Dalziel and Pascoe and Jonathan Creek

Due to my new regime of watching more tely and without the 590+ channels i had before, this blog will become more frequent.

Dalziel and Pascoe waddled back on Sunday 6^th May. So used to having two-parters delivered in consecutive days (cf. Waking The Dead), I am quite upset about having to wait until next Sunday for the closing part. Not as upset as I am with the actual programme.

 

How can we make a bombastic return to BBC One? I know! Pentangles and tarot crap! So clumsily handled are nearly all Occult Whodunits (O.W.) on TV that it’s a genre all to itself with some or all of the following ingredients to make the cack potion: tarot, dragons, blood rituals, spells, white witches, Hallowe’en, dodgy vicars, swinging, issues over inheritance, dead old women.  The D&P O.W. had much of this, including everyone’s favourite Swazilandian Richard E. Grant as a spooky/evil hypnotist. And some absurd stuff about dragons. These aren’t supposed to be Warhammer fans. Groan.

 

I have it on good authority that Warren Clarke is a knob. On screen he oozes this, but not in a suitably Dalziel way as he used to. Like any programme the longer it runs, the more self-knowing the performances become cf. Johnson in new Peep Show, Frost towards the end of Touch of Frost, Homer. Dalziel now delivers lines that Monkfish from the Fast Show would be embarrassed by: ‘Oi posho stop being so pleased with yourself and make me a cup of tea two sugars!’ The scene with the smoking in the office was dreadful. Dalziel has become a parody of Dalziel, a smoking sexist arsehole but without the subtlety or humanity of previous series, a classic situation.

 

Pascoe has put on a lot of weight since All Quiet on the Preston Front. Paradox time: as Pascoe has put on more weight, his character has lost any weight it once had: in the beginning he was married (to that pretty fit lady who has now disappeared from our screens, maybe she’s on Doctors); he had marital problems; he was divorced; he had another love interests. His character was relatable-to, a horrible phrase. Without a love interest, and the pangs that we all know that go with this, he is left with his indivisible dislike of Dalziel. And that is all. There was a hint of something-maybe I’m just on heat-between Pascoe and Posho but nothing happened. So Pascoe is a shell of a character, albeit a slightly heavier shell.

 

A haunting flute is not something you normally relate to D&P. But to go with all good O.W.s it is a must. The imperative remix of the Saint-Saën song that Jonathan Creek snatched is here in abundance, not what you expect from D&P. It was over the top, unleashed when there was a flashback or thunderclap. I’m no Angelo Badalamenti but I know when to turn it up to 11, and The One To Watch on BBC One never needs an 11.

 

There was also a stupidly savage and unbelievably symbolic death. Has The Da Vinci Code construed to make all secondary deaths on TV be found in a pentangle? Satan has a lot to answer for.

 

I don’t think I’ll be in next Sunday night when the concluding part will be aired. And I’m not sure that many people who watched the first part will be either. I will put my hands up and say I was intrigued by the One To Watch trailer-what’s Richard E. Grant doing there, why are those toffs drinking each other’s blood?-but I was mightily disappointed. Give me Trevor Eve poking about under a church any day. I wish they hadn’t got rid of Claire ‘FHM’s 100 fittest’ Goose on Waking the Dead.

Big Brother

I have only missed the majority of one Big Brother, when Cameron won. That was due in part to attempting to go travelling but also because it was pretty lame from the beginning and it had Ray Shah in it.

Celebrity Big Brother has developed its own traditions remarkably quickly, most prominently the house is always recognisable from the previous real BB in the summer. But more worrying, lazy traditions are afoot:

Celebrity Intruders-The introduction of another celebrity into the house started with Jackie Stallone, an absolute gem of an entrance and quality television. Then there was Jimmy Saville who appeared and disappeared without a hint of hilarity. This year Jade Goody’s clan have already gone in, and there are worrying rumours that everyone’s favourite misogynist David Hasselhoff will appear. The problem with this is that it makes the format look even more staid than the familiar surroundings, the misplaced belief that reinvention makes it more exciting is getting in the way of the good telly, and we all expect it. Moreover, Jade Goody-as a product of BB-makes the cliquey ‘what is a celebrity anyway’ nature of Channel 4′s January spin-off very irritating. Not only did an non-celebrity win it last year, the comment section of The Guardian, and Rob Liddle probably, will start pondering the nature of celebrity again, a theory that’s been done to death and is populist faux-sociology at its peak.
The Secret Room- The restriction of using the same house is that everyone knows there will be a secret house in which some of the celebs will have to live. This year’s couldn’t be less exciting. A servant’s quarter WITH ACTUAL REAL DUST is the home of all but three, where these celebrities have to wait on Jade Goody’s family, but hey she only became a celebrity from Big Brother and these are real celebrities, how crazy is that? Not very, and is made even less kerazzy by the actual level of celebrity they have. The producers were no doubt gutted that neither Jermaine Jackson nor Shilpa Shetty went in, two supposed clean freaks who have their own servants.

