Gogglebox

It’s time to acknowledge something that’s been painfully clear in all of these posts: I’m pretty sure I’m addicted to TV.  Things came to a head in these last few weeks of I’m A Celebrity.  Until the Sky man comes next weekend (so that I have ITV2 HD in time for Love Island – always set and achieve your life goals), I’m in a household without any decent way of recording off my massive OLED telly.  Unable to stomach a nightly hour-long show complete with adverts (especially at Christmas, the most odious time of the year) I decided to watch the show catching up a day behind on ITV Hub.  However, this VoD service has the picture quality of peering through a steamed shower panel, the ads are all still there but at higher frequency and it loses your programme coming out of each break with a cheeky Whoops! message that infuriates more than it sympathises.  Realising it would only be a matter of time before my remote was smashed through my LG 55” screen, I reluctantly switched back to live viewing.  Suddenly, we were back in HD, and I could tell which one was Ant and which one was Dec again.  The dreaded ad breaks became three-minute chunks during which I would find other things to do, banal things like wash up, clean the kitchen, Whatsapp pals or stare into space – each preferable to watching supermarkets argue about who can provide the most magical Christmas.  The bigger drawback, though, was that I became a slave to the appointment to view.

Every evening was a countdown to 9pm, lest I miss the opening link.  Before the I’m A Celeb final, the nightly show was running longer till 10.30, cutting thirty minutes into my sacred bedtime and making the 5.30am alarm the next morning for Crossfit all the more devastating.  It was hell.  I’m relieved it’s over, despite loving the show.  My point is, keeping up with my favourites and devouring new boxsets in order to keep this blog interesting is starting to dominate my evening life.  I’m ending up watching hours each night, normally too exhausted from the early morning and full day of work to do anything productive (first-world problem – it warrants no sympathy).  Once my bum hits the sofa, that’s it.  I’m supposed to be furnishing a new flat, but now that the TV den part of the living room is up and running, I’ve a bad feeling we’re going to be stalled here for some time before there’s any further progress.  I have become a couch potato.  I have become my father.

It’s only fitting, then, that this week I should take a look at another set of people who while away their time on this fascinating planet sedentary on DFS furniture staring at a telly screen (though my sofa is from Heal’s everybody).  So, let’s do Gogglebox.  But, before we go any further, I should confess that this is a programme I don’t watch.  Don’t worry, though, that’s never stopped me throwing in my two pennies’ worth before (see posts on The Apprentice and Keeping Up With The Kardashians).  I’ve channel-surfed on enough Friday evenings to catch sufficient chunks of it to have the measure of the format and its cast.  Please read on while I oscillate wildly between tearing it asunder and extolling its charm.

And I do have some bones to pick with Gogglebox.  For the unaware, it’s a TV programme about people watching TV programmes.  It’s a real-life The Royle Family.  Up and down Britain, we mutually view selected televisual highlights with a cast of actual non-famous normos.  That’s right – we watch people watch telly.  Despite all of the above making it clear I’m wasting my life away, this format is the very definition to me of wasted time, and it’s for this reason I never make any effort to watch it.  Additionally, it shows you all the must-see moments of the week just gone which I rightly suspect would have the effect of making me want to watch even more TV.  This would benefit no-one.  But what I didn’t realise about the filming process was that the cast of Gogglebox know what they’re going to watch – they have scheduled filming sessions.  The production team pick the shows, put them on and then sit down to shoot the reactions.  When I realised this, I was very disappointed.  I thought we had more of a Big Brother vibe: families sign up to a camera being in the living room, go about their viewing lives as normal, and then the best bits are picked up and edited together.  This, I always felt, would be a fairer reflection of what we really watch and how we really react.  It’s excessive and impractical, but that’s just where my imagination goes to first.

Linked to this first fallacy and the fact that the participants know they are being filmed we have the following consequence: their responses aren’t that natural.  It’s an artificial set up.  I therefore can’t escape the feeling they’re all showing off.  Don’t get me wrong, I love showing off.  I do it constantly and enjoy it in others if they are entertaining me.  But Gogglebox acts like it’s a sneak peek behind closed doors to a more humdrum evening, with interstitial shots of household façades leading to cosy living-room set-ups, allowing we privileged few to glimpse real truth from unaware subjects.  But no, it’s just regional accents trying to think of the funniest thing to say about that week’s news or the John Lewis advert.  And it’s at that point I stop caring.

Everyone talks about their favourite Goggleboxers, but I don’t really know who’s who beyond those that have appeared in other reality shows (looking at you, Celebrity Big Brother).  What I do love is the diversity.  We have all points of the UK compass covered here: a wide array of family structures, lifestyle choices, ethnic backgrounds, cultural values, political persuasions, incomes, faiths, genders, ages, sexualities etc – basically every flavour of Brit you can shove out of the way on a crowded train.  What unites them all is a need to redecorate their living rooms.  It’s a bit like Come Dine With Me when you see that someone’s kitchen is a bit natty in comparison to all the show kitchens you see on cookery shows.  That said, given how many of them have hundreds of dogs sprawled across their soft furnishings, rubbing their worms into the fabric and wafting their canine farts over the cushions, there’d be no point updating any of the interiors.  You can sometimes smell the dog breath through the screen.  But it doesn’t matter what I think: what’s touching is the genuine love and affection these family members and friends have for each other.  That, at least, is always reassuringly genuine, if sprinkled with dog hair.

