Off The Telly » Andrew Collins http://www.offthetelly.co.uk Contemporary and classic British TV Sat, 29 Oct 2011 16:07:07 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.2 The Apprentice http://www.offthetelly.co.uk/?p=2499 http://www.offthetelly.co.uk/?p=2499#comments Wed, 08 Mar 2006 20:00:29 +0000 Andrew Collins http://www.offthetelly.co.uk/?p=2499

If I had a bomb, and a place to drop it from, I’d drop it on you, business hopefuls.

Let’s not fool ourselves that the entrepreneurial spirit was first raised in the ’80s – one glance at Foyle’s War proves that “business bad boys” were rife in 1942, even in Hastings – but the decade of red braces and Gordon Gekko did a lot to turn it into a way of life. As one particularly nasty lobbyist proclaims in oil-industry potboiler Syriana, the latest piece of liberal porn from the George Clooney/Steven Soderbergh camp, “That’s Milton Friedman! He got a goddamn Nobel Prize!”

Friedman, the father of the free market, got his prize in 1976, but his influence was mostly felt once Reagan and Thatcher had been elected, and judging by The Apprentice, their fall from power did little to dampen our enthusiasm for private enterprise. (Sir Alan’s Amstrad empire was first floated on the stock market in 1980, as if to prefigure the aroma of success that stuck to the decade like Paco Raban.) The contestants on this second series, reduced at the end of week three to a band of six brothers and five sisters, were, with one or two elder exceptions, born in the ’70s and raised in the greed-is-good decade. Worse, they will have started work in the ’90s, when American business speak infected our boardrooms, hence all the talk of strategy, bringing it on, and “going for the close”. (This week, Paul, 26, announced that he was going to “role-play” when haggling for a yard of silk, when what he meant was “lie”. What monsters we have created.)

On points, episode three was the weakest in terms of task, dispensed by Sir Alan at the London Stock Exchange from an unnecessary balcony that can only be described as papal, at the very least dictatorial: to buy 10 prescribed items (lobsters, saffron, cigar). The winning team would be the one that came back with the most change from £1000.

This was a fairly mundane quest, almost random, like one of those wacky inheritance comedy films of the 1960s, designed perhaps to test their teamwork but too unwieldy to keep track of, despite the programme’s skilful editing. A 24-style clock in the corner might have helped. Also, the specification that all items must be purchased for under cost price, or else penalties awaited, simply spelled the unedifying sight of grown people groveling to get a penny taken off at a wholesalers. “Go on, please,” whined Mani at one stage of the negotiations for some silk. He is 39 and must surely now examine where his life is actually going.

The knockabout task aside, this was the most compelling dramatic outing so far, partly because we are getting to know the less noisy contestants, like “sweet natured” Alexa, and the foul-mouthed Michelle (who at one fraught moment, summed up with, “What a fucking farce!”).

This, though, was Jo’s show. The 35-year-old undiagnosed-bipolar HR manager was given enough rope to hang herself by the other members of Velocity, allowed to nominate herself as project manager with forethought that would have impressed Judas. It’s interesting that the show’s other early candidate for villain, the actually reasonable Syed, also got his chance as team leader but made little impact, dramatically, beyond haggling for a lobster at zero hour by lying, sorry, role-playing. Indeed, Invicta did little of any interest except win, by eight quid. The spotlight belonged to Velocity, and the inevitable power struggle between Jo and Everybody Who Isn’t Jo.

She put herself forward without any challenges from her spirited teammates, unless you count a barbed, “What skills have you got?” from belligerent Brummie Ruth, who I rather like, despite myself. To her credit, Jo kept the tears under control, but not her mouth, or her isolationist tendencies (always good in a team leader). She was warned by “nice lady” Karen the lawyer to “stop brooding” after not getting her own way, but there is little scope for cutting yourself off from the team in the back of a people carrier.

