The after-match interviews with participants in the FA Cup Final were highly revealing: not for anything that the players or coaches said, but for the way in which the questions were put. "How sweet is this moment?" the triumphant Portsmouth boss, Harry Redknapp, was challenged, while his goalkeeper, David James, was asked to "describe your emotions at this moment?"
Behind these exchanges lies an intriguing story of TV self-censorship, says Mark Lawson. For years, TV critics and letter-writers to listings magazines ridiculed the habit of asking sweaty athletes, straight after their event: "How do you feel?" Survivors of high-school shoot-outs or earthquakes would also be prodded for immediate feedback on their feelings.
In a relatively rare example of satire changing behaviour, the complaints eventually resulted in on-the-scene reporters recognising that these four words had become unacceptable. Hence, now: "Describe your emotions."
But such translation is the linguistic equivalent of repainting the walls in a doss-house. Equally, "how sweet is this moment?" is not inherently a better question than "How do you feel?" and may, in fact, even be a worse one because it assumes a positive response, whereas even the now-discredited four-worder allowed the interviewee to say that they felt shitty or angry.
Another solution is to use a boring formula but try to defuse it. So, after Ryan Giggs received his latest Premiership medal, Sky asked him: "It's a cliche that the first one is the sweetest but how does this compare with the rest?"
This was another good example of the nervousness about hackneyed phrases. But switching from inanity to inanity that's apologised for is a small step. The problem is not the language but the format. No good interview can be drawn from an athlete who is exhausted and desperate to celebrate, so the only possible question is a stupid one, however phrased. How would they feel about dropping these breathless encounters completely?
Showing posts with label Comment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Comment. Show all posts
Thursday, 22 May 2008
Monday, 19 May 2008
BBC to reschedule The Apprentice
The BBC risks angering fans of The Apprentice by switching the hit business reality show next week from its regular Wednesday 9pm berth to Tuesday because of a clash with an England friendly international football match.
Next week's scheduling move will see Sir Alan Sugar go head to head with Gordon Ramsay on Channel 4's The F Word, as well as ITV1's Britain's Got Talent, which is airing every night next week, at 9pm on Tuesday. BBC2's The Apprentice: You're Fired! will also switch days to Tuesday at 10pm. BBC1's commitment to screen the England v USA friendly means the network will devote two hours between 8pm and 10pm to the game on Wednesday next week.
The Apprentice, which regularly pulls in up to 7 million viewers, is one of BBC1's most popular shows and a must-see on Wednesday nights for many fans. A BBC spokesman confirmed The Apprentice's move to Tuesday next week. "The show has been moved to make way for this match. It is quite usual for us to move programmes to accommodate big sporting occasions. That is the reason for this schedule change," he said.
Elsewhere, Anushka Asthana has labelled The Apprentice as the most moral show on television. Writing in the Guardian, she states...
He started his journey as a silly posh-boy, notable only for his thick eyebrows, floppy hair and absurd manner. Then a single act of kindness propelled Raef Bjayou, a disliked contender on the hit television show The Apprentice, into a realms of chivalry. It was a wonderful moment: the 27-year-old 'entrepreneur', dressed in a smart pink shirt, leant forward, raised his hand and demanded an end to the savage attack being carried out on his fellow contestant, Sara Dhada.
'A decision has been made,' he boomed, to the delight of millions of viewers appalled by the behaviour of the other Apprentice hopefuls who were acting like a swarming gang of playground bullies. 'Sir Alan has made it.' Soon the clip had made its way to YouTube, Raef fan clubs had started to appear on the internet and The Apprentice faithful, of which I am one, had a new hero. All it had taken was a simple moment of compassion; a moment that convinced me that The Apprentice, which sees contestants battle it out for a six-figure job in Sir Alan Sugar's empire, is a show with the stiffest of moral backbones.
People who sneer at reality television, who argue it brings out the worst in its voyeuristic viewers, who insist it provides little more than a gladiatorial stage on which people have little choice but to humiliate, disgrace and hang themselves, are missing the point. What actually happens is that over time the veneers created by the contestants in preparation for the show start to slip away and one by one their true characters emerge. Yes, we watch with glee when some of them are cruelly dispatched, but only those who have lied, twisted and manipulated their way through. The people who have played fair, meanwhile, who have been kind, decent and honest are lauded and cheered in front rooms across the country. That is why Bjayou, a man who was dismissed as comical at the start - following a 'I get on with prince or pauper' gaffe - is now a firm favourite to win.
So what does this tell us? Well, conversations about the programme have begun to take on the tone of an ethical debate. 'The Apprentice generates a moral reaction in the audience,' says one female friend, an economist in her late twenties, as we gather around the television set for our weekly fix. 'We side with the ones who we believe act in a moral way. We turn against those who are bitchy, lie or seem unpleasant.' It is true that each week we find ourselves howling at the television from around 9.45pm, urging Sugar to eliminate the least-loved character - normally the one who we decide has been a little too mean or sly.
If that is the case for us, then surely it is true for many more of the show's wide base of fans, those 7.4 million viewers who tune in. The demographic covers teenagers and the retired, men and women, rich and poor. It is even sparking encouraging discussions among school pupils. One colleague says her children, aged 11 and 13, regularly discuss whether or not the contestants have behaved morally: 'They say "he's lying", "he's bullying" or "he's cheating". They are starting to think you do not have to be nasty and pushy to get ahead. It has definitely made them think in a moral way.'
And it is not just the viewers. Even Sugar, famed for his ruthless nature, seems to be rewarding hard work and honesty this time round. His message in the boardroom is clear: lie, cheat or manipulate and you 'will get fired'. Take the example of Jenny Celerier, who has earned herself a reputation as this series's nasty. When she bribed a Moroccan shopkeeper in an attempt to hamper the other team's chances, Sugar was furious and soon sent her packing. He was equally unimpressed when she appeared to lie in order to make her fellow contestant look bad. But for me and my friends, there is one thing Sugar needs to do - and soon - finally to prove the show's morality.
The self-made millionaire must dispatch the contestant who has been most sneaky and aggressive to date: Michael Sophocles. He is the 24-year-old telesales executive who claimed on his CV that he was a 'good Jewish boy' in order to impress Sugar, before admitting he had no idea what kosher was (he thought it was a Muslim tradition) and crossing himself outside the boardroom. It seems unlikely that such morals were formed in a church, mosque or synagogue, but if Sophocles - Sophocles! - a name once better known as the author of the Oedipus cycle, gets the chop, then there will be many children picking up a sense of right and wrong from, God forbid, a reality television show.
Next week's scheduling move will see Sir Alan Sugar go head to head with Gordon Ramsay on Channel 4's The F Word, as well as ITV1's Britain's Got Talent, which is airing every night next week, at 9pm on Tuesday. BBC2's The Apprentice: You're Fired! will also switch days to Tuesday at 10pm. BBC1's commitment to screen the England v USA friendly means the network will devote two hours between 8pm and 10pm to the game on Wednesday next week.
The Apprentice, which regularly pulls in up to 7 million viewers, is one of BBC1's most popular shows and a must-see on Wednesday nights for many fans. A BBC spokesman confirmed The Apprentice's move to Tuesday next week. "The show has been moved to make way for this match. It is quite usual for us to move programmes to accommodate big sporting occasions. That is the reason for this schedule change," he said.
Elsewhere, Anushka Asthana has labelled The Apprentice as the most moral show on television. Writing in the Guardian, she states...
He started his journey as a silly posh-boy, notable only for his thick eyebrows, floppy hair and absurd manner. Then a single act of kindness propelled Raef Bjayou, a disliked contender on the hit television show The Apprentice, into a realms of chivalry. It was a wonderful moment: the 27-year-old 'entrepreneur', dressed in a smart pink shirt, leant forward, raised his hand and demanded an end to the savage attack being carried out on his fellow contestant, Sara Dhada.
'A decision has been made,' he boomed, to the delight of millions of viewers appalled by the behaviour of the other Apprentice hopefuls who were acting like a swarming gang of playground bullies. 'Sir Alan has made it.' Soon the clip had made its way to YouTube, Raef fan clubs had started to appear on the internet and The Apprentice faithful, of which I am one, had a new hero. All it had taken was a simple moment of compassion; a moment that convinced me that The Apprentice, which sees contestants battle it out for a six-figure job in Sir Alan Sugar's empire, is a show with the stiffest of moral backbones.
