The epitome of a good parody has to be something that takes
on a greater significance than the original target. This week’s show is one that achieved that
several times over. It’s lucky it did,
as I still had no inspiration for what to cover in this week’s post, and then a
meeting this morning brought Bo’
Selecta! back into my life, sixteen years after it first appeared on our
screens.
Members of our Management team had gathered in a meeting
room for important and confidential discussions (though these will only be
interesting to you if you work in content partnerships for a media
agency). One key member needed to be
dialled in from home, where they had been using the classic excuse of a poorly
baby to get an extra-long lie-in. A
mobile was placed on the table and our dialler-inner was put on speaker. “Are you there?” we asked.
“Yes,” came the response.
“Good,” said someone else. “You’re on speaker, so don’t say
f*ck or bugger.” Naturally, I was
furious that the joke hadn’t come from me.
I was just about to launch into my usual spiel where I tell colleagues
to be careful, as I’ll do the jokes round here (which must be about as charming
as it sounds to type out here).
Instead, the phone crackled with our remote member dropping
a particularly loud C bomb. Oh, how we
fell about laughing. Saying naughty
words without your parents telling you off is one of the best things about
being an adult. It might actually be the
only thing.
By now, you’re either wondering what the devil I’m on about,
or you’re recalling fondly the Davina McCall character
from Bo’ Selecta! Or you’ve stopped
reading entirely, as you can source boring stories about someone’s life in an
office from the person next to you on any train. Either way, it’s fitting in this final week
of Big Brother (whose final final I caught
up with and said goodbye to as another part of my youth slipped into the
ether), that we are talking about a sketch show that took the piss out of
it. I would wager that more people have
quoted Bo’ Selecta!’s version of Big Brother this year than have actually
watched the 2018 series.
When speaking live to the Big Brother house, our host Davina
always had to remind the potty-mouthed housemates to mind their effing and
jeffing: “Big Brother house, this is Davina; please do not swear.” Not a funny line in itself, until Bo’
Selecta! turned it on its head with the absurd, “Big Brother house, this is
Davina; please do not say f*ck or bugger.”
How ridiculous: here’s Davina saying the words that aren’t allowed on
air, and, what’s more, they’re not even the worst words. Fair enough, I think the F bomb is second
only to the C bomb, but bugger is probably barely in the top twenty of
offensive things you can say.
But the deviation from reality didn’t end there. Bo’ Selecta!’s impressions of popular and unpopular
people from popular culture never cared much for accuracy. That’s because most parts were played by a
white man. Instead of prosthetics, he
just donned some oversized NHS glasses and an even bigger rubber chin. Our favourite celebrities, from Lorraine Kelly to Gareth Gates, would then
be portrayed as grotesque creatures that often had little to do with their
real-life namesakes. The famous
Americans often came in for worse treatment, getting transplanted from the
glamorous US origins to some crap town in Britain.
Yet, these versions often threatened to eclipse their
inspiration. In 2002, Craig David was one of the
UK’s biggest popstars. He was so smooth
he even declared in an album title that he was Slicker Than Your Average. But, in the world of Bo’ Selecta!, he wasn’t
from Southampton anymore, but from Yorkshire.
He wet the bed. He had a pet
kestrel called Kes. He was deeply uncool
and it soon became impossible to see Craig David without donning a northern
accent and shrieking Craaaaig Daaaavid.
Having seen the real Craig David in recent years at a Summertime Ball
(via free tickets from work, but let’s be honest: I loved it), it seems time
has finally allowed him to reclaim his own identity, with his resurgence
enthusiastically enabled by older millennials desperate to relive the heyday of
UK garage.
Other characters didn’t necessarily have quite the same
impact, but, for me, there are still certain words or phrases I can’t hear
without thinking of them. Any time
something is described as mint condition, I can picture Destiny’s Child in a
bus shelter, with Kelly only able to say “Question?” while Beyoncé explains in
a Leeds accent that the best way to remain in “totally mint condition” is to
rub lard on your shiny legs. I can’t
hear someone say “no offence” without the Simon Cowell character
coming to mind, telling an unsuccessful X Factor hopeful, “No offence, but I
wish your mum was dead.” If I’m ever
told to bring a friend, I immediately picture a scouse Christina Aguilera
giving two simultaneous handjobs offscreen in a caravan, while explaining that
she is dirrrty as you like, and telling punters to, “Bring a friend next time.”
In fact, every time I hear the name, Christina Aguilera, I
can see the Bo’ Selecta! Kelly
Osbourne (whose dad had terribly long arms and whose mum went around
looking for dog poos to treasure) switching between a cutesy American accent to
welcome viewers to The Kelly Osbourne Show (“Hey, you douchebags”) before
aggressively ranting in a British accent about how much she effing hates
Christina Aguilera, before switching back to American to declare, “But she has
the most wonderful voice.” Manatees make
me think of a posh Marilyn
Manson. Shazam makes me think of a
pervy David Blaine. Earpieces make me think of Ant Man and Dec
Pet, and so on and so forth…
I could live without the show’s interstitials, which saw
neck-braced Avid Merrion conducting a personal creepathon with his celebrity
obsessions. In fact, a lot of the humour
was deeply crass, puerile and generally offensive, with some of the racial and
sexuality stereotyping feeling a bit wide of the mark for today’s tastes. But it was often done while knowingly being
so far from the reality that its ridiculousness was the very source of the
laughs. It didn’t feel the need to
celebrate celebrities. Instead, it
really went for them (though I did miss some of the jokes due to the accents
and rubber masks, which were hard to hear through).
Nevertheless, such a subversive late-night Channel 4 show didn’t quite make a
household name of its creator, Leigh Francis, but he is now practically an ITV treasure in his more palatable (though
equally as flap-orientated) character of Keith Lemon. On the other hand, other elements of the show
are fondly remembered in my household (by my sister and me, not by our
parents), such as the ground-breaking feature: The Week In Bits, With Jodie
Marsh’s Tits. This really was a round-up
of celeb gossip voiced by an actual nipple.
I suppose it depends on your household.
Nighty Night
Rick & Morty
Little Britain
Come Fly With Me
Peep Show
Cardinal Burns
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