Friday, February 20, 2009

The Difficult Second Series

My holdall is absolutely rammed with VHS tapes but I'm hoping that it will all pay off in the end. I may never get a chance to see them again in such a long while so it's probably a better time than none to remember the best years of my life in front of the television.

Although that's not to mention the poorer programmes that went out that for me are a good subject of comedy/humiliation.

One of them being the 2005 series of Hell's Kitchen where as a result of Gordon Ramsay signing a golden handcuffs deal with Channel 4, changes were made and in my eyes were not for improvement.

The sharp tounged chef was replaced by not one but two people to oversee the contestants, them being Gary Rhodes and Jean Christophe Novelli who would oversee two teams fighting it out.

The other significant change was that instead of famous (and not so famous) people adopting the white overalls, they got members of the public instead and the "tinkering" of the format lost me as a viewer for the rest of the series.

It turns out I wasn't the only one who was unimpressed as the series disapeared from our screens, until it returned in it's original form in September 2007 with Marco-Pierre White adding aggression over a very tense celeb chef hot plate.

Jean Christophe Novelli meanwhile took part in the X Factor Battle of the Stars which proved to be another unsucessful spin off.

Whilst the third series was a lot better than the previous one, it was slightly hard to watch at times as when it started I was still in St Martin's Hospital and found it difficult to stay up beyond 10pm, despite the dodgy confrontations with Jim Davidson, who was the main protagonist.

I suppose my regret of doing so was not being able to see him leaving the show, not by vote, but asked to leave because of his homophobic comments towards fellow contestant Brian Dowling.

It appeared that the Radio Times wanted to disregard the second series as in their listings they had the 2007 series labeled as "Series Two" rather than Series Three in what's becoming a habit of listing magazines listing the episode and series number, proving that ordinary people are more interested in television to those levels.

Moving onwards and following my comments last week, I managed to find the first 20 minutes of what has to be one of the worst television programmes of the decade: Celebrity Wrestling.

Everything about it was just wrong, the presenter, the on-screen presentation, the forced nature, the contrived setup, just an utter joke.

ITV1 had been promoting it quite a bit with even special idents made with those taking part accompanied by AC/DC's "For Those About To Rock".

The use of the word "Celebrity" in the title couldn't be further from the truth although I was rather sad to see people such as Jenny Powell, and Annabel Croft sinking this low.

However the others that did deserved the humilation of agreeing to do such rubbish, especially James Hewitt, a man who has appeared on many shows of a similar nature with no acknowldgement of the two words "fuck off".

The paring of the ever wooden Kate Thornton with Rowdy Roddy Piper saw even less chemistry than Fox and Fleetwood at the 1989 Brits, whilst the coaches were even more embarassing.

One of them being D'Lo Brown who the last time I saw in the WWE was when him and Chaz in the Tag Team "Lo Down" were now being overseen by Tiger Ali Singh and wore sikh clothing and demanded the audience to be silent whilst paying their respects.

That would have as much success as getting John Terry to move from Chelsea.

With regards to the other coach "Joe Legend" I'd rather listen to a John Legend album instead of watching that load of rubbish, if Doctor Who wasn't on BBC 1 at the same time.

Although that's not to say the BBC had a few rough patches around this time.

Some clever so and so thought it would be an idea to give Anne Robinson her own satire show on Friday nights in the slot formerly occupied by HIGNFY, which went by the title of "What's The Problem? With Anne Robinson".

This had another awkward pairing, this time with Marcus Brigstocke providing the "comic relief" but he was heavily underused and Anne proved that she wasn't really that good a gag teller.

It also consisted of interviews with public figures such as George Galloway and Piers Morgan which for me were enough to reach for the off button.

Content was pretty weak as well with the first episode using a rather dated clip of Cherie Blair giving an embarassing rendition of "When I'm 64" which ironically used to be the theme tune to one of Anne's older series
"Points Of View".

The series is probably even more infamous for one of the editions being dropped due to it being scheduled the day after the London bombings.

It was also around the time "Mock The Week" started over on BBC 2 and whilst the first series wasn't as good as the rest, at least it had potential to be successful.

A year later Marcus Brigstocke appeared as a guest on HIGNFY where the host that week was Trevor McDonald who in the introduction, joked about Marcus being hired by the BBC "to make Anne Robinson look funny".

Ironically in 2007 Trevor was commisioned by ITV1 to host a similar series to Anne Robinson's one from two years earlier with noneother than Marcus Brigstocke, alongside other comedians such as Reginald D Hunter called
"News Knight With Sir Trevor".

The programme got into a bit of trouble for this incident shown after Bernard Manning had died where Trevor referred to him as "a fat white bastard".

Despite getting cleared by OFCOM, a second series never surfaced.

It probably proves that satire shows are best left to the ones who provide the laughs rather than the journalists themselves.

Good night.

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