People who sneer at reality television, who argue it brings out the worst in its voyeuristic viewers, who insist it provides little more than a gladiatorial stage on which people have little choice but to humiliate, disgrace and hang themselves, are missing the point. What actually happens is that over time the veneers created by the contestants in preparation for the show start to slip away and one by one their true characters emerge. Yes, we watch with glee when some of them are cruelly dispatched, but only those who have lied, twisted and manipulated their way through. The people who have played fair, meanwhile, who have been kind, decent and honest are lauded and cheered in front rooms across the country. That is why Bjayou, a man who was dismissed as comical at the start - following a 'I get on with prince or pauper' gaffe - is now a firm favourite to win.
So what does this tell us? Well, conversations about the programme have begun to take on the tone of an ethical debate. 'The Apprentice generates a moral reaction in the audience,' says one female friend, an economist in her late twenties, as we gather around the television set for our weekly fix. 'We side with the ones who we believe act in a moral way. We turn against those who are bitchy, lie or seem unpleasant.' It is true that each week we find ourselves howling at the television from around 9.45pm, urging Sugar to eliminate the least-loved character - normally the one who we decide has been a little too mean or sly.
If that is the case for us, then surely it is true for many more of the show's wide base of fans, those 7.4 million viewers who tune in. The demographic covers teenagers and the retired, men and women, rich and poor. It is even sparking encouraging discussions among school pupils. One colleague says her children, aged 11 and 13, regularly discuss whether or not the contestants have behaved morally: 'They say "he's lying", "he's bullying" or "he's cheating". They are starting to think you do not have to be nasty and pushy to get ahead. It has definitely made them think in a moral way.'
And it is not just the viewers. Even Sugar, famed for his ruthless nature, seems to be rewarding hard work and honesty this time round. His message in the boardroom is clear: lie, cheat or manipulate and you 'will get fired'. Take the example of Jenny Celerier, who has earned herself a reputation as this series's nasty. When she bribed a Moroccan shopkeeper in an attempt to hamper the other team's chances, Sugar was furious and soon sent her packing. He was equally unimpressed when she appeared to lie in order to make her fellow contestant look bad. But for me and my friends, there is one thing Sugar needs to do - and soon - finally to prove the show's morality.
The self-made millionaire must dispatch the contestant who has been most sneaky and aggressive to date: Michael Sophocles. He is the 24-year-old telesales executive who claimed on his CV that he was a 'good Jewish boy' in order to impress Sugar, before admitting he had no idea what kosher was (he thought it was a Muslim tradition) and crossing himself outside the boardroom. It seems unlikely that such morals were formed in a church, mosque or synagogue, but if Sophocles - Sophocles! - a name once better known as the author of the Oedipus cycle, gets the chop, then there will be many children picking up a sense of right and wrong from, God forbid, a reality television show.
Saturday, 17 May 2008
You don't know what you've got till it's gone
An end to war? Environmentally friendly alternatives to oil? The second coming? No. What the world has been crying out for, apparently, is the return of Gladiators (Sun, 6pm, Sky One), which vanished from our screens eight years ago. I don't recall much protest at the time, writes Charlie Brooker. No one established an emergency helpline or threw themselves under the controller of ITV's car. Not a single leading newspaper ran a wounded editorial lamenting its demise and pleading with God for a revival. There were no dazed crowds of jonesing Gladiators fans wandering the street in a sorrowful funk, dumbly bumping into shop windows without even noticing, quivering in a puddle of tears in the cold and distant grief dimension. Its passing went largely unnoticed. A gentle nationwide shrug rolled across the country like an underfed Mexican wave. Gladiators had passed away, and we, as a nation, moved on.
But, like the song says, you don't know what you've got till it's gone. A year after Gladiators disappeared, 9/11 shook Planet Earth's axis to its core, creating a new landmark paradigm in watershed epochs. The world was left stunned, reeling. "Where are our Gladiators now?" it wailed with its mouth, "Because we need something to take our minds off this shit." And in the years following, with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, widespread economic meltdown, and the growing awareness of impending environmental disaster, the clamour for the return of the soothing balm of Gladiators grew ever more cacophonous.
Now the dark ages are at an end: Gladiators is back, and it's better than ever. And by "better", I mean "the same": an hour of people in leotards running, tumbling, wrestling, jumping, and hitting each other over the head with padded sticks, inside a cavernous crash mat-and-searchlight repository.
Gladiators has never felt very British. The audience shriek and hoot throughout, and they're all waving outsized foam hands with pointy fingers, which must make it nigh-on impossible to see. Perhaps they're not baying for blood at all, but just shouting at the person in front to get that stupid foam hand out of the way.
Everything in the arena is either red or blue or a 20,000-watt lightbulb - apart from the Gladiators, whose costumes are monochrome and more individually "pimped" than before. Spartan, for instance, has some vaguely Ancient Roman-style strappy bits hanging down round his balls, leaving him looking like a cross between a promotional poster for the film 300 and a collector's edition of Boyz magazine.
Incredibly, he's not the gayest-looking male Gladiator. That honour goes to Atlas, who has a body made of raw, bulging muscle, but the head and face of a woman. In his introductory ident, he appears to shake his flowing locks and wink coquettishly at the viewer. They should've called him Dorothy and had done with it.
Keeping with the homoerotic theme, you may have noticed that all the male Gladiators have names that sound like gay nightclubs. Oblivion, for instance, sounds like a steaming 4am sinbox filled with strobe lights and shaved heads. But it isn't. It's a 6ft 3in bellend in black trunks. The producers have given Oblivion a complex personality: he's angry and he complains a lot. This makes him different to Predator, who brags and looks hard. The level of characterisation pisses all over The Wire.
The lady Gladiators are slightly less absurd, apart from Inferno, who looks like a pornographic Manga sketch of Geri Halliwell circa 1998, and Battleaxe - a champion hammer-thrower, and the least ladylike of the bunch. She may look beefy and stern, but calling her Battleaxe seems a tad harsh. Perhaps next year they'll bring in one called Dog. Or Moose. Or Boiler.
Actually, in this interactive age, they should throw the naming of the Gladiators open to the public. How about one called Bastard? Or Perineum? Any other suggestions? Send them to charlie.brooker@guardian.co.uk and we'll make it a contest.
But, like the song says, you don't know what you've got till it's gone. A year after Gladiators disappeared, 9/11 shook Planet Earth's axis to its core, creating a new landmark paradigm in watershed epochs. The world was left stunned, reeling. "Where are our Gladiators now?" it wailed with its mouth, "Because we need something to take our minds off this shit." And in the years following, with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, widespread economic meltdown, and the growing awareness of impending environmental disaster, the clamour for the return of the soothing balm of Gladiators grew ever more cacophonous.
Now the dark ages are at an end: Gladiators is back, and it's better than ever. And by "better", I mean "the same": an hour of people in leotards running, tumbling, wrestling, jumping, and hitting each other over the head with padded sticks, inside a cavernous crash mat-and-searchlight repository.
Gladiators has never felt very British. The audience shriek and hoot throughout, and they're all waving outsized foam hands with pointy fingers, which must make it nigh-on impossible to see. Perhaps they're not baying for blood at all, but just shouting at the person in front to get that stupid foam hand out of the way.
Everything in the arena is either red or blue or a 20,000-watt lightbulb - apart from the Gladiators, whose costumes are monochrome and more individually "pimped" than before. Spartan, for instance, has some vaguely Ancient Roman-style strappy bits hanging down round his balls, leaving him looking like a cross between a promotional poster for the film 300 and a collector's edition of Boyz magazine.
Incredibly, he's not the gayest-looking male Gladiator. That honour goes to Atlas, who has a body made of raw, bulging muscle, but the head and face of a woman. In his introductory ident, he appears to shake his flowing locks and wink coquettishly at the viewer. They should've called him Dorothy and had done with it.
Keeping with the homoerotic theme, you may have noticed that all the male Gladiators have names that sound like gay nightclubs. Oblivion, for instance, sounds like a steaming 4am sinbox filled with strobe lights and shaved heads. But it isn't. It's a 6ft 3in bellend in black trunks. The producers have given Oblivion a complex personality: he's angry and he complains a lot. This makes him different to Predator, who brags and looks hard. The level of characterisation pisses all over The Wire.
The lady Gladiators are slightly less absurd, apart from Inferno, who looks like a pornographic Manga sketch of Geri Halliwell circa 1998, and Battleaxe - a champion hammer-thrower, and the least ladylike of the bunch. She may look beefy and stern, but calling her Battleaxe seems a tad harsh. Perhaps next year they'll bring in one called Dog. Or Moose. Or Boiler.
