My Bestest Show

In the midst of all this doom and gloom about the BBC, let me totally ignore the big burning issue and explain why a rubbish clip show is The Best Non-Repeated Show On Telly. Note the caveat there - they're re-running Queer as Folk to celebrate C4's birthday and it's the exception to my tv rule of all old stuff being rubbish. It isn't that old, I know, but it still sings with more funny lines, interesting characters and deft scripting than all the new drama on tv.

As usual, distracted in the first paragraph. Anyway, back to my favourite show. It's on E! (love the ejaculation mark there), and - oddly - isn't repeated at all. Now E! broadcasts everything 500 times so that's weird. Probably copyright restrictions on the clips. And it's got the so-not-prime-it's-funny Saturday 10.30pm slot.

It's called The Soup and is basically a bunch of clips of American tv having the piss taken out of them by a smart-assed comedian-cum-presenter called Joel McHale. It came out of a show called Talk Soup, presented by Greg Kinnear initially, which had the easy-to-write-down-but-so-hard-to-do-well idea of showing clips of kerrrr-azy US talk shows and laughing at them.

I used to wonder how they managed to get such great clips but the answer was obvious - they'd plug the next episode of Springer by a caption saying "Tomorrow on Springer: Dwarf Lesbians Fight Back!" or whatever. Genius.

Anyway, The Soup is one of those shows that rewards regular viewers with in-jokes, making it somewhat better than a mish-mash of clips. It's sarcastic and ironic too, not something E! is known for, and Mr McHale's merciless ribbing of E! top dog Ryan Seacrest* is something beautiful to watch. This takes place in the segment where Joel takes the piss out of E!'s shows called "Let's Take Some E!", all pounding dance music and that. Not the world's wittiest joke, but, hey, it always makes me smile.

If you like laughing at celebrities and crap telly, this is the show for you. Here's a link to a very po-faced Wikipedia entry about it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soup


*Ryan Seacrest: a name designed by computer, surely? It can't be real. A bit like Ryan himself. Mind you, who'd have thought the British commander of forces in Iraq wasn't a fictional character. Sir Jock Stirrup. He sounds like he's a minor character in The Dambusters...

Charlie Brooker II

Having watched this week's Screenwipe, I humbly bow to the genuis of Mr Brooker. His episode about tv news was a marvellous piece of telly, not just for news anoraks like me but for less-than-obsessed-normal-people (like my partner).

Perfect. Especially all those old title sequences. And getting Adam Curtis, out of BBC Two conspiracy-cum-scare-o-matic docs like Power of Nightmares to do a piece was especially cool.

I should've emailed Mr B that bit from Sky News about stone-skipping world records coming after man being stoned and drowning, shouldn't I?

Ah well.

Charlie Brooker

If you watch BBC Four (hey, I can hope the readers of this stuff are intellectual, refined and have nothing to do of an evening) you'll have seen Mr Charlie Brooker pop up in the idents. Over and over again. Every. Single. Time.

It seems the Beeb, after several series of Screenwipe sneaking out, have decided it's A Right Good Thing and are pushing it like ITV2 are hyping that prozzie thing with ickle Billie Piper innit. Note to self: Charlie Brooker is BBC Four's Billie Piper... discuss.

Anyhow, I enjoy Mr Brooker's feverish rantings in the press and on the telly, and always enjoy a tv show about tv. I've even been known to tune into Wogan's Points Of View on purpose. Sad eh?

This time... well, much as I chortled, I felt a bit, er, bad and that. His comparison of the credits of shows being like the pause you have after finishing a book was funny (especially the clown popping up with a "READ THIS!" sign, brandishing Harry Potter) but not particularly valid. A book takes more than half an hour to read... and does anyone need a nice pause to contemplate what they've just seen when it's Look, I'm Out Of Doctor Who And Am A Hooer As Well! on ITV2 or Bloody Hell, Anthea, Look At The Fleas In My Pants! on BBC Three?

And then he did a thing about marketing where he assaulted some twit who'd said a line of marketing spiel. Hmmm. And then he screamed and shouted and swore a lot - something there's not enough of on tv, unless it's in my house where the shouting usually comes from me - but something there was too much of in this show.

I loved the ripping apart of Street Doctors, that was very funny ("Doctor, it's my anus, go on, look at my anus in the street") as was the far-too-true bit about how tv careers work, but apart from Richard Herring's surreal take on Big Cook, Little Cook (so easy to mistype a word in that title) there was no, er, affection for anything. Charlie can do affection - read his pieces on video games or that really brilliant US cop drama that no-one watches, the one who's name escapes me but everyone is crooked and on crack and that.