Most of the boardroom bullshit (remember – Sir Alan doesn’t like “bullshidders”) came from the boys, but there was scant tension to entertain us. Having spent two and half hours planning what to do rather than actually do anything, the girls split into two teams of three and Karen and Alexa were unlucky enough to end up on Jo’s. That was their downfall (keep your friends close, but your enemies closer, or something). While the other three spunkily went off and, without consulting their leader, procured seven out of the 10 items – for which their reward was a panicky last-minute delegation to find the elusive tyre – Jo proved herself useless yet again, taking her team on a wild goose chase to Camden for a dinner jacket. If she spent less time phoning the other team on her fancy mobile and more time getting on with it …

Always on speaker phone, the sight of women yelling into an open mobile as if using a compact will be the enduring image of this series. “I’m not having it,” huffed Jo, who claimed to have “eyes and ears in the back of my head,” but displayed very little between those freakishly-sited lugholes.

In the boardroom, it quickly emerged that that the poorest negotiators (the boys) had won, and were packed off to a symbolic race meeting at Sandown Park for champagne and chest-beating. We saw little of Ansell, who seemed so promising in episode two in his towel, but that just shows that The Apprentice is edited like a soap, as indeed it should be. He was a supporting player this week, but he did get to observe that “treats work”.

As for our treat, Jo dragged her loyal captains Karen and Alexa into the final showdown with Sir Alan, whose criticisms are always met with a straightforward denial.

“You’re amateurish.”

“I’m not amateurish, Sir Alan.”

Alexa, her cheeks aglow like a star of the equestrian club, was accused of being a bit girlish by woman-hating Sir Alan, but she spoke up and saved her own outdoorsy skin. Karen, arbitrarily given retrospective responsibility for the missing tyre, kept her counsel (well, she is a lawyer) and was summarily and unjustly fired. (“Nice lady, but she had to go.”) The first unfair sacking of the series. Jo emerged into reception less outwardly and nauseatingly triumphant than last week, the pink varnish on her nails all but chewed away. Like the tears, she seems to know when to play the clenched fists. Can her mania also be an act?

Of course the nation now hates her more than we ever did Saira. And that, like an idiot chef who can’t tell pork from a scallop on Kitchen Nightmares, is TV gold. (The producers must have begged Sir Alan to leave her in for another week. Or is that a cynical view?) “I was like a Rottweiler,” she said, at one point, picking far too sympathetic an animal. Sir Alan identified her “machine gun rat-a-tat” delivery, but called her “a bloody nutter” in an almost affectionate way. She loved that. She is the kind of person that says, “I’m mad, I am.”

Jo is having it after all. Her claim not to be a threat is false. I love this programme more than any other, while hating those participating to an equal degree. That’s reality TV. And it proves that Milton Friedman has even more to answer for than we thought. Although I’ll bet, on receiving his Nobel, he didn’t punch the air and say, “Bring it on!”

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Survivor: The £1m Final http://www.offthetelly.co.uk/?p=5500 http://www.offthetelly.co.uk/?p=5500#comments Thu, 26 Jul 2001 21:00:27 +0000 Andrew Collins http://www.offthetelly.co.uk/?p=5500 It’s been lonely out here by the water cooler this summer. Everyone else has been chattering away about Big Brother (Helen this, Paul that), the return of Sharon Watts, Coronation Street‘s internet stalker, Ricky Gervais (genius or c***?), there was even a conversation or two about the General Election. But no one would talk to me about Survivor. About the tribal councils or the Sekutu merger or Zoë or Bible Pete or the missing rice. I have been marooned, alone, on a desert island, hundreds of miles from the zeitgeist.

Maybe it’s the sophisticated company I keep. I know for a fact that even on a bad week (by which I mean most weeks) some 5.7 million others have also been tuned in to ITV’s most expensive (£9m) flop, but Survivor never captured the interest of the nation in the places where such “event television” needs to most: among excitable, txt-msging 16-24-year-olds, in the Nelson Mandela Bar, around the water pump, and at the tabloids. The only front pages Survivor nabbed in 10 weeks were through the untelevised (yes, we’re coming to that) antics of “Charlotte the Harlot”, eventual winner of the £1m prize. She may be young, Welsh and dirty, but she’s no Helen.

