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The Best...TV voiceover

Harry Hill
  • Posted at 12:43pm
  • 07 January 2008
  • by DavidWhitehouse-RT
  • 2 comments

You have to go to some considerable lengths to balls up a concept as simple as You've Been Framed!.

Jeremy Beadle had it down pat, and it went like this: presenter tells a joke so poor that the audience is left wondering which language it was badly translated from. Presenter introduces a loose theme for the next set of clips (usually a variation on dogs, babies or idiots swinging above a brook on a piece of rope). Clips are shown. Canned laughter is uncanned. Repeat. The only trouble is that Beadle didn't stick around and the YBF! format became a bloated caricature of its former self.

Thank the lord of popular entertainment (whose name is probably Lord Antanddec), then, for the arrival of Harry Hill, Britain's most underrated TV host, who has saved YBF! from the doldrums of light entertainment. But how, you ask?

Well, Hill understands that never should we underestimate the entertainment value found in watching another person embarrass and/or hurt themselves. It appeals to our most base human instinct, what I like to call our slapstick gland.

When our slapstick gland is tickled, be it by seeing a cat slip into a toilet or a baby fall asleep in its breakfast, it feels good. You've Been Framed!, of course, always tickled that slapstick gland better than any other programme.

When Beadle departed, the people that make the show panicked and started messing with the format. Thus we found ourselves watching each slew of clips being interjected with the baffling presenting style of Lisa Riley, better known as a member of the interminably popular Dingle clan from the televisual coma that is Emmerdale. It was like being shouted at by a bad comedian dressed as a bear.

What simple charm the show had was lost in an instant. Gone was the stimulation of said slapstick gland to be replaced by a slight irritation of our annoyance duct. Unbelievably, things were only going to get worse.

Once the British public began abandoning the show in droves, another change of face was made. Riley was replaced by Jonathan Wilkes, whose contribution was to turn You've Been Framed! into a cod game show, stripping it of its simplicity and rendering it completely defunct.

The few remaining viewers began to desert, and it became clear that unless it was sorted out ITV may as well have been televising slow-motion footage of a fly circling a side of beef on the grounds that it would have been infinitely more interesting.

What Harry Hill realised when he got the gig is that we weren't watching YBF! to have some no mark spout bad puns at us. We were watching because we like to see toddlers laugh at puppies and pensioners topple over while dancing at a wedding. So Hill removed himself from the picture, choosing instead to have the whole show consist of back-to-back clips linked only by his own completely nonsensical voiceover treating it all with the level of seriousness it actually deserves...absolutely none whatsoever.

It is a masterstroke, combining Hill's trademark gibberish with hit after hit of the stupid camcorder exploits we've come to expect. And it means our slapstick gland is completely in his hands. Fear not, he used to be a doctor, you know.

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Comments

  • Posted on 04 August 2009
  • at 5:22pm
  • by M. R.

To me, the reason why YBF! works with Harry Hill and didn't work with Lisa Riley is simple: Harry Hill is funny; Lisa Riley is not. If Harry Hill were removed as host and replaced with someone else, YBF! would probably be just as awful as it was before. (This is given that, even now, it only barely passes as "quality entertainment".)

  • Posted on 27 December 2008
  • at 4:17pm
  • by Bryan

ITV in general is like watching a fly in slow motion travelling around something that looks like a piece of beef , and might have been at one point but is no longer. ITV more like RIP if the rating for Christmas and the year are to be believed .

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