When Dragondude Met Gordon Ramsey

Last weekend, I had the pleasure of having Gordon Ramsey over to my flat as part of my new TV series, ‘Making You Look Like A Cunt Because You Don‘t Know How To Do Something That I Know How To Do‘. He is already well known as a celebrity chef, but could he cut the fucking mustard as a fucking DJ?

His first mistake was turning up exactly on time at my flat as arranged at ten o’clock. He banged on my flat door for more than twenty minutes, before finally rousing me from my dopey torpor on the sofa by kicking it off its hinges. I awoke to find him standing bare-chested over me, angling his middle-aged body underneath the bare light bulb, which was casting a moody shadow across his paunch.

‘What the fuck do you think you are doing?”, I demanded. My mind was still not clear and this allowed me to deliver a stream of poorly constructed swearwords loosely based on a number of cue cards that an assistant was holding up for me just out of sight of the TV cameras. ‘You will never fucking make it as a DJ if you shitting turn up promptly you fucking cock-turd. You are like a pissing wank-sock-pant-pissing Sunday school ma’am, not a show stopping International DJ Gigolo’. Before he could respond I sent him immediately to the kitchen to make us both a pint of gin and tonic and busied myself with turning on the sound system in my living room. Thankfully, his skills in the kitchen paid dividends and he returned with two of the finest G&Ts I had ever seen. I gulped greedily at mine and gestured that he make his way to the turntables.

I explained that I wanted to hear him play what he thought was good music and play it in an interesting way. I asked him to imagine that he was playing at Pacha in Ibiza, that it was three in the morning, and that he had a packed club of 6,000 gurning clubbers hanging on his every move. Ramsey dithered with his hands hovering over the 350-odd 12″ records in front of the decks. I could see already that he was completely out of his depth. I let him take his time slurping thirstily on my gin, waiting until he had made his selection.

When he was ready he turned and grinned idiotically at me, whilst looking expectantly at the decks. I winced as he placed the first platter on the deck as if he were placing a new tile on a bathroom floor. By the time he had put on the headphones (back to front) and got the second record ready I was losing the will to live. He stabbed wildly and impotently at all the controls on both the mixer and the turntables, often sending the needle skidding angrily across the vinyl. He had no idea what he was doing – the amateur. The sound coming from my speakers sounded like two joyriders with their stereos on, repeatedly smashing stolen Renault Clios into each other in a fairground car park.

I got up, slowly drained the remainder of my drink, and walked over to where he was grunting over the turntables. I could take no more. Drawing myself up to my full height I knocked the headphones off his head and shoved him against the wall. ‘What the fuck are you trying to do?’, I screamed at him.’Remember when I said that you should imagine that you are in a nightclub in Ibiza? This sounds more like reveille in Guantanamo Bay! If this is what you want to listen to when you have a good time then I fucking feel sorry for your fucking wife when you are trying to fuck her.’. He gestured limply at the records and the mixer. ‘SPEAK THEN!’ I howled, my face inches from his. ‘The records…’, he started to mumble, still waving his limp hand over the controls before trailing off into inaudible misery. ‘The records?’, I hissed, ‘THE RECORDS? If what happens when you cook is the same as what happens when you try to entertain a room full of clubbers I am surprised that you have not been bankrupted and beaten soundly by gangs of vomiting restaurant customers!’.

(Continues in this vein for several pages…)

Right, Then.

I thought long and hard about whether I should post anything on the subject of “Big Brother” on here or not. After all, it will be all over every other forum on the internet, and you can avail yourself of the completely fantastic Big Bruvva Boleslaw blog should your needs not be being met elsewhere. In the end, though, I came to the only rational conclusion that I could come to. Like it or not, “Big Brother” is the big television event of the summer, and it would be frankly remiss of me to ignore it completely.

I’m more than happy to admit that I am quite thrilled by the idea of “Big Brother”. It strikes me that the format is the modern equivalent of the Victorian freak show. You wheel the contestants in and we, the public, stare through the windows at them and laugh at them. In an ideal world, it would be a little bit like national service. Everybody in the country on the voters role would be entered into a giant lottery, and twelve people would be removed from their normal lives and placed into this zoo for our amusement. Sadly, some human rights groups migh be somewhat averse to this, so we’re stuck with the format that we have, and it’s one that filters out the 99.8% most interesting potential inmates – people that really, really would not want to go into the “Big Brother” house – and left with the other 0.02%.

