The utter shite that is modern TV!

People used to get very excited about what special ‘treats’ the main channels would offer at Christmas. Not any more.

The top ten ratings for Christmas Day 2018 indicate a big decline.

The Queen’s Christmas Broadcast took the No1 slot with a meagre 6.3 million viewers. Some social justice warriors took offence because Her Maj was sat by a golden piano. Zzzzzz …

Michael McIntyre’s Big Christmas Show came second with 6.1m viewers. Of course, I didn’t watch it! Because I’m not a thick person, that’s why!

McIntyre is one of many so-called comedians favoured by the BBC that I not only don’t find funny, but who also come across as intensely irritating. John Bishop is another.

Coronation Street is the only ITV product in the top ten – with a measly 4.6m watching. What a spectacular decline! Corrie used to pull in more than 20 million viewers per episode back in the 1980s. Mind you, back then it wasn’t the unrelenting tale of abject misery it is now.

I am frequently horrified at the utter banality of TV offerings. Television aims low, and the result is the turning of the viewing public into morons. Those that don’t take the sensible option of switching off, that is, and reading a book, or going for a walk, or going to the pub (all three are better options that staring at the idiot’s lantern).

Of course, the decline of terrestrial TV is only one part of the story. Many people now turn to streaming services instead. But from what I see they are no better – too way too much gun-toting and car-chasing for my liking. And as for things such as Game of Thrones, really? Are people so dumb they take that stuff seriously?

I did watch a bit of telly over the festive period. The bio-drama Torvill & Dean (ITV) wasn’t TOO bad (certainly well cast), though it did have some flaws. It fudged the issue of whether there was sexual attraction between the skaters. Also, that sequence filmed through a bus window didn't work. It ought to have been edited out. Plus, the drama was way too long.

I also start to watch the Bond film Quantum of Solace. But only for the opening 15 minutes or so, which was so predictable – loads of car-chasing, gun-shooting, and macho men (I’m guessing stunt doubles rather than actors) leaping across exotic rooftops etc. Boring!

When it came for a bit of straightforward acting in the film, I simply couldn’t bear to watch Daniel Craig as 007. The man looks like he’s permanently and painfully constipated.

And talking of luvvies, I’m so sick of seeing them front up slow-motion compassion porn adverts for charities. Crying children, chained donkeys etc. Then the luvvies urge you to “text CARE to give just £3 per month”, which presumably goes to funding the next ridiculous advert, or other marketing bullcrap, or the inflated salaries of charity bosses.

Anyhoo, here’s wishing you a happy and hopefully screen-reduced New Year. You will feel much better for it.     

TV: precious few gems among SO MUCH crap

The state of the la la land that is TV just get worse and worse. Apart from occasional gems, such as the timely repeat of ITV’s Cilla* in recent days, there is so much junk.

Why, for instance does the BBC persist in churning out Casualty and Holby City? They aren’t dramas. They are textbook examples of hand-wringing, liberal issues-led dross.

Coronation Street, meanwhile, is nowhere near as good as it was. It shouldn’t keep chugging away with crisis-heavy storylines, and preachy stuff such as Steve suffering depression, and now Cathy being addicted to hoarding rubbish, and Carla  becoming a problem gambler.

However, the actress who plays Cathy, Melanie Hill, is brilliant. I loved her role as Cilla Black’s mum in ITV’s hit biopic miniseries – especially her yodelling scene. I hope Melanie becomes a mainstay in Corrie as Cathy – but please add some beef to her role.

It was good to see John White as Cilla’s Dad, too. He was so good in Early Doors, one of the few occasions the BBC have ever managed an intelligent take on soulful northern English humour and pathos.

Northern humour still does surface in Corrie, of course, but rarely. The last time I laughed out loud was months ago when Scary Mary talked of her prowess at yoga. "My crescent moon is the talk of the community centre,” she boasted. Fffnnnarrr!

