Why it's so hard to LIKE the BBC. NB Fergal Keane!

I try very hard to like the BBC – but the people who work for the corporation make that very difficult.

Take the newsreaders and presenters, for example…

From those stiffs on ‘Breakfast’ – Bill Turnbull and Sian Williams – to the dorks who front main BBC1 bulletins such as Kate Silverton; they all seem to have strawberries stuck up their arses.

And don't even get me started on Fergal Keane and his bleeding heart, liberal compassion industery reportage. Aaarrrggh!

I much prefer the more down-to-earth presentation style of Sky News, where the likes of Anna Botting and Stephen Dixon do a great job.

And I still occasionally watch ITV’s News at Ten - though it isn’t what it was in the good old days of Trevor McDonald and Reginald Bosanquet .

Elsewhere on the BBC, the output makes me want to rush to my en-suite vomitarium. I am certainly sick of the smug face of Sue Perkins crapping on about the baking of cakes – as if that was in any way important.

And tonight (5 October 2011) Perkins is to appear on some dull twaddle on BBC2 about “celebrities” walking in the “wild” … in Cornwall. I shan’t be watching.

What else? Well, I think all those tarts (gender neutral usage!) who front cookery shows on all channels should be bludgeoned in their beds.

But, like I say, I do try to like the BBC. I don’t want to be thought of as one of those mad, conservative types who are always spluttering about the BBC’s undoubted obsessions with gay sexuality and multiculturalism.

For the record, I have no problem with gay culture or ethnic minority cultures. I think our national culture is all the richer and more humorous for those elements. I just don’t like being preached at in middlebrow dramas such as Casualty and EastEnders.

I think the BBC is very good indeed at sitcoms. It has always knocked ITV into a cocked hat with those. ITV has only ever made ONE good sitcom –Shelley. The BBC has made loads – from old classics such as Till Death Us Do Part, to recent offerings such as the brilliant Outnumbered.

However, the best comedy show – as opposed to traditional 30-minute sitcom – is Harry Hill’s TV Burp, an ITV offering.

And the two best comedy dramas of contemporary times are also both ITV products – Benidorm and Doc Martin.

At heart, in terms of cultural identity, I'm still an ITV man - tinged perhaps with a Sky News sort of attitude.

Despite my best efforts, I simply can't bring myself to like the BBC. I think there is always an agenda with its people. They are, in the main, Guardian readers.

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.

Television – a terrible waste of creative energy

I’m planning to be mightily bored on Wednesday night … as I watch the National TV Awards on ITV1.
Most years I watch this drivel – and it reminds me how right I’ve been over the years to express the view that TV is a shallow medium which favours mediocrity and insincere sentiment.
In the days when I worked as TV critic for the old Oracle Teletext service, I used to go to the season launches of the various networks and just sneer at everything.
Occasionally, I’d ask debunking questions…such as one I remember puttig to Selina Scott at the ill-starred launch of British Satellite Broadcasting in the late 1980s.
After her “triumph” on BBC1’s breakfast show, simpering Selina had been chosen to front a new BSB channel devoted to “people who enjoy living”.
When the time came for questions from the media I chipped in with this: “Surely, if people really are interested in living, then the last thing they should be doing is sitting on their arses watching television.”
Bloody hell, you’d think I’d just farted in the room. How dare anyone question the validity of a TV programme!
But when it comes to covering telly, print journalists (apart from a few heroes) tend to be extra-fawning, especially the hagiographers of the women’s magazines.
I’m afraid I earned quite a reputation as the man who always asked awkward questions – and the man who wasn’t impressed by showbiz fluffheads.
So shocking was my reputation for asking hostile questions that I remember one soppy bird – who these days writes crap about soap operas for the Daily Mail – opining in an article that the “man from the Oracle asked his predictable question”. Well, at least she was being quite funny for once.
Since my days as Oracle’s TV critic, television has expanded enormously, which means we now have endlessly repeated US moron-fodder such as Friends and various other imports on Freeview and the Sky channels.
And on the main channels, awful cookery shows and karaoke cack such as the X Factor, Britain’s Got Talent and Britannia High – plus all those preposterous shows with hopeless hoofers, ice-skaters and Andrew Lloyd-Webber.
If anything, the “talent”-base of TV presenters and comedians is now rock bottom. Alan Carr, Russell Brand?! Laugh? I thought I’d never start…
Don’t even get me started on Dale Winton and his Hole in the Wall.
Apart from the excellent and poetic sitcom Early Doors, Harry Hill’s TV Burp, and a few of the Catherine Tate shows (though even some of them are patchy), British TV has produced precious little to be proud about over the past 20 years.
Virtually the whole industry is a sinful waste of creative energy – so I’m very happy to see it failing so badly, with ratings plummeting.
Why on earth British TV thinks it is worthy of receiving awards is a mystery to me.

IN MY new incarnation in this blog, I shall be turning my gaze on lots of aspects of life – not just the crock of excrement that is contemporary telly.
Newspapers are also going down the pan.
I picked up The Independent the other day. It is supposed to be an intelligent and serious newspaper, but hasn’t been that for quite a while.
On page 27, masquerading as world news, was an article about Smurfs, those blue-faced Belgian comic book characters that some of you might just about remember. Apparently, Smurfs were created 50 years ago. That was the “peg” for a “news” story. Pathetic.
With each page I turned the paper got worse. In the “Independent Life” section was an illustrated guide to “the ten best egg cups”, complete with information about where you can buy them …if you’ve got up to £15.99 to waste on buying one egg cup, such as the “SuckUK” one (sic!) … and if your boring enough to worry if your egg cups are quite cutting edge enough.
So often when I read today’s newspapers the SFW (so f***ing what!) factor clicks in almost instantly.
Till next time, folks… keep it real and keep the faith!
And remember, all those years when I was away, I never forgot about you.
XXX Sam.