Mel & Sue's Generation Game - TV for thick people

There's obviously been some insider bitching going on at the BBC about how awful the new series is of The Generation Game.

I don't need any persuading. Even by the abysmally low standards of TV light entertainment, the launch show on Sunday (1 April) was utter crap.

Mel Giedroyc and Sue Perkins are both unconvincing as they try to chummy up with the contestants. This pair have made a very good living out of being condescending to ordinary people (including viewers) in recent years.

Perkins is smugness personified. There is a bit more human warmth to Giedroyc - but neither is a good communicator.

This first show was over-cheery and fatuous in tone from the opening 'game', which was basically a silly pottery-making scenario, featuring the over-rated Johnny Vegas, who's clearly a MUCH better potter than he is a comedian or comedy actor.

And, oh, when the contestants had to handle wet clay to make a handle for a teapot, goodness me, didn't it look like they were stroking a wet penis?!

Well, that might have been funny - but not with Mel and Sue pulling their annoying arch faces, and Johnny Vegas tittering away in the background.

And anyway, the pottery thing with Vegas had been done before - on The Generation Game in 2005. How unimaginative to start a new series of an old format with a repeated feature.

Next up in the 'new' show was a Bollywood-style dance troupe. Great movers they were, but it was simply patronising to expect overweight and middle aged contestants to replicate those sort of routines.

But, hey, that's what contemporary TV is all about - making fun of ordinary people who've paid their TV licences. 

Well that, and paying mediocrities such as Mel and Sue way too much money.

Also, I couldn't see the point on having two 'celebrity guests' on the new show. Some speccy geek from a boring panel show was one. The other was Lorraine Kelly.

I used to have a lot of time for Lorraine, but as her daytime ITV show reveals, she's now all too happy to take the money for being regarded as 'TV talent'. She uses her airtime to big up the unimportant things in life - such as ageing pop stars, other light entertainment fluffheads and endless fashion shite. 

There is very little genuine talent among the industry's perceived pool of 'TV talent'.

There is much that is damaging to contemporary society in the output of mainstream TV. In shamelessly catering for what it considers to be its brain-dead viewers, television is, sadly, making more and more people very, very stupid indeed.

And frankly, that dynamic is causing serious damage to the proper transmission of human identity in a country where, anyway,  education and moral training are failing alarmingly fast.

I intend to challenge the practices and programme content of TV.

Someone needs to do that ... and change the game for the sake of future generations. 

Watch this space.