With each passing year, the people going into the house have become less and less like the rest of us and, consequentially, the programme has suffered. Perhaps it’s merely the law of diminishing returns at work. Perhaps the gene pool is merely smaller than we thought it was. For all I know, the thirteen people in there now are the only applicants this year, and that’s why twelve of them are women. This year’s decision to start with twelve women whilst (obviously) not telling anyone what’s going to happen means that this year’s series starts from a unique position. This year, “Big Brother” is the star. We may well end up less interested in what any of the contestants have to say than we are in the way that the overall game show (which, lest we forget, is ultimately what it is) is going to unfold before our very eyes. One could almost be forgiven for the farces of the last couple of series, which have seen contestants more or less have nervous breakdowns live on air. But more on that shortly.

The problem with this, though, is what has made “Big Brother” (for me, at least) nominally less and less interesting with each passing series – the gimmicks. Everybody else, of course, loves them, but I don’t. I’d like to see twelve people in a room, getting to know each other, and one of them getting voted out by the public every week. The daily tasks bore me rigid – I don’t want to see somebody that isn’t funny (and, upon hearing the task given to them, realising that they’re not half as funny as they thought they were) having to do two minutes of stand-up comedy on a hastily-constructed wooden stage, or dressing up like an extra from a seaside revue version of “Boogie Nights”. If booze makes them more interesting and more likely to have a fight, just give them booze every day! It’s not that complicated. There is no question that there will not be only one man in “Big Brother” in a few weeks. “Twists & turns” mean more phone votes, and that (possibly because Four has halved the cost of voting this year) is very important.

It’s worth remembering how close to the wind Endemol sailed with the “Celebrity Big Brother” farce in January. Is it is, Jade Goody’s career is more or less over (no matter how much she blubs in interviews), Danielle Lloyd will be remembered as a celebrity racist rather than as a Lidl version of Kelly Brook and Jo O’Meara won’t be getting any live work outside Burnley and certain corners of the East End. “Big Brother” and “Celebrity Big Brother” are, by a country mile, Channel Four’s biggest cash cows, and they were pretty close to being taken off the air by Ofcom, and Ofcom are almost unbelievably toothless compared to their predecessor, the ITC and the IBA. If either of them had been in charge earlier this year, Channel Four’s entire licence would have been stripped from them. Endemol will be very, very aware that they are being scrutinized in a way that no TV production company has ever been before, yet they still have to ensure decent viewing figures for Four. It’s a very difficult tightrope to walk, and I am at least looking forward to seeing how they deal with that particular little conundrum.

I won’t be posting very regularly on the subject, still less on the contestants themselves. You’ve got G&KBBB for that. However, in a summer schedule that is desperately short on anything like entertainment, I will be tuning in regularly. After all, there aren’t many TV shows that sum up the zeitgeist better than “Big Brother”. I fully expect steam to be coming out of my ears within two or three weeks, though. Somehow, it wouldn’t be the same if I didn’t get angry about it at some point.

And The Point Of This Is…?

Normally, dear reader(s), I embellish these posts with a little picture to keep you all entertained, but tonight’s little rant is, I rather feel, not worthy of a picture. You see, in the multi-channel digital landscape of the future, there is a lot of utter, utter crap on the television, but one of the advantages of being able to choose from dozens and dozens of channels is that you soon learn which ones to avoid. Take, for example, the humble Freeview channels. It’s pretty safe to say that, most of the time, there will be something worth watching on one of the following: BBC2, Channel 4, BBC4 or E4. Now, I’m not saying that there will be something worth watching on all of them, more that one of them will have something that you can sit in front of and allow your eyes to glaze over. Near the bottom of the list are ITV1, ITV2 and ITV4, along with Sky 3, ABC1, FTN and The Hits. Pretty near the bottom though, for me at least, is BBC3.

I have had very long and tedious conversations about what the exact point of BBC3 is. Is it a channel for the BBC to hide all the utter rubbish that they’re too ashamed to show elsewhere? Doubtful, because they could just cut their corners and not bother making it in the first place. Is it their idea of what “yoof” wants? I do hope not because, if it is, they’re as hopelessly out of date as the BBC Light Service was when every single person in the whole of the UK was listening to Radio London and Radio Caroline in about 1966. First you have to filter through the endless “Doctor Who” and “Eastenders” (not episodes from years ago that you might fancy seeing again for old times’ sake, but the ones that were on a couple of days previously). Then, you have to work your way through their painfully unfunny new comedy schedule, which largely features sitcoms and sketch shows that are so unfunny that they can’t even be shown on BBC1 and BBC2, where the likes of “The Catherine Tate Show” and “Coupling” are considered hits, and, even after that, there’s a heap of dreadful documentary-lite programmes like “Dog Borstal” and “Honey We’re Killing The Kids” – programmes so wretched and lightweight that one gets the impression that if you pushed your hand against the television screen while they were one, it would just tear like a paper bag.