So, who on earth do I think I am talking disparagingly about Gogglebox simply because the people on it watch TV and do showing off?  This whole blog is based around the exact same concept: I watch too much TV and then show off about it, desperately seeking attention for my musings, awaiting offers of global syndication and secretly beaming when friends compliment my writing in real life.  The difference, sadly for me, is that Gogglebox still has millions of viewers, whereas I’m only getting tens of thousands of reads here…

The Royle Family

After so many posts harping on about national treasures in the world of telly (Fleabag, Nighty Night, Chewing Gum), I’m prompted this week to consider the national treasures we have lost.  British summer seems at last to have remembered that it’s June and, judging by my back sweat as I sit on this Sunday morning train home to London from an idyllic seaside wedding in Kent, this better weather may indeed seem at odds with the somewhat hibernal nature of the show in the title of this week’s offering.  But indulge me the lack of seasonality; we’ve covered nearly a hundred shows here so perfect alignment to the cultural calendar isn’t always possible or interesting (to me).  In fact, continuing with the theme of writing more about myself than the shows in question, it’s the loss of a personal treasure that has influenced me here.  But don’t worry: it would be fairly uncharacteristic of me to display genuine emotion, so you’ll just need to bear with me as I segue clunkily from a death in the family to irreverent commentary on a sitcom from a few years back.  I mean, yes, even that sentence was clunky, wasn’t it?

We’ll start with the theme tune.  For us in our late twenties and early thirties, Oasis sound-tracked our coming of age.  In fact, last night’s wedding culminated in the bride and groom held aloft on the shoulders of pals, Don’t Look Back In Anger blaring out from the booth of a DJ only slightly disgruntled that a drunken pal had spilled drinks on one of his lights (which he then mopped up with a cushion) and with raucously caterwauled backing vocals provided by a choir of prosecco-fuelled Millennials playing at being adults, a moment as aspirationally instagrammable as it was beautiful in real life.  But beyond this band’s best-known hits, Half The World Away sticks out, not for being any less anthemic, but for its subtle pain teamed with muted comfort.  And thus, Noel Gallagher’s voice brings us each episode into the world of the Royles of Manchester.

I am bound to confess that my household missed out on The Royle Family during its initial broadcasts on BBC2 in 1998.  As northern as gravy on everything, the show failed to appeal to my southern clan’s Surrey ways.  These people were unemployed, so what interest could we have in their lives?  While their working classness was there to be celebrated, my parents had striven all their lives to project middle class temperaments at every encounter: for example, I wasn’t supposed to watch Grange Hill in case I picked up on their examples of poor speech.  It was only during my year abroad that a dear friend sourced and shared the DVDs.  I’ve previously talked of how, at the time, daily viewings of dinnerladies provided an essential link back to Blighty (before it was an embarrassing place to be from when in Europe), but once we had completed both series, it was The Royle Family that stepped up to offer us respite from all the Vollkornbrot posturing and Umsteigemöglichkeiten announcements.

Our premise is a family sitting on their sofas watching TV.  In many ways, then, an accurate reflection of my own family’s time spent together.  But while we literally ate crumpets for Sunday tea while watching (and bloody loving) Just William, the Royles seem to sit around watching any old thing.  But unlike the showing off of Gogglebox, these viewers’ charm came from their subtlety.  Instead of sweeping statements for shock value, or trying to look good with a pre-practised opinion, the Royles gave us a rawer realism, a more honest reflection of life on the British settee: flatulence, bickering about who makes the tea, gossiping about neighbours and selfish channel-hopping.  Yet, through that, the affection was irresistible, and its identifiability therefore transcended all factors of class and region.

The highs and lows, and the overall below averageness of the Royles made us fall in love with them, accepting them and all their unwashed clothing, nose-picking and toilet talk.  Patriarch Jim of course had the best seat in the house, selected for its unbeatable view of the small screen: a policy repeated in lounges the country over.  Meanwhile, at his side, Sue Johnston’s scrunchy-wearing Barbara perfectly captured that classic mum behaviour of getting very tired after doing what always seemed like not very much (at least to us as kids – I now know that all adult life is peerlessly exhausting), reclining deep in the sofa’s cushioning, her neck barely supporting the weight of her own head, while making sure every visitor had had their tea.  Coming and going was awkward teen our Antony, sent unfairly to the shop for any errand, before growing into a driven young man, much to the surprise of his own parents.

Propelling gentle plots forwards was eldest daughter Denise, played by the show’s creator and writer, national treasure Caroline Aherne.  Her relationship with, then engagement to long-term collaborator Craig Cash as Dave, who goes on to become her husband and the father of her children, generated the drama, if any.  From their spats to the eventual wedding, and in particular, the birth of their first child, crescendoing in a post-broken waters bathroom scene between father and daughter that I esteem to be one of the most accurate portrayals of British parental love ever committed to TV (much like Tim and Dawn’s romance in The Office is the most accurate portrayal of romantic love).  Fair enough, Denise does go on to display a lean-back approach to parenting and later claims that Christmas isn’t really for kids, but you wouldn’t expect much else from someone whose idea of dinner is Dairylea on toast.  And, more importantly, Baby David (or, rather, Dabry Babid) joins a family that love him no matter what.

