Monkey Tennis. Cooking in Prison. Youth Hostelling with Chris Eubank. Inner-city Sumo. Arm-wrestling with Chas & Dave. You all know the famous scene in which Alan Partridge, desperate to pitch a successful idea to the BBC, reels a series of random show ideas off the top of his head; the joke – sorry, I know you don’t need it explaining to you – is that programmes like these would be such mind-numbing, lowest common denominator guff that nobody in their right mind would ever consider watching them.
…except that they would. That satirical point was made back in 1997, and made perfect sense at the time. But now, just fifteen years later, any one of those shows could feasibly appear on television without anybody batting an eyelid. Indeed, ‘Cooking in Prison’ exists – Gordon Ramsay filmed the pilot in Brixton prison in December. And let’s take a look at, to pluck a shit channel from the air, the Channel 5 schedule to see what else may fit that’s already poisoning the airwaves…
OK, we’ve got Celebrity Wedding Planner, Brighton Beach Patrol, Croc Man, Sex: How To Do Everything, Supersize Grime, Essex Jungle, The Man Who Injects Venom, Mist: Sheepdog Tales, Tamara Ecclestone: Billion $$ Girl and World’s Toughest Trucker. Fucking hell, people will watch anything, won’t they?
So, if it really is that easy to come up with a marketable load of old tripe for public broadcast, let’s try putting in exactly the same amount of effort as Alan did and see what popular nonsense we can create.
[Switch on Dictaphone. “Idea for a programme…”]
Holmes Under the Hammers
Downtrodden celebrity beard Katie Holmes is encouraged to engage in a series of unpleasant and degrading carnal acts with the entire West Ham squad, many of whom carry actual hammers to imbue the scenario with a little pathos. She clearly doesn’t require much cajoling, the implication being that the on-screen squelching is nothing compared to her day-to-day Cruise-inflicted atrocities. Keep an eye out for the cheeky look on Papa Bouba Diop’s face. He has no idea what’s going on, but he likes it.
Winter Wipeout
Alex Winter, the less successful half of Bill & Ted, is locked in a dusty, windowless shed with nothing to do but play the hit 1995 PlayStation game ‘Wipeout’ on a decrepit and faltering console. He’s hooked up to a drip and a catheter to ensure that all physical and mental energy can be devoted to playing the game. Endlessly. Any error in gameplay – clipping tunnel walls with his wings, say – results in the administering of a mild electric pulse to the frontal lobes. Full-on wipeouts force the temporary reversal of drip and catheter function, with hilarious consequences.
Bargain Hunt
The estate of expired playboy Formula One driver James Hunt is up for grabs! We follow pantomime villain Bernie Ecclestone as he rakes through Hunt’s old belongings, auctioning off anything he thinks will raise a few quid and burning the rest. Only you can save the Hunt estate! But will Bernie realise the true value of those seventies pit jackets and Castrol merchandise, or will you be able to wangle a bargain…?
The One Show
A tedious investigation into the workings of a streamlined binary language, in which zeroes are eliminated and information is encoded solely in the inflection, pronunciation and scale of the number 1. SPOILER ALERT: Base-2 doesn’t work without zeroes. Waste of time.
Mrs Brown’s Boys
[Some pointless load of old fucking shit.]
The Graham Norton Show
A genuinely impressive exercise in engineering ingenuity. A group of college professors devote several years of their lives to building a perfect replica of a 1967 Norton Commando out of graham crackers; a necessarily delicate and fastidious endeavour beset by myriad pitfalls – crumbly carburettors, porous tyres, and the ever-present danger of absent-mindedly eating bits of it. They eventually get it to work, powered by a cream-cheese fuel. One of them has been starving himself throughout the entire process so that he’s sufficiently slight to ride it without breaking it. They show it to people.
Don’t Tell the Bride
A patchy and confusing effort in which people attempt to discourage one another from revealing which playing cards they’re holding in their hands whilst travelling in retro Toyota touge-runners equipped by the tuning outfit Bride. Requires quite specific knowledge of poker terminology and semi-obscure aftermarket competition tuners, always requires explaining, and doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. (Features lots of bright colours, though – ideal late-night viewing for stoners.)
Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps
In an effort to reinvent herself as culturally relevant in a market increasingly dominated by the chirpy likes of Jamie Oliver et al, Delia Smith takes cookery back to basics by eliminating the cookery altogether.
These weekly hour-long episodes follow her to a variety of rural pubs in which we get to see her spend rather too long choosing which of the two generic draught lagers she’d like to try that week, demonstrate the poor bar etiquette common to all TV celebs (‘serve me now, I’m famous – these plebs won’t mind’) and spout shit Jilly Gooldenisms about how the Scampi Fries complement the Carling. Odious.
Big Brother
A chilling dramatisation of a timeless dystopian novel, which absolutely does not piss on the literary legacy of the notion of ‘Big Brother’ by making everybody automatically associate the phrase with a bunch of worthless fame-hungry pricks being filmed trying not to fuck each other in a brightly-coloured house.
I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!
Famous criminals are justly punished for their crimes as if they were normal people. Ashley Cole is jailed for shooting the work experience kid. Gary Glitter is confined indefinitely to solitary confinement for being a filthy fiddler. OJ Simpson goes back to the big house. Don King is brought to justice for those two people he killed. Matthew McConaughey is incarcerated for being the nauseating phallus he so indisputably is. And so on. We watch their spiralling descent into madness as they fruitlessly beg for mercy. See? Fame didn’t grant you impunity after all.
The Million Pound Drop
An elderly man, selected for his uncontrollably shaky fingers, is convinced that he’s inherited a million pounds from a wealthy but hitherto unknown relative. Hidden cameras follow him to collect the loot. A flashmob immediately descends upon the fiscal carnage as he accidentally drops it all on the way home. He goes back to his unfortunate, penniless existence, hating the world and waiting for the reaper. Numerous Facebook fans involved in the flashmob now have new trainers.
The Biggest Loser
We watch with an increasing sense of exasperation as loser “comedian” Michael McIntyre desperately tries to be amusing without coming across as slappably smug. And fails. Hard.
Then we switch over, because he is shit.
University Challenge
Socially inept university students are tracked by camera crews as they struggle through the two perennial university challenges: trying to buy as many groceries as possible for a fiver, and trying to copulate with anything that happens to move nearby. Laugh as they’re knocked back by the cool kids! Grin as their mums come to visit and happen across the unopened packs of condoms in the bathroom cabinet! Chuckle as they slowly succumb to scurvy!
8 Out of 10 Cats
Ten cats are forced through a series of near-impossible tasks; freeing themselves from brick-laden sacks at the bottom of rivers, escaping from microwaves, untying themselves from train tracks and so on. Horrifically cruel and occasionally disgusting, but with an impressive 80% survival rate that really demonstrates the vital instincts of the domestic feline in ultimately quite a heartwarming manner.
Undercover Boss
Bruce Springsteen (a.k.a. ‘The Boss’) painstakingly re-records the Rolling Stones’ 1983 album ‘Undercover’, playing all instruments, singing all vocals and, in a bold move, recording his efforts over the original master tapes. Ultimately pointless, but worth persevering with for his hilariously inept attempts at a cockney accent on the track ‘Too Much Blood’.
There’s got to be a hit in there somewhere. Make it happen, Tony Hayers!
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