I’ve been working a late shift this week, which offers me the rare opportunity to sit up until all hours drinking the booze and pontificating, and last night I was channel surfing at about midnight, and came across two episodes of “Family Guy”. Now, “Family Guy”, I love. It’s a beautifully dysfunctional version of “The Simpsons”, which leaves out the latter’s occasional mawkishness and heads straight for the jugular. I’ve got every episode of it and the film on DVD but, when the alternatives on the television are “Late Night Poker”, a repeat of a documentary about kids’ TV on BBC4 that I had watched merely three hours previously and “The Mint” (personally, I have no objection to ITV ripping people off on their premium rate telephone lines – if you’re so imbecilic that you phone them, you deserve a £600 phone bill), this was manna from heaven. The two episodes flashed by rather quicker than I would have liked (of course, half an hour’s television on American TV amounts to about 20 minutes’ worth on the advert-free BBC, and left the television playing away in the background while I got on with some other pieces, and next up on BBC3 was a double-bill of “Two Pints Of Lager & A Packet Of Crisps”, so I kind of half watched it and, by Christ, I’ve never seen anything quite so awful in my entire life.

Now, “The Sitcom Guide” describes “Two Pints…” as “a very British sitcom set around the working classes which contains more cutting edge humour”, and even dares to describe it as a British equivalent of “Friends”. I would like to disagree with this comment, and add that “Two Pints…” is about as funny as Hepatitis B, with heavy-handed writers, at least one character who is so one-dimensional that she would almost certainly disappear if she turned sideways, and has such heavy-handed writing that one suspects that one day, the entire cast will merely strip naked and run around in circles for half an hour. It’s problem isn’t the actors involved. As “The Royle Family” confirmed, Ralf Little can be a fine comedy actor if he’s given decent material to work with, and I’m prepared to even concede that Will Mellor and Natalie Casey did a reasonable job of impersonating real human beings in “Hollyoaks”, but the material here that they have (on the off-chance that you haven’t seen it, it’s basically thirty minutes of crudity about sex and booze, but not done in a way that makes you do anything but wrinkle your forehead and wonder why anyone is bothering) is so poor that they don’t even sound as if they’re acting. They merely sound is if they’re reading lines off an auto-cue. It’s been said before that no-one speaks in the one at a time way that people do in sitcoms, but the heavy-handedness on display here simply gives them no room for any sort of manoeuvre whatsoever. It makes something like “Man About The House” (the basic premise of which is rather simply) look like Brecht. At the end of it, I tried to sum up my feelings towards it, and the only thing I could manage was (bearing in mind that it is set in Runcorn, in Cheshire) “the Northerners that I’ve meant aren’t much of a bunch of cocks as that lot”.

There’s a part of me that would very much like BBC3 to be taken off the air, and it’s space in the digital firmament to be given over to something more worthwhile, like a twenty-four hour streaming paint drying channel (“…and tonight on BBC Paint 24, Magnolia.”), but the fact that six series (a jaw-dropping 56 episodes) of crap like this have been commissioned by, well, someone, lead me to believe that if it wasn’t tucked away here, where I know where it is, and where I can ignore it, it would sneak it’s way onto BBC2 or BBC4, displacing something infinitely more worthwhile, and that would be the only thing worse than sitting through an hour of this unremittingly tedious, bollock and tit obsessed, shite.

Five Random Pieces Of TV Music (Part 2)

Following on from the roaring success of the last little sets of TV music curios, I rather thought that it was about time for another five. There is high excitement coming up in televisual terms next week, when “Big Brother” returns to the airwaves, but this time of the year is a pretty quiet one on the box, so apologies for this place not having been updated as regularly as it should have been . I have every intention of offering up a complete guide to the ITV regions (do try and stay awake at the back), but this is still a work in progress, so for now, more music.  There was a golden age of British television, that we’ll never see again. Considerable amounts of work went into every single aspect of broadcasting (even the bosses of ITV would no sooner have considered broadcasting “The Mint” than they would have considered a twelve week long series in which an old age pensioner has sex with as many farm animals in order to establish which is the best), and this afternoon’s five come from that period, on both sides of the Atlantic.