And now, after endless boring cookery shows, we have some awful, overblown bollox of a barbeque competition, ITV’s BBQ Champ. Two things I find irritating about it instantly …

(A) It’s a rip-off of the BBC’s Great British Bake-Off, and that was hardly worth copying.

And (B), two of the new show’s ‘stars’ are among the most irritating people ever to appear on telly. (I know! There’s a lot of competition; are you listening Phillip Schofield and Su Perkins?)

The two supremely annoying people in BBQ Champ are, of course, Myleene Klass and Adam Richardson. Oh, come on, it needs saying!

On a sombre note, there’s something else I need to say too… Requiescat In Pace, Cilla Black.

A 'top' soap that reeks of DESPERATION!

There'll be no Coronation Street on ITV1 tonight, because the schedule's stuffed with a friendly England v Peru football game – complete with the usual rushed, rubbishy commentary from Adrian Chiles and co – as an opener for the World Cup.

Traditionally Corrie fans get upset when football pushes the soap out, but I suspect many of them tonight will be relieved to have a rest from all the artificial sweat and tension of recent weeks.

Tina is in hospital on life-support in a standard soap cliché scene, and Peter Barlow is desperate for a drink, no doubt. ZZZzzzzz.

Now we have those other TV chestnuts to get through ... who was responsible for her death? (Apparently it was Rob, but I couldn't be arsed to watch the Tuesday episode which revealed that.) Next, will the correct killer be bought to justice?

Honestly, who bloody cares? I suspect the actors themselves find it hilarious than anyone can take such overwritten bollocks can seriously.

Now, Corrie bosses are doubtless crowing that viewing figures are up for recent episodes, the ones where Tina planned to run away with Peter Barlow to somewhere down south, where she could get her teeth whitened more regularly.

I think some 10 million have watched those episodes, but actually that's well down on Corrie's viewing figures some 25 years ago, when it regularly pulled in more than 20 million viewers per episode – without having to resort to tram crashes and silly murders.

Now, I'm not saying that the Street should be solely about ordinary people doing ordinary things – there would be no drama in that, and that is not what drama is about.  

But the producers do need to be less desperate in the plotting and the rush to make everything that happens so anxious and knife-edgey. It just doesn't work.

What this vintage soap needs to get back to is fine script-writing, which builds character, humour and the sort of street-wise philosophy that we who live in the North of England recognise a strong and life-affirming part of daily existence.

Hail, the Queen of the Street!

I do hope Julie Goodyear isn’t voted off Celebrity Big Brother. Without her the show would not be worth watching.

I fear she may be voted off, however, not least because most of the people who ring the Channel 5 phone lines are … well … young and a bit thick.

Sorry if that seems cruel, but the type of people who regard the rapper MC Harvey and the US actor ‘The Situation’ as celebrities - or even remotely interesting – must be dim.

The Situation is a former underwear model who was in the axed and very crap reality show Jersey Shore. Yes, he’s that tacky, folks.

Julie Goodyear, however, is a tough old bird who really does have a genuinely strong personality – a megastar of Coronation Street as the brassy barmaid Bet Lynch with her famous catchphrase, “What can I do for you, cock?”

Julie is from the rough-as-rats Lancashire town of Heywood. And as I’m from the equally rough-as-rats Lancashire town of Wigan, I know what I’m talking about.

I once met Julie, as it happens, when she was starring in some camp nonsense of a stage show in York, and I was a columnist for the Hull Daily Mail. I think it was in 2002, somewhere around that time.

She was due to appear in the same show in Hull a few weeks later, hence I was sent to interview here for my weekly Out To Lunch column – which had a cult following in the city’s evening paper.

It was my duty in those days to take a celeb out to lunch at a restaurant each week and ask them a few questions while getting sloshed on expenses (me getting sloshed, usually, not the guests; they knew they had to stay sober and on their mettle).

