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Review of the year

The cast of This Life + 10
  • Posted at 1:04pm
  • 17 December 2007
  • by RhodriMarsden-RT
  • 3 comments

Tuesday 2 January 2007 was the day that I proudly bought my first ever TV. (Up until that point I'd made do with family hand-me-downs.) It was flat, it was big, and it came with a port to hook up to my computer. Suddenly I could find stuff on the internet and watch from the questionable comfort of a sofa I picked up for 50 quid on eBay.

I sat down to enjoy an old episode of Animal Kwackers with trepidation, remembering that it scared me witless when I was five years old. Most of June and July were taken up with watching hour upon hour of old continuity anouncements or documentaries about the Cold War, so I don't have much idea of what was on British telly over the summer. But I did manage to break the stranglehold of nostalgia to keep appointments with a few shows.

The year kicked off with This Life + 10, which looked at the present-day lives of characters from the 1990s series This Life. It consisted mainly of upper-middle-class oafs getting drunk and bellowing at each other in a country mansion while, for some implausible reason, an annoying woman followed them around with a video camera. Even my girlfriend, a dedicated fan of the original, was reduced to throwing stuff at the screen (which I had to put a stop to, because that telly didn't come cheap).

In February came The Verdict. This presented a fictional rape case to a real jury - well, as real as a jury featuring Chris Tarrant's wife and Jeffrey Archer can get. Some jurors, particularly Sara Payne and Michael Portillo, managed to emerge with dignity, while others emerged as self-obsessed egotists. (Take a bow, footballer Stan Collymore, and rapper Dwayne Vincent, whom jurors were hilariously obliged to refer to as "Megaman" throughout.)

The jury eventually pronounced the accused rapists not guilty, but not without some of them having massive doubts. At some points, you forgot that it wasn't real. Then you thanked God it wasn't real. Then realised that cases like this are probably more common than we'd ever like to imagine.

I needed cheering up. The magnificent fourth series of Peep Show in late spring did the job, in which Mark attempted to get out of his wedding to Sophie by first proposing to a waitress and then contriving to get run over (neither of which worked, obviously). Paul Whitehouse and Harry Enfield's new sketch show Ruddy Hell! It's Harry and Paul began magnificently - particularly the mysterious man in a strange hat who deflects criticism from brusque women in positions of power by offering them a selection of soft-centred chocolates - but I'd stopped watching by episode three.

July's special episode of political comedy The Thick of It, however, reaffirmed my faith in British comedy: once again, it marked out Chris Addison as an exceptional comedy actor, as well as a brilliant stand-up.

I'm obsessed with food shows - as was minutely detailed in my daily blog - and 2007 threw up a mixture of tasty treats and bitter disappointments. First we had to bid farewell to Jeni Barnett, whose Good Food Live show on UKTV Food was unceremoniously axed despite her being one of the most reliably funny TV broadcasters in the country, and replaced with the astonishingly bad Market Kitchen.

I had to seek solace in the bizarrely dubbed French cookery show Le Breton Gourmand for a few months, until the autumn gave us the double whammy of Raymond Blanc's The Restaurant (or, as I call it, "Ze Restaurant") and Hell's Kitchen with Marco Pierre White.

Both exceptional in their own way, Blanc's show demonstrated the nightmarish reality of running a restaurant by throwing nine couples with no previous experience in at the deep end. Highlights included the novice chef who was more interested in setting up a drum kit than cooking, and Jane, one of the eventual winners, who would burst into tears if she noticed, say, a stain on a tablecloth.

Hell's Kitchen just stuck to the tried and tested formula of having a belligerent chef reduce celebrities to quivering wrecks, and Marco was sensational. Nigella Lawson, meanwhile, should be forced to sit down and watch every smug, self-satisfied moment of her most recent series before she deigns to inflict another one on us.

I'm already horribly over my word limit, so brief shout-outs to Alastair Campbell, for the unintentionally hilarious moment during his televised diaries where he imagined that Princess Diana was actually flirting with him at a dinner party in 1997; Paul Merton, for making a travel show about China that gave me the extraordinary new experience of actually wanting to watch something on Five; Stephen Fry, for his documentary on HIV, a worthy follow-up to last year's look at manic depression; BBC4's Flight of the Conchords, which managed to be both gently moving and screamingly funny; Al Murray's inevitable and welcome foray into the chat show medium; and Chris Ditchburn, who I spent endless hours watching spin a roulette wheel on Sky channel 847.

So yes, some top TV moments. Sadly, most TV output was unable to beat internet clips such as a series of hilarious dubbings of classic rock artists. Or the fainting goats. Or the Montgomery Flea Market video. Or the ten most ridiculous black-metal music videos.

But one thing's clear - we'll have no shortage of stuff to watch in 2008. Merry Christmas!

**

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Comments

  • Posted on 30 December 2007
  • at 4:57pm
  • by s6owl

TV highlight of the year - an incredible third series of Doctor Who which ended in spectacular fashion.

  • Posted on 20 December 2007
  • at 5:28pm
  • by RhodriMarsden-RT

An intriguing point well made, mancrob26! Merry Christmas!

  • Posted on 19 December 2007
  • at 9:45pm
  • by mancrob26

None of those You tube clips are funny

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