Actually, in this interactive age, they should throw the naming of the Gladiators open to the public. How about one called Bastard? Or Perineum? Any other suggestions? Send them to charlie.brooker@guardian.co.uk and we'll make it a contest.
The X Factor vision spells disaster for Brown
In Hollywood, producers let you know their intentions for a movie script by calling for certain "types". It's pretty euphemistic. Scripts looking for "a Nicole Kidman type" might persuade Naomi Watts to become attached to them. A Renee Zellweger type? You might get that one in Grey's Anatomy. A Lindsay Lohan type? Honey, these days Lindsay Lohan's taking scripts meant for a Lindsay Lohan type. The past year has not been kind.
The practice of managing expectations in this way came to mind this week, says Marina Hyde, when it emerged that Gordon Brown has been approached by the BBC to judge a young talent show called Junior PM, aimed at what its producers describe as "an Apprentice meets Maria/Strictly Come Dancing audience". You couldn't help thinking they were looking for "an Alan Sugar type", and after being rejected by several cheap imitations, eventually sighed: "Well, I suppose we could settle for the prime minister."
And weren't they in luck? Whereas Sir Alan would never have lowered himself to even read the proposal, Junior PM's producers only had to raise it with Hazel Blears for her to take it all the way to a bleeding cabinet meeting. Her special adviser confirmed that the communities secretary intended to raise it "in the margins of cabinet". I suppose we should be grateful it wasn't item one on the agenda at the table around which political titans of yesteryear once sat. But you are formally dared to imagine Barbara Castle turning to Harold Wilson and saying: "Ooh, now, the Beeb has come up with a great idea in which you judge a telly talent contest. Hughie Green's turned it down, so unless Monkhouse fancies it, you should start looking grateful." In fact, it's difficult to decide which is more hilarious: that the running of Britain has now been relegated to the status of a telly prize, or that the BBC thinks the prime minister might actually say yes.
Put delicately, the idea of spending licence payers' money on a Gordon Brown vehicle is up there with Alan Partridge's legendary Monkey Tennis. The entire country knows Gordon is not what you'd call a TV natural. For the past couple of months he has only worn one expression: that of a man watching his legacy being torn down in slow motion. His telly outings already make us squirm in vicarious discomfort; it would be positively excruciating to see him dispensing a Simon Cowell-style verdict on some precocious little horror: "That was the worse post-neoclassical endogenous growth theorising I've seen in the Birmingham auditions ..."
This isn't the Beeb's vision, apparently. "It is a golden opportunity for the PM to gather a youth manifesto and become more popular than Alan Sugar," ran its pitch, and at some level you have to admire the misplaced confidence that Brown can afford to be worrying about the nine-year-old demographic, when his need to appeal to the already enfranchised would seem rather more pressing. "It is a very worthy programme idea," a Blears spokesman insisted, as though the entertainment potential were not sufficiently moribund without a government press officer describing it as "worthy". "The idea is to get more young people interested in politics."
But of course it is, because it is one of the orthodoxies of the age that more young people vote in reality TV elections than in general elections. Complete cobblers, as it goes, though I won't trouble you with the statistics. That said, you'd think our mathlete of a prime minister might be aware of them, because he is absurdly, uncomfortably obsessed with reality TV. Last month he appeared on American Idol, but two years ago he was already outlining his vision of "an X Factor Britain", a comment that managed to combine fatuity, neediness, and a total failure to understand what these kind of talent shows are really about. They don't make dreams come true; they sell you disappointment, which is why every series includes more and more of the episodes focusing on deluded clods auditioning.
And increasingly, doesn't Mr Brown's torment remind you of one of these tone-deaf unfortunates, whose painful progress makes you shriek "How on earth did he think he could do this?", and whom you can hardly bear to watch for the transferred embarrassment? Watching PMQs can feel like intruding on private grief, while the prime minister cannot seem to reverse the perception that he is faintly ridiculous. There is a sort of momentum to it now, where every one of these mooted stunts plays atrociously for him. It's just so easy to turn his gimmicks against him, a fact not lost on the Tories, who not only spent this week's PMQs making jokes about the electorate telling Mr Brown "You're fired!", but gave Strictly Come Dancing host Bruce Forsyth a special ticket to watch proceedings from the gallery. They do like to sledgehammer home a point in Westminster.
Need they even have bothered? The episode barely needed glossing. Everything about Junior PM feels hackneyed, knackered and devoid of ideas - the format, the thinking behind it, but most of all its intended star. As Sir Alan would say: he hasn't got a bladdy clue.
The practice of managing expectations in this way came to mind this week, says Marina Hyde, when it emerged that Gordon Brown has been approached by the BBC to judge a young talent show called Junior PM, aimed at what its producers describe as "an Apprentice meets Maria/Strictly Come Dancing audience". You couldn't help thinking they were looking for "an Alan Sugar type", and after being rejected by several cheap imitations, eventually sighed: "Well, I suppose we could settle for the prime minister."
And weren't they in luck? Whereas Sir Alan would never have lowered himself to even read the proposal, Junior PM's producers only had to raise it with Hazel Blears for her to take it all the way to a bleeding cabinet meeting. Her special adviser confirmed that the communities secretary intended to raise it "in the margins of cabinet". I suppose we should be grateful it wasn't item one on the agenda at the table around which political titans of yesteryear once sat. But you are formally dared to imagine Barbara Castle turning to Harold Wilson and saying: "Ooh, now, the Beeb has come up with a great idea in which you judge a telly talent contest. Hughie Green's turned it down, so unless Monkhouse fancies it, you should start looking grateful." In fact, it's difficult to decide which is more hilarious: that the running of Britain has now been relegated to the status of a telly prize, or that the BBC thinks the prime minister might actually say yes.
Put delicately, the idea of spending licence payers' money on a Gordon Brown vehicle is up there with Alan Partridge's legendary Monkey Tennis. The entire country knows Gordon is not what you'd call a TV natural. For the past couple of months he has only worn one expression: that of a man watching his legacy being torn down in slow motion. His telly outings already make us squirm in vicarious discomfort; it would be positively excruciating to see him dispensing a Simon Cowell-style verdict on some precocious little horror: "That was the worse post-neoclassical endogenous growth theorising I've seen in the Birmingham auditions ..."
This isn't the Beeb's vision, apparently. "It is a golden opportunity for the PM to gather a youth manifesto and become more popular than Alan Sugar," ran its pitch, and at some level you have to admire the misplaced confidence that Brown can afford to be worrying about the nine-year-old demographic, when his need to appeal to the already enfranchised would seem rather more pressing. "It is a very worthy programme idea," a Blears spokesman insisted, as though the entertainment potential were not sufficiently moribund without a government press officer describing it as "worthy". "The idea is to get more young people interested in politics."
But of course it is, because it is one of the orthodoxies of the age that more young people vote in reality TV elections than in general elections. Complete cobblers, as it goes, though I won't trouble you with the statistics. That said, you'd think our mathlete of a prime minister might be aware of them, because he is absurdly, uncomfortably obsessed with reality TV. Last month he appeared on American Idol, but two years ago he was already outlining his vision of "an X Factor Britain", a comment that managed to combine fatuity, neediness, and a total failure to understand what these kind of talent shows are really about. They don't make dreams come true; they sell you disappointment, which is why every series includes more and more of the episodes focusing on deluded clods auditioning.
And increasingly, doesn't Mr Brown's torment remind you of one of these tone-deaf unfortunates, whose painful progress makes you shriek "How on earth did he think he could do this?", and whom you can hardly bear to watch for the transferred embarrassment? Watching PMQs can feel like intruding on private grief, while the prime minister cannot seem to reverse the perception that he is faintly ridiculous. There is a sort of momentum to it now, where every one of these mooted stunts plays atrociously for him. It's just so easy to turn his gimmicks against him, a fact not lost on the Tories, who not only spent this week's PMQs making jokes about the electorate telling Mr Brown "You're fired!", but gave Strictly Come Dancing host Bruce Forsyth a special ticket to watch proceedings from the gallery. They do like to sledgehammer home a point in Westminster.
Need they even have bothered? The episode barely needed glossing. Everything about Junior PM feels hackneyed, knackered and devoid of ideas - the format, the thinking behind it, but most of all its intended star. As Sir Alan would say: he hasn't got a bladdy clue.
Friday, 16 May 2008
Voilà (sort of)!