1. “Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads?” (BBC) -  We occasionally forget that, amongst the turgid sitcoms that were churned out in this country in the 1970s there were a few gems, and none shone more brightly than “Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads?”. I will more write a more fulsome tribute to it at a later date, but for now here’s the theme tune to it – written, somewhat curiously, by Mike Hugg, formerly the drummer in 60s Dylan-coverers Manfred Mann.

2. “Weekend World” (LWT) – On of the few hangovers from the era when television stations still had some sort of public service obligation in the Sunday lunchtime political slot. ITV new boys London Weekend were the kings of this slot, producing “Weekend World” for two decades. Hosted at first by Peter Jay and then the impersonators’ favourite Brian Walden, it grilled the politicians of the day in a manner that puts most political debate on the television now to shame. The theme, curiously and brilliantly, was “Nantucket Sleighride”, by Mountain. Rocking.

3.  “World In Action” (Granada) – If ever you needed a stark contrast between the quality of ITV twenty years ago and now, you won’t get much better than the difference between “World In Action” and “This Week”. Whereas “This Week” is basically the Daily Mail on your television screens, “World In Action” was so heavyweight that it made “Panorama” look like “It’s A Knockout”. A great, mournful, organtastic theme tune, too.

4. “It’s A Knockout” (BBC) – There’s a blog post to be written on this subject too, really, isn’t there? Man, what a programme. Along with “Jeux Sans Frontieres” (the official Eurovision game show, no less), this programme is near the top of my list marked “TV Programmes That Should Never, Never Have Been Taken Off The Air”. The theme tune is by the magnificently parpsome Herb Alpert.

5.  Tales Of The Unexpected (Anglia) - Of all the things that best sum up “Tales Of The Unexpected”, my favourite is the opening titles. There are plenty of people that would watch just the opening titles to this, turn over for twenty-five minutes and switch back at the end. I have no idea how many people’s first sexual awakening was to the woman dancing behind a silk sheet at the start of it, but I wouldn’t mind betting that it runs into thousands.

Forecasting The End Of The World – Part Two

There are plenty of people that would say that there is too much paranoia on the television these days. Well, there certainly is a lot of paranoia. The BBC’s “If…” series proposed a number of mild mannered dystopian versions of the future, whilst the series “The Trap” and “The Power Of Nightmares” by Adam Curtis hinted darkly that problems relating to personal freedom and religious fundamentalism are the tip of the iceberg, compared to what we could have to look forward to. The truth of the matter is that television has always done this, from “Quatermass” (one of the first successful science fiction series) through to the present day and, if anything, the current crop are less apocalyptic than were produced in the 1970s and 1980s. In those days, the end of the world meant the end of the world, and one of the most apocalyptic series of them all was the BBC’s “Survivors”.

“Survivors” was the brainchild of Terry Nation, the creator of the Daleks. It first aired in 1975, and painted a grim future for Britain, as a sudden pandemic sweeps Britain, killing all bar a few thousand people. As society rapidly collapses around the ears of the survivors, they have to do the best that they can to continue surviving with the odds stacked against them. The programme’s key success was in its foreboding, oppressive atmosphere. The main characters escape to the countryside for their own safety, and the first series is punctuated with lengthy and eerie silences, and the you can feel the dirt accumulating under the fingernails of the main characters as they get used to a life without regular running water. They start out effectively as scavengers, breaking into stores to loot food and other essentials, but it becomes apparent to them, as time passes, that this way of living will only last them so long, and eventually they start to build their own community. As times passes, they start to learn to live with the problems that rebuilding a society can bring.

There is one major criticism that we can level at “Survivors”, and that is to say that it could well be considered a little, well, “Daily Mail” in its attitude. It’s quite clear from the start that the main characters are, by and large middle-class and, as some people might put it, “from a good home”. It’s clear that from the start that they are “right”, and the people that are less well off, including a Welsh tramp, a psychotic football supporter (played by Brian Blessed) and, for the want of a better word, a simpleton, are “bad”. The tramp, Tom, kills a woman by accident in the process of molesting her. The dividing line between who’s right and who’s wrong is occasionally too simplistically drawn, and far too clearly drawn on class lines.