So it has come to this, and i am sad to write i am pretty disappointed with this year’s offering. Last year i was in a pub and got a flurry of text messages informing me of Galloway’s real surprise entry, news that excited me and made me giggle; there is no such excitement with the ex-sidekick of Kenny Everett. I may be proved wrong and i hope i am: CBB has had some very memorable moments in it over the years, but the crop of back-slapping chaps this time around may severely curtail the fun.

And Donny Tourette leapt over the fence last night, however irritating he may have been he was good copy and was making unusual friendships with Jackson and Sayer.

Reality TV Spin-off is not hard television

Big Brother gets much less viewing figures than I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here! (IACGMOOH). But the spin-offs from both shows, the ‘behind-the-scenes’ ITV2/E4 shows are the other way round: BB glues fans in with Dermot O’Leary and Russell Brand; I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here! Now! is less complusive viewing for the family flavour of the principal show.

IACGMOOH!Now! has been through the works recently. In previous years the after-show party has been led by Tara Palmer-Tompkinson and fellow hyphon heavy presenter Mark Durden-Smith. TPT quit before the commencement of this new series and producers decided to overhaul the whole thing (not sure which one came first).

In her and MDS’ place stood Kelly Osbourne and Brendon Burns respectively. The new look IACGMOOH!Now! had cabbage patch doll reporting from Oz and Antipodean Brendon Burns reporting from London, complete with Big Brother’s Big Mouth pleb audience-albeit dramatically reduced to about 20 people-and Burns’ none too funny gags about aussies in London (‘shouldn’t i be behind a bar? Or something?!?!?!??!?’).

I had the pleasure of watching the first one and a number of things stand out which made it worth my while in the sense of seeing ITV squirm:

1. The show did not follow straight after IAMCGMOOH: between was a thirty minute documentary on elderly parenting. How can you expect an already pitiful audience to stick with a spin-off if it’s not straight after the original show? Simply madness.
2. When Kelly Osbourne went to check on the guests over in Oz, Jan Leeming didn’t know who she was, so chubby doll face had to utter the sentence of the year ‘Hi I’m Kelly Osbourne from ITV’!
3. The time delay between London and Oz was having a great day, even pros like Rageh Omar and Matt Frei have been felled by such a situation, hapless Osbourne and clueless Burns stood no chance.
4. The producers tried to create a relationship between Osbourne and Burns, slightly flirty but still a bit silly. Instead, the completely unlikeable Burns was met by a completely unprofessional and anti-flirt Kelly Osbourne, car crash telly.
5. The pleb audience in the London studio with Burns was made up of exact same faces from Big Brother’s big mouth, honestly i recognised nearly all of them from the far better spin-off show.
6. The studio even drafted in a celebrity psychologist who wowed all with psychoanalysing such as ‘Jan Leeming may be complaining a lot about the situation, but soon the others will get sick of her complaining’. Insightful!
7. Brendon Burns was a complete tosser, unfunny and useless at television presenting. His worst moments included missing a golden comedy opportunity when the psycholoigst said ‘i’ll start psychoanalysing you in a minute’, to which he spluttered and looked awkward for five seconds before saying nothing at all. One of those hep new stand-ups who gets out of trouble by jolting his body around and laughing too much, dross.
8. Burns had one joke that got a laugh at the beginning, taking the piss out of Jason Donovan getting on with David Gest, but he used the same thing over and over, to the point where there was just awkward silences from the audience, you could feel the heat from their embarrassed cheeks.

The fallout? Well Burns got sacked straight afterwards, replaced with Mr-Dependable Mark Durden-Smith. Kelly Osbourne too is about to be given the heave-ho, apparently she has diva like demands and no one likes her, her presenting alone was enough to get sacked. Why not get her Adrenalin Junkie Hair Bear brother in, at least he can read off autocue.

This blog has tried to defend ITV on occassions but it keeps on shooting itself in the foot. My suggestion would be to have a dedicated Sunday evening ITV1 show that is a lot like The Apprentice You’re Fired, with two competent presenters, then get people watching that, bring them across to ITV2 daily half-hour updates, dispense with the rancid crap audience idea (cos you’re not willing to spend enough money on it) and replace with a clip-heavy cheap alternative, have daily behind-the-scenes stuff for the anoraks and an interview with Ant or Dec, half-hour easy.

Stop cocking-up ITV.