Sadly, we lost Aherne in 2016.  From her first appearances in The Fast Show, declaring the weather to be scorchio or commenting on customers’ shopping as a garrulous checkout girl, her contribution to national comedy celebrated with laser-sharp observation the silliest things about us.  In addition, The Royle Family featured another lost national treasure.  Liz Smith inhabited the role of Nana Royle as comfortably as she sank into the cushions of her family’s well-used and well-worn sofa, a crafty foil to son-in-law Jim, but a source of grandmaternal comfort to all who sat beside her in that front room.  I could bawl now just thinking of the episode where Nana Royle passes away.  The loss was so touching in its normality that it felt all the more painful.  Understandably, the nation mourned again when Smith retired from the comedy of life at the age of 95, also in 2016.

And so, back to me, everybody.  A matter of days short of ninety, my mum’s last, yet much older, sister died peacefully in hospital.  She hadn’t been out of her nursing home bed in six years and never had any teeth in the whole 34 years during which I had the pleasure of knowing her, yet she was always cheerful and would never say no to a Jelly Baby (in fact, she would actively request them).  Steering clear of an excessive bout of sentiment, I won’t dwell on the grief of losing a personal treasure.  For the first time, I no longer have an elderly relative who needs visiting in an old people’s home, which means my sister and I will have to give up one of our favourite hobbies: speculating on the origins of brown stains on the ceilings (my sister: “that’s not coffee”).  This blog isn’t going to make a huge contribution to how we process grief, but whether it’s your Auntie Yvonne or Nana Royle, cherishing happy memories will always bring more than lamenting loss.  I don’t have a sitcom I can re-watch to reconnect with my aunt as I can with Aherne and Smith, but I can replay recollections of her telling me I had grown bigger, despite me being over 30.  And the smile that brings will have to be enough.

Sex Education

If you’ve ever wondered where all the ugly jackets in the world have gone, I can now reveal their whereabouts to you.  They’ve been hoarded by the costume department of Sex Education.  Don’t worry, I’m about to say a whole load of nice things about this show, but let’s just dwell on the programme’s aesthetic before we really get into things.  Every character, from an eccentric older patient in an abortion clinic, to the fundamentalist protestors outside, is clad in the sort of coat you’ll remember from embarrassing (actual, not digital) photos from your eighties or nineties childhood (people with childhoods any later shouldn’t really be reading this as I don’t know what to say to them).  The colours clash, the shoulders box up beyond human anatomy, the sleeves tease you with mysteries.  If you’re going to embrace bad taste, though, then you might as well own it.

I’m reminded of a costume hire company in the ski resort of Morzine where I was lucky enough to be taken on a jolly with work.  For our ironic night out, a van load of dated onesies was brought to the chalet and laid out on the pool table; we were invited to make our selections amidst the inescapably recognisable odour of jumble sale.  Our criteria were simple: the more garish, the better.  In these extravagant (and warm) disguises, we could be amplified versions of ourselves, dancing on podiums, recreating the video to I’m A Slave 4 U by Britney Spears or photographing ourselves draped over petrol pumps in the snow.  It was as if the outfits came with added character.  That evening around the pool table is how I imagine jacket selection day during the filming of Sex Education.  These were the same bad-taste onesies, they just had the legs and crotches cut off (thereby making them jackets obviously).

But it works.  Sex Education takes place in a version of Britain where everyone wears these jackets (and a whole host of other eye-catching items).  Moordale Secondary School teems with teens who are at home balancing irony with style in order to create a look and feel that is at once real and yet an enhancement of reality.  The office Netflix chat around the show was universal: everyone should watch it because it’s great.  But the second comment was always a reference to the fact this UK-based comedy-drama seemed to unfold in an American high school transplanted from the USA to South Wales.  Regular readers will know that the high school is one of my favourite settings for TV (see posts on The OC and Teen Wolf) but I would argue that Moordale is actually a mid-Atlantic fusion.  Sure, there are letterman jackets for the swim team and wide corridors filled with big US-style lockers, but these just serve to signpost and facilitate the setting, the relationships and the storylines.  The characters inhabiting this setting are as bloody British as spending two years failing to get a Brexit deal (so let’s please remain).  My school didn’t have a pool, and our shoebox lockers were just places where we forgot a packed lunch of sandwiches over the Easter holidays.

In fact, Moordale Secondary seems to be what we would call a sixth form college.  We’re not told much about its setting – there’s no named town to host us (like Riverdale).  It’s rural, which, based on my Surrey youth, means everything is too far apart to walk and you need your folks to cart you about until you pass your driving test, but the characters dash about in the dark between each other’s homes without too much difficulty.  Why my mind focused on the transportation practicalities is a reflection of my own anxieties, and it’s not interesting for me to write about here, so I don’t even know why you’re reading this bit.  Let’s instead focus on the British countryside looking breath-taking and cinematic – our nation of crap towns hasn’t looked this good on camera since The End Of The F***ing World.

Even that observation isn’t important.  So, now for the main bit: Moordale is packed with a young community of sexually active students whose enthusiasm for fornication (for the most part) is only outstripped by their cluelessness.  Our link into this world is our hero, Otis, whose disgust at sexual acts is at odds with his mum’s occupation: she is a sex therapist, practising what she preaches with a parade of casual (and cringe) lovers.  Played by Gillian Anderson, Dr Jean F. Milburn might know her away around a phallic ornament (the house is dripping in them) but she’s as lost at raising a modern teen as any parent would be.  Nevertheless, her vocation rubs off, with Sex Education’s premise being that her son ends up charging his academic cohort (a delicious piece of jargon, courtesy of my old headmistress) for his own brand of sex therapy.  His virginity is no barrier to imparting his teachings on scissoring, gag reflexes and ejaculation.  And if you’re wincing at those sexual terms, then this isn’t the show for you.  Bonking appears on screen every few minutes, with frank discussion of it filling most of the rest of the time.  Brits are prudishly reserved when it comes to open conversation about slap and/or tickle, but we’re also obsessed with it.  Sex Education treads this balance beautifully, celebrating sexual diversity, inexperience and experimentation in all its silly sloppiness.  After all, it is our vagina (reference to episode five).