Naturally, I researched each interviewee first, and among the cuttings on La Goodyear was an interview she’d done with a Fleet St columnist who had written that our Julie had “more facial hair than all of The Dubliners together”. Miaow!

Julie does have a bit of a face fuzz problem, as it happens, but it would be ungallant of me to dwell on that.  

Anyway, during my interview with her, she didn’t want any lunch. It was all done in the theatre dressing room, with the actress (and she is, actually, quite a good actress) smoking from her trademark cigarette holder and giving arch replies to my questions.

One question – and it is, unfortunately, one that provincial journalists are expected to ask of a star about to visit their local patch – was: “So are you looking forward to coming to Hull, Julie?”

Hmmmm... She chose not to reply verbally; she merely gave me a horrified look. Time spent in Hull ….definitly NOT something anyone in their right mind would look forward to. That was the meaning of her look.

I was tempted to say, at that point, “Oh, come on Julie. Hull’s not THAT bad. I find it easy enough to endure if I keep myself topped up with booze” but I thought better of it.


Anyway, Julie’s an old pro, so she gave me some decent catty and camp quotes for the interview. I remember the paper ran it as a spread (across two pages) with the strapline ‘The King of Hull meets the Queen of the Street’.

I should explain that, at the time, I was billed as the ‘King of Hull’ for my critiques of the city and its incompetent Labour rulers in the column, which appeared in the paper three nights each week. Happy days.

Anyway, back to Celeb Big Brother. I think Goodyear's been the star of it – with her two-faced moaning, that episode of genuine kindness with a sobbing Martin Kemp, and for her constant use of “F**k off” and “Piss off”.

Also, I think the show deserves a big pat on the back for its positive promotion of SMOKING!

Virtually, all the BB residents smoke. Good! Two fingers to the many health fascists in Government and the medical profession who are trying to stamp out smoking altogether.

Smoking has many positive aspects – it boosts social inclusion and relieves stress, for example.

No-one is pretending that smoking is actually healthy, of course, but the ban on smoking in pubs, restaurants and workplaces is most definitely evil – an act of tyranny.

After all, what is the point of being healthy, if you are not free?

If I remember, I will put my money where my big gob is – and vote for Julie to stay in the BB house.

Early Doors sticks two fingers up to Britain's Smoking Ban Nazis

It’s something to cheer, I suppose, that one of the precious few good shows commissioned by the BBC in recent years is back for a series of reruns.
Early Doors was always a brilliant, poetic, philosophical, character-driven sitcom.
I came home from work the other night, feeling knackered, and slightly down-hearted because, as everyone knows, there is never anything worth watching on telly on Tuesdays.
(EastEnders? I'd rather stick needles in my eyes. It is condescending twaddle about the working classes - clunkingly written in politically correct jargon beloved of middle class luvvies at the BBC.)
But Early Doors is quality. It's a gentle and slow-paced show set in a back street Northern English pub. It doesn't strain for laughs; it often makes you think profoundly about the absurdity of modern life and the lazy and corrupt characters you come across (such as greedy, bent police officers).
Old Tommy, who sits on his own, is my favourite character. His grimace perfectly sums up what I feel about contemporary British society ... utter weariness at the sheer stupidity of it all, occasional disgust, and a sure knowledge that life used to be better. Much better.
Meanwhile, Winnie the cleaner shows a sly wit, and Ken the landlord has much human warmth, masked by a gruff exterior. Though many of the characters are defective in many ways, collectively, you can't help but love 'em.
It is a show that benefits from perfect casting and writing .. .and you can't say that about many.
And watching it again as a repeat on BBC4 I was also seduced by the lovely smoky character of the Grapes pub.
Wreaths of curling ciggie smoke are part of the elegant beauty and the comforting atmosphere of the traditional British pub. When these programmes were made, the hated smoking ban in workplaces had not been introduced.
It made think again how very unfair that blanket ban was – and how much pleasure it has taken away from people.
The ban has also contributed in a big way to the huge wave of pub closures now under way in our country. That’s not good at all.
When a pub closes, you are not just losing a business but a focal point for the community.
Pubs are sacred to our memories. In each backstreet pub so many tender scenes have taken place down the decades: jokes have been told; tears shed; words of love spoken; baptisms, birthdays and weddings celebrated; and precious last cigarettes have been tenderly handed over to mates and loved ones.
To destroy all that with a total smoking ban on dubious health grounds was a hateful and sinister act by our tyrannical Labour Government.
To my mind, the smoking ban isn't even about health.
It's about freedom – which, actually, is much more important.
Because there is little point being healthy if you aren't allowed to be free.
Before the current "Ban It" madness infected our mainstream political culture, the only powerful people to be rabidly anti-smoking were the Nazis under Adolf Hitler.
They are the spiritual inspiration for the proscriptive anti-smoking martinets now infesting the UK Government and National Health Service.
It is strange that such a lovely and quintessentially British programme such as Early Doors should be such a powerful and eloquent reminder of just how beautiful and enjoyable smoking in pubs used to be.
Nearly all the show’s characters smoke. If a new series is to be made, then I suppose the Grapes will have to feature a wretched Smoke Hole in its yard, where the regulars will have to go and freeze their knackers off and get wet if they choose to spark up ... just like we have to do in real life.
A final thought ... three cheers to Coronation Street for not giving in the pressure from Britain's thin-lipped Smoke Ban Nazis to run "positive" stories showing the benefits of giving up the habit.