So what’s on the block at the 'upfronts' this month? Could it be the future of television? asks Virginia Heffernan...
Every spring since the early ’80s, the lavish presentations known as the upfronts have been a propaganda jamboree for the TV business. What began as a network trade show for ad-world elites has evolved, thanks to industry one-upmanship, into a bacchanal of variety shows hosted by the networks and staged before standing-room hordes at places like Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Centre.
In the midst of extravagant audiovisuals, musical numbers, comedy sketches, pricey giveaways and celebrity appearances, the networks divulge their fall prime-time schedules — the sitcoms, dramas, game shows and reality programmes that are broadcast between 8 and 11. They settle with great fanfare industry nail-biters like “Will Fox cede the Thursday 8:30 hammock time slot to NBC?” The audience for this arcana includes reporters and prospective advertisers, who sit rapt for an hour or two and then mill around at swanky after-parties, hoping to glimpse Kiefer Sutherland and sounding off about how dumb or weird the presentations were.
And the upfronts are kind of dumb. They are overblown tributes to a bygone style of salesmanship, and from the point of view of advertisers, they are almost pointless. In the old days, execs from Ralston Purina, say, would attend exclusive in-studio screenings of CBS pilots so they could be sure to place Puppy Chow ads during shows that featured dogs. But today, when media buyers can screen shows online and study a network’s demographics and ad platforms, the upfronts function chiefly as an ostentatious corporate week on the town.
They are a sight to see: the ad world squealing over small-screen stars, small-screen stars conversing knowingly with network accountants and alpha executives donning big shoes and clown noses, begging for ad dollars while flanked by high-flying guys and dolls. (Think Aretha Franklin, the Who, Mary J. Blige, Chris Rock, Eli and Peyton Manning, Jerry Seinfeld, Tyra Banks, Ashton Kutcher, Mariah Carey.) The whole spectacle has got to be one of the most embarrassing, astonishing, confusing, wondrous collisions of American sensibilities you’ll ever see.
Or it was. For decades. When TV was a business of winners. But winning streaks must end. Having so long excoriated themselves as a nation of zombie-eyed TV addicts — they average six hours a day, the old studies always showed — Americans cannot seem to face the fact that we have sobered up. But it’s true: many of us seem to have shut off the networks, at least in prime time. Instead, we watch DVDs, DVRs, on-demand, online and niche cable channels. We also do other things. No one knows what, exactly, but it’s evidently less quantifiable than watching TV. (One suggestive statistic: Americans watched 10 billion videos online in the month of February alone, according to the comScore Video Metrix service.)
To people who work in television, this development is known as “the viewer plunge.” Last spring at the upfronts, a chilling number was widely whispered: 2.5 million fewer people were watching NBC, CBS, ABC and Fox than had in spring 2006. TV executives repeatedly reassured ad buyers that everything was A-O.K., but they also took to kitchen-sinking to explain away the plunge. Daylight Savings Time had come too early. Everyone was using TiVo and the Internet. The rating system is unfair. The war. The economy. The toxins. The bees. But things were going to be great in ’08.
And then came the writers’ strike. Combined with the viewer plunge, it was like the Depression and the Dust Bowl — a double whammy for television and its audience. The strike “orphaned” viewers (as the jargon has it) without their favourite shows, which gave viewers a reason to leave network television entirely. And they did. Sayonara. According to The Hollywood Reporter, most returning shows lost between 10 and 30 percent of the viewers they had before the strike, when ratings for the networks were already low.
It’s not immediately clear what all this means for the upfronts. How do you celebrate your wedding anniversary the year that divorce is imminent? Do you drink alone? Toast to old times? “It’s going to be much more like a meeting,” Mike Shaw, the president of sales and marketing for ABC, said, referring to this year’s upfronts, on an advertising panel at the Harvard Business School in February. He cited, as one reason for this change, the fact that the writers’ strike compressed the time available for producing pilots. Still, the writing is on the wall: the good times are over. The ABC gang will show up at Lincoln Center but offer some kind of “streamlined” corporate presentation and no party. Sounds like fun.
Jeff Zucker, the chief executive of NBC Universal, which is trailing closely behind the three other big networks, seems equally chastened. At the same event in February, he declared that NBC would be “much more realistic and much more honest” in its presentation of programming to advertisers. (NBC has resolved to make shows faster, cheaper and year-round, meaning they won’t make and summarily kill the usual huge number of sample shows.) Fox, which still has a bona fide, if recently weakened, hit in American Idol, planned its upfront as usual, but with no surprises or dramatic unveilings. Finally, CBS did a programming and advertising presentation. No party.
"I’m not going to any upfronts this year," says Heffernan. "I’ll miss them: I’ve loved every minute of the cuckoo shows in the past, and I’ll probably never get to see those mongo entertainers at such close range again. At the upfronts I always learned something too about what the American people want: heartwarming dramas, women’s stuff, sports, heroism, complex characters, real people, guilty pleasures, eye candy, names they can trust, ambiguous villains, simple comedies, hipster hipness, good old-fashioned values, edginess, upscaleness, satire, science fiction, girls, boys, Latinas, crime procedurals, urban sitcoms, aspirationalism, a way to express their anger."
Closing credits. Colour bars. Static. For decades, what Americans want has been something that could be piped into a television screen. What if it’s not any more?
Every spring since the early ’80s, the lavish presentations known as the upfronts have been a propaganda jamboree for the TV business. What began as a network trade show for ad-world elites has evolved, thanks to industry one-upmanship, into a bacchanal of variety shows hosted by the networks and staged before standing-room hordes at places like Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Centre.
In the midst of extravagant audiovisuals, musical numbers, comedy sketches, pricey giveaways and celebrity appearances, the networks divulge their fall prime-time schedules — the sitcoms, dramas, game shows and reality programmes that are broadcast between 8 and 11. They settle with great fanfare industry nail-biters like “Will Fox cede the Thursday 8:30 hammock time slot to NBC?” The audience for this arcana includes reporters and prospective advertisers, who sit rapt for an hour or two and then mill around at swanky after-parties, hoping to glimpse Kiefer Sutherland and sounding off about how dumb or weird the presentations were.
And the upfronts are kind of dumb. They are overblown tributes to a bygone style of salesmanship, and from the point of view of advertisers, they are almost pointless. In the old days, execs from Ralston Purina, say, would attend exclusive in-studio screenings of CBS pilots so they could be sure to place Puppy Chow ads during shows that featured dogs. But today, when media buyers can screen shows online and study a network’s demographics and ad platforms, the upfronts function chiefly as an ostentatious corporate week on the town.
They are a sight to see: the ad world squealing over small-screen stars, small-screen stars conversing knowingly with network accountants and alpha executives donning big shoes and clown noses, begging for ad dollars while flanked by high-flying guys and dolls. (Think Aretha Franklin, the Who, Mary J. Blige, Chris Rock, Eli and Peyton Manning, Jerry Seinfeld, Tyra Banks, Ashton Kutcher, Mariah Carey.) The whole spectacle has got to be one of the most embarrassing, astonishing, confusing, wondrous collisions of American sensibilities you’ll ever see.
Or it was. For decades. When TV was a business of winners. But winning streaks must end. Having so long excoriated themselves as a nation of zombie-eyed TV addicts — they average six hours a day, the old studies always showed — Americans cannot seem to face the fact that we have sobered up. But it’s true: many of us seem to have shut off the networks, at least in prime time. Instead, we watch DVDs, DVRs, on-demand, online and niche cable channels. We also do other things. No one knows what, exactly, but it’s evidently less quantifiable than watching TV. (One suggestive statistic: Americans watched 10 billion videos online in the month of February alone, according to the comScore Video Metrix service.)
To people who work in television, this development is known as “the viewer plunge.” Last spring at the upfronts, a chilling number was widely whispered: 2.5 million fewer people were watching NBC, CBS, ABC and Fox than had in spring 2006. TV executives repeatedly reassured ad buyers that everything was A-O.K., but they also took to kitchen-sinking to explain away the plunge. Daylight Savings Time had come too early. Everyone was using TiVo and the Internet. The rating system is unfair. The war. The economy. The toxins. The bees. But things were going to be great in ’08.
And then came the writers’ strike. Combined with the viewer plunge, it was like the Depression and the Dust Bowl — a double whammy for television and its audience. The strike “orphaned” viewers (as the jargon has it) without their favourite shows, which gave viewers a reason to leave network television entirely. And they did. Sayonara. According to The Hollywood Reporter, most returning shows lost between 10 and 30 percent of the viewers they had before the strike, when ratings for the networks were already low.