That’s not fair. Comparisons to Big Brother have always been odious – not that the show’s wealthy originators, Planet 24, nor ITV can complain about that, having bullishly scheduled “beautiful but dangerous” Pulau Tiga island against the maximum security ski lodge in Bow from week one, back in May. How well we remember the words of The Guardian’s Gareth MacLean: “[Survivor] should be a substantial hit … any backlash would most likely be reserved for Big Brother 2.” We’ll have no unsightly schadenfreude here, please. It seemed a credible viewpoint at the time. But apparently the two programmes were never in competition. Producer Nigel Lythgoe now stands amid the wreckage – dreaming no doubt of Popstars 2 – and says that Survivor was never Reality TV anyway – it was only a game show. Of course it was Reality TV! Or at least it was until Survivor – The £1m Final.

Every last vestige of reality was destroyed in the climactic live finale. In what was a commendable last-minute gesture of support, ITV – having manhandled the programme around the schedules like Basil Fawlty trying to hide Mr Leeman’s corpse – stuck with what must have been the original plan and devoted two whole primetime hours to the final Tribal Council, in which a jury comprising the last seven islanders voted between Charlotte and Jackie. This usually takes about five minutes, by the way.

Those of us who have genuinely enjoyed Survivor – the overwrought production values, the stock footage of snakes, silly old Mark Austin, the wailing woman, the mundane Immunity Challenges, fire representing your time on this island, all that guff – have never been as interested in the follow-up programme to each eviction: studio-based, John Leslie-hosted, and in the true spirit of a TV own goal entitled Survivor Unseen. While the regular Survivor slid from 6.6m viewers to 5.2m, Unseen hovered around the 4m mark. Leslie’s cheesy, This Morning-type interviews with each Survivor in front of a captive studio audience, have been missable all along – particularly uninteresting with the early evictees, whom we hardly knew. So to effectively allow the crap format to swallow the good format for the last show was suicidal.

The seven jury members, the seven luckless earlier evictees (I’d forgotten what JJ and Nick looked like) and the two finalists were all seen, scrubbed, fed, styled and preposterously glammed up, yet seated in that awful jungle set, a Rainforest Café facsimile of the tribal council (even the million quid was locked in a see-through box with an old pirate-style padlock straight out of the Pinewood props cupboard). “Reality” is a devalued term – how real can any surival experience be with a 140-strong camera crew hovering? – but Survivor at least nurtured its own version of reality on the island: the water run, the meals, the challenges. By transporting this experience back to a television studio, unreality set back in pretty quickly. (No such jolt occurs when each Big Brother housemate crosses the bridge to their Davina interrogation. It’s a short walk away.)

In order to pad the agony out to two hours – intended agony for Charlotte and Jackie, who’ve been home from the island for about three months, and unintended agony for those of us who’ve remained loyal to the bitter end – John Leslie (who can’t say the word “million” unfortunately) dissected every brief piece of island footage by seeking comments from those involved (“Why did you ask that question, Mick?”), Mark Austin (who had nothing of interest to add, although his nose looked enormous in the studio) and pop-psychologist Steven Flett (“Richard will follow his heart not his head”).

I was reminded of Lenny Henry’s catch-phrase from the early days of Comic Relief: “Keep broadcasting, Griff!” Any drama in the actual decisive council, filmed all those weeks ago back on the island amid the heat, rats and malnutrition, was sapped by constant cuts back to the studio, whose atmosphere was one of a case reconvened after a long recess – I imagine the accused Leeds Utd players will feel the same when they return to court shortly.

In a tight hour, with maximum footage and minimum showbiz, this could have been a fitting end. Instead it was appallingly presented by the shallow, guileless, football-headed Leslie and messily stage-managed, the final handover turning into a scrum of friends and family on the tiny stage. It was as uncomfortable as the rather manly Eve trussed up in a party frock. In the end, ITV killed the programme with kindness. Anyone tuning in for the first time would have been baffled at best.

