Do you know what's cracking good fun? Laughing at other people and TV show creators just know it.
Many modern entertainment programmes are based exactly on that premise, making us all feel better about ourselves as we sit watching TV every night getting slowly older, balder and full of aches which must be nothing...not worth bothering the doctor about surely.
The Only Way Is Essex? Ha, they lack primary school level syntax. Deal Or No Deal? Chortle, some people think chanting will change what they will find in a box. The Jeremy Kyle Show? Well, you get the picture.
Laughing at social groups or 'show title first, show format second'. That's the secret to TV success. I know the rules, but just don't want to exploit them to my own ends...
Amazing Greys (ho, ho) fits both of those categories - a pun title and the mild titillating thrill that you'll get to laugh at a segment of the social strata - this time the older generation.
The premise of the show is a strapping young person, cocksure and fancy-free, strides on to Ant and Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway stage (decorated slightly differently) to take on a series of challenges where he or she will take on a person who experienced food rationing, the Suez Crisis and men always wearing great hats.
Said young person is seemingly encouraged to make a series of thrusting pronouncements the jist of which he will beat someone who has 50 years on him/her at any game - making them look less confident and more of a bullying 'banter-saurus'.
The show sets you up to think the young person will sweep all before them and take home £10,000. I mean, look at the opposition. Take a good, long look at them. They're old! They like slippers and read the Daily Express and wear fantastically ironed trousers.
But, wait, hold the phone, all is not as it would seem. This older generation are all experts in their fields (like a 1940s-born version of Eggheads but far less annoying). They make amusing cracks and jokes. Some of them aren't even grey!
And lo! More often than not they wipe the floor with their opponents and it is wonderfully life-affirming.
Not the fact older people are showing off mad skillz, bur rather arrogant Take Me Out-standard knobheads usually getting their comeuppance handed to them from someone three times their age.
They even get the chance to be given a 'headstart' in one of the games and get gimme questions about Katy Perry or TOWIE and still they fail.
Ha ha, screw you young people with your sexual promiscuity and your haircuts and your Daily Star and your skinny jeans - you got beaten by people with decades of experience in their field, a field you presumably have very little experience in. Ha ha! Oh.
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