Having said that, “Survivors” is still a very good watch, written with a deftness by Terry Nation that becomes all the more noticeable after he left before the start of the third series. There is a sharp deterioration in the quality of the writing afterwards. It left its influence, too. ITV returned to the theme with their nearly-identical series “The Last Train” (with added technology and an absolutely ludicrous ending) in 1997, and there are more than a few echoes of it in the film “28 Days Later” – the theme of escaping the city in a time of crisis possibly linking into some subconscious war issues that we still have. If you can overlook the strangely 1970s feel of it all (there were plenty of people at that time who predicted all out class war – see also “The Fall & Rise Of Reginald Perrin” or “Doomwatch”, for example), it’s a pretty absorbing way to pass the time.

Freak Show

We like to think that we are somehow better than previous generations, don’t we? With our internet, our mobile phones and our hi-tech games consoles, it’s easy to fall into the trap of believing that we are somehow smarter and better evolved than previous generations. We’re fooling ourselves, of course. We’ve got more in common with our ancestors than we would ever like to admit. Everybody knows the story of John Merrick, “The Elephant Man”. Born with a crippling disease, he was paraded around for the entertainment of Victorian society in a freak show, where people could gawp at his hideousness and thank God almighty that they had been fortunate enough to not be born like that. The concept of the freak show still exists today, but it has to market itself as something quite different in order to be socially acceptable (I’m thinking of such carnivals as The Jim Rose Circus here), but the concept of the it has also entered the realms of mass entertainment. Television, which used to be a window on the world, seems to be stuck in a rut, of late. The prurience of the tabloid newspapers has been transferred lock, stock and barrel onto the box in the corner of your room, and at least two or three times a week you can see programming that openly invites us to laugh at the freaks.

This week’s Freak Du Jour was James, a 26 year old man who had been a late developer (his speech had been so late in developing that his parents had believed that he was mentally ill) and suffered considerable bullying at school. As a result of this, he had reached his mid-twenties without having had any contact with women whatsoever. He was determined to do something about this, so he registered with “Aquarion”, a “school for love and leadership” based in Amsterdam which employs sex therapists to coach the likes of James out of their shells. It could have been an interesting examination of someone that had chosen, in this sex-soaked age, to withdraw from something that has gone beyond being a rite of passage into being something approaching a human right but, this being Channel Four, the director wanted us to snigger at him. There was a veil of seriousness over the programme, but it was a veil made of the same sort of material as an Ann Summers negligee. The voice-over was appropriately hushed, and the programme nodded occasionally at what should have been the really interesting aspect of the subject, but all they were really interested in was watching a 26 year old man have sex with a 50 year old woman. There were brief interviews with the subject himself, and he hinted at being open enough to discuss what he felt were the motives behind what made him the way that he was but, ultimately, it was all about a woman with white hair taking her knickers off, and him looking at what lay beneath as if someone had just put a baby alien down in front of him – which, in one way, they had.

When interviewed, the therapists were sensitive and professional about the motives and beliefs that lay behind what they did. James himself was a surprisingly articulate about himself, when he was allowed more than ten seconds in which speak in any one go. He didn’t address the issue of why he chose to wear boxers and underpants, for example. The symbolism of this was almost overbearing. Was he trying to make himself a chastity belt? No-one bothered to ask. Why bother, when you could watch him masturbating in front of a woman for the first time? It wasn’t until the closing credits of the programme, with more or less its last statement, that the programme got to the heart of the issue. James had been delighted with his first sexual experience, but upon his return to England had decided that he needed to look for love rather than for sex. Why did it take fifty-eight minutes for this to even be addressed? The subject of love hadn’t even been mentioned before, as if it hadn’t even occurred to the producers of the programme that the entire reason that James had given up his privacy wasn’t that he had come to the conclusion that he was desperate to get his end away, rather that he was desperate for emotional intimacy. It would certainly answer the question of what motivated him to go to such lengths in the first place.

Anyway, kudos to James for doing it and coming across with such sensitivity, good humour and self-awareness about his circumstances, and good luck to him. He clearly had “issues”, but ended the programme at the beginning of a far more interesting adventure – a quest to find love. Something meaningful. Channel Four, though, should perhaps have a go at thinking more laterally when they make this sort of programme. I know that Four is more about ratings than, arguably, any other channel (they’re like a lion chasing a wounded gazelle in their pursuit of ITV1 at the moment), so this is probably a fruitless request, but it would be nice to see a bit more documentary on the television that wasn’t like a Victorian freak show, and a little more that actually got under the surface of the subject that it was pretending to cover. I’m not especially optimistic about this, when they have the easier option of making “Me And My Three Tits”, though.

