Ok, so here’s what you do to get a new tv programme on the air:

You find a ‘thing’ that people can do; any ‘thing’ will do, literally so.

You make them do that ‘thing’ competitively.

You have ‘judges’ to decide how well that ‘thing’ is performed. And to get nasty and mean and insulting. To add ‘flavour’ to it all.

And, most important of all, you throw some loser off the show every week. Preferably someone who’s really sweet and nice and cuddly but totally fucking clueless about doing ‘the thing’. Then the viewing audience (average IQ of between 7 and 33) can cry about it and bemoan the cruelty of life. Adding controversy to the format as well as pathos. Lots of pathos because really, the entire fucking enterprise is quite pathetic.

Eventually, 58 weeks later, you have a winner. Who will be on the front pages of every hi-brow newspaper and in the news reports as if he or she had just cured cancer. (Which, so far, has not been one of those ‘things’. But in time…)

Then you wait a week and bring out the ‘celebrity’ version, getting G-list ‘celebs’ to do that same ‘thing’.

Ok, so we need some things. Which aren’t anything like as important as the formula, but you need something to glue it together. Things people to do with varying degrees of competence…

Ok, singing’s an obvious one. Let’s flog that theme to death.

Dancing.

Acting.

Anything vaguely falling under the umbrella of ‘talent’.

Sex. Mariella Frostrup hosts such a thing on some downmarket channel where couples go into a booth and have sex. Live on tv!!!!! Even though there’s no cameras in there and anyone can grunt and moan, even in a metal box; have they never seen ‘when Harry met Sally’?? Should be called ‘The great Fuck Off’.

Right, then cooking. Everyone can cook. Ahhhh, but can they?

And baking. The great Bake Off. 27 weeks of cakes. Jesus H jumping Christ. So we all now know about a soggy bottom, a ‘good bake’, about too dry, too wet, too fancy, to bland, tasteless, too many flavours, not enough flavours, too much custard, not enough depleted uranium, cakes that will cause constipation, flatulence, gut-rot, indigestion, brain haemorrhages, everything that can possibly go wrong with a fucking cake. But now its over and Ruby didn’t win. My life will never be the same again. Until the next series. God help us all.

Big Brother was perhaps the proto-version of this formula, the beta-model, which used as its ‘thing’ personality, or character. Because that was what was being judged. Had to be, because this group of imprisoned people did nothing, performed nothing, had no discernable ‘thing’ other than talking rubbish for 6 months, which came so easily to them all.

I’m waiting for ‘America’s got Hit Men’ to be shown. Where assassins murder people and the judges mark them on artistry, efficiency, cleanness of kill. Though the judges may feel somewhat compromised in their sarcastic criticism of a woman (well, why not?? frikkin sexist assumptionist) who stands before them with an Uzi in one hand and a blood-dripping Samurai sword in the other.

‘Celebrity Surgical Procedures’ has some potential. But the waiting lists would make the show a bit slow.

 

I just don’t know any more, I just don’t know.

 

Happy wednesday

 

A xxxx