Alan Carr’s Celebrity Ding Dong

 

Oh dear. Oh god. Oh holy moly mother of Jesus-titty-fucking-Christ. What is this? What the fuck is this? How did this bile inducing piece of horseflesh ever get splashed across my screen? What sins have I and by extension the rest of the country, committed in a previous life to be offered this sack of shit as Friday night entertainment?

I know what we did. We gave credence to a little thing called the Friday Night Projected. Hosted by two fucktard rejects from comedy, this piss-poor excuse for television somehow became popular and launched its mediocre frontmen to national fame. Justin Lee Collins is bad enough – a Butlins level wookie milking his yokel accent in place of charm – but the true crime that FNP commited was giving us Alan Carr.

Alan Carr. Alan Carr. Just  run that name around in your head for a second and let the syllables trickle over your tongue… Alan Carr, the carry on Columbus of modern comedy, the liberal’s excuse for homophobia, the heir apparent to Joe Pasquale…

You see Alan Carr is gay. GAY. That means he likes kissing men. Which is hilarious. HILARIOUS.  Because he’s gay he’s obsessed with cock , like all gay men are. He’s camp, and effeminate, and high pitched and squealingly consumed by innuendo… just like every other gay man in the world. He’s such a great representative of the homosexual community that he makes the women think he’s sweet and the men think he’s non-threatening… just like all gay men should be. He should work for the United Nations as an ambassador or something, he’d really further the cause.

So, Alan Carr’s Celebrity Ding Dong (ooh, see what they did there? ‘Ding dong’ is euphemism for cock) is about pitting celebrities against civilians, seeing who knows more about the other’s life. Seeing that the private life of every cunt who’s ever been television is forcefed down our throats 24 hours a day, while normal life is often held in disdain by even the lowliest X-Factor loser, it shouldn’t be too hard to guess how it works out…

Alan enters to a standing ovation (yes, a fucking standing ovation!) from the Heat subscribers who make up his audience and positions himself betwixt the huge final letter of Ding and first letter of Dong, making himself the O of self worship. He reads the autocue with the ability of a man who learnt to read yesterday and introduces the bottom scrapings that are his celebrity guests:

• Kirsty Gallagher, who says not one fucking word all show – no doubt earning her 10 grand payday
• Les Dennis, squandering his Ricky Gervais given second wind with all the finesse of Cuba Gooding Jr after an Oscar win
• Konnie Huq, kick starting her unavoidable slide into lad mags pictorials
• Davina McCall, the cackling high priestess of shit television
• Alex somebody who might have something to do with music, but I only recognize him from a G2 fashion supplement where he talks about his kooky hat collection.

Hardly human beings, let alone celebrities…

The civilian guests enter and are no doubt picked from a gene pool of competing hilarity… each is a little funny looking,  too short or too tall and uncomfortable in their skin.

They are, are of course, from a notoriously boring town and hold down wildly dull jobs. One of them lives in a council house; Davina finds this hilarious.

And so the games begin; which takes longer to obtain, an African baby or a council house? Which is fatter; Posh’s waist or the bingo wings of a fat girl? Throughout we are treated to ‘comedy skits’, the worst of which features Derek Acorah channeling dead celebrities and giving Alan plenty of chances to say “oooh, I’ve been entered” over and over again.

The script – and it is scripted, thoroughly and entirely – is appalling, the delivery of the ‘improvised’ comedy is stage managed to the nth degree, pointing out how completely untalented anybody on the stage is. I’ve seen Brit awards ceremonies hosted by Sam Fox and Mick Fleetwood that are more natural than the lines passing for banter here.

And it keeps coming like this, for 50 fucking minutes! There’s the game where you guess the cooking times of microwave food – but not just any microwave food, no, it’s microwavable faggots and spotted dick. Which is funny because Alan Carr is, like, gay. It’s hilariously clever…! You can just imagine the Hoxton underling who they sent out to buy the props for the show – hawing with laughter in the frozen section of Netto as he foraged for the cheapest, nastiest and most gay-sounding foods he could find.

It finished, somebody won and no doubt the plebs were humiliated for ever thinking they could stand in Davina’s shadow. I don’t know what happened, I couldn’t watch the end. I felt dirty, and stained by seeping homophobia and Alan Carr’s misjudged sense of irony. The whole thing was a barrel of shit, a great big filthy barrel of shit – not fit for consumption by anybody, ever. It wasn’t clever, or multi-layered, or referential, or ironic or any of the usual defenses offered – it was just a bubbling, rotting, spewing barrel of shit. 

Tags: Alan Carr, Alan Carr's Celebrity Ding Dong, Channel 4, Davina McCall, Entertainment, Kirsty Gallagher, Konnie Huq, Les Dennis, Shit television, TV