It’s not immediately clear what all this means for the upfronts. How do you celebrate your wedding anniversary the year that divorce is imminent? Do you drink alone? Toast to old times? “It’s going to be much more like a meeting,” Mike Shaw, the president of sales and marketing for ABC, said, referring to this year’s upfronts, on an advertising panel at the Harvard Business School in February. He cited, as one reason for this change, the fact that the writers’ strike compressed the time available for producing pilots. Still, the writing is on the wall: the good times are over. The ABC gang will show up at Lincoln Center but offer some kind of “streamlined” corporate presentation and no party. Sounds like fun.
Jeff Zucker, the chief executive of NBC Universal, which is trailing closely behind the three other big networks, seems equally chastened. At the same event in February, he declared that NBC would be “much more realistic and much more honest” in its presentation of programming to advertisers. (NBC has resolved to make shows faster, cheaper and year-round, meaning they won’t make and summarily kill the usual huge number of sample shows.) Fox, which still has a bona fide, if recently weakened, hit in American Idol, planned its upfront as usual, but with no surprises or dramatic unveilings. Finally, CBS did a programming and advertising presentation. No party.
"I’m not going to any upfronts this year," says Heffernan. "I’ll miss them: I’ve loved every minute of the cuckoo shows in the past, and I’ll probably never get to see those mongo entertainers at such close range again. At the upfronts I always learned something too about what the American people want: heartwarming dramas, women’s stuff, sports, heroism, complex characters, real people, guilty pleasures, eye candy, names they can trust, ambiguous villains, simple comedies, hipster hipness, good old-fashioned values, edginess, upscaleness, satire, science fiction, girls, boys, Latinas, crime procedurals, urban sitcoms, aspirationalism, a way to express their anger."
Closing credits. Colour bars. Static. For decades, what Americans want has been something that could be piped into a television screen. What if it’s not any more?
Wednesday, 14 May 2008
Seinfeld- 10 years on
On May 14, 1998: There were riots in Indonesia. Cannes was under way. The Dow had made up for some losses. Continental slashed airfares. And later that night, Frank Sinatra died at 82. But for most Americans - at least the 79 million people who watched - one memory endures. A perfect storm of hype and unmet expectations, the Seinfeld finale - that silly trial scene, remember? - remains a watershed moment in popular culture reports Verne Gay.
Why? Reasonable question.
Other hits have gone in the intervening years, such as Friends and Everybody Loves Raymond. Cultural Solomons such as Entertainment Weekly devoted many issues to them, as well. Plus over those years, we survived the reality boom, then endured it. The sitcom was declared dead, and the drama reborn. The Internet gathered force, then revolutionized TV (and everything else). YouTube rose while the networks declined. With the lone exception of The Simpsons, most everything on TV changed (and changed completely), but Seinfeld's last day still seems like yesterday.
Here's why: Seinfeld was often an indisputably great situation comedy and, as the years wore on, continued to wear well - a welcome fate denied other titans in the quest of rerun eternity (such as, say, Friends). Then, there was and is the ubiquity. If you are American and have never actually seen Seinfeld, then you don't actually own a TV. Estelle Harris (who played George's mother, Estelle Costanza) said in a recent interview, "It's getting more and more popular because there's a whole new generation that has become interested in the show from the repeats. Younger and younger people are stopping me on the streets, all races, creeds and colours, saying, 'You're just like my mother.'"
"Luck" is another word you hear from veterans of the show, as if the normally malevolent gods of prime time were on a nine-year lunch break over those years, ensuring its survival. "I guess I felt really lucky, but I also felt like part of a family, which happens when you're on a show for so long," says veteran stage and TV actress Liz Sheridan, Jerry's "mother," Helen. "It didn't surprise me that we were so successful because we were so good."
Spike Feresten, host of Fox's TalkShow, and long-time Seinfeld scribe, says of the enduring appeal: "I think it's kind of something Jerry and Larry always believed - that making someone laugh is a very powerful experience, and if you can do that consistently, then they will love you because there's not a lot that they're laughing about in their own lives. It could be as simple as that."
But a decade's a decade, and while Seinfeld is forever trapped in TV amber, the lives of the principles are not. Here's what has happened to our four heroes over the years - with a quick assessment on just how well they've used their precious time...
Jerry Seinfeld- Yeah, he's done pretty much next to nothing. Oh, sure - there was some movie about bees, and he got married and fathered three children. Some stand-up here and some stand-up there. But it's been so nothing that he worked the joke into his routine. ("Everybody says to me, 'Hey, you don't do the show any more. What do you do?' I'll tell you what do I do: nothing.... Well, let me tell you, doing nothing is not as easy as it looks ... because the idea of doing anything, which could easily lead to doing something, would cut into your nothing, and that would force me to have to drop everything.")
So nothing. Bee Movie (which he co-wrote with Feresten) was a hit. His first love, the club circuit - a road through hell for the unfamous, and an invitation to snotty critics to say, "See - he's not that funny" for the famous - has been good to him as well. At 54, his reputation remains mostly intact. Rumours of another show on NBC seem to go down in flames reliably every year (he made a funny cameo on 30 Rock's season opener this year), and someone during the open mike part of a recent performance asked about a small-screen reprisal: "No. I'm old, I'm rich and I'm tired."
One of the most skillful "retirements" in show business history - Carsonesque, almost. The chances of producing another show as good as Seinfeld are (about) one in 1.987 billion; so why bother? He continues to do what he loves (stand-up) and he does a good bee, too. Seinfeld - of course - can afford to be picky-choosy: The vast residual windfall was largely denied his three co-stars, who were effectively forced to start a second act.
Julia Louis-Dreyfus- Go ahead - you create one of the most memorable female characters in TV history (Elaine Benes) and then step away from it. Possible? Maybe, but you'd probably have to have to star in and produce (on your own dime) a big-screen version of "Clytemnestra." Louis-Dreyfus, instead, has done what she does best - TV comedy. The Adventures of Old Christine may - or may not - get picked up by CBS this week (though there's speculation ABC may grab it). Over the past 10 years, Louis-Dreyfus has had three major TV roles - Ellie Riggs, in the short-lived Watching Ellie; Maggie Lizer (briefly), in Arrested Development; and, of course, spunky single mother Christine (and she appeared on Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm. Otherwise, she's doing the hardest job of all - raising two sons, 16 and 11. (She's married to TV writer Brad Hall.)
Louis-Dreyfus was stuck with the tired old label/cliche, "The Seinfeld Curse," by the press for most of the decade until she scored the lead actress/sitcom Emmy in 2006. Then, the scarlet letter magically melted away. Was it ever fair? Not really. "Ellie" was a good show - innovative, sometimes funny - and even featured a before-he-was-famous Steve Carell. Ditto "Christine." No one ever expected "Seinfeld Redux." Or should have.
Jason Alexander- In some ways, this has been the most fascinating post-"Seinfeld" life; it's a spin-the-dial career, and where you stop ... well, who knows! He's guest-judging on Bravo's dance show, "Step It Up" - bizarre - while there have been a few dozen cameos, starring roles, and other assorted turns on the tube (including Curb Your Enthusiasm), along with a handful of movies since 1998. His two TV sitcoms both flopped - ABC's 2001 Bob Patterson (he played a motivational speaker) and CBS' 2004-05 Listen Up (he played a sportswriter, based on The Washington Post's Tony Kornheiser). He's started a stand-up career (recently toured in Australia), and the Tony Award winner has also returned to the stage: He's artistic director of the Los Angeles-based Reprise Theatre Company, which produces four musical revivals per year.
A career track suggesting both an adventurous spirit and an insecure one. Another possibility: He doesn't know exactly what he wants to do; Seinfeld - or at least the DVDs - gave Alexander the financial security blanket needed to escape George, but he's squandered some of that. The job at Reprise, however, may well be the best move of all. There's hope still for the abundantly talented George ... er, Jason.
Michael Richards- was first out with a major sitcom - The Michael Richards Show - in 2000. It was burdened by expectations and the inevitable critical blow-back that "it'll never be as good." And hardly was. The show was cancelled after six episodes, and the "Seinfeld Curse" began. Richards did some credited voice work (for Jerry Seinfeld's Bee Movie) and there were rare cameos. He also worked on the comedy circuit, but the Nov. 20, 2006 Laugh Factory tirade ended it. That performance - a blowtorch of rage and racial epithets - was captured on a cell phone, and Richards' career seemed over. He disappeared into the Far East, where a reporter for the Los Angeles Times caught up with him: "That night, when I was insulted and disrupted, I lost my heart; I lost my sense of humour. I've retired from that." He's back and in production on a major studio animated release, Cat Tale.
