2008 and all that

That's 2008 then. The Bright Ambassador highlights:

• Guitar Hero 3 - how to kill weekend afternoons during a crap summer


• Dexter


• Nottingham Forest's promotion


• Mad Men


• Metallica back on form


• Charlie Brooker's print and TV tribute to Oliver Postgate


• Fleet Foxes


• The sitcom Pulling - deliciously filthy


• Word magazine's Prog edition


• Danny Baker back on 606


• Rebecca Romero


• Son of Rambow


• The rise of Christine Bleakley


• Dead Set


• Jez using a £20 note as a masturbatory visual aid on Peep Show


• The Ting Tings


• Seeing Peep Show's Isy Suttie in the flesh (pictured)


• Elbow finally getting the recognition they deserve


• Kristen Schaal in The Flight of the Conchords


• Armstrong and Miller's Timeghost podcast


• Terry Wogan leaving Eurovision - how about him leaving Radio 2?


• Watson and Oliver at Edinburgh
  

What didn't float my boat:

• Sam Allardyce not coming to Nottingham Forest


• Graham Norton joining Eurovision


• The way newspapers, especially The Sun and Daily Mail, use the slightest thing as a stick with which to beat the BBC. I'm surprised I haven't seen a headline along the lines of 'Man's disgust at getting papercut from the 1985 edition of Radio 1's Which Way Now? pack. Fat cat Beeb bosses laugh themselves unconscious at the news during the Christmas party WE paid for'.


• The film PS I Love You


• The Ting Tings


• Nottingham Forest playing like a steaming pile of poo from August onwards


• Ashes to Ashes (the telly show, not the Bowie song)


• Dirty Sexy Money - the biggest waste of talent since ELP


• The upward curve of Frankie Boyle's career


• Hole in the Wall

What to look forward to in 2009:

• Guitar Hero: Metallica Edition


• Seeing Metallica in February for the first time in sixteen years


• Anything else Metallica-related

That's me done for this year. Happy Christmas - whether you like it or not. As Geddy Lee says, with alarming regularity immediately pre-interval, I'm 'going to take a break for some brain surgery.' Things are out of my control a little work-wise in the new year, so whether I'll be back sooner rather than later is yet to be seen.

To quote Derek Batey, be good to each other. Ta-ra.

Can I have thirty minutes of my life back please?

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.