Survivor need not have been like this. It could have been scheduled with confidence, even when the numbers were shaky: regular time slots, perhaps just out of primetime to allow for lower figures and more racy material. It could have been edited and shown as it happened, no matter how rough the edges – that way we would’ve felt more involved. It should have been honest, and shown us Charlotte’s dalliance with Adrian. (While Big Brother has been embarrassing itself almost daily trying to engineer some rumpo, Survivor had some and sat on it!)

I will remember Survivor as a noble and enthralling piece of television that had courage in all the wrong convictions. I will not remember it by its final, desperate two hours. Anyone want to talk about it?

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Big Brother http://www.offthetelly.co.uk/?p=5572 http://www.offthetelly.co.uk/?p=5572#comments Fri, 01 Jun 2001 22:00:45 +0000 Andrew Collins http://www.offthetelly.co.uk/?p=5572 And with these choice words – “Faarkin’ ‘ell!” – did the lukewarmly-anticipated sequel to Big Brother begin on Saturday. The apposite exclamation – which spoke for us all – came from Paul Ferguson, aka Bubble, first housemate through the door in a curiously staggered entry. He was as unprepared for the awfulness of the 2001 décor as we were. Gone was the “penal chic” of last year, replaced by a sort of hellish Ikea log cabin look. Faarkin’ ‘ell, indeed – “Am I going to have to sit on these tree trunks for nine weeks?”, the behatted 25-year-old single parent must have been thinking.

Within days, the hype-complicit tabloids had short-handed Bubble the “self-confessed former cocaine addict” (he’s banned from driving too, the rogue). Well, what better way to find redemption than to seek enforced exile in a locked chalet when his real-life existence looked in the introductory film to be pretty crap (sees the kiddy at weekends; sleeps alone in a “wicked” king-size bed; sits outside pubs convincing himself he still has the “Bubble Magic”). In a week awash with delicious TV parallels, we saw Bubble’s more likeable bricklaying doppelganger Peter fighting his own addictions on BBC2′s Inside Clouds: A Drink and Drugs Clinic. I was amazed at the willingness of these addicts to allow cameras into their private rehab – but then this is the 21st century and if a tree falls untelevised in the forest, has it really fallen?

Another addict, the gurning Davina McCall, claimed on Friday night’s all-singing, all-whooping Big Brother vote-off, “I am so hooked”. Of course you are – you’re being paid, woman. The £70,000 question remains: are we? Much play was made in the press of ITV’s big-budget Survivor losing the ratings war (down to 5.3 million viewers by Bank Holiday Monday, with BB closing at 3.4 million). Needless to say, that other TV popularity contest, the General Election, isn’t getting a look-in.

Voter apathy is rife. I don’t work in an office with a water cooler, but I’m not getting much of a “buzz” (sorry, BT Cellnet) from the people I talk to. Many are abstaining and only know about Bubble and Penny from the papers. I am unable to vibe them up. Unlike Davina, I’m not hooked yet. I’ve been tuned in all week – on both channels and the stupid web stream (“rebuffering 35.9 Kbps”) – and I had to look up the names of Dean and Stuart before writing this. That’s bad, isn’t it?

So what, apart from refurnishing the house with curvy tables and adding a shag-pad, have the makers of Big Brother done to jolly up the format? The vote-in is a new twist. All week we have been urged to choose a new housemate to replace next Friday’s first evictee. This mini cattle-market only had the effect of reminding us how the new 10 actually talked their way in out of the reported 50,000 hopefuls: by prostituting themselves shamelessly. My hopes were vainly pinned on fortysomething grandmother Anne, but the phone-consensus went the way of Josh, a strapping lad who promised “nudity and naughtiness”. (At least, like model Natasha, he didn’t claim “attitude” with a straight face.) The ulterior motive of Big Brother 2 is all too clear. They need sex this time. We’re already a series behind the Germans and the Dutch on this score, hence the tiresomely fruity nature of nearly all the 2001 contestants. One of them’s a table-dancer for heaven’s sake!