Richards stared down the biggest challenge of any actor - how to get beyond the character that made you - then seemed to back off. His The Michael Richards Show character was part Monk, part Cosmo and reinforced the quandary. After the Laugh Factory incident he tried the recovery program (hired big-league P.R. firm, etc.) but remains somewhat radioactive.
Larry David (co-creator and voice of George Steinbrenner)- Three words - Curb Your Enthusiasm. Alone among all, he's the one to create a post-Seinfeld classic.
Phil Morris (Johnnie Cochran-esque lawyer Jackie Chiles): Full and busy career on the tube, including appearances on JAG, NCIS and Smallville.
Heidi Swedberg (Susan Biddle Ross, George's fiancee): Guest shots in such shows as ER and Without a Trace.
Estelle Harris (Estelle Costanza, George's mother): Voiced Mrs. Potato Head in Toy Story 2 and Toy Story 3, due in 2010. Has appeared on Disney Channel's The Suite Life of Zach and Cody and in movies; heavily involved in charity work.
Jerry Stiller (Frank Costanza, George's father): Father-in-law Arthur Spooner in The King of Queens (1998-2007) plus roles in movies such as Zoolander, with son, Ben.
Liz Sheridan (Helen Seinfeld, Jerry's mother): Wrote book on her long-ago love affair with James Dean, and is shopping a screenplay based on that memoir.
John O'Hurley (J. Peterman): Winning Dancing With the Stars will probably be his legacy, not his role as Elaine's boss.
Barney Martin (Morty Seinfeld, Jerry's father): Died in 2005.
Len Lesser (Uncle Leo): Played Garvin on Everybody Loves Raymond.
Patrick Warburton (David Puddy, Elaine's boyfriend): He's been everywhere: NewsRadio ... The Emperor's New Groove ... The Tick ... Less Than Perfect ... Kim Possible ... Family Guy ... Rules of Engagement.
Seinfeld was a sophisticated sitcom that wowed America - so why did it never quite catch on in the UK? asks Dan Worth...
Ten years ago tomorrow, 75 million Americans sat around their televisions - the third largest audience of all time - to witness the end of one of the greatest comedies of the 20th century. Seinfeld was a phenomenon in the US and was so successful NBC were prepared to offer Jerry Seinfeld $5m per episode to continue - the cast of Friends were earning "just" $1m per episode at the height of their success.
But in the UK Seinfeld never caught on and for a show that was built around the inextricable frustrations of modern life, often coupled with righteous indignation - personified by the ever put-upon George Costanza - this seems strange. Especially when we seem to pride ourselves on such traits.
Erratic late-night scheduling on BBC2 certainly didn't help and perhaps now in the age of Sky+ Seinfeld would have thrived, but successful shows usually overcome such things to find an audience. Perhaps the shallow nature of the characters and the nihilism inherent in the show, which led to its label "a show about nothing", turned British audiences off. But when you consider the success of almost every other US import to these shores there is one noticeable difference - resolution.
While Scrubs has JD's constant voiceovers to bring episodes to a conclusion, Frasier had the story arc of Niles and Daphne to follow alongside lessons for Frasier, and Friends continually showed the characters maturing and learning at the end of each episode, Seinfeld purposefully did the opposite. Episodes frequently ended in situations that were immediately forgotten at the beginning of the next, the characters starting with a clean slate once again, having learned nothing from their experiences. Larry David, the show's co-creator, famously insisted on a strict "no hugging, no learning" rule on set and in one episode Kramer (Jerry's neighbour against whom all other wacky next-door neighbours pale in comparison) tells Jerry, "You know the important thing is that you learned something," only to be rebuffed, "No I didn't!"
It seems striking that while The Office, our defining sitcom of the 21st century so far, gave us an out-of-character happy ending with Tim and Dawn together and David Brent having at least not embarrassed himself on a blind date, Seinfeld ended with the four main characters, not married, not successful, not even happy, but sitting in prison about to start a one-year jail sentence. When it comes to comedy, perhaps we Brits are less sophisticated than we like to think.
Why? Reasonable question.
Other hits have gone in the intervening years, such as Friends and Everybody Loves Raymond. Cultural Solomons such as Entertainment Weekly devoted many issues to them, as well. Plus over those years, we survived the reality boom, then endured it. The sitcom was declared dead, and the drama reborn. The Internet gathered force, then revolutionized TV (and everything else). YouTube rose while the networks declined. With the lone exception of The Simpsons, most everything on TV changed (and changed completely), but Seinfeld's last day still seems like yesterday.
Here's why: Seinfeld was often an indisputably great situation comedy and, as the years wore on, continued to wear well - a welcome fate denied other titans in the quest of rerun eternity (such as, say, Friends). Then, there was and is the ubiquity. If you are American and have never actually seen Seinfeld, then you don't actually own a TV. Estelle Harris (who played George's mother, Estelle Costanza) said in a recent interview, "It's getting more and more popular because there's a whole new generation that has become interested in the show from the repeats. Younger and younger people are stopping me on the streets, all races, creeds and colours, saying, 'You're just like my mother.'"
"Luck" is another word you hear from veterans of the show, as if the normally malevolent gods of prime time were on a nine-year lunch break over those years, ensuring its survival. "I guess I felt really lucky, but I also felt like part of a family, which happens when you're on a show for so long," says veteran stage and TV actress Liz Sheridan, Jerry's "mother," Helen. "It didn't surprise me that we were so successful because we were so good."
Spike Feresten, host of Fox's TalkShow, and long-time Seinfeld scribe, says of the enduring appeal: "I think it's kind of something Jerry and Larry always believed - that making someone laugh is a very powerful experience, and if you can do that consistently, then they will love you because there's not a lot that they're laughing about in their own lives. It could be as simple as that."
But a decade's a decade, and while Seinfeld is forever trapped in TV amber, the lives of the principles are not. Here's what has happened to our four heroes over the years - with a quick assessment on just how well they've used their precious time...
Jerry Seinfeld- Yeah, he's done pretty much next to nothing. Oh, sure - there was some movie about bees, and he got married and fathered three children. Some stand-up here and some stand-up there. But it's been so nothing that he worked the joke into his routine. ("Everybody says to me, 'Hey, you don't do the show any more. What do you do?' I'll tell you what do I do: nothing.... Well, let me tell you, doing nothing is not as easy as it looks ... because the idea of doing anything, which could easily lead to doing something, would cut into your nothing, and that would force me to have to drop everything.")
So nothing. Bee Movie (which he co-wrote with Feresten) was a hit. His first love, the club circuit - a road through hell for the unfamous, and an invitation to snotty critics to say, "See - he's not that funny" for the famous - has been good to him as well. At 54, his reputation remains mostly intact. Rumours of another show on NBC seem to go down in flames reliably every year (he made a funny cameo on 30 Rock's season opener this year), and someone during the open mike part of a recent performance asked about a small-screen reprisal: "No. I'm old, I'm rich and I'm tired."
One of the most skillful "retirements" in show business history - Carsonesque, almost. The chances of producing another show as good as Seinfeld are (about) one in 1.987 billion; so why bother? He continues to do what he loves (stand-up) and he does a good bee, too. Seinfeld - of course - can afford to be picky-choosy: The vast residual windfall was largely denied his three co-stars, who were effectively forced to start a second act.
Julia Louis-Dreyfus- Go ahead - you create one of the most memorable female characters in TV history (Elaine Benes) and then step away from it. Possible? Maybe, but you'd probably have to have to star in and produce (on your own dime) a big-screen version of "Clytemnestra." Louis-Dreyfus, instead, has done what she does best - TV comedy. The Adventures of Old Christine may - or may not - get picked up by CBS this week (though there's speculation ABC may grab it). Over the past 10 years, Louis-Dreyfus has had three major TV roles - Ellie Riggs, in the short-lived Watching Ellie; Maggie Lizer (briefly), in Arrested Development; and, of course, spunky single mother Christine (and she appeared on Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm. Otherwise, she's doing the hardest job of all - raising two sons, 16 and 11. (She's married to TV writer Brad Hall.)
