What was the worst programme on TV in 2013?
If you reply with Mrs. Brown's Boys, the broad strokes of an adult pantomime which trolls media critics to the extent it might well be filmed in front of a studio audience under a humpback bridge, you'd be wrong. I mean, you're right - it is dire:
See? But it's not the worst.
Did I hear someone at the back shout out The Wright Way, by Ben Elton?
Wrong. True, a situation comedy written as a shout-piece vehicle for it's writer, Ben Elton currently in his conservative (with a small c) establishment period pomp, the show is horrible. From the pun in the title to the husks of characterisation and simply awful double entendre jokes and actors channelling Ben's delivery and words woven into over long rants in the forlorn hope that they are in themselves somehow funny, as a structure it was sub-BBC3 fare. I found myself harking back to better Elton times. Times like when Elton wrote The Thin Blue Line. That's how bad it is.
I tweeted my review of it at the time and I think it remains the perfection of summing up the comedy show:
Ironically, The Wright Way's main protagonist, Mr. Wright, a jobs-worth Health And Safety Officer, would utterly approve of the show. It's jokes so well signposted that it is impossible not to see them coming from miles off.
This is in Ben Elton's head these days. All the time. He thinks of scenes like that and goes: Hahaha.
Did I hear a murmur of "that thing with the folk in the toilet"? Yeah, that was a nadir.
Channel 4 put out a lot of content of drunk, good time youngsters in the Indian Summer of 2013. I am not sure what the point of it all was.
If I happen to be waiting for a taxi at night then I can see what is going on. If I am not waiting for a taxi I am not thinking: I wonder what waiting for a taxi in the night is like? No one does.
Unperturbed by this, Channel 4 went ahead "Revealing the reality" by filming folk waiting for a taxi at closing time for bars and clubs, getting regrettably unwise tattoos when spilling out of bars and clubs on holiday or standing in a nightclub toilet. Such settings does not sound like decent TV it will make. And it didn't.
The Nightclub Toilet was the worst of the Up All Night trilogy.
I have been in nightclub male toilets. The trick is to use it as infrequently and then as swiftly as possible. There is no talking, not even in the unfortunate circumstance where you see someone you know going in, in front of you. Eyes centre and down, soldier. Remember to wash. And then not touch any surfaces.
Instead, in this version, nightclub toilets are a place to go in, hang about for a bit. It is a place to tell of drunken relationship woes, chat to the attendant to get a slice a of their working life and breakdance on the dubious fluid puddle collecting floor. And that was just in the Gents.
The show was forgettable as a partially overheard discussion. The people involved utterly without merit to give a second look. It is not exactly their fault. Channel 4 in their miss-directed wisdom to have a programme where the hook is to see behind the toilet door basically got what it deserved: everybody already knows and none of the process is interesting.
The rule is drunk people tend to find drunk people next to them entertaining. People sitting in on a Thursday night watching TV before setting out the paperwork for tomorrow's morning strategy meeting do not. Those people are sitting watching footage of men struggling to balance, pissing in a trough.
That is not good TV.
It's one saving grace is that it has surely killed stone dead the unbelievably sleazy practice of one nightclub's grotesque selling point of "secret" two-way mirror viewing in their ladies' toilets. http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/fury-over-two-way-mirrors-looking-1908048
No one is going to pay to sit and watch a nightclub toilet after seeing The Nightclub Toilet.
But... this was not the worst thing shown on TV in 2013, oh no.
That comes in part 2...
No comments:
Post a Comment