Navigating this hormonal onslaught alongside Otis, his fellow students are all a source of constant joy in their own ways.  Rather than box-ticking a series of high school tropes, their genuine uniqueness brings grit and proximity to Sex Education’s colourful costumes.  You root for them all.  Audiences will fall in love with Eric, Otis’s best friend who doesn’t let being average at French horn (not a euphemism) hold back his extravagant wardrobe choices, but I was charmed by Aimee, a member of Moordale’s own Mean Girls, The Untouchables, who finally learns to put herself first.  I also want to mention Lily, not just for her erotic alien fiction, but also her combinations of rollnecks and bumbags.  I can’t leave out Maeve and Jackson either, but I’ll finish on Adam, the bullies-get-bullied bad boy and chest-hairiest teen whose last-episode resolution will either blow you away (literally) or prove correct suspicions you’ll have had since his first appearance.

I haven’t been this saddened by finishing a show since the end of Parks & Recreation, but thank goodness news already abounds of a second series getting commissioned.  If the rumours of 40 million streams are true, then I can just hear the LOLs echoing out around the world.  Get yourself sex educated.  Just don’t focus too much on the jackets.

Shipwrecked

This is a battle between two shows.  The first was a Sunday morning staple from the very earliest days of reality TV, which, when looked back on from 2019, is imbued with youthful nostalgia and innocence.  The second is a reboot of the format after nearly a decade’s hiatus.  The cynic in me wonders if this return is a response to the discovery by ITV2 of the formula for 16-34 TV gold: beautiful young people minus clothing plus sunny island equals captive audience (that would otherwise be on Instagram and not watching telly).  Yes, I was talking about Love Island just then everybody, but this post is about Shipwrecked in all of its guises, on T4, e4 and Channel 4, and with and without its suffix: colon Battle Of The Islands.

Cast your minds back.  It’s nearly the Millennium (which I still think of as the Minnellium, as the word better encapsulates the absolute naffness of this pointless event) and we children have been brought by our mother to Devon for a party with old family friends.  I remember two things: my sister’s guinea pig died while we were away, continuing our pets’ tradition of snuffing it on special occasions, and I laughed so hard during a game of cards that I farted loudly in front of my parents’ grown-up friends.  But, at the same time, months before Big Brother, Shipwrecked came to our screens.  Those first series, one running in 2000 and two (yes, two!) following in 2001, were from a more naïve era.  There was no competition.  This was simply a documentary crew following young people living a back-to-basics existence while receiving permanent skin damage in the sun of the South Pacific.  Animals were slaughtered, people got sand in their cracks, and dramas ensued about kissing boys and raising gay community flags.  But this wasn’t 24-hour surveillance; a film crew chased the islanders among the palms, waving a boom and clutching cameras, so we never knew how much was reality and how much was showing off.  Rumours later abounded that the juiciest action never made it to air: an island strewn with condom wrappers was the only physical evidence of how the crew and the cast inevitably succumbed to the holiday combination of heat, scantily cladness and being away.

Five years later, the format returned, only this time there were two islands.  And they were at war.  Adding some spice and jeopardy, new arrivals would appear each week, spending time with rival tribes before ultimately picking their permanent home.  The most populous tribe would nab some prize money, which, once divided twenty-five ways, was probably just enough to cover the psychological counselling anyone would need after spending weeks in a tropical paradise and then having to return to the UK.  As a sixth former, this was religious viewing.  You needed to be able to enter the common room debate about whether you’d rather be a Tiger or a Shark.  I honestly can’t remember which of the two was the tribe for me, but I do know it was the same animal each series.  T4, a curious youth strand on Channel 4, had cornered the market in weekend morning hangover TV, and we, graduating from being Inbetweeners, were more or less legally allowed to drink alcohol.  Every weekend was filled with eighteenth birthday parties and all the Smirnoff Ices you could drink.  Shipwrecked: Battle Of The Islands was perfect viewing.

I would go into more detail on what occurred in these episodes between 2006 and 2009, but this period, at least in terms of the internet, is a very long way away.  How we’re able to excavate ancient ruins and carbon-date millennia-old fossils, yet I can’t find a non-pixellated image of the 2008 cast is beyond me.  I do recall, though, that at some point, the scheduling shifted from weekend mornings to weekday evenings.  More specifically, Tuesdays.  In this age before reliable catch up and when your dad still controlled the VCR, I was devastated.  On Tuesday nights I pushed trolleys around the car park of Waitrose in Cobham.  I still therefore miss the series I never saw, despite the generous wages and benefits of the John Lewis Partnership.  Instead, I have memories of dodging the BMWs and Audis while fetching back the abandoned shopping carts, refusing to wear the high-vis jacket even when it snowed as it stunk of someone else’s BO, overhearing mums telling their children to work hard at school so they didn’t end up like me (despite me having a place at Oxford) until I finally got moved indoors.  Ramming twelve trolleys into the back of a Mercedes might have been part of it (the driver was still inside).

