BLOGS
Reggie Perrin is depressingly bad
- Posted at 5:05pm
- 30 April 2009
- by AlisonGraham-RT
Watching Reggie Perrin had a necrotising effect - I realised I was dying slowly when Reggie (Martin Clunes, left) made a joke to his wife's female friends about how he admired women because: "Anyone who can bleed for five days without dying deserves a bunch of flowers every now and again."
I wasn't sure I'd heard that correctly, so I had to watch again on iPlayer, just to make sure. No, I wasn't wrong, I really had heard a pathologically abysmal gag about menstruation on a primetime BBC1 "comedy".
Now, there's absolutely...
Katie & Peter: the Next Chapter Stateside
- Posted at 10:49am
- 24 April 2009
- by AlisonGraham-RT
Katie & Peter: the Next Chapter Stateside began with a tautological fanfare from the excitable narrator: "Britain's number one celebrity couple in the UK are back!"
It was at this point that I could feel my brain cells draining away, like scum down a plughole. It's my own fault - the fumblings of Katie Price and her husband, Peter Andre, always have this effect on me, yet I keep going back for more.
This time, the couple are off to America, where Peter hopes to revive his music career - though Peter, who looks like a shocked Action...
Susan Boyle on Britain's Got Talent
- Posted at 2:17pm
- 16 April 2009
- by DavidButcher-RT
Britain's Got Talent always arrives like a circus train blowing into town. Ring the church bells! Hang out the bunting! Oddballs with groundless faith in their own talents are making fools of themselves! "Finally the wait is over!" Dec kept yelling.
The same panel of judges was back: Simon Cowell, still with the blinding teeth, the loo-brush hair, the winking; Amanda Holden with the hyperbole ("I just want to say that it was a complete privilege listening to that"); Piers Morgan looking suspiciously younger than he did in the last series.
But the...
The Real Swiss Family Robinson
- Posted at 4:02pm
- 02 April 2009
- by AlisonGraham-RT
The idea behind the new BBC1 reality series The Real Swiss Family Robinson is for British families in crisis to be "marooned" on a desert island, where peeing into a hole in the ground presumably puts all of their woes into perspective.
I'm not convinced. It didn't do much for the Dyes from Essex (below). Dad Andy's building firm had collapsed so he, wife Vicki, daughters Courtney and Charlotte and Charlotte's boyfriend Tom tootled off to the Pacific island of Kiribati for three weeks.
They might just as well have gone on a camping...
Kevin Whately on Dementia
- Posted at 12:02pm
- 27 March 2009
- by DavidButcher-RT
You'd be hard-pressed to come up with a programme title less tempting than Kevin Whately on Dementia (23 March ITV1), but let's try, shall we? How about Giles Brandreth on Shingles or An Audience with Martin Shaw?
No, I think Mr Whately edges it. No offence to him, but we know to our cost that actors make dreadful presenters. I hate to drag up Extreme Fishing with Robson Green again, but it's an obvious whipping boy, and short of Five commissioning Extreme Embroidery with Trevor Eve, likely to remain in a class...
Robert Webb on Let's Dance for Comic Relief
- Posted at 11:17am
- 20 March 2009
- by AlisonGraham-RT
I know a number of women - sensible, level-headed ones at that - who've blushingly admitted that they found Robert Webb's winning turn on BBC1's Let's Dance for Comic Relief powerfully erotic.
On any level, this is impossible to analyse. This was, after all, a man dressed as a woman, wearing a hideous black wig, full make-up, a high-cut leotard, legwarmers and shiny tights. And he has sensational legs, the kind of pins that wouldn't disgrace a supermodel. Yet there was no mistaking Webb's, ahem, masculinity, and not just because that leotard left little...
Ken and Martha in Coronation Street
- Posted at 6:17pm
- 13 March 2009
- by AlisonGraham-RT
There was a lovely moment in a recent Coronation Street when Deirdre Barlow surveyed her life of serene domesticity during a happy bout of ironing. All chez Barlow was perfect, but for one little wrinkle in the checked tablecloth of Deirdre's existence: "If only our Tracy was out of prison, it would be just perfect." No sadness attached itself to this particular sentence; it wasn't weighed down by the ballast of sentimentality. Deirdre simply went back to ironing husband Ken's shirts.
Ken looked pained, and not because Deirdre had so carelessly mentioned his incarcerated stepdaughter. No,...
Red Riding
- Posted at 2:50pm
- 06 March 2009
- by PaulJones-RT
It wasn't the explicit gore-fest we've come to expect from the modern British serial killer drama, but Red Riding was just as brutal and far more disturbing than most.