Focusing on your strengths is one thing, and boy can Charlie rant in a funny, apt and bile-driven way, but relentless shouting and bleeping of swearwords just gets repetitive after a while. The same way as the utter blandish niceness of Lorraine Kelly makes you want to wipe poo on her frock after half an hour. Or is that just me?

My totally pointess advice to far-more-successful-at-writing-about-telly-than-me Mr Brooker would be light and shade, love. I'd laugh a lot more at those ridiculous ads you take the piss out of so brilliantly if you showed something you liked as well, no matter what it is.

Still, I'll watch every week - well, BBC Four bills each episode as new so my Tivo records it twice a day, so I can't miss it. It's a news special next week. I hope they've got all the theme tunes on from over the years. *PUTS ANORAK ON*

The Worst Trailer In History

I offer this with no comment. If anyone has a recording of this, please YouTube it and let me know. When I heard it, I nearly fell off the crosstrainer in the gym. That's a piece of equipment, not a person...

The place: Sky News Live at Five
The newsreader: Jeremy Thompson
The time: between 5.30 and 6.45pm I think, Monday 1 October (just after the chat with Jeff Randall anyway)

FOOTAGE: A STRETCH OF WATER
"...and more on that story about a sixteen year-old boy, drowned in a flooded chalk pit after being pelted with stones..."

FOOTAGE: ANOTHER STRETCH OF WATER
"...and coming up... how the world stone-skimming record was broken!"

GRAPHICS: NEWS CHANNEL OF THE YEAR

Err, didn't anyone think these two stories, one a tragic stone-and-water related death, one a ho-ho-ho chucklesome story about stones-and-water, might not be put right next to each other?

Tsk.

"Don't phone, it's just for fun!"

Ah, the olden days of breakfast tv, The Big Breakfast in particular... it's funny, GMTV should have abided by the Brekkie's old slogan that titles this blogpart. Then they wouldn't be fined £2m.

Today's MediaGuardian (http://media.guardian.co.uk/mediaguardian/story/0,,2180589,00.html) has a big story about how ITV's breakfast franchise is in a bit of bother. The scary fact was that 40% of their profits came from premium rate phoneline competitions. That's just odd. I haven't watched GMTV that much - hey, I'm not a middle-aged mum so it's not aimed at me - but when I did there were endless competitions with stupid "what's the name of this programme?"-style questions.

Surely someone somewhere thought that relying so heavily on £2-a-minute phonelines was dodgy? Mind you, even the combined brains of the brightest financial minds in the world in the City of London didn't foresee Northern Rock going boom-bang-a-bang...

The question that interests me is what is breakfast telly for nowadays? I worked for the company that made The Big Brekkie and used to love the show in the Chris Evans heyday (and like it quite a lot when Danny Baker was on it - briefly... and like it mostly when Johnny Vaughan and Liza Tarbuck did it, especially when they dressed up as eggs, that was cool, but not when Mr V and Ms Van Outen came back the second time - you should never go back...)

Anyway, the main reason the Brekkie died was nothing to do with the state of the show, which might not have been utterly unmissable but was fairly watchable. Ah, apart from the short-lived incarnation in a nightclub-style set. The death knell was sounded by the competition from Five and BBC2. Their kids' shows basically took the kids and young mums away, leaving only 'da yoot' audience - but nowadays they are Facebook- or Myspace-ing, listening to Chris Moyles or getting down to MTV Base+1. Or, usually, all three.

Not watching a chunky Northern actress lady dressed up like an egg.

So breakfast telly is much more disparate and spilt up than it used to be, just like primetime telly - but from a smaller base so it's more critical to revenues. It's sad to think that in five years' time we may have news on the Beeb and repeats/acquired stuff on all the other terrestrials.

Oh, and apologies for not updating for a wee while. I've been busy but not that busy. I've watched telly and suchlike. I've simply had nothing much to say about it. Even Anthea Turner telling manky chavs to tidy their kitchens otherwise the rats will poo everywhere just elicited a slight 'tsch' from me. Not sure why...

Hats

Hello. I've been off in Spanish Spain for a week or so hence the lack of blogitude. Sadly I was having far too good a time to watch much Spanish tv. Here are three tapas-sized factettes about what I did watch:-

• The 'noticias', the news, usually has thumping bassy music all the way through, like off of Radio 1;
• Spanish current affairs and discussion shows are mainly presented by forty- and fifty-something women, something you never see here;
• German MTV, always piped into hotels for some reason, has ten-minute breaks full of the same mobile ringtone ads on a loop. Literally one full minute long ad, then another, then the first one again. Times five. And, by the way, why is it just MTV for our German friends? UK viewers get CNN and, in the poncey hotel I was in, CNBC. News and that, not pulpy pop. Hmmm...