One series I was able to enjoy fully was the 2008 season.  This was when I started my job in media.  It was July 2008.  I had misspent a year in a headhunting firm where people were very serious, discussing the economy or rugby or braying about their children.  I had got in constant trouble so I was determined to keep a low profile in this new role.  I would resist piping up in all office discussions until I had proven I was good at my job.  But then, I overheard new colleagues (who are still beloved to this day) talking about the previous night’s episode of Shipwrecked.  It took all my willpower (and there’s not much) to resist wheeling over there in my desk chair and joining in.  But what it did prove was that I had come to the right place.

And now, it’s back.  This time, we’re broadcasting at 9pm each weeknight on e4, so we can have as much swearing and boobies as we like.  Sadly missing is Morcheeba’s The Sea, a track I will forever associate with Shipwrecked.  We have a new narrator.  Gone are Andrew Lincoln and Craig Kelly, both of whom sounded bored out of their minds while describing the antics of attention-seeking twentysomethings.  Vick Hope gently pokes fun at the characters, but mostly gets on with it, which somehow leaves me craving the acid-tongued lashings of Love Island’s Iain Stirling.  But much is the same.  Even Aygo by Toyota (the old sponsor of T4) is back on board (shout out to the friend who did this deal).  We have Sharks and we have Tigers.  The ante is upped though, as the new arrivals, who have so far in this first week come in pairs, also have to be picked by the island they choose, with a mismatch resulting in a one-way ticket back to Blighty.  This has brought high tension and just desserts, though I have just watched the fifth episode, where the complication of having a pair of identical twins as the arrivals made the format seem slightly cruel.  Having gone through secondary education with five twins in my form of thirty (and a further two pairs in the year group – clearly something in the water in Horsley) my twindar felt quite sensitive to the onslaught.

Sadly I’m not yet watching this on a massive f***-off telly in my own home.  I can pick between the non-HD live broadcast where I’m overwhelmed by adverts, or catch up on All4, where I’m overwhelmed by adverts.  Both scenarios also include the inhabitants of the flat upstairs, divided from ours by a ceiling made presumably of hopes and dreams, stomping about constantly, so if I’m not distracted by the heel-walking of the morbidly obese, I’m squinting at the low-def picture, filling in the gaps with my imagination.  This year, the Sharks are a lovely bunch, while the Tigers have a nastier streak.  I’m therefore definitely a Tiger, as that sort of person is always more interesting.

Is it as good as we remember?  Well, after some acclimatisation, this could be a vintage year.  Times have changed, and it’s hard to work out if this is a dating show or a survivalist documentary.  In addition, I’m now ten years older than most of the contestants, rather than them seeming like inhabitants of a distant future adulthood that was years away.  I can’t help but wonder if it would be rewarding if the cast had greater maturity and life experience.  Maybe I could bowl up: hi, I’m Rob; I’m 33 and work in advertising; I enjoy too much telly and going to bed early.  Maybe not.  It’s just that these young people seem to shriek so much.  There’s a boat: cue screaming.  There’s a palm tree: cue caterwauling.  There’s a pontoon: cue sh*t being lost.  Then a friend articulated my reservation perfectly: this is hangover TV, but we don’t have hangovers.

Come Dine With Me

I’m on the cusp of being able to buy my first ever home.  This doesn’t mean I have been squatting in a crisp packet this whole time, but that I have spent the last 11 years renting and sharing (and huge apologies to all former and current flatmates; I really am dreadful).  I’m around 18 months behind on my own personal life schedule with this purchase (let’s blame Brexit) but the fact that it’s so close is half-terrifying, half-spectacular.  I even found myself looking at massive tellies in John Lewis today, even though my parents have saved me one from a dead neighbour and are keeping it under their bed for me (the telly, not the neighbour).  As a future home owner, what I plan to do, and what I have never really done in any of my rentals, is to have friends round for dinner.  I have a list of all the dear chums I need to pay back for the hospitality: all their wine I’ve drunk, all their main courses I’ve not really chewed but swallowed down like a gannet due to hunger and hanger mismanagement, all the puddings I’ve spooned in my face because excess fat and sugar don’t count if you’re in someone else’s house and have already surpassed your recommended daily allowance of alcohol units.  I’m not going to be held back by the fact I can only really make a few things and have little to no interest in how food tastes most of the time.  I just hope they all like porridge.  I do.

Anyway, this has led me to consider Come Dine With Me for this week’s self-absorbed few hundred words that I’m hoping some people will want to read.  It’s a show that’s about having people round to dinner as a competitive sport.  And please note, these aren’t friends you’re having round, these are strangers that the casting team have decided will make good telly.  Each guest scores their host, before the tables turn on the following night.  Once everyone has had a chance to arrange Parma ham on slices of melon and to slag off each other’s desserts for being too sweet, the highest-scoring contestant is revealed and richly rewarded with a wad of cash and some intensely petty envy.  TV gold, I’m sure you’ll agree.  In the UK, ITV Studios produce this show for Channel 4, which is a fun fact for your next dinner party (you’re welcome).  It’s also, the last time I checked, the most syndicated TV format in the world, currently showing in, I don’t know, a million territories or something.