Penny – currently a schoolteacher, but not for long it seems – may be the other housemates’ joint least-favourite (five votes each for she and dozy Welsh girl Helen on Friday), but the public may well prefer her to stay put, since she seems to be the most hormonally charged: necking with Paul, dropping her towel live on daytime E4 (what happened to the face-saving delay?), and generally looking “most likely to”. Bubble thinks all women want his magic (“You so want me,” he said to Amma in a “private” moment). Paul, he told us, loves women. Only old-timers Thingy, 36 (married with three kids), and Whatsisname, 37 (engaged), let the male side down in terms of wanting it. Gay sex is obviously beyond the realms of ratings-grabbing decency – or else why would the production team so cruelly deny camp Brian anyone to play with? He – and we – can only hope Josh swings.

Sex cursed through the bloodstream of week one like Bubble’s former drug of choice. The sun helped, keeping clothes down to a minimum. I’ve just flicked over to the web feed (much more user-friendly this year) and a morning aerobics session caused high-kicking Helen to complain, “Bet my knickers are showing.” Hmmm. The horse has already bolted, I fear. It was Helen (“Hilda”) who gave it the full porn starlet when posing legs akimbo for the mucky calendar midweek – a task cynically designed to shed kit (God, even boring Elizabeth “got them out”). Why didn’t they just lace Helen’s birthday champagne with Spanish Fly and be done with it?

I don’t wish to appear prudish. It’s just that the original Big Brother, though clearly fabricated, seemed to have a more organic life than this one. Here, the narrative came ready-unfolded. A symptom of last year’s phenomenal overground success, it has inevitably coloured both production expectations and the attitude of the contestants. They seem more aware of the cameras and “the nation” watching. Narinder the Asian Geordie (so perversely sexualised in bikini, high heels and goggles with that axe for the calendar) wondered to every-girl’s-pal Brian if any celebrities might be watching her. He suggested Stevie Wonder. Our thoughts immediately turned to the compulsive Celebrity Big Brother, which was a lot more fun than this: the already-famous bidding for mundanity, rather than vice versa.

What sort of person would volunteer for this ordeal when they know that the “fame” it offers ranges from presenting Chained on E4 (the oh-so-principled Mel) to the total humiliation of seeing your single enter the charts at 73 (Nichola)? Perhaps some of the single housemates are looking for true love, à la Tom and Claire who have just announced they are having a baby. Maybe the self-conscious Penny simply wants out of her underpaid job (where they think she’s “a complete lunatic!”) Maybe Bubble just wants the 70 grand for his little daughter, to prove to his estranged girlfriend that he is not a loser. Such stories ought to make this appointment TV. It isn’t. Yet.

But then Bazal/Endemol are caught in a cleft stick. Are they running a straight franchise here like Last of the Summer Wine or Police Academy? Conventional wisdom has it that audiences fear change and prefer to know exactly what they’re going to get. And Big Brother didn’t look broke when 10 million tuned in and seven million phoned at the death last summer – so why fix it? The pressure is on to deliver Channel 4 – and their multiple commercial partners – another cultural-event-of-the-year. More of the same, in other words. But the bar has been raised by everything from Survivor and Boot Camp, to Surviving the Iron Age and the appalling Chained, and these people have their professional pride. You can imagine bosses Ruth Wrigley and Conrad Green saying, “Oh it’s totally different this time. The audience get to vote someone in! And the first eviction is going to be a day earlier than the housemates think!”

Big Brother 2 is more of the same, and so much less. The innocence is gone. The tabloids have hit the ground running this time to compensate for their Pearl Harbor-style lateness last year (both The Mirror and The Sun claim to be the “official Big Brother paper”), but their appetite for stories merely highlights the lack of anything worth writing about thus far. One “Fuck you, arsehole!”, one drink-driving conviction and a flash of muff.

On Wednesday, or so the desperate papers told us, the housemates were ordered inside when fireworks went off near the house. Shouldn’t they be going off indoors?