Set in 1974, this first of three two-hour episodes adapted from David Peace's quartet of novels plunged us into a world where almost the entire police force of West Yorkshire (not to mention the journalists!) were corrupt and murderous.
So violence and malevolence pervaded the story, rather than being delivered in measured doses of blood and guts. Emotionally draining, yes. But tremendously gripping...
Extreme Fishing with Robson Green
- Posted at 3:21pm
- 05 March 2009
- by DavidButcher-RT
"It's a waiting game," said Robson Green's fishing guide as they tried to hook a sturgeon in the waters of British Columbia. A waiting game, you say? On TV? I know it's fishing, but that doesn't sound great. If I had to choose between, say, a football game and a waiting game, I know which I'd watch.
But this wasn't just fishing, it was Extreme Fishing with Robson Green. This was Five. They weren't about to make us sit and watch waiting. No, they edited out the waiting and instead gave us the bits where...
Gail Trimble on University Challenge
- Posted at 4:07pm
- 26 February 2009
- by AlisonGraham-RT
If ever a woman's body language shouted, "I'm clever, but I'm rather shy and I don't want to be seen as a show-off", it was that of Gail Trimble, intellectual Panzer and captain of the Corpus Christi College, Oxford team on University Challenge. Acknowledged as the quiz's highest-scoring competitor ever, Trimble laid waste to opponents with her sweetly nervous smile and breathtaking general knowledge.
It was Pollyanna-ish of me not to realise until the day of the grand final (23 February BBC2) that not everyone thought, as I did, that she was terrific - immensely...
Damages
- Posted at 4:31pm
- 20 February 2009
- by AlisonGraham-RT
In the unlikely event that Lladro should ever decide to manufacture a line of porcelain Angry Bereaved Lady Lawyer figurines to take its place among all of those shepherdesses and geishas, they'd surely have to model it on Damages's Ellen Parsons.
Ellen (Rose Byrne) returned in the much-anticipated new series of the brilliant, playful thriller looking like a bruised angel, with ice in her veins and fire in her heart, seeking revenge. In series one, her fiancé was killed on the orders of a crooked businessman and Ellen escaped with her life after her boss hired...
Paris Hilton's British Best Friend
- Posted at 12:22pm
- 09 February 2009
- by AlisonGraham-RT
If you could actually hear candyfloss, I swear it would sound just like Paris Hilton. With her itty-bitty, teeny-weeny, sing-songy little voice. Paris ("businesswoman, singer, actress and brand" though, oddly, not "drunk driver and ex-con") arrived on our shores to choose her British Best Friend (Thursdays ITV2). Aren't we lucky?
Twelve thousand applied, but only 12 were chosen; 11 shrieking girlies with false eyelashes that made their faces look like bats' graveyards, and a squealing boy. "I've read her book!" twittered one as they awaited the arrival of Paris. She's written a book? Dear Lord. For...
Battlestar Galactica
- Posted at 3:02pm
- 30 January 2009
- by MarkBraxton-RT
It's a very exclusive club: we love a show with the same quality control as The Sopranos, The West Wing and The Wire, yet there are fewer than 200,000 of us in the UK - next to nothing in TV terms.
The club's latest talking point? Nuclear war has turned Earth to toast. A big deal, in anyone's book. But in the final run of science-fiction colossus Battlestar Galactica (Tuesdays Sky1, HD), it's just a plot kink.
At the start of the show in 2004, humans in a distant galaxy fled a holocaust and...
Dancing on Ice leaves Alison Graham cold
- Posted at 5:46pm
- 23 January 2009
- by AlisonGraham-RT
There was no hope of hiding from the bombast in the opening show of Dancing on Ice (11 January ITV1), because it started early. As the overblown Carmina Burana blasted across the rink and the "celebrity" skaters lined up to grin with fear, the voiceover boomed: "This is one of the greatest challenges they will ever face." Oh for heaven's sake, it's not as if they're embarking on the early stages of stem-cell research, it's a talent show.
But the egregiousness didn't stop there. Step forward Tony Gubba, who commentated on the slow-motion bits after...
MasterChef
- Posted at 10:52am
- 21 January 2009
- by DavidButcher-RT
Life isn't fair. I look at Gregg Wallace, the bald judge on cookery talent show MasterChef, and that's what I think: life isn't fair. How come his job is to eat for a living and mine isn't?
His whole raison d'être is to be stocky and hard to please four times a week. I could do stocky and hard to please, yet thanks to the perverse cruelty of life, I don't get paid to sample half-a-dozen dishes of freshly cooked haute cuisine a day and critique them, and I don't think it's because I didn't work...
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