But now that the serious journalism bit is out the way, let me tell you what things I like about the show the most:

The terrible characters

You need an array of personality defects to want to be on this programme.  There are the obvious ones, such as over-confidence in your cooking abilities, a strong conviction that your approach to hosting is world class and a compulsive need to be the centre of attention.  But this is where the genius of the casting comes in.  That annoying loudmouth in your office whose voice you can’t block out?  They’d be in.  The person in your family that seems to create awkwardness every Christmas?  Them too.  That schoolfriend who’s always showing off about their unorthodox lifestyle choices?  Of course.  Oh wait, I’m just describing myself now.

The irreverent voiceover

I believe strongly that irreverence is the best way to treat most things (though this does mean I have lost the ability to know if I am being sarcastic or not, which is challenging).  The narrator of Come Dine With Me takes this to another level, though, as he clearly thinks that every contestant is an absolute bellend.  It’s probably what inspired the mickey-taking of Love Island’s voiceover, and we all know what joy that brings us.  The hosting contestants often genuinely believe they are culinarily gifted food professionals, so when they talk us through their pedestrian recipes, they are ripe for ribbing.  The guest contestants behave like seasoned restaurant critics, often directly to their hosts’ faces, so it’s a gratifying shared joke for us viewers to hear the voiceover take them down a peg or two.  I can guarantee you laughing out loud here.

People’s awful homes

When you watch a cookery programme normally, things take place in some sort of deliciously artisanal kitchen with rustic herbs a-dangling and distressed work surfaces a-glistening and clutter-free.  But if you delve inside the actual average British kitchen, it’s a bad-taste buffet of mismatching cutlery, damp patches and novelty teacups hanging limply from mug-trees.  Behind closed doors, that dodgy chopping board or the limescale visible on the side of your kettle are just part of what makes it a normal home.  But on camera, it always looks like the site of a natural disaster.  You expect to hear Michael Buerk asking you to give just £5 a month so these people can afford some decent kitchenware.  But then I don’t know if the people that already have quite nice stuff are actually worse, because they seem to have no taste in the first place.  They arrange rocket salads on square plates, or use wine glasses the size of church fonts, or have blingy knives and forks.

I didn’t mean to slag it all off so much, as it does make for wonderful entertainment.  Being rooted in reality, however, does take away any aspirational edge (for most people – for me, having friends to dinner is still only an aspiration).  Therefore, watching it, despite the titters, can end up accompanied by the suspicion you could be doing something better with your time.  Episodes either last an hour and cover a group of four contestants with each dinner party in a fifteen-minute segment, or you can get strips of five episodes, where each lasts half an hour and covers a different event, with more focus on the prep.  The latter has a curious habit of drawing you in for, quite literally, just one more episode, if you ever stumble across it on More4 of a Sunday afternoon.  We’re running out of time to mention the celebrity specials, the fact that contestants also snoop around each other’s homes, or the story that some colleagues once recreated the format in real life, which involved one of them getting up repeatedly throughout the night to moisten their pulled pork, and still not winning.  My final nugget though, which I once read on a trashy website, is that each episode takes hours to film, what with all the pieces to camera, so the hosts end up serving desserts at 3am and the guests end up sloshed off their faces.  Maybe this explains some of the behaviour.

Once in a while, then, it’s ok to treat yourself (in the style of Parks & Recreation) and wallow on your sofa, scoffing at these real people, their homes, their food and their manners, safe in the knowledge they can’t see you, where you live, what you eat, or how you treat your guests.

Footballers’ Wives

I have no idea why I’m doing a show from 2002, but it seems to have been a classic year for vintage TV.  In addition, the Desperate Housewives post whipped up a storm of reads, so I’ve decided that wives is a popular theme, and this show is about wives as well (clue’s in the title).  Then, I’m amplifying that with the power of nostalgia, after the Buffy The Vampire Slayer post drew more attention than I was prepared for: turns out we like to relive our memories of shows from when we were younger and less jaded, safely in the EU and certain of an economically prosperous future.

The next uninteresting detail I will talk you through at length is the orthography of the show’s name itself.  After some soul searching, I’ve decided to go with Footballers’ Wives, as you’ll see from the header on the post.  This is significant because at any one time I am devoting 20% of my life’s energy to grammatical pedantry.  Even at the age of 17, when this week’s programme was first broadcast, my teenage self was appalled at the lack of plural possessive apostrophe concluding the opening credits: Footballers Wives.  You’re only young once, so I’m glad I spent that time obsessing about punctuation.  Otherwise, how on earth are you supposed to know that the wives belong to the footballers?  It just looks like a strange, unconnected list.  But then, matters were made worse once I reminded myself how things really appeared: footballers wive$.  I won’t unpick why this is an abomination in my eyes (and if you don’t know why, then get out now please), but it does serve handily to illustrate the level of class on offer in this show.  In short, there was none.  Let’s crack on, then.

But first, it’s 2018, so let’s dispel the myth that wives are the property of their husbands (with or without the appropriate apostrophe to indicate this possession).  Yes, in this day and age, people can’t wait to rush up the aisle in order to spend thousands of pounds on flowers that nobody will remember and to secure a sofa buddy for future series of The Crown, but vows tend to be more about an equal partnership rather than referring to any duty of obedience.  But this was the beauty of Footballers’ Wives – the ladies wore the trousers.  Everything about the menfolk was incidental.  There were merely possessions to trade.  Even their footballing prowess was limited to a couple of lines in the script – almost no actual match footage ever appealed.  For someone with better things to do than sit through any sort of ballsport (such as watching reruns of dinnerladies) this only added to the programme’s appeal.

