Saturday 17 April 2010
Britain’s Got Talent- ITV1- Saturdays @ 8pm- 5 out of 10
In more joyful times, ITV could go more than 4 months without a vehicle for Simon Cowell. Sadly, this is no longer the case so this week we welcomed back with (forced) open arms the happy-clappy (but sadly not slappy) Britain's Got Talent.
Sob as Take That's What About Now is dubbed over a fat Brummie who lost his toe in a pizza delivery accident. Laugh at a deluded Scouser who sings like a dog with its bollocks caught on an open can of Pedigree Chum. Count the number of facial expressions Amanda Holden can pull (it's three). Question the relevance of a civilisation that puts Piers Morgan on a show that has talent in its name.
Yes, you can do all this and more in this annual combination of laughing at people and yet still being able to come out of the end feeling good cos you supported that small child who was rubbish but had a good backstory, ya good person you. "Quick, dub some Keane
Somewhere Only We Know over the top of this" yell the producers as the kid tells the world his sad story.
Of course, this is the paradox of this show. It brings out all the things you want to feel from a TV show; laughter, sadness, curiosity and so on. And yet, you can openly laugh at someone who clearly is made of sterner stuff than you because they actually go on a show like this in front of so many people and perform, whilst you sit there guffawing at them. But the negative feeling you should be feeling about this concept is quickly offset by the fact you can claim that you are a good person because you felt bad after listening to the aforementioned sob story. Genius!
Anywho, aside from this and on to other points.
Firstly, will there come a point when there will indeed be no talent in Britain because of this show? Logic dictates that there is only a certain amount of talented people in the field of performing arts so the talent should all be hovered up soon, correct?
Secondly, what a lovely addition walking jolly magnet Louis Walsh was for a portion of the show. As incapable as he is at recognising talent, aside from singing, (he is to talent searching as I am to architectural surveying), his jolly smile lightens up any room, likewise the never wearisome Ant and Dec with their cheeky chappy faces that are half punchable half huggable.
Finally, more dancing dogs please. There's nothing I like more than entertainment that can also be construed as animal abuse. Oh and play some Coldplay over it so I don't feel to bad. Thanks.
Dan
Saturday 10 April 2010
Chris Tarrant: A Comedy Roast- Channel 4- Friday@ 10pm- 4 out 10
The roast format has now been transported here to the UK from the land of the USA and what a disappointment. Basically, volunteering to be roasted is a bit like volunteering to face a firing squad or volunteering to be in the Sugababes, both usually involve an awful lot of agonising and ultimately a death, career or otherwise. Hence why its done at the end of their careers as a final payday. Huzzah!
Tarrant's 30-year career was summed up in a nice 90-second montage showing him evolving from zany morning TV host with bad hair to straight-laced quiz show host with worse hair, the only man to have worse hair in the noughties than the 70s. Nice to see three decades of hard work condensed into a montage that lasts less time than brushing your teeth.
Anywho, the roasters are a curious mix of comedians, television personalities and Sally James. Oh, and a man that makes you question the reason why we are here in this world at all, Jamie Theakston.
Before long, about two minutes in fact, the show descends into sniping between the roasters, usually led by chief roaster Jimmy Carr, which begs the question why was Carr asked to host this show in the first place. A host should be the leader of the roast, not in among the throngs, uniting the roasters against their target. All that's left is occasional one-liners about Tarrant's divorce or Tiswas or Who Wants to be a Millionaire
As is my understanding, and I'm no TV producer here, a roast is meant to be full of original gags and not something a working mans club type comedian could pen whilst sat on the toilet reading the Daily Star.
To be honest, the stand out roasts come from people like James who actually has good anecdotes on Tarrant rather than just churning out endless divorce jokes and from Theakston who earnestly described him as an inspiration.
Even outstanding comedians like Sean Lock and Jack Dee get dragged down into a series of one-liners and barely average barbs about the shit gameshows Tarrant has hosted down the years, or into the mud-slinging between each other. Originality please roasters! The media do enough of this repetitive bollocks. The only comedians to come out of this show with any credit are Jack Whitehall who gave an eloquent, yet funny, roast and Mark Watson, who roasted Tarrant's appalling game shows properly. Interestingly, both of these are probably too young to remember Tarrant in his pomp.
Overall, a waste of what, across the pond at least, appears to be a very good format.