Teenage Kicks

You know, being a teenager is such a long time ago for me that I’ve almost completely forgotten how it feels. Sometimes, it helps to recall those days, and short of hanging around outside Churchill Square shopping mall with a skateboard, television is as good a way to recall it as any. Television and cinema has long been fascinated with these strange, other-worldly beasts for as long as they’ve walked the earth, and the fascination continues to this day. On British television, teenagers are portrayed as being beyond merely being self-centred, to the point to being self destructive. Channel Four “dramas” on the subject range from the risible (the cliched lesbian coming-of-age “Sugar Rush”) to the execrable (“As If”, a show in which the main characters were so vile that they gve up on even on being vile to each other and started being vile to themselves), but Britain doesn’t really do this sort of thing very well. You know, when America was giving the world Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry, the best that we could do was Cliff Richard and Joe Brown, and so it is with Yoof TV. British culture is at its worst when it merely imitates American culture. It comes out as something like a faded facsimile.

In the 1960s and 1970s, it was pretty straightforward stuff. Anyone under the age of about twenty-five was a “wacky kid”, who had saccharine adventures, with a heart-warming end. In the 1980s, though, kids started to get “attitude”. They got “wise”. They started to take “Days Off”, wear mirrored shades and high schools went from being a little bit like holiday camps to being, in time, somewhere a little bit darker. The jocks became less like people that we should aspire to be and more like people that we should dislike. A change the perception of these groups was starting to become apparent – for once, American culture was learning to love the underdog. In “Heathers”, Winona Ryder sought revenge upon the bullies that had been ruining her life. In the peculiar little film “Pump Up The Volume”, a young Christian Slater confronted his demons through the medium of becoming a proto-shock-jock. Hollywood leads television in these cultural changes, of course, and at the start of the 1990s, by which time I was exiting my teenage years, the majority of American teenage TV was still stuck in an era in which teenage angst was limited to getting the beach in time to partay (no, that’s not a typo) and playing hilarious jokes on the nerds. Something, however was slowly changing. “The Wonder Years” attempted it (albeit with the considerable comfort blanket of nostalgia) from time to time, and shows like “Saved By The Bell” and “The Fresh Prince Of Bel Air” were looking tired and dated.

The kids, however, were not alright. They were listening to Nirvana and Pearl Jam, and ABC Television in America, possibly by accident, possibly having spotted this shift in youth culture, commissioned “My So-Called Life”, starring Clare Danes and Jared Leto. In one of those bizarre decisions that American programme schedulers make with alarming regularity, though, ABC scheduled it to run against the hit sitcoms “Friends” and “Mad About You”. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it flopped, and this, combined with Clare Danes’ request to leave the show, meant that it only managed the one series. Despite this, it maintained a reputation as having been a superior quality show (for this particular genre) and had a run in the six o’clock spot on Channel Four. It was released on DVD in the USA in 2002, and is set to be re-issued there later this year. It went on sale in this country, coincidentally, yesterday.

It’s difficult to tell how much of “My So-Called Life” was cliche at the time, and how much of it has subsequently become cliche. Certainly, it feels (for the want of a better phrase) “Generation X”. The colours have a washed out look about them. The series opens with a shot of a high school corridor that makes it look like a zoo. Danes’ character, Angela, dies her hair with henna at the start of the first episode (which also covers under-age drinking, sneaking out to go to a club, sexual assault a psychotic  ex-best friend). The object of her affections, I suspect, is meant to come across as mean, moody and deep, but merely comes across as being monosyllabic and dense. None of this is helped by Jared Leto’s rent-a-hunk looks. The geek, Brian Krakow, has Albert Einstein hair and no social skills (you lose any sympathy for his character within about five minutes of the start of the second episode). By episode three… a gun has been found in the school! High excitement indeed. It has maintained its popularity – twelve years after the last episode was broadcast, there are still tribute message boards to it – and, you know, it’s not bad, with occasional moments of wit and charm.

I am rather of the opinion that American high school culture is a massively damaging environment, and nothing that I ever see of it on the television ever changes that opinion. Teenagers are still misunderstood, until they grow out of it. Parents think that they understand their children, but they don’t. It’s one of the ever decreasing circles of life. The only other thing I know for certain is that every time I happen to catch a show of this sort, I feel considerably older than the last time I did.