Louis-Dreyfus was stuck with the tired old label/cliche, "The Seinfeld Curse," by the press for most of the decade until she scored the lead actress/sitcom Emmy in 2006. Then, the scarlet letter magically melted away. Was it ever fair? Not really. "Ellie" was a good show - innovative, sometimes funny - and even featured a before-he-was-famous Steve Carell. Ditto "Christine." No one ever expected "Seinfeld Redux." Or should have.
Jason Alexander- In some ways, this has been the most fascinating post-"Seinfeld" life; it's a spin-the-dial career, and where you stop ... well, who knows! He's guest-judging on Bravo's dance show, "Step It Up" - bizarre - while there have been a few dozen cameos, starring roles, and other assorted turns on the tube (including Curb Your Enthusiasm), along with a handful of movies since 1998. His two TV sitcoms both flopped - ABC's 2001 Bob Patterson (he played a motivational speaker) and CBS' 2004-05 Listen Up (he played a sportswriter, based on The Washington Post's Tony Kornheiser). He's started a stand-up career (recently toured in Australia), and the Tony Award winner has also returned to the stage: He's artistic director of the Los Angeles-based Reprise Theatre Company, which produces four musical revivals per year.
A career track suggesting both an adventurous spirit and an insecure one. Another possibility: He doesn't know exactly what he wants to do; Seinfeld - or at least the DVDs - gave Alexander the financial security blanket needed to escape George, but he's squandered some of that. The job at Reprise, however, may well be the best move of all. There's hope still for the abundantly talented George ... er, Jason.
Michael Richards- was first out with a major sitcom - The Michael Richards Show - in 2000. It was burdened by expectations and the inevitable critical blow-back that "it'll never be as good." And hardly was. The show was cancelled after six episodes, and the "Seinfeld Curse" began. Richards did some credited voice work (for Jerry Seinfeld's Bee Movie) and there were rare cameos. He also worked on the comedy circuit, but the Nov. 20, 2006 Laugh Factory tirade ended it. That performance - a blowtorch of rage and racial epithets - was captured on a cell phone, and Richards' career seemed over. He disappeared into the Far East, where a reporter for the Los Angeles Times caught up with him: "That night, when I was insulted and disrupted, I lost my heart; I lost my sense of humour. I've retired from that." He's back and in production on a major studio animated release, Cat Tale.
Richards stared down the biggest challenge of any actor - how to get beyond the character that made you - then seemed to back off. His The Michael Richards Show character was part Monk, part Cosmo and reinforced the quandary. After the Laugh Factory incident he tried the recovery program (hired big-league P.R. firm, etc.) but remains somewhat radioactive.
Larry David (co-creator and voice of George Steinbrenner)- Three words - Curb Your Enthusiasm. Alone among all, he's the one to create a post-Seinfeld classic.
Phil Morris (Johnnie Cochran-esque lawyer Jackie Chiles): Full and busy career on the tube, including appearances on JAG, NCIS and Smallville.
Heidi Swedberg (Susan Biddle Ross, George's fiancee): Guest shots in such shows as ER and Without a Trace.
Estelle Harris (Estelle Costanza, George's mother): Voiced Mrs. Potato Head in Toy Story 2 and Toy Story 3, due in 2010. Has appeared on Disney Channel's The Suite Life of Zach and Cody and in movies; heavily involved in charity work.
Jerry Stiller (Frank Costanza, George's father): Father-in-law Arthur Spooner in The King of Queens (1998-2007) plus roles in movies such as Zoolander, with son, Ben.
Liz Sheridan (Helen Seinfeld, Jerry's mother): Wrote book on her long-ago love affair with James Dean, and is shopping a screenplay based on that memoir.
John O'Hurley (J. Peterman): Winning Dancing With the Stars will probably be his legacy, not his role as Elaine's boss.
Barney Martin (Morty Seinfeld, Jerry's father): Died in 2005.
Len Lesser (Uncle Leo): Played Garvin on Everybody Loves Raymond.
Patrick Warburton (David Puddy, Elaine's boyfriend): He's been everywhere: NewsRadio ... The Emperor's New Groove ... The Tick ... Less Than Perfect ... Kim Possible ... Family Guy ... Rules of Engagement.
Seinfeld was a sophisticated sitcom that wowed America - so why did it never quite catch on in the UK? asks Dan Worth...
Ten years ago tomorrow, 75 million Americans sat around their televisions - the third largest audience of all time - to witness the end of one of the greatest comedies of the 20th century. Seinfeld was a phenomenon in the US and was so successful NBC were prepared to offer Jerry Seinfeld $5m per episode to continue - the cast of Friends were earning "just" $1m per episode at the height of their success.
But in the UK Seinfeld never caught on and for a show that was built around the inextricable frustrations of modern life, often coupled with righteous indignation - personified by the ever put-upon George Costanza - this seems strange. Especially when we seem to pride ourselves on such traits.
Erratic late-night scheduling on BBC2 certainly didn't help and perhaps now in the age of Sky+ Seinfeld would have thrived, but successful shows usually overcome such things to find an audience. Perhaps the shallow nature of the characters and the nihilism inherent in the show, which led to its label "a show about nothing", turned British audiences off. But when you consider the success of almost every other US import to these shores there is one noticeable difference - resolution.
While Scrubs has JD's constant voiceovers to bring episodes to a conclusion, Frasier had the story arc of Niles and Daphne to follow alongside lessons for Frasier, and Friends continually showed the characters maturing and learning at the end of each episode, Seinfeld purposefully did the opposite. Episodes frequently ended in situations that were immediately forgotten at the beginning of the next, the characters starting with a clean slate once again, having learned nothing from their experiences. Larry David, the show's co-creator, famously insisted on a strict "no hugging, no learning" rule on set and in one episode Kramer (Jerry's neighbour against whom all other wacky next-door neighbours pale in comparison) tells Jerry, "You know the important thing is that you learned something," only to be rebuffed, "No I didn't!"
It seems striking that while The Office, our defining sitcom of the 21st century so far, gave us an out-of-character happy ending with Tim and Dawn together and David Brent having at least not embarrassed himself on a blind date, Seinfeld ended with the four main characters, not married, not successful, not even happy, but sitting in prison about to start a one-year jail sentence. When it comes to comedy, perhaps we Brits are less sophisticated than we like to think.
Tuesday, 13 May 2008
A civil union is no big deal
Tonight on Brothers & Sisters, ABC is featuring the quintessential May sweeps event, but with a critical twist, notes matthew Gilbert. It's a big fat wedding, which, along with burials and casting stunts, is how the networks inflate ratings during those months when ad rates are set. But the Brothers & Sisters marriage is a gay marriage - technically, a civil union, since the show's Walker clan is dysfunctional by way of LA and not Boston. And so some 11 million viewers will watch the joining of two men in what one character calls "holy man-trimony."
Stop the presses?
Actually, no. The wedding of Kevin and Scotty isn't a controversial network milestone, like those early gay and lesbian kisses on the likes of Dawson's Creek and Roseanne. Indeed, it's no big deal at all. ABC has deemed a gay commitment ceremony a sweeps event; no advertisers are pulling out and no hate campaigners are shooting arrows, according to ABC; and life goes on. Despite the decade's fraught politics about gay unions, the subject is not exactly making for incendiary TV in 2008. While gay marriage can still be a polarizing political issue, the realities of gay life - coming out, kissing, weddings - have become normalized in popular culture enough to pass by almost unnoticed on prime time.
Compare that to the noise that has accompanied so many early, pioneering network attempts to show gay people doing what straight people do, such as simply talking in bed, which triggered protest in 1989 over an episode of Thirtysomething. When Ellen DeGeneres came out of the closet on Ellen in 1997, there was brouhaha and there were boycotts. Now, on the day of Kevin and Scotty's nuptials, which arrives after much on-screen making out by the couple, there seems to be only TiVo-setting and shoulder shrugging.
Even the writers of Brothers & Sisters don't bother charging tonight's wedding with conflict and controversy. Scotty's parents are certainly unhappy about the ceremony - his mother calls it a "contrived event" and a "pretend wedding" - but none of the conservative regular characters on the series blink twice. Indeed, Calista Flockhart's Kitty, a former right-wing TV pundit who has objected to gay marriage and who is now married to Rob Lowe's Republican senator, presides at the altar. "When we give up on what was," she says to all those assembled, "well that's when things we thought improbable or impossible, even, happen right before your eyes."