Dan
Thursday 1 April 2010
The Bubble- BBC1- Friday @ 9pm- 7 out of 10
Looking over the top 10 list of most viewed shows on BBC's iPlayer, becuase I'm back in Reading as this is being written and anything is better than being out in Reading on a Saturday night, one finds four comedy shows regarding current affairs and also four general comedy/panel quiz shows. Apparently, the market is not nearly yet saturated enough and must be bled drier than a virgin at a vampire orgy before moving on to the next erstwhile pure genre. The Bubble covers both current affairs and comedy and quiz/panel based comedy joining Mock the Week, Have I Got News For You and 8 out of 10 Cats to name but three also present in the crowded middle circle of that particular Venn Diagram.
Anywho, The Bubble's spin on the format is actually rather orginal. Take three comedians/newspaper columnists/ talking heads/ plant pots and put them in a house (the bubble) for a week prior to filiming with no contact with the outside world. No phones, no Internet, no TV, no newspapers, thus, the hope being, they cannot tell the difference between real news stories and ones made up by the production team. The aim is not only to provide laughs but to also utilise some unusual news stories from the week, in a less original spin on things.
Apart from the obvious human rights aspects of locking people away for days on end (dressing them in jumpsuits may or may not have been discussed at the first production meeting), the show works well. David Mitchell hosts, gaining experience of being in the hot seat of a panel show before fulfilling his inevitable destiny to replace Stephen Fry on QI once Fry gets bored of being universally loved and leaves. This puts the show in a safe pair of hands as Mitchell's quick wit and withering delivery will more often than not deliver.
Sat in what resembles a library from the year 2087 (at least to my limited and stunted imagination), Mitchell proceeds to give the contestants three news stories from different medias for each round, from which they choose the correct one that they believe is real, a task far harder than it actually sounds.
As with all panel/quiz shows the standard of guests will define the quality of the programme and whether it will make it through to "Stage Two" of television: recommission. Whilst the first show offered a glittering all-star cast of Frank Skinner, Victoria Coren and Reginald D. Hunter to play wit tennis with Mitchell. However, the show's description on the iPlayer website terrifyingly promises "wildcard bookings" as guests in the future. This could go one of two ways. Firstly, they get a 'character' on like ultra-cock Rod Liddle or that scary dancing man pillock thing from the "we-buy-any-car" advert. The other option being the complete opposite, a person so dull and beige that the seat they are sitting in offers a more dynamic, engaging personality.
Either way, a troubling conundrum for a promising, innovative take on an increasingly doomed genre.
Dan
Anywho, The Bubble's spin on the format is actually rather orginal. Take three comedians/newspaper columnists/ talking heads/ plant pots and put them in a house (the bubble) for a week prior to filiming with no contact with the outside world. No phones, no Internet, no TV, no newspapers, thus, the hope being, they cannot tell the difference between real news stories and ones made up by the production team. The aim is not only to provide laughs but to also utilise some unusual news stories from the week, in a less original spin on things.
Apart from the obvious human rights aspects of locking people away for days on end (dressing them in jumpsuits may or may not have been discussed at the first production meeting), the show works well. David Mitchell hosts, gaining experience of being in the hot seat of a panel show before fulfilling his inevitable destiny to replace Stephen Fry on QI once Fry gets bored of being universally loved and leaves. This puts the show in a safe pair of hands as Mitchell's quick wit and withering delivery will more often than not deliver.
Sat in what resembles a library from the year 2087 (at least to my limited and stunted imagination), Mitchell proceeds to give the contestants three news stories from different medias for each round, from which they choose the correct one that they believe is real, a task far harder than it actually sounds.
As with all panel/quiz shows the standard of guests will define the quality of the programme and whether it will make it through to "Stage Two" of television: recommission. Whilst the first show offered a glittering all-star cast of Frank Skinner, Victoria Coren and Reginald D. Hunter to play wit tennis with Mitchell. However, the show's description on the iPlayer website terrifyingly promises "wildcard bookings" as guests in the future. This could go one of two ways. Firstly, they get a 'character' on like ultra-cock Rod Liddle or that scary dancing man pillock thing from the "we-buy-any-car" advert. The other option being the complete opposite, a person so dull and beige that the seat they are sitting in offers a more dynamic, engaging personality.