There’s every chance it’ll pick up. But Dean is no Tom, Brian is no Anna and Bubble is no Craig, despite what the producers must have desperately hoped. The promise of sex is not enough to keep me glued. Not when they’re eating live slugs and snuffing out symbolic flames on Survivor. If there’s one thing we’ve learned from reality TV, it’s that the further away it gets from reality the better. Last year, during the post-Nick lull, Big Brother turned into a bunch of people talking about being on Big Brother. This year it’s started out that way. Except their knickers are showing.

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I Love 1988 http://www.offthetelly.co.uk/?p=5496 http://www.offthetelly.co.uk/?p=5496#comments Sat, 17 Mar 2001 20:00:56 +0000 Andrew Collins http://www.offthetelly.co.uk/?p=5496

Alright, let’s start with that assumption. Do I love 1988?

Well, it means a lot to me in retrospect because it was my first full year out of college and the year I landed my first job in the media (Design Assistant at the NME). I was 23. It was a year of too much thinking – living alone in a studio flat in South London, sort-of-voluntarily celibate, making spaghetti Bolognese, drinking Kaliber at house parties, hanging around other people’s places of higher education to ease my own withdrawal from college, watching an inordinate amount of TV and renting a lot of videos.

As we have seen from previous editions of I Love the Eighties, the nostalgia offered is mostly specific to my own thirtysomething demographic, we who – eek! – stay in on a Saturday night (hence all the pencil cases and verucas in the early ’80s, when 36-year-olds were still at school), with a few crumbs thrown in for the twentysomethings who tape it and the good-looking TV presenters I have never heard of who appear on it.

So did the items selected for I Love 1988 say anything to me about my life? Loadsamoney, quiz machines, Acid House, Viz, Hitman & Her - yes. All the rest, no. Which is not to say that the programme-makers didn’t nail the zeitgeist. By casting their net beyond pop and kitsch telly to sport and fads, I Love 1988 presented a passable summation of the year.

Using the animated Ninja Turtles as “hosts” was technically clever, but laid the programme open, yet again, to charges of date-fixing. The series debuted in Britain in 1988, but am I going mad or wasn’t it on Sky? Turtlemania didn’t really happen here until 1989-1990 (the hit single and film certainly came in 1990). Perhaps it’s pedantic to fixate on dates, but when a programme seeks to define a calendar year, such “seasonal adjustment” whiffs of convenience.

No arguments about Bros vs Brother Beyond – an inspired start to the show. Both had their 15 minutes in ’88. By ’89 they were toast, which is why disposable pop sums up a year better than more substantial rock music. We had no testimony from the dim-witted Goss brothers, but preening Brother Beyond singer Nathan Barley was on hand to tragically state that his band had gone down “somewhere in history but not too indelibly”.

The Loadsamoney section was all too brief. (What a quiet man Charlie Higson is.) There was, however, very little new to learn about this much-discussed character. The dedicated Turtles bit was launched, in now-traditional style, with the magnificent Peter Kay (underused this week) remembering the theme tune. It’s a simple down-the-pub trick, but it works. What a shame we had Gail Porter asking, pointlessly, “Who thought that up?” Well, some comics writers you fool. Good gag from my close personal friend Maconie (“Donatella, Panatella, Jackson Pollock and Rolf Harris”), and hearing from both creators, two of the voice artists and a consultant biologist was no less than we have come to expect from the tireless I Love researchers.

On the subject of pundits, this week’s virgins were disappointing: pisspoor Guardian TV critic Gareth McLean, weight-obsessed posho columnist India Knight, Brendan Coogan (who seemed to be there solely to represent brother Steve re: Madeley/Partridge) and Patrick Kielty, who at least had something Northern Irish to add about novelty hands and bullet holes on cars. Thank heavens, once again, for Johnny Vegas (who imagined Hitman & Her dancer Wiggy working at a bureau de change: “I don’t trust you with currency”) and the aforementioned Maconie, who appears in two shirts because they asked him back to help fill out the apparently bereft later years. His pub machine reminiscence was up there with Gregory’s Girl.