The 100 Greatest Clips Shows

I don’t know if any of you caught Simon Pegg and Nick Frost’s Ideal Night In (or whatever the hell it was called), but… my word. What a complete dog’s breakfast of a television show it was. I had been largely unaware of it being on, but we were struggling to fully understand what was going on with the DVD of “Soylent Green” that we were watching (though, yes, of course I know how it all finishes up), so it seemed worth flicking over to watch it. After an unfeasibly rough weekend (thank you very much, “El Bandido Negro” tequila), I needed the televisual equivalent of milk pudding, and Channel Four is often very good for that sort of thing on a Sunday night. However, by assuming a completely scattergun approach towards their televisual highlights, they gave the impression of acting up to the cameras and fulfilling some sort of Channel Four-appointed role of being Britain’s equivalent of “Generation X”. Except, of course, I’d be highly surprised if Pegg, at least, isn’t a millionaire. They seemed to be throwing around as many “cult” shows as Channel Four had the rights to show, so in amongst some genuine gems (Pegg is clearly very genuinely a fan of “Monkey”, for example), came some very jarringly scripted sections. Neither host strikes me as being in the slightest bit interested, for example, in football, but they still took five minutes out to discuss David Beckham’s free-kick for England against Greece at Old Trafford in 2001. Could this have been, per chance, because Four had managed to snaffle an interview with Beckham, rather than because it was Pegg and Frost’s favourite sporting moment? Such segments gave the whole programme the impression of being staged. To be honest, there were times when the hosts looked as uncomfortable with the concept as I felt watching it.

The BBC has fallen slightly out of love with the concept of the clips show, but Channel Four in love with it, and the reasons for this are obvious. Primarily, it’s a cheap medium. You can get access to the archives for a few quid, bung a small cheque at a few celebrities, and bingo! You’ve got anything up to four hours’ worth of entertainment, and people will watch it. More importantly still, it is what advertising ponces describe as “water cooler television”. In other words, it’s the sort of thing that people talk about the next day. Finally, it’s a pretty decent vehicle for a channel like Four, which spends considerable amounts of money signing up “new talent”, to show off their (occasionally dubious) talents. After he won the Perrier Award, Jimmy Carr was picked up by Channel Four on a big contract, but they’ve struggled to find a use for him since. His own programmes, for example “Eight Out Of Ten Cats”, have been patchy, and he has been thrown at these things by Four. They don’t have to pay him much extra to do it, and his face gets the exposure that Four needs it to get. The result of all of this is a glut of these programmes, but, while some of them do betray a degree of quality control (one of the first, “The 100 Greatest Kids Shows”, was well-researched and contained some excellent archive footage), the majority now simply look like filler material for people that have such a short attention span that they can’t even be bothered to watch whole programmes any more.

Ironically, there is almost certainly a place in the multi-channel era for a channel that shows nothing but repeats. Now, I know that such places kind of already exis, but the likes of UK Gold simply throw in too much crap. Why not have a channel which shows only repeats, but of the great shows? Should such a thing come to pass, BBC5 should take advantage of the BBC’s massive archive, and celebrate its history unashamedly. ITV should do the same – is it really cheaper for them to throw together some of the crap that they show than it would be to show, say, some of the brilliant programmes that Euston Films (the drama arm of Thames TV) or the “Survival” shows that pushed “Life On Earth” all the way in the 1970s and 1980s? Well, you never know.

Forecasting The End Of The World – Part One

I am, above anything else, a child of the Cold War, and my collection of all things apocalyptic has made some visitors to my flat a little bit queasy. Each film or television drama on the subject has, in its own way etched itself into the national conciousness. By their very nature they are all horrifying, and they always garner acres of coverage in the media – none more so, it has to be said, than Peter Watkins’ “The War Game”, which was made in 1965, but not shown by the BBC for twenty years.

It is, perhaps, unsurprising that such a project had not been undertaken by the BBC before. Such a project had been put forward by them once before, in 1954, but it was personally vetoed by Winston Churchill. By the early 1960s, though, times were changing and Peter Watkins was picked up by the BBC’s Head Of Drama, Huw Wheldon. His play “Culloden” was a massive critical success, which persuaded Wheldon to allow to fulfil his ambition of making a film about the effects of a nuclear attack on Britain. Wheldon referred the idea to his superiors, and they, in turn referred it to the Home Office.