Either way, a troubling conundrum for a promising, innovative take on an increasingly doomed genre.
Dan
Push The Button- ITV1- Saturday @ 7.25pm- 6 out of 10
Note the presenters, the time the show is on, it's opening sequence and it's advert. You don't need me to tell you what Push the Button is all about, but I'm going to do it anyway because that's how a review works ya see?
Push the Button works like this. There are two teams (usually families), some strange games and the target is to win money, kind of like Family Fortunes meets the Crystal Maze in a blender, with lots of studio lighting and perma-grinning thrown in for good measure. Basic premise is that the families are given £100,000 at the start and the challenges take a certain amount of time to complete. In this time, the amount of money you have dwindles. Less time you take, more money you get. You can also take money off the other other family, which adds a healthy Machiavellian streak, disappointingly missing on most cheerful TV shows.
The families appear to have to be Northern with a sense of fun. It is a complete surprise for them when Ant and Dec travel up to their town to say they are on their show it is quite heart-warming seeing people's reactions to see Ant and/or Dec, like having a Cup-a-Soup after a long walk in the cold or seeing a person you hated at school working at McDonalds.
What follows is a bit of meeting the families filler, with establishing shots showing just how much they want to win and how it will "change-their-lives". Shot in black and white, naturally because that makes it mean more and wants us to care.
Each person in the two teams have a specific 'skill' that doesn't seem to have any relevance at all to the way the show works. For example, one says his 'skill' is tanning. Another is 'waxing' leading me to believe there would be a salon round in which Ant and Dec are stripped naked and the two teams compete to see who can "back, crack and sack" one of them fastest. Ant would be harder because he's got a fatter arse but Dec is hairier, possibly.
Meanwhile, Ronnie Corbett does the voiceover for some reason unbeknown to mankind, like he was being held hostage by the producers for their own amusement.
Of course, Ant and Dec are always entertaining in a lowest common denominator way. It's cliched but you just can't resist their Geordie charm and faces that don't age, looking like they've walked off the set of Byker Grove in 1990, via the medieval torture device the Rack to stretch them a bit.
Ultimately, there's something for everyone. For the elitists, you can laugh at people who don't know where Saint Basil's Cathedral is, or indeed what it is. For everyone else that isn't a complete bastard, it's a fun, cheery, good-natured show that will entertain on a Saturday night.
Dan
Push the Button works like this. There are two teams (usually families), some strange games and the target is to win money, kind of like Family Fortunes meets the Crystal Maze in a blender, with lots of studio lighting and perma-grinning thrown in for good measure. Basic premise is that the families are given £100,000 at the start and the challenges take a certain amount of time to complete. In this time, the amount of money you have dwindles. Less time you take, more money you get. You can also take money off the other other family, which adds a healthy Machiavellian streak, disappointingly missing on most cheerful TV shows.
The families appear to have to be Northern with a sense of fun. It is a complete surprise for them when Ant and Dec travel up to their town to say they are on their show it is quite heart-warming seeing people's reactions to see Ant and/or Dec, like having a Cup-a-Soup after a long walk in the cold or seeing a person you hated at school working at McDonalds.
What follows is a bit of meeting the families filler, with establishing shots showing just how much they want to win and how it will "change-their-lives". Shot in black and white, naturally because that makes it mean more and wants us to care.
Each person in the two teams have a specific 'skill' that doesn't seem to have any relevance at all to the way the show works. For example, one says his 'skill' is tanning. Another is 'waxing' leading me to believe there would be a salon round in which Ant and Dec are stripped naked and the two teams compete to see who can "back, crack and sack" one of them fastest. Ant would be harder because he's got a fatter arse but Dec is hairier, possibly.
Meanwhile, Ronnie Corbett does the voiceover for some reason unbeknown to mankind, like he was being held hostage by the producers for their own amusement.
Of course, Ant and Dec are always entertaining in a lowest common denominator way. It's cliched but you just can't resist their Geordie charm and faces that don't age, looking like they've walked off the set of Byker Grove in 1990, via the medieval torture device the Rack to stretch them a bit.
Ultimately, there's something for everyone. For the elitists, you can laugh at people who don't know where Saint Basil's Cathedral is, or indeed what it is. For everyone else that isn't a complete bastard, it's a fun, cheery, good-natured show that will entertain on a Saturday night.
Dan
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