Tags: ITV, Reality TV, media, television, Brendon Burns, Kelly Osbourne, I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here

Countwise

Why some people are mourning the departure of Desmond Lynam from presenting Countdown is beyond me. He’s not very good at it, much like Richard Whitely wasn’t very good but at least he laughed in all the right places when Richard Digess spoke and thought Barry Norman’s comic soliloquy on tarmac worth a chortle. Lynam sits there looking shifty, the rlection from his glasses shrouding his eyes so as to make them unreadable, his moustache getting in the way of his words.

And so to the repalcement, someone i championed for the job before Lynam got it. Tom

O’Connor is one of my favourite Dictionary Coner guests, he’s quick, inoffensive and tells jokes well and listens to what other people would say, he’d often wait with baited breath as Whitely replied to a gag by O’Connor in a wholly unsatisfactory way. He made Crosswise nearly bearable as a programme, i honestly believe he could turn his hand to nearly anything on telly and it is a mystery as to why he hasn’t had more work. He is the man for Countdown, it is very hard to hate Tom O’Connor, as good a reason as any that he should get the job. If Dave Benson-Phillips is booked.

Family Friendly=Dumbing Down

A room of people all ages camped round the telly watching Patch Adams, grown-ups smiling at the whimsy, children ensconsed in the moving pictures. For the head of Saturday entertainment on BBC1, this image is for the wank-bank.

Patch Adams is a good analogy of BBC1 Saturday night viewing, in that it’s not very good. But gullible children and adults who should know better like it. Saturday night on BBC1 has an air of crapness to it, but what gets on my wick is that this crapness is purposefully emphasised to make it more family friendly. I hate this situation but no doubt is it there.

Dr. Who was such an alarming success it bred a spin-off and they were even contemplating doing another spin-off as well. It was aimed at getting son/daughter and father together on the sofa, watching something they both love i.e. Billy Piper. The suggestion is that the crapness (cheap sets, poor acting, rubbish scripts, poor acting, cheap sets) is excused by the father-he’s seen how bad it is but peers at his offspring’s saucer like eyes and excuses the crapness as whimsical-and not noticed by the dumb Tweenie-fiddling youngster. And the BBC can channel all the other money on a huge and overblown hype campaign. For Dr. Who to be true to itself it has to look crap. This is one of the failings of outr retro society, we are incapable fo separating ourselves from contemporary technological innovations and find it hilarious that wobbly sets and poor dubbing ever existed without realising that a lot of it at the time was rather cutting edge. So Dr. Who gets made as poorly as possible, the crapness hailed as a tradition of Dr. Who and the-way-telly-should-be. I hate this sitaution. It demeans adults into believing that their children are so gullible they’ll be impressed by a green-painted Peter Kay and it demeans the children by saying that you’re so young you won’t notice the crapness. Youth is blind.

The kick-off of new series ‘Robin Hood’ is in the same vein as the very successful Dr. Who. Starring a nobody as Robin Hood, whose specialities include Flamenco and accents, and the arsehole Keith Allen as Sheriff of Nottingham, it has a much lusher colour to it compared to the Crystal-Maze-Industrial-Zoneness of Dr. Who. I managed to catch the first ten minutes in the pub but alas missed the rest, much to my great relief i am sure it will be repeated on BBC Three. It has the same air of whimsy as Lovejoy did, where you expect the protagonist to turn to camera at any point. Such zaniness i have come to expect from a tired format of family-friendly light comedy-dramas. I really don’t like them and i find it hard to see how it’s justified to keep Saturday nights in a time warp when mums made the tea and bananas were a delicacy. BBC1 needs to put natural world programmes on at peak time, get rid of all these stupid comedy-dramas and bring back Winning Lines. I aplogise for the amount of times i use crapness and whimsy in this blog.

Daily Drivel

Flicking through the Freeview megasphere I came up against the documentary-laden übershit of More 4. Unlucky for some, Channel 13 is the home of this responsible heavy-browed thoughtful channel. And every night at 8.30pm, Sarah Smith’s brows can lift slightly, as the Daily Show with Jon Stewart light-heartedly skips on to the channel it was born to be on.
Like Bremner, Bird and Fortune, I started out liking the Daily Show, solely from internet clips, and was asphyxiwanking with anticipation when I heard it was coming to a British Channel near you. Unfortunately, exactly like Bremner, Bird, and Fortune, the level of satirical humour has dropped appallingly. I know there may be those who can’t understand why anyone would watch it in the first place, and that the level has stayed continually bad; I would disagree, I definitely think it’s got much worse recently.
TV Squad hits a few nails on some heads, stating that the new people on the show are not as good as the old ones, but then makes the fatal error of congratulating Rob Corddry for being brilliant. He isn’t, even if you are American.

I am now starting to wonder why I ever liked the programme, I think it comes down to Jon Stewart’s laugh, Jon Stewart’s bits to camera and everything else Jon Stewart does.

