as I mentioned in my first reply), and if their settings are appropriate, the shows will start recording again without further intervention when they resume, if they do, when the ratings season resumes. This is a feature of IceTV, and as I mentioned before, is simply how it works. Don't be surprised if your My Shows list eventually gets quite large, though. Mine has close to 300 shows in it.
As for spelling checking, I just use the built-in spelling checking in my browser (Firefox, though I'm sure that many other browsers have a similar feature). It underlines any misspelt (or at least unrecognised) words in red, and if I right-click over such a word it shows a menu of alternatives. However, the forum's own Spell Check button seems to work fine for me.