OK, so to the title of this blethering. A friend of mine is a big fan of Deadwood, the cowboy thing with him off of Lovejoy and lots of horseys, wooden houses, dirt, swearing and stuff.

I tried to watch this once and failed dismally. I thought it was my general dislike of costume drama - ie I managed five minutes of Vanity Fair or that one with D'Arcy in it. But, no, it's not.

I can't watch anything where the majority of the cast wear hats. It just really puts me off. "Look, he's got a top hat on!" I keep thinking. They may as well be speaking Spanish, I can't listen to anything anyone says when they've got, say, a bonnet on their head. The theme tune to Bonanza goes through my mind on a loop when Lovejoy was saying the c-word a lot, not "ooh, what a daring piece of drama" or anything. "Dang-deda-lang deda-lang deda-lang BON-ANNN-ZAAA!". Over and over again.

That's why all them fillums with pixies and goblins make me snooze immediately - hats. Also because they're overlong snoozefests full of people with fake noses stuck on too. And Orlando Bloom, who looks like Shirley Temple to me. Typing that last sentence makes me feel very old by the way. Sigh.

Hats. Keep 'em off the telly.

(OK, it's just been pointed out that lots of the South Park characters wear hats and I like that. But it's a cartoon. They're not real hats on real heads. They're just drawn on.)

BBCs Three and Four...

Better people than me have been wondering whether the BBC should continue funding BBC's Three and Four.

http://media.guardian.co.uk/mediaguardian/story/0,,2165608,00.html

My view? Hmmm. It's not straightforward. Some people criticise BBC Three's ratings for being dominated by repeats of EastEnders and Little Britain. Er, that's not BBC Three's fault. It's the viewers' fault. They could've tuned in for Ouch, My Bum Smells Of Poo! or Excuse Me, You've Got Mould Growing On Your Ears! but, no, they watch a re-run of the tedium in Albert Square instead.

I won't go on about stupid titles again... well, maybe once - Help, I Smell Of Fish! being this week's corker.

"They cost so much money!" is another complaint. Yeah, well, BBC Choice, the forerunner to BBC Three, had a tiny budget and as a result had no viewers. BBC Four struggles on their budget too, and it was interesting watching a repeat of a 1997 series about the history of gay rights on that channel last week (not sure why BBC Four's Big Gay Week was a month after C4...). The Wall To Wall-produced show was obviously so much better funded than similar docs nowadays, properly researched and filmed, no PDs with Digicams I bet.

Anyway...

"Put the money into news instead, that's more important than Oy Missus, Your Puffin Is Showing!". Er, yes, news is important, but BBC News is well-funded already. You can tell it costs more than Sky News - but not so much more. Notice it's all the not-exactly-poor famous news faces complaining. It reminds me of the scene in top film Broadcast News where celeb anchor Jack Nicholson is in the news office when budget cuts are announced. He commiserates with everyone and as he's leaving someone jauntily says "well, if you gave up a bit of your multi-million dollar salary we'd be OK". The look he gives them is perfect.

"Put all the good stuff on BBC Two". Well, they kinda do that anyway. And whereas I do agree BBC Two has lost a little purpose recently, and needs a rethink, simply transferring more Proms and some subtitled movies from BBC Four isn't going to do it.

My own not-too-snappy view is that channels, in the main, are dead or dying. Yes, there'll still be a core of people who switch on ITV1 or BBC One and sit there for a full evening. I don't know who these people are but they apparently exist. The hideous trailer-and-recap fever that infects all channels proves it.

Look at a six year-old kid flick through the EPG - they don't care about Nick Jnr, CBBC, Cartoon Net or CBBC Two, they just wanna watch Spongebob. Does anyone apart from schedulers and animation nerds obsessed with the little Plastercine logo blobs care whether Torchwood is on BBC Two or Three? I don't, I just want to see the fairies attack Cardiff again.

Sadly, the "programme-is-all" mentality leads to Whoops, I Tumbledried The Cat Again!-type titles. But the main fact about BBC's Three and Four is that the BBC are simply making more stuff. The extra £150m they spend on these channels is justified if the stuff they make is good. And it's wasted if the stuff they make is crap. That's the debate to be having.