Wednesday, 23 November 2011

That’s Britain- BBC1 @ 8pm Wednesdays- 3 out of 10


At the risk of sounding like an advert for stereotyping Britishness, we Brits all love a good moan. That and not making eye contact. And hiding our prejudices under a veneer of awkward politeness. Just to clarify, the first thing I said is what ‘That’s Britain’ is all about.
Fronting the show are second coolest stubble wearer in the world Nick Knowles and Julia Bradbury (of whom I have nothing to say really) who proceed to participate in awkward banter and bonhomie about Tube drivers, dog poo, recycling and why Warwickshire County Council shouldn’t make huge towers out of gold sheets.
To start with something called The Wall of Anger is introduced, which is a bit strong but then again, the Wall of Mild Annoyance isn’t quite as grabbing. It’s basically like a Tweet Clod and allows Knowles to rant, well, like an amateur really. Queues at the petrol station are caused by “turning them into supermarkets”. True, but hardly enthralling ranting their Knowlesy. Hopefully Twitter can organise some sort of campaign whereby the biggest thing on the wall is ‘That’s Britain’ itself making a paradox of embarrassment.
It’s not the only name that’s misleading. The kind of things that are investigated or the cause of annoyance are the same anywhere in the world. It probably should be called “That’s the world” or something a whole lot more imaginative than that.
Elsewhere, there are four reporters who tackle an issue each week in their own ways.
This week, first up was call centre operator’s nightmare Grainne Seoige who kicked off with a political piece on junk mail which was interesting at some points but incredibly boring at others. Not even Seoige’s Irishness (usually a surefire way to this reviewer’s heart) could redeem the feature. Oh, and it was spliced with tonnes of vox pops as why get expert opinion when you can ask the average plank on the street for a monotone monosyllable answer?
Next up, we had Shaun Williamson who looked dreadfully angry whenever he was referred to as “Eastenders’ Shaun Williamson”, which is fair enough as he left eight years ago. At least refer to him as “Extras’ Shaun Williamson”. Williamson was basically asking a question no one really wants to know the answer to; should we get bus conductors back? It would be quite nice to have bus conductors back but it would also be nice to have a house with four bathrooms but, for financial reasons, it probably isn’t going to happen. To cap it all off, a poll was conducted asking whether you would pay 25p extra on your bus fare to get said conductors back. Unsurprisingly, in a hypothetical, people went for the option that made them look good. The Pullitzer Prize is in the post.
Third on the hit list we had usually entertaining Ade Edmundson do a piece on just where our luggage goes at the airport. The report’s content was about as interesting as reading the latest issue of “Beige Magazine” on a train from Slough to Milton Keynes which couldn’t even be livened up by Edmondson’s natural sense of fun. No wonder he looked to be in a rush to get the hell out of there at the end of his piece.
Finally, Stanley Johnson, father of Boris (boy could you tell that) did a hidden camera experiment with an old fella parking his car badly and asking for help which was to investigative as Boris himself is to speech making.
You’ll notice that my description of each of the reports is getting shorter and shorter and, to be quite honest, by this point I’d lost 99% of my interest and had started to watch the clock ticking toward 9 o’clock so I could turn over and watch some Nick Robinson talking about taxation which might well tell its own story.
Interspersed with all these reports were more opportunities for Knowles to rant badly, for Bradbury to make an occasional decent quip and for Williamson to shout out nonsense from the sofa on the stage. It all felt like a really bad episode of Watchdog meets every single episode of The One Show bundled up with a lovely feeling of the BBC reaching out an olive branch to the Daily Mail with tales of local council spending and ridiculous health and safety stories
It’s not that it’s not very good, it’s just really, really, REALLY boring. If you want to make a show about current affairs, you would hire journalists to make the reports. If you want to make an entertainment show about issues, you hire well known faces to make films. ‘That’s Britain’ can’t seem to decide what it wants to be and ends up being neither. Which makes it not very good as well as boring come to think of it. And that’s what’s annoying me ‘That’s Britain’.

1 comment:

  1. If the Wall of anger shows the top/most popular 2 word email subject lines it shouldnt be too hard to organise "Crap Telly" or "BBC Tosh" showing on it next week, lets have a twitter campaign to get those mails sent next week!

    Even Ricky Gervais uses Shaun Williamson as a parody of himself, yet he then ends up on this!

    @Steven_Osborne

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