It’s an odd title for a posting I grant you but I promise you it’s a real place. In my imagination. A place where annoying tv people with big egos, scant GCSE’s, weird personalities, a misguided sense of their sexual appeal (and occasionally hazy sexuality) and a strange style sense all live. Continue reading
I’m a big fan of the cheap and cheerful competitive home dining/home styling/home catering tv formats like Come Dine With Me, Dinner Date, May the Best House Win and Four in a Bed. Things have moved on since Changing Rooms and Can’t Cook; Won’t Cook where the focus was on the designers and chefs. Now the focus is on the ordinary folk hoping to prove their B&B or home or cooking/hospitality/dating skills are the best. Of course the delight is not finding great culinary, courtship or business expertise but in coming across some of the funniest and most delusional people that hopefully you’ll only ever meet through the medium of tv.
Autumn is well and truly over and thankfully that means the reality tv blockbusters have all crowned their various champions at last and are over for another season. Yee hah. But that means it’s the Xmas schedules on the telly now and one of the things about having a wife and 3 daughters and 3 grandchildren is that you get to watch a lot of stuff over the festive period which can be as much fun as anal warts.
Arggh my eyes….I’ve just switched on the tv to watch the Argentina match on ITV and there’s that fat fuck Adrian Chiles presenting the pundits’ preview in a pair of tight shorts. My lovely sister H forewarned me the other evening that she’d witnessed the grumpy one’s pallid legs and it wasn’t a pretty sight. My God she wasn’t joking. That just shouldn’t be allowed before the watershed. I was chomping on a cherry at the time and I nearly choked on the frigging stone. Just imagine if the last thing I’d seen before I died were the Chiles thighs. Shudder…
pp
Do you remember that song from Alanis Morissette where she sang about lots of things which touched her soul and after each example invited us to agree with her that ‘Isn’t it ironic?’. The thing was that none of the things she wrote about were actually ironic. Unfortunate perhaps and slightly annoying but sadly Alanis, not particularly paradoxical. So last night my wife C’s watching the final episode of a drama series that’s been gripping her and 7m other viewers, set in the bleak Yorkshire landscape around Halifax. Bleak’s a good word because that describes the plotline which features a police officer, played excellently by Sarah Lancashire, faced with issues of drug addiction, suicide (her own daughter), murder, kidnapping and extortion, rape, brutal violence, dysfunctional family relationships, desperation, decay, divorce, police incompetence and lots of rain. It’s relentlessly grim; in other words it’s just an other day in t’West Yerkshire. And the name of this series? Happy Valley. Ha! And C loved it and didn’t see the title as the least bit enigmatic. 40 years plus together and she’s still a delightful mystery to me. Women eh. Alanis give us a burst of that song again love…
Reet belting.
pp
Well it’s been a few weeks without a posting. I felt compelled to write something…anything having spent the last 15 minutes watching ITV’s latest Sunday night concept programme ‘Off Their Rockers’. Apparently some fu**wit in the commissioning department was convinced that getting OAPs to do Candid Camera type stuff would have us rolling off our sofas with hysterical laughter. I’ve seen more comedy on the World at War.
I wrote the other day about an annoying trend by the TV companies to have their main presenters showcase several shows. As if there wasn’t any new talent out there. On top of that I’ve noticed a similar tendency for all the broadcasters to get their popular ‘stars’ on as many shows as possible. So we see the likes of Denise Welch, who was for several years acting against type as the flirty barmaid in Corrie, playing a regular role on daytime panel show Loose Women as the loosest of the lot, featuring in the drama series Waterloo Rd, then as a contestant on the current series of Dancing on Ice and tonight I saw her and hubby appearing on a trailer for the forthcoming comedy series Benidorm. And of course she features on every damn chat show as her celebrity status as the boozing, snorting, partying 52 year old in all the sleb mags and other media grows by the day. It seems to be a deliberate policy of finding a viewers’ favourite then re-cycling him or her throughout the schedules over and over again like a bit of old plastic. Continue reading
Pasta Paulie 