The film itself was produced in a revolutionary mockumentary format, following various characters in the build up to an atomic bomb being dropped near Rochester in Kent, followed by the effects of the explosion itself and the aftermath, including the imposition of martial law as society itself started to crumble. It is brilliantly conceived and executed. Vox pops with politicians and senior military figures (featuring actors relaying actual quotes from these figures) jar with what you’re seeing on screen, while scientists dispassionately describe the effects of radiation and interviews with the public show an unsurprising lack of knowledge about the bombs under whose shadows they lived. The build up to the attack shows just how ill-prepared this country was. The evacuation plans betrayed the fact that most people believed that nuclear attack would be little worse than the Blitz (something which would, of course, have been in the living memory of many people living in the early 1960s), whilst civil defence consisted of handing out a few pamphlets and leaving people to get on with it. Possibly to save on special effects, or possibly to reduce the sheer depth of horror on show, the actual explosion itself takes place some distance from where the play is set. The effects are obvious, though, and the special effects and make up (especially considering what must have been a very tight budget) are magnificent. Several of the corpses on display look as they’ve been thoroughly barbecued.

When the programme was completed, the BBC panicked a bit. Watkins himself had already quit over the attempts at tampering from the government and the corporation’s senior executives and, upon viewing it, the BBC themselves decided that it was simply too horrifying to show on the television. While it didn’t get a television broadcast (the scheduled broadcast date was the 8th of August, 1966), it did get shown extensively at art house and independent cinemas, and was adopted by CND as something of a cause celebre. The critic Kenneth Tynan described it as “the most important film ever made”, and the BBC’s embarrassment was complete when it won the Oscar for Best Documentary at The 1967 Academy Awards. It was finally broadcast in 1985, as part of the BBC’s “After The Bomb” series, commemorating forty years of the existence of the bomb. Ironically, the first programme detailing a nuclear attack was the American-made “The Day After”, shown on the BBC two years earlier.

Where “The Day After” (more on which at a later  point) was approaching Hollywood gloss in its production, “The War Game” succeeds because of its earthy, gritty style. “Threads”, produced in 1984, was more gruesome than it yet, but it is the very matter-of-factness of “The War Game” that makes this a piece of genuine “must watch” television. You can see it on YouTube.

Five Random Pieces Of TV Music

People that have read my other blog or, way back when, listened to my occasional podcasts will be more than aware of my geekiness when it comes to TV theme tunes. I could waste a couple of hundred words trying to justify or explain it, but I’m pretty certain that there’s no way that this could be done, so let’s just get on with the first instalment of an occasional series, which basically consists of me uploading random bits of television music for your delectation. Over time, you’ll be able to build a library of MP3s of TV theme tunes which you can use as ring tones, scare off birds or amaze and impress your friends. Obviously you’ll have to have pretty impressionable friends to achieve the latter of these three options, but I have faith in you. So, on with the show!

“Crossroads” Theme – Tony Hatch Orchestra: Oh, such memories. I’ll come back to “Crossroads” in some detail at a later point, but it’s certainly fair to say that one of the genuinely high quality moments within ATV’s long-running soap opera was this piece of theme music.

“Miami Vice” Theme – Jan Hammer – Roll up the sleeves on your jacket and learn to love pastel colours. This programme was the last word in cool in the mid-1980s and, obviously, I learnt more about fashion from this that I have from any other show before or since. To be honest, I didn’t learn much about crime-fighting from it, though.

“Mr Noseybonk” – This monstrosity will only really mean much to you if you’re British and between the age of about 25 and 35. Mr Noseybonk was a hideous, nightmare-inducing character who appeared in the BBC kids’ series “Jigsaw” in the early 1980s. He got into “scrapes”. He looked like an amalgam of everything that a child could ever find frightening. You can learn more about him here, should you feel so inclined.

“1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-11-12!” – The Pointer Sisters: Well, if you ever needed any clues as to how much more effortlessly cool American TV was than British TV in the 1970s, then here’s the definitive answer. While we looking with bemusement at a pink hippo, a camp bear and a, well, a thing with a zip on “Rainbow”, American kids were learning to count through the medium of psychedelic pinball and The Pointer Sisters on “Sesame Street”. No wonder they rule the world, nowadays.

“The Money Programme”: We can do cool, of course. It just happens to turn up in the most unlikely of places. BBC2’s “The Money Programme”, that bastion of all things capitalist, has had this funky number by Jimmy Smith for over thirty years, now. It’s worth tuning in just for the opening thirty seconds. Of course, you won’t need to any more, now you’ve got the whole thing.