Thursday 8 November 2018

Bo’ Selecta!

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.

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