NewsGush: Let’s Dance for Comic Relief!

Because Fame Academy is rubbish and Strictly Come Dancing is for old people, Comic Relief have invented a new format for 2009’s reality-performance strand. And this is it. It’s basically loads of famous but not that famous people dancing  to old songs from films. Acting the giddy goat for coin, essentially. ‘So open your purse’, they’ll say, ‘and spray us with sterling’.

And look who’s hosting! It’s only E102-charged, fringed twig Winkleman – daughter of the violently disagreeable Eve Pollard.

And who’s that beside her?

It’s that big lunk, Steve Jones. Steven ‘Berluddy’ Jones – the half bred offspring of a tree and a bull with damaged sperms. A lump of bum-muscle. An oafish, grinning tit, with his skinny tie and three-steps-behind-indie stylings. And YES. I would say that to his face. Before running away and jumping down a hole.

I can’t fucking wait!

So, who’s dancing? You asking?

I’ll tell you. The list is as follows, lovingly cut and pasted from this here press release:

Jo Brand, Robert Webb, Dick & Dom, Keith Lemon & Paddy McGuinness; Peter Jones, Duncan Bannatyne, Deborah Meaden from Dragons’ Den and Blue Peter presenters Tim Vincent, Anthea Turner, Mark Curry, Diana Louise Jordan, Peter Duncan, Janet Ellis and Helen Skelton. Also, the cast of Hollyoaks (names to be confirmed), chefs (Paul Rankin, Sophie Grigson, John Burton Race, Nancy Lam, Kevin Woodford, Sophie Michel, Tony Tobin, Reza Mohammad and Silvana Rowe), Les Dennis, Neil Fox, Angela Rippon and Nancy Sorrell

So, that’s seven ex-Blue Peters, three Dragons (where the hell is Caan? Lumbago got the better of him?), Jo Brand, Robert Webb, that bouncer off Phoenix Nights, those two morons off Saturday morning TV and the Bo Selecta man.

We’ve also got some Hollyoaks kids I won’t recognise, some chefs I might recognise, but only just, Neil ‘Foxy Doctor’ Fox, Vic Reeves’s missus, Les Den and Angela the Rippon.

It’s win win. The charity gets a boost, the celebs get fantastic PR and we, the lucky audience, get some quality entertainment packed with laughs, proficient presentation and funky moves.

Actually… now I think about it, is that technically a three way win? Can’t help but feel someone’s got the bum end of the deal…

Are you excited?

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. 

Desperate Times

 

It’s finally happened. Television programme makers are so desperate for ideas that they’ve resorted to watching that old episode of ‘I’m Alan Partridge’ for fresh concepts. You know the one – Alan has a lunch meeting with the Commissioning Editor of the Beeb and, realising that his failing career is about to go down the shitter once and for all, panics and resorts to pitching a stream of ever more ridiculous ideas for telly programmes. How else can you rationally explain the following programme?

‘Robbie Coltrane’s B-Road Britain’

Yes, you read that right. The fat Scottish comic turned fat Scottish credible actor is plonked behind the wheel of a classic 1950s car and embarks on a journey from London to Glasgow, avoiding the motorways and stopping off wherever his fancy takes him. In my mind, the programme conjures up visions of Coltrane parked up in a lay-by, sweating profusely as he struggles with an oversized road map of Britain, espousing the joys of the B4009, which “…follows the route of the ancient Roman road, Icknield Way, and is *takes slug from giant bottle of Glenmorangie* the besht fucken B-road EVAH!”.

OK, so when you actually get away from that godawful excuse for a title you start to realise the programme may have some depth. Coltrane is a genial fella with a decent sense of humour, and the Great British Public™ are eccentric enough to ensure he’s bound to encounter some interesting people along the way. In fact, as per Napoleon’s piece below, it’s got classic Sunday methadone telly written all over it (it’s being shown on a Wednesday though, which seems to me to be a massive scheduling error).

In the first episode, Coltrane is in High Wycombe where he watches the Mayor getting weighed. He also meets some girls performing acrobatics on biplanes, and plays Frisbee golf in Warwickshire and tiddlywinks in Cambridge. See – the old farts will love it. And anyone who’s had a frontal lobotomy. Smackheads. The infirm. Obese people who’ve eaten their remote control and can’t be bothered to get up and change the channel. There’s a vast audience there for sure, in combined weight at least.

It seems to me like they must have came up with the title first, stuck the fat bloke behind the wheel and sent him off praying to Bruce Forsythe that something representing entertaining telly would be the end result. They probably had John Thaw pencilled in to do it, but then remembered he’s dead, so approached John Nettles (touring in Bergerac’s Bentley), but he turned them down. Les Dennis in a Skoda? Nope, Cracker in a vintage Jag – BINGO. Televisual gold.

Suddenly ‘Youth Hostelling with Chris Eubank’, Partridge’s final, desperate roll of the dice, feels like not that bad an idea. Imagine it – the monocled buffoon, in a wooden shack up a mountain in the Cairngorms, lisping through an awkward conversation with a group of bemused German teenagers. It’s got legs, admit it. Even ‘Arm Wrestling with Chas ‘n’ Dave’ doesn’t seem that ridiculous now. In the 2am slot it has the potential to become a cult student classic. Definitely an improvement on those tedious 9-hour quiz shows. Every show could end up with all the contestants swilling lager round the old Joanna as they belt out a reworked version of ‘Snooker Loopy’ called ‘Arm Wrestling Loopy’. It still needs some work, but ITV have got creative departments to sort out the finer details. The concept is a strong one.

Next week also sees the return of the daytime ITV show, ‘Have I Been Here Before?’. If you’ve got a job, you probably will have missed the first series, but the concept is that Z-list celebs are regressed by a hypnotist, and encouraged to delve into their previous lives. Fucking bizarre. I’m not really a believer in reincarnation, though nor are the participants in this piss poor excuse for telly. But they are great believers in half an hour of telly devoted to themselves and the furthering of their fading careers. I’m only flagging this up because on the same day that ‘B-Road Britain’ airs, ‘Have I Been Here Before?’ features John Barrowman and the premise is just so ludicrous I felt it had to be shared –

“John Barrowman goes back to his previous life as a clown in Budapest during the 1800s.”

I’m almost lost for words at what staggeringly “so bad it’s good” television that has the potential to be. I’ll definitely be setting the video. The following week sees David Seaman entering into a bloody medieval conflict as a gallant knight. With real blood I hope, and his to boot, the deep-voiced Gooner bastard. This whole shitstorm is presented by Philip Schofield, who really needs to get himself a new agent.

‘Robbie Coltrane’s B-Road Britain’ starts this Wednesday 15th August at 9pm.

‘Have I Been Here Before?’ featuring John Barrowman as a Hungarian clown is shown the same day at 1pm.

I’m currently formulating a pilot episode for ‘Youth Hostelling with Chris Eubank’, which I plan to pitch to ITV. I might even make the development and pitching process into a fly-on-the-wall documentary. Channel 4 are already interested. If you know of any good youth hostels in your area, please send them to me at jasespace@hotmail.com