Let’s look at Tanya Turner, the ur-WAG.  Throughout the five series (yes, five!) she ended up in all manner of relationships, working through around half of the Earls Park FC first team, a proportion of the support staff and anyone else who just happened to be passing for that matter.  This wasn’t a search for love, though, but a quest to keep herself in acrylic nails and extraordinarily tacky outfit choices with no expense spared.  Once ex-captain Jason was dispatched, she fought for a place in new signing Conrad Gates’ bed (despite his straightened hair), dallied with sports agent/chairwoman Hazel Bailey and even found the time to get herself astride Frank Laslett, the overweight, over-age chairman of the club, specifically with the intention of shagging him to death.  Imagine talking about that storyline in the office the next day.  But the combination of cocaine, booze and vigorous love making did the job – our Tanya got what she wanted out of each chap (or chapette, in the case of Hazel) and then moved on to the next one.  Played with bags of aplomb by Zöe Lucker (whom I don’t seem to spot on TV these days, but ought to be a national treasure), Tanya was a popular creation, rooted for by an audience that was fully entertained by her outrageous behaviour.

In fact, the show suffered whenever she was absent.  IMDB tells me that Gillian Taylforth (Cathy from Eastenders, everyone) appeared in the most episodes, playing Jackie Pascoe, the overbearing pushy mother.  Yet, my most memorable character is Nurse Dunkley.  The name in itself is a comic moniker for someone you’re never going to take seriously.  But her arc was as sinister as they come: caring for Frank Laslett during his coma (obviously) she went from an apparently incidental background artist to front-of-camera abuser, pursuing a physical relationship with the unconscious man in her care, while whispering sweet nothings to him in her simpleton-sounding northern accent.  Her spectacles practically steaming up with lust is an image that still haunts me to this day.

But this was what we all tuned in for: far-fetched melodrama.  But you can watch that in most soap operas, so the attraction is better qualified as: far-fetched melodrama involving wealthy, mostly attractive people in glamorous settings.  Which is loads better.  Babies were swapped.  Boob implants caught fire.  Murders were attempted and completed.  Sex videos were leaked.  Joan Collins popped in.  Peter Stringfellow popped in.  This was the level of Footballers’ Wives.  As a result, it was wickedly fun.  I’m not ashamed to admit I also really enjoyed the foul language and frequent nudity – seeing someone being told to f*** off when their boobs are peaking over the duvet is oddly gratifying when you’re a teenager with punctuation-related anxiety.

Sadly, the show ended in 2006; it may well have been shagged to death itself to be honest.  I don’t even know if there’s any way to watch it these days, shy of trawling car boots for the old DVDs and then squinting at the appalling image quality with your HD-accustomed eyeballs, before realising things look appalling due to the noughties fashions the show so willingly embraced.  In fact, I don’t even recommend re-watching; times have changed, and the old show’s website still exists here, reminding you how crude the old internet was.  Have a click around and think of times past.  This is the trash that brought millions to ITV’s peak schedule.  At least now we have Love Island, eh?

Fear The Walking Dead

If you’re going to watch a lot of television shows, it’s worth figuring out what sort of themes you like the most.  For some reason, I’ve never been able to interest myself in shows about solving murders.  I’m (probably) never going to murder anyone, so it all seems largely irrelevant.  However, any show with a hint of zombie apocalypse goes straight on my watchlist.  If I follow my own logic, then this should mean that I fully expect to live through humanity being killed off by the undead.  But then, I don’t think I do see this in my future.  Yet, it’s still feels more relevant to my life.  And this is most likely because half my days are spent in a zombie-like routine, catching the same buses, standing in the same spots on Tube platforms, thumbing through the same apps and repeatedly writing the same office emails.  It’s not quite apocalyptic, but its tedium is probably as painful as being eaten alive by cadavers.

Anyway, we’ve got distracted.  The point is, I love anything about zombies.  Ever since I was dragged to see 28 Days Later (actually about an infection), I’ve never found anything as compelling as working out what I would do in the same situation.  That said, I still don’t have a plan.  And so, with the eighth series of The Walking Dead hitting UK screens, it’s time to turn attentions to the spin off, mostly because I’ve just finished the second series.

With the democratisation of TV content, allowing viewers to pick their own schedules, a model that’s done so well for Netflix and Amazon, it was an absolute mugging off that BT did the worst thing ever with Fear The Walking Dead on its UK launch by holding it hostage on its paid-for channels in order to force people to sign up.  Instead, people simply resorted to pirating it, so go fudge yourselves, BT.  I have been a good boy and simply hung on for the episodes to come under Amazon Prime.

The show’s lack of ubiquity is a real shame, as its quality really is up there with The Walking Dead.  Sure, the gore maws your eyes sore, but having the fall of civilisation as a backdrop really makes a good character arc seem all the more compelling.  The action centres on LA in the early days of the outbreak, complementing The Walking Dead’s setting in the well-established future of the same apocalypse.  The tension that dominates the first series as the characters try and work out what’s going on while we’re fully clued up on their fates makes for epic viewing.

But, it’s actually very hard to like any of the characters.  The show still has you rooting for them to survive, but they mostly are a real bunch of bastards.  This continues into the second series and ties in with the theory that, while monsters may walk the earth, humans will always be the biggest bad guys.

