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Why I Love…The 100 Greatest… shows

John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John in Grease
  • Posted at 5:10pm
  • 16 October 2007
  • by KateCoffey-RT
  • 2 comments

Watching one of Channel 4's The 100 Greatest… shows is the TV equivalent of a tube of Pringles: once you switch on, you can't switch off. They're tasty and addictive, yet somehow leave you feeling bloated and slightly guilty.

Let's face it, there are far more constructive things to be doing of an evening than consuming visual junk food for the brain. Like doing your laundry, for instance, or taming the weekend's accumulated hangover with an early night.

Instead, you turn on the TV only to be sucked in by a celluloid vortex cataloguing The 100 Greatest…Musicals of All Time. Before you know it, midnight has come and gone and the only preparation you've done for that 9:00am meeting is to discover that Grease beat Summer Holiday to the much-coveted top spot.

So why do I love them? Well, they're slick. A bit like buying said junk food from Waitrose, you feel slightly better about eating it when it's packaged with a bit more class. And unlike the Kwik Save versions on Five, there's generally a decent guest narrator, not some rent-a-celeb doling out asinine vox pops between clips.

There's also something ingenious about the TV countdown format. Logic would lead us to believe that suspense leads to pay-off. Especially as it is packaged as a public vote: the law of averages means that the democratic choice is likely to be the right one.

You'd think so, wouldn't you? This is unless, like me, you have witnessed the Ask the Audience option in Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? one too many times. When the contestant puts faith in the collective intelligence of the crowd, there's always an alarming proportion who, when faced with a question such as

What does a chicken lay?

a) Bricks b) Eggs c) Milk d) Frogs

would choose either a), c) or d). This statistic came to mind when watching The 100 Greatest…Tearjerkers, only to discover that Animal Hospital actually rated higher than Midnight Cowboy. It might also go some way towards explaining how that floating turkey Titanic somehow reached the dizzy heights of number three.

If the collective-vote theory is a bit hit and miss, perhaps a more valid reason why I love The 100 Greatest… series is good old-fashioned nostalgia. Take The 100 Greatest…Pop Videos. Nothing is going to transport you back to your youth like seeing MC Hammer gallop around in fluorescent parachute trousers to U Can't Touch This. Or Morten Harket leaping into a comic book to ask his animated dream girl to Take on Me (despite not having fully grasped the English syntax first).

Likewise, I'm sure The 100 Greatest…Kids' TV Shows has prompted millions of watercooler conversations debating the merits of Byker Grove over Timmy Mallett's Wide Awake Club. I don't know about you, but PJ's paintball blinding accident ("My eyyyye, my eyyye!!") was a seminal moment of my youth. Now that's a bit embarrassing to admit to. But so is consuming an entire tube of Pringles in a single sitting.

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  • Posted on 20 November 2009
  • at 3:37pm
  • by Dagmar

I do like these 100 Best... Shows, but I also find them terribly long to watch all in one go. Wouldn't it be possible to split them, say, in two? The other evening with the 100 Best Actors in the end it was so late that I had to go to bed. I was actually feeling rather unwell, too, after such a long time of almost constant concentration and all the ad spaces in between didn't help much at that time of night, either.

  • Posted on 04 January 2008
  • at 12:01pm
  • by MazY

It's the cheapest and nastiest form of television there is. I have grown so tired of viewing the television listings and having to give out another tired sigh as I see "100 Greatest......." littering the page.Aside from being the most banal thing ever to infect our television screens (and yes, I am aware of Big Brother), have people still not learned that there is no such thing as an accurate public vote on television these days?I was pleased to just read that C4 claim to not be showing this cheap rubbish any longer. Something tells me that their budget will dictate otherwise. Unless, of course, they have an even cheaper and more banal offering waiting in the barrels. Hmm...How about a "Watch it Grow" series. All that is needed is a small stationary camera and an irritating voice-over (Richard Bacon should fit the bill nicely) artist, who tends to think his supposedly witty comments are amusing the people at home.Series One - Watching it Grow: The Begonia Series Two - Watching it Grow: The Oak TreeWe could perhaps have a phone-in vote too, in order to guess the fully grown height. And let's not forget the talking heads to comment on how much quicker things grew in their day.

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