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And Then You Die

Puppet presenter Barry Stardust
  • Posted at 12:43pm
  • 28 November 2007
  • by RhodriMarsden-RT

Ah, the panel-based quiz show. The last refuge of the desperate commissioning editor. Despite the fact that They Think It's All Over and Never Mind the Buzzcocks are among the most profoundly irritating programmes on British TV, copycat shows keep on rolling out, forcing comedians who are normally pretty funny to deliver a load of stilted, supposedly comic observations in the name of entertainment.

But they don't come any worse than this. And Then You Die just beggars belief. It'll surely be dredged up on one of those equally ubiquitous list-based programmes in a few years' time - I dunno, maybe The Nation's Top 500 Misconceived Panel-Based Quiz Shows. The spin they've put on it is that the presenter is a puppet. A Muppet-looking puppet, called Barrie Stardust.

As Barrie's character is an old-school, working men's club-type entertainer, this gives the production team the opportunity to stick a Celebrity Squares-style intro at the beginning, and allows the scriptwriters to pen a load of off-colour observations that Roy Chubby Brown and Bernard Manning would have rejected as substandard.

I can see why they're doing it. Theoretically it'll make the show appeal to those poor souls that marketing gurus have decided comprise the Dave channel's viewership - blokes who read Nuts or the Daily Star, can't really deal with anything remotely highbrow, and who will laugh at absolutely anything, but especially the word "tits".

It's only half an hour long, but it represents a massive test of endurance. The first round saw Barrie Stardust announce three topics currently in the news, and the panellists supposedly had to guess which one the British public find most annoying. What that means, of course, is that Barrie says "obesity crisis" and the panellists have to dredge up a related segment from their stand-up routines and pass it off as the "witty banter" that Dave supposedly prides itself on.

It's beyond desperate. The programme is littered with nervous laughter and embarrassed silences, during which the bloke with his hand up Barrie Stardust's back thanks God that he's hidden under the desk. The panellists do a good job of trying not to look uncomfortable - but not quite good enough. One of them, Rob Rouse - a very funny stand-up, as it goes - turned to the camera after one joke fell flat, and said, "Could you cut that one out?"

But of course, it stayed in. Just to give you an idea of the general level of humour, here are Barrie Stardust's lines for the opening of the second half of the programme, right after the commercial break:

"Welcome back to And Then You Die, the show that proves that a broken mirror doesn't just give you seven years of bad luck: if you're David Gest, it'll give you a lifetime of misery just by looking at it."

I rewound and watched this again and again, wondering if I'd missed something. I don't think I had. Perhaps the scriptwriters' strike has finally hit the UK.

The show ended with one team being awarded a prize of an urn containing Abu Hamza's oven glove collection - no, I don't get it either - and then Barrie performed a James Blunt song in a slightly stupid voice.

I was so eager to name and shame the cretinous bunch of sixth-formers who wrote this drivel, I fast-forwarded straight to the credits - but here's a thing: they're in tiny letters, with a big glow effect behind them, and moving so fast that you can't actually read any of the names. They could have saved time and effort by sticking a big notice up saying "The makers of this programme, fearful for their future in television, are desperate to remain anonymous."

And Then You Die is on Dave (Sky 111, Virgin 126, Freeview 19).

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