Beyond describing the premise as following a band of survivors attempting to live out the end of days, there’s not much else you need to know.  Comparisons to The Walking Dead might be all we have.  While everyone in that show looks sweaty as balls in the Georgia humidity, Fear The Walking Dead plays out in the dry heat of California and beyond.  As someone who is almost always too hot and can barely keep any clothes on, my biggest concern is how someone can bear to wear jeans in a desert, not the fact that they are being chased by brain-devouring zombies.

The languages geek within me loves the fact that a good portion of the show switches between Spanish and English, and you’re definitely in for a treat if you like boats.  The Walking Dead’s zombie lore is well observed, though Fear The Walking Dead does rely a great deal on the fact that smearing yourself with dead people’s bodily mush disguises to zombies that you are still alive.  It’s a bit too easy.

Zombie-based dramas trump a lot of other themes, simply because any and all of the characters can die at any minute.  It might sound macabre to enjoy this, but what else can consistently provide such strong human drama?  In murder mysteries, the victim is already dead, lying there cold and inert in a chilly morgue.  In Fear The Walking Dead, the victims of death stalk the earth having a lot more fun (and doing that sort of breathy growling they enjoy so much).  Just don’t watch it straight before bed as you will be too tense to sleep, unless you have finally numbed all your emotions by watching too much of this sort of thing.

Bob's Burgers

While some TV show episodes drag into eternity, others are over all too quickly.  From Bob’s Burgers’ jaunty opening sequence to its production company’s endframe, every moment of viewing is just right.  I find myself sitting there expecting more quality entertainment, when all that follows are adverts or an awkward silence.

Whenever I meet someone else who watches Bob’s Burgers, I immediately try and launch into a conversation with them where we can compare our favourite quotations from the show.  But then I always get stuck on the fact I can’t remember any of them.  Yet, every time I watch it, I think to myself how clever and funny each line is.  But this might just be the beauty of the show.  Unlike a lot of animated series, it hasn’t had to rely on stock expressions to engage its audience.  Instead, it has built up individual characters over time.

As a fan of the Simpsons and Family Guy, it makes sense I would enjoy Bob’s Burgers, but I can’t remember at all how I first came across it.  As ever, it took a couple of series of dodgier animation and rougher voice recordings for it to find its feet, but now each episode is a mini masterpiece.  Most recently, it seemed to appear in my Sky Plus on Saturday mornings (assuming it’s getting recording late on Friday evenings) and it makes the perfect viewing accompaniment for me when I am eating porridge and scrambling eggs and drinking a mug of coffee after training.

Family is at the heart of the show, so I have ranked the Belcher family below in order of funniness, and, consequently, their place in my estimations.

Linda

She’s the matriarch of the brood, but probably the least sensible.  More easily swayed by doing what seems fun than by doing what seems important, it’s often her whims that launch the family into its adventures.  That said, she loves her ‘babies’ and her ‘Bobby’ almost as much as she loves dancing in front of an audience and drinking wine.  Everything she says is funny.

Tina

One of the perviest characters ever to grace animation, Tina is what my mum would call ‘boy mad’.  Unfortunate for her, then, that she is stuck in the awkwardness of pubescence.  Her romantic dreams are almost always hopeless, but we root for her because we have all been that weirdo teen.  Her strong moral compass is often at odds with Linda’s shenanigans, but Tina has incredible throwaway lines that pepper the show with an undercurrent of darkness.

Louise

An amazing character if only for the amazing voice of Kristen Schaal.  Louise never takes off her bunny ears (perhaps her one weakness) and takes a small-time gangster approach to most things.  Her cynicism and relentless drive give way only very rarely to the more tender feelings we would expect from a small girl.  Adults beware.  In fact, everyone beware.

Bob

Long-suffering, yes, but innocent, no.  Bob indulges just as much of his own childishness as any of the other Belchers.  The difference is that he is the slightly downtrodden father figure with a flair for fine burgers.  Voiced by H. Jon Benjamin (which will make Archer sound like Bob and Bob sound like Archer, depending on which show you start with), his voice of reason is easily ignored, which is great, as it would only get in the way of the comedy.

Gene

Is it wrong that I like Gene the least?  His voice is wild, his roll malleable.  He is the disgusting boy, but both his sisters can be more extreme without even trying.  Again, he is a champion of throwaway comments and the driving force behind the show’s semi-musical nature.

There’s also Aunt Gayle.  If I could add her into the main nuclear family, she’d be in third place.  This is not only because she is literally me in ten years’ time (lonely old cat lady) but also because her selfishness is exceeded only by her delusion – a recurring theme in many of my favourite comic characters (see Nighty Night).  In addition to both of these points, she is also voiced by Megan Mullally.  This lady could read out anything and it would sound funny.

As the show has grown, however, so has the cast of characters.  Indeed, their unnamed Long Island town is populated with a host of outlandish, yet strangely realistic, individuals: Marshmallow, the transgender sex worker, Speedo Guy, who skates around in a pink pair of pants and nothing else, Mr Ambrose, the sour librarian (also me now – see The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt) and Jocelyn, the high school girl whose pronunciation is the most fun you can have with your mouth, or ears, or both.  I have to admit that I cannot abide Teddy.  His whole schtick is that he is desperate to be part of the family, but my skin just crawls each time he speaks, even though he is really a sweetheart.

Threaded through each episode is a touch of musicality, often driven by Gene’s attachment to his fart noise-producing keyboard.  Our closing credits are always accompanied by a reprise of whichever original song has been brought to life in the episode and a skit in the restaurant’s grill kitchen.  I’m always sad the episode is over.  But then, I can just watch another one.