The biggest beef I have with the programme is when I was absent-mindedly watching it, glum face in hand, and who should pop up as a [guffaw] special reporter from London Heathrow? None other than Jon Oliver. Tumbleweed ensues. Well you should recognise his face if, like me, you have watched all the 100 Greatest Showstopping TV jazz hands &c. He is one of the oiks who comes on as says:‘Well it was like ‘Shit he’s actually trying to get an axe through the door’ and you’re like ‘Shit, this is really scary’ and when he says ‘Here’s Johnny’ you’re like ‘Shit, I can’t believe how scary this is!’.Proper twat, worse than that he isn’t amusing at all, like the bastard child of Justin Lee Simba and Alan ‘Ooh pop it in me inbox’ Carr. He did a truly awful stint as the reporter from Heathrow going on about how crazy it was that you couldn’t take liquids on to an aeroplane now! And then he told the gag everyone knew was coming but prayed would be spared, alas: ‘The human body is made up of 50% water, so what, they’re going to ban people from travelling?!’ [cue girlish giggle from Stewart and weird whooping from Tabbed-up audience]. Absolutely pitiful

I think they should probably cancel it, like many things that are daily programmes it loses its fizz cf. So Graham Norton I know you used to find it funny when it was weekly so don’t pretend.

Tags: More 4, John Oliver, media, television, freeview, The Daily Show

This is a test blog post.

Channel 4 is above you.

This blog seems to be becoming a bit telly heavy but it’s important.

The relaunch of Film 4-with brand new snazzy emblem-has brought a few hip hoorays from some and ‘how can they make it free i’ve paid for it since it launched’ from approx. 10 people. Coupled with the launch of Film 4 as a free service on Digital Satellite/Freeview was one of the omnipresent Channel 4 ’50 things to talk about on camera with Edith Bowman and Justin Lee-Simba before you die’ lists, this time 50 films you just have to watch.

And what an interesting list it was, full of some old favourites (‘Erin Brokovich’) and some lesser known classic fare (‘Alien’). Most intriguingly was the tally of how many of the films are owned by Channel 4 and its evil subsidiaries. I put it at 28/50 which can only be seen on the small screen through Film4, Channel4, More4, More4+1 and E4+1. Staggering.

What gets on my wick is how Channel 4 has been able to stylise itself as BBC2′s kookie little brother, with a quite ludicrous mix of cheap yank tat One Tree Hill, to utter bollocks watched by 50,000 people ‘Chantelle’s Dream Dates’. Mixed in with this is their sense of justice with Channel 4 News and More 4 News, dumbed down to an alarming rate with pretend interaction through caption competition, email sifting and text surveys. Over on E4 you are confronted with the madcap craziness of MTV circa 1995 with truly mental Estings-the matchbox dog who sets himself on fire!-and that old man who says things in an old man accent like ‘Listen up you muddyfunsters, some kick arse American teen trouble in Angel, enough to get you rumpelstiltskinning up your curtains screaming come and take me, HALLELUIA’ which was funny when it launched but is now too annoying for words.

More 4 is a re-run haven of the West Wing-cos it’s poli’ical innit-and the truly terrible ’30 Days’, a Morgan Spurlock-fronted delve into American life ‘Can a Mom get drunk like her 20 year-old daughter for a month?’ who cares? I don’t, and just because you have that moustachioed vegan fronting it means bugger all, it’s a crap programme. I hope More 4 goes the way of ITV News Channel soon, the only thing that is half interesting is the Daily Show but like every other successful American it has been pushed too far, never had a holiday and is too tired to justify itself now.

Tags: film four, Justin-Lee Collins, media, television, freeview, film

Murdoch O’Connell Newscorp genius

Yes, those words in that order.

 I speak of the new TFI-Fridaybaby ‘Christian O’Connell’s Sunday Service’, the very poor new show on Sky One. And also on Sky Three which is on freeview.

My interest is not in the unlikeliness of Mr. O’Connell’s jaw nor in my belief that he is ten times better on the radio than in my face. It is this: Newscorp has a controlling stake in The Sun and The Times and Sky. These three little blighters have for years cross-advertised massively, with Sky deals with this Saturday’s Sun etc. and the same with The Times. And now Murdoch is at it again, and he is truly the canniest of canny men.

 Picking up myspace for a quid was pretty good, now this new piss-poor programme is inviting you to go to their myspace page instead of the usual’head over to the website for more….’. And it gets better. This programme is aimed at an audience of 20-35 year olds i am sure of that. This group use the internet as much as the 10-20 year olds do, but they don’t use myspace nearly as much.

This cross-advertising is so clever because it introduces the upper end of the 20-35 year olds to something they would never have used before and opening up a new band of user who has been so reluctant to delve into the emo-ridden stripey-tight land. Although a small point, i believe it is fascinating nonetheless.