the telly.
I’m mighty sick of telly programmes that are advertised as being a celebration of a certain person or act that ends up being 1% of the individuals in question and 99% talking bloody heads wittering about how they once met them or how much they loved them.
There was two in particular over the holiday period, both caught my eye in the listings and straight away I set the timer to record them.
First up was on Hogmany – “Toffee in His Pocket” – was a celebration of that bizarre but exceptional Scottish comic Chic Murray, clips of who you so very rarely see these days. Great I can sit through a half hour, minus ad breaks, of Chic’s stream of unconsciousness. But no, of the half hour there must have ended up being a whole five minutes of Chic in stand up action, there seemed to be more or Ricky Fulton (great comic actor) straight acting or Jimmy Logan dying on top of a hill in “Take The High Road”. The rest was just talking bloody heads, out of which came about three funny “anecdotes”, yeah they might have been his mates but I wasn’t tuning in for them. This all was intercut with the one stand up routine shown so you lost the track of it. Christ the programme was even titled after probably Chic’s most famous joke and they never even showed the man telling it but left it to a talking bloody head.
Then later on on the Beeb they had Paul Merton doing a show about Morecambe & Wise, oh yes for an hour of Eric and Ern I can put up with Merton, who’s a pretty good comic after all. But then he introduced his first “guest”, Eddie Izzard, what has he got to do with Eric & Ern, bugger all that’s what. Waffle, waffle, waffle for ages then Jack Dee, now I like Dee – can take or leave Izzard – but again what’s he got to do with the pair, nowt.
Yes I can totally understand having Eddie Braben on after all it was a show what he wrote, and OK have Angela Rippon on it was a famous moment in the show’s history, though of course it has led to all theses newsreaders who aren’t journalists but just trying to get a telly prog with their name in the title. And of course have Andrew Preview talking about that classic sketch, which of course I’m going to have to post up again…
But cut down on the amount they talked, put up more sketches, some of which haven’t been shown for some time – can’t find the live ventriloquist bit on YouTube which is hilarious. It was a far better programme than the Chic Murray one, there was far more of the subject matter doing what they do best but still too many talking bloody heads. TV execs seem to think viewers would prefer to see so called celebs talking about something instead of actually seeing and hearing it for themselves.
And so yes the first post of 2009 shows how this blog is going to go forward in the new year tackling the important subjects of the day and leaving the trivial nonsense to others…I thank you.