Are YOU working class and beautiful like old ITV … or Liberal-Fascist like the modern BBC?

IT’S rather a shame that ITV is crumbling to dust and can’t even come up with good new ideas any more. Demons?! How derivative is it possible to be?
In the glory days of British television (the mid 1960s to the mid 1980s) ITV was more than a telly channel … it was a badge of national cultural identity.
In those days, you were either an ITV person (lively, quick-witted, working class, and rather beautiful) or you were a BBC person (stuffy, bourgeois, Pooterish and humourless).
Nowadays, of course, television is much expanded and yet, paradoxically, it’s not nearly such a potent force culturally.
But suppose for a minute we Brits still identified ourselves by our choice of TV network; then I guess an ITV Person would now be nervous, short of money, insecure, bereft of ideas.
And a BBC Person would be a Liberal-Fascist, hideously corporatist and obsessed with racial issues and feminism.
So I guess ITV still represents the majority of British people … just about!
Meanwhile, one gem of quality writing and character-driven humour survives on ITV, thrives even … and that is Coronation Street.
Last night’s episode saw Becky within five minutes end her engagement to thick-as-a-plank Jason Grimshaw, get engaged and move in with Steve McDonald, and have a blazing row with Steve’s ex, Michelle.
We also saw Steve have a bust-up with both his mam and Eileen.
It was entertaining stuff and as ever there was a neat philosophical contrast between all the passion going on … and Roy and Hayley Cropper, just a few feet away in the Rovers, together the epitome of buttoned up propriety and pained humanity.
And that’s before you consider that Roy is a pathological misfit – and Hayley a transsexual.
The actor who plays Ken Barlow, original cast member William Roache, is now on leave as he grieves for the death of his wife.
I hope the weeks ahead go as well as can be expected for William, and that soon he is back at work to continue Ken’s exquisite illicit romance with the narrowboat-dwelling siren played by Stephanie Beacham.