I never watched Richard and Judy so this cult passed me by, but what is the point of Tara Palmer-Tompkinson saying “Oh I love Richard and Judy!” (likewise, Terry Alderton saying “Bill and Ted was a great film”) – this is not pop-nostalgia, it’s not even strictly comment or punditry. Bald statements have become more prevalent as the series has struggled to fill its insane brief week by week. I recall Dermot O Leary being on once in 1985 to say “I really like Bruce Springsteen.” Let’s hope they have a bit longer to edit together I Love the Nineties.

Nice section on “tragic” US sprinter Flo Jo, with good, relevant punditry (spoiled only by Michelle Gayle saying it was important to bring glamour to track and field – er, why?) and a tasteful obituary, with enough from Jim White to suggest that her heart attack at 48 may have been steroid-assisted. Fine telly. And keen use of backing track: I Know You Got Soul by Eric B and Rakim (Seoul Olympics, geddit?)

1988 was The Year Of Acid House. I was working at the NME when it all went off and so even though I didn’t step foot in a warehouse or take E in 1988, I felt this cultural flashpoint – well told by the pundits, especially erudite DJ Graeme Park, who made the religious point well (DJ in pulpit etc.), and we were allowed to laugh at the dancing, even though the movement had its serious side (nicely put by Miranda Sawyer). Bez summed it up with the old cliché: “Can’t really remember it, it must have been good!”

Being neither a lesbian or a football fan I can’t really remember Prisoner Cell Block H or inflatable bananas so they must have been good, but I enjoyed the sections, especially the comfortable-shoe-wearing woman who brought Bea over to meet the Mayor of Derby, and the footballer Imre Varadi, whose name started the banana craze. Good to see Bob Wilson having inflatables dropped on him. It’s these innocuous bits of TV that encapsulate a year: Bruno Brookes’ misjudged Top Gun jacket on TOTP, Mike Read lamely making a “Top of the Wads” crack about Harry Enfield, Josie Lawrence setting fire to her hair on This Morning and some sports reporter describing sumo legend Dumptruck as “576 lbs of fighting flab”.

The Viz part was slightly flat – again, perhaps it’s a story told too often. And Debbie Gibson vs Tiffany was too similar to Bros/Brother Beyond (apart from Mrs Gibson, telling us how Debbie wrote “eight, 10, 12 songs a day” – no good ones though, eh?)

Bill and Ted? Again, good work on booking the interviewees, but this needed more context, more about nascent slacker culture and where it went next (grunge, Wayne’s World, Wheatus) – maybe it’s too big for the slot.

To finish, The Hitman & Her, who should, of course, have hosted I Love 1988 from some Warrington fleshpot. I was fascinated by Pete Waterman’s comment about turning on the telly late at night and finding Elvis Costello talking about Irish politics – which is why he inventedHitman. And thus was brainless post-pub telly conceived. Me? I’d stay up any night to watch Elvis Costello talking about Irish politics, but there you go.

So, in I Love 1988 were we told that Acid House changed clubbing forever, and then we saw that clubbing hadn’t changed at all. You wonder if the overworked programme-makers even got time to watch the finished programme back before they deliver it to the Beeb. It’s like a dozen little programmes all stuck together, with no central theme and no overview whatsoever. This has been true all along. The only themes have been Stuart Maconie and Gina Yashere.

Still, lots of fun on the night: Brian Blessed, someone describing Bros as “Hitler youth”, Richard Madeley asking Neighbours actor Shane O’Brien if he felt “a bit of a poof” and a reminder of that Sun headline: “SHOOT THESE EVIL DRUG BARONS” I am a little tired of having to give up an hour and half of my Saturday night to this series now, but once I do, it never fails to tickle – more so now that I am not on it any more. Less anxiety.

And where was I in 1988? At a rave? Watching the Olympics? Waving a banana? No. Listening to George Best by The Wedding Present (1987), watching Broadway Danny Rose (1984) and reading Money by Martin Amis (1984). If only life were as neat as a pop-cultural documentary.

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