Of course, it was much simpler when I was a kid, Saturday evening telly followed a simple pattern: Teleprinter, news, Tom and Jerry, Jim'll Fix It/Doctor Who (ugh), Generation Game, All Creatures Great and Small/Fanny by Gaslight/Juliet Bravo.
Just lately though, Saturday telly seems to have taken a turn for the worse. I say this because on Saturday night I was witness to probably the lowest point in British television history, and, yes, I've seen Loose Women. I'm talking about Hole in the Wall. If you didn't see it, it's based on a Japanese game show, which is enough to make you switch off already (a note to BBC commissioning execs: Clive James used to show Japanese game shows for a reason - to highlight that British TV wasn't all that bad). Apparently clips of the Japanese version were popular on the internet, which is yet another reason why the internet needs to stay on the internet.
The basic premise is that some minor celebrities dress in awful silver Lycra outfits and helmets and have to fit through a hole in a wall that's advancing rapidly towards them, if they don't they end up in a kiddies' paddling pool. That's it. No questions to answer, no skill involved.
One of this week's guests was one of the Hairy Bikers, don't ask me which one, it wasn't the Geordie one. The sight of him in skin-tight clothes was enough to scare off any children who may have tuned in by mistake. I say by mistake because surely nobody planned this into their Saturday evening viewing schedule, did they? I caught it by mistake because it was on at my mother's. Honest.
Watching Andi Peters get shoved in the water was mildly amusing though. Mind you, I could think of a lot worse things I'd like to see happen to that little turd, like making sure he never appears on TV again. Especially as he single-handedly ruined Top of the Pops.
Here's a clip of it, miraculously from the BBC's own You Tube channel. I'd would have thought that they wouldn't have wanted to show off about it. And yes, Dale Winton, you left Radio Trent for a career in telly, did you ever think this is what you'd end up doing, a vehicle even worse than Supermarket Sweep or Pets Win Prizes?
Nobody's a winner in this game show, not the contestants, the presenter or the audience. I've never felt like asking for a portion of my licence fee back, but I do now.
5 comments:
Now I like Dale, but sometimes he'll do any old shit - remember Touch The Truck, where contestants won a truck by, er, being the last one to be touching it?
I was quite looking forward to this after being amused by the clips of the Jap one on Youtube. But it was execrable. Soooo slow. And those lycra outfits were beyond embarrassing. Utter trash.
It's getting to the stage where they're going to start making a UK version of those Italian quiz shows, where middle-aged housewives take their tops off for cash prizes. If that happens then I'm calling the police.
*puts top back on*
Oh leave it off, I could do with cheering up.
I hope nobody else reads this far down.
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