Paris Hilton's cackfest / pouting on Sky News

I’M not remotely interested in anything Paris Hilton says or does. Not many people I know are.
And inane, televised chatter from young British people competing to be her best friend is my idea of utter hideousness and pointlessness combined.
Now, I know only too well just how shallow and thick young Britons can be – they have a demented addiction to trashy celebrity and they’ve suffered from p***poor education in our awful state schools.
So perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that some young folk actually volunteered to take part in Paris Hilton’s British Best Friend (ITV2).
This takes reality TV to moronic new lows. Paris sets sad little tests for her wannabe buddies and they, being daft and therefore prone to manipulation and exploitation, are only too ready to jump through hoops.
The cynical TV executives who commissioned this pathetic cackfest of a show should hang their heads in shame.
One by one Paris’ putative pals are eliminated – or walk out, feeling weary and convinced they have made a Big Mistake (which they have, all of them).
I forced myself to watch a slice of it last night (Tuesday 10 February). Hilton – the blonde bubblehead of an heiress who recently had the brass neck to ask Paul McCartney if she could duet with him – sits on a sort of throne while the contestants emote incoherently and bitch about one another … “you’re not genuine!” seems to be the most common charge they put to each other.
Talking of blonde vacuity, I am amazed at the lip-glossed, excitable glamour that the female presenters on Sky News try, and usually fail, to project.
They’re all at it, pouting away like billy-ho, but Anna Botting is the worse offender – with her silly Kathy Kirby-style glittery lipgloss.
It's as if they've all attended the same puckering up classes as queen pouter Kay Burley.
And last night (Tuesday 10 February) there was a new (to me) face up there, a bird who looked like a blonde version of that pneumatic little strumpet Rosie Webster on Coronation Street. All this glamour seems inappropriate on a news channel with serious pretensions. Sky News would be better advised recruiting hefty, plain lasses to read the news, as the BBC News channel does in the main.
It doesn’t matter if the presenters don’t have much in the way of personality, eloquence or brains. We’ve come to accept that.
But as long as they can read the autocue without seeming to peer through fog, and they can ask some half-decent questions of weary politicians / confused foreigners etc, that’ll do us.

Welcome to the Cretin Land that is British TV

MAYBE I’m just a jaded old fart, but I find almost everything I see on telly in this supposedly fabulous, digital age, not just boring but profoundly, worryingly depressing.
The general output across the UK freeview channels (the only ones I can be arsed to receive) convinces me that both the content providers of TV, and the viewers, are just so very thick, and their behaviour juvenile and repetitive.
The only programmes I actually look forward to watching these days are Coronation Street, Scrubs, and Harry Hill’s TV Burp. Perhaps I should add that I thought the Rab C Nesbit Crimbo special was also a blast - as indeed was an old repeat of the subversively philosophical Scottish sitcom which I saw just the other night.
Everything else is… shite, frankly.
Let’s examine the evidence … endless cops and docs pap (YES, including Whitechapel) … hysterical karaoke contests such as the Eurovision confection currently under way … the campfest Dancing on Ice … a ridiculous Pimp My Ride show featuring that idiot maracas merchant, Bez, from the Happy Mondays … and the absolute moron-fodder that is Hollyoaks.
Then there was something I watched about a Scrapheap Challenge which featured middle-aged men behaving like excitable schoolboy nerds ... and the return of Jonathan Ross' chat show with him greasing up shamlelessly to Tom Cruise (wot, no questions about Scientology?!) before asking the actor whether he farted in bed with his wife.
Modern telly, eh? Garbage piled upon garbage.
I was going to say that at least through January we’ve had a rest from seeing those lip-glossed bimbos Girls Aloud prancing around like sex industry workers as they did all over the Christmas period, but then again I’m sure while channel-hopping the other day up they popped again … or maybe it was just a bad dream.
Can anyone remember a single Girls Aloud song? The Women’s Liberation Movement struggled in vain and punk rock was futile if these cheap, tacky, groin-thrusting airheads are considered good.
Contemporary TV lacks the following qualities: good writing; and a different take on life other than that defined by our ailing pop music industry, tired old sex jokes, and the dead hand of a reality TV that's packed with celebrity-lite no-marks.
In future postings I will, of course, continue to have my say on the monstrous mess that is the TV industry, but I shall also be focusing on other weak spots in the culture of our country (Britain) and that of the wider, crumbling, degenerate West.
Keep the faith,
Sam.