Kitty's reference to "what was" has a broad resonance on Brothers & Sisters. The Walkers' Uncle Saul, played by Ron Rifkin, is a gay man who has spent his life in the closet; he finally comes out to the entire family tonight. Now in his 60s, Saul is plagued with regret for having failed to live his life out loud, without the fulfilment that his nephew Kevin has found. During the ceremony, as Kevin (Matthew Rhys) and Scotty (Luke MacFarlane) exchange rings, the camera gives us a poignant shot of Saul. He is the product of a time when gays and lesbians were more apt to spend their lives trying to come out - or trying not to come out - instead of moving ahead to find love and commitment.
"What was" represents the thinking of earlier generations that were sceptical or condemning of enduring gay unions. Brothers & Sisters is both expressing compassion for and distancing itself from the kind of old-school thinking that doomed gays and lesbians to short-term relationships or loneliness.
In some ways, the show's stance toward Saul and his generation recalls how Barack Obama tried to describe his relationship to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright in his March speech, before denouncing Wright entirely. Obama understood the roots of Wright's point of view, even while he rejected it: "For the men and women of Rev. Wright's generation," he said before once again chanting his mantra of change, "the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years."
Brothers & Sisters wants to focus on the change, as well. "It's amazing, what our children teach us," Sally Field's Nora says to Saul tonight after the ceremony. Brothers & Sisters is no stranger to self-congratulation; the series has always served its liberal point of view with a chaser of sanctimony. But it does consistently push forward, at no cost to its popularity. Surely it's no coincidence that two of the show's key producers, Greg Berlanti and Jon Robin Baitz, are openly gay.
The road leading up to this Brothers & Sisters non-moment has included countless TV breakthroughs, of course, most of which have garnered attention. On the networks, the pushing of the envelope has primarily been in the context of comedy, on sitcoms such as Will & Grace, Roseanne, and Friends, which gave us a commitment ceremony between Ross's ex-wife and her partner in 1996. And in the cable TV niches, writers have been delivering dramatically rich portrayals of gays and lesbians for years, on shows such as Six Feet Under and The L Word. And the fact that recently out-of-the-closet celebrities such as Neil Patrick Harris and T.R. Knight are successfully playing heterosexual men has added to the de-fusing of sexual orientation on series TV.
Brothers & Sisters is defining a new sense of calm about gay life in America, one that involves none of the gawking and squawking that have accompanied so many of the networks' earlier attempts to normalize homosexuality. I suspect that Brothers & Sisters will stimulate more public controversy over its incest-tinged plot line - a growing romance between Justin Walker and the woman he thought was his half-sister - than anything having to do with gay marriage. Sometimes, the phrase "so what" is the password to the future.
Stop the presses?
Actually, no. The wedding of Kevin and Scotty isn't a controversial network milestone, like those early gay and lesbian kisses on the likes of Dawson's Creek and Roseanne. Indeed, it's no big deal at all. ABC has deemed a gay commitment ceremony a sweeps event; no advertisers are pulling out and no hate campaigners are shooting arrows, according to ABC; and life goes on. Despite the decade's fraught politics about gay unions, the subject is not exactly making for incendiary TV in 2008. While gay marriage can still be a polarizing political issue, the realities of gay life - coming out, kissing, weddings - have become normalized in popular culture enough to pass by almost unnoticed on prime time.
Compare that to the noise that has accompanied so many early, pioneering network attempts to show gay people doing what straight people do, such as simply talking in bed, which triggered protest in 1989 over an episode of Thirtysomething. When Ellen DeGeneres came out of the closet on Ellen in 1997, there was brouhaha and there were boycotts. Now, on the day of Kevin and Scotty's nuptials, which arrives after much on-screen making out by the couple, there seems to be only TiVo-setting and shoulder shrugging.
Even the writers of Brothers & Sisters don't bother charging tonight's wedding with conflict and controversy. Scotty's parents are certainly unhappy about the ceremony - his mother calls it a "contrived event" and a "pretend wedding" - but none of the conservative regular characters on the series blink twice. Indeed, Calista Flockhart's Kitty, a former right-wing TV pundit who has objected to gay marriage and who is now married to Rob Lowe's Republican senator, presides at the altar. "When we give up on what was," she says to all those assembled, "well that's when things we thought improbable or impossible, even, happen right before your eyes."
Kitty's reference to "what was" has a broad resonance on Brothers & Sisters. The Walkers' Uncle Saul, played by Ron Rifkin, is a gay man who has spent his life in the closet; he finally comes out to the entire family tonight. Now in his 60s, Saul is plagued with regret for having failed to live his life out loud, without the fulfilment that his nephew Kevin has found. During the ceremony, as Kevin (Matthew Rhys) and Scotty (Luke MacFarlane) exchange rings, the camera gives us a poignant shot of Saul. He is the product of a time when gays and lesbians were more apt to spend their lives trying to come out - or trying not to come out - instead of moving ahead to find love and commitment.
"What was" represents the thinking of earlier generations that were sceptical or condemning of enduring gay unions. Brothers & Sisters is both expressing compassion for and distancing itself from the kind of old-school thinking that doomed gays and lesbians to short-term relationships or loneliness.
In some ways, the show's stance toward Saul and his generation recalls how Barack Obama tried to describe his relationship to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright in his March speech, before denouncing Wright entirely. Obama understood the roots of Wright's point of view, even while he rejected it: "For the men and women of Rev. Wright's generation," he said before once again chanting his mantra of change, "the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years."
Brothers & Sisters wants to focus on the change, as well. "It's amazing, what our children teach us," Sally Field's Nora says to Saul tonight after the ceremony. Brothers & Sisters is no stranger to self-congratulation; the series has always served its liberal point of view with a chaser of sanctimony. But it does consistently push forward, at no cost to its popularity. Surely it's no coincidence that two of the show's key producers, Greg Berlanti and Jon Robin Baitz, are openly gay.
The road leading up to this Brothers & Sisters non-moment has included countless TV breakthroughs, of course, most of which have garnered attention. On the networks, the pushing of the envelope has primarily been in the context of comedy, on sitcoms such as Will & Grace, Roseanne, and Friends, which gave us a commitment ceremony between Ross's ex-wife and her partner in 1996. And in the cable TV niches, writers have been delivering dramatically rich portrayals of gays and lesbians for years, on shows such as Six Feet Under and The L Word. And the fact that recently out-of-the-closet celebrities such as Neil Patrick Harris and T.R. Knight are successfully playing heterosexual men has added to the de-fusing of sexual orientation on series TV.
Brothers & Sisters is defining a new sense of calm about gay life in America, one that involves none of the gawking and squawking that have accompanied so many of the networks' earlier attempts to normalize homosexuality. I suspect that Brothers & Sisters will stimulate more public controversy over its incest-tinged plot line - a growing romance between Justin Walker and the woman he thought was his half-sister - than anything having to do with gay marriage. Sometimes, the phrase "so what" is the password to the future.
Flood was a puerilely tasteless disaster
Television is a medium that suffers congenital amnesia. Nobody remembers anything. AA Gill writes this every two or three years. Gill writes it because television is a medium that suffers congenital amnesia and nobody remembers anything. Actually, that’s not quite true. Tristrams refuse to remember the worthwhile. They just can’t forget, or can’t get enough of, the meretricious, embarrassing, brain-rotting drivel that they clone with obsessive-compulsive hysteria.
The constant problem with television is that the people who make it watch too much and too little. They see endless window-dressed plagiarism and nothing like enough from the past. So, each generation loses the experience of the previous one. They hand each other awards named for Flaherty, Grierson and Jennings, but have no idea who these people were; and they only know Ken Russell as a batty old end-of-the-pier ranter, because they’ve never seen his Delius or Elgar docu-dramas. They know Lindsay Anderson because of If..., but know nothing of the Free Cinema Movement or the dozens of documentaries he made. Saddest, perhaps, is that hardly anyone making drama or documentary will have seen the work of Peter Watkins. He was the Giorgione of television. Not much is known about him, and he didn’t make much, but what he did is superlative.
Gill thought about Watkins while watching Flood (Sunday-Monday, ITV1). Before the producers start phoning their mothers, let me say this is not going to be a pleasant review experience. You won’t want to share it. Watkins made a television documentary in 1965 called The War Game, about a nuclear attack on Britain. It was the first prototype disaster movie made for television. It was also banned for being too good, too realistic, too frightening, and embarrassing for politicians. So, now, a generation on, someone makes a four-hour film about flooding London, the global-warming, searising version of a nuclear attack, this century’s collective annihilation fear - and they’d learnt little or nothing. Everything that was chilling and gripping and brilliant about The War Game was sodden, flabby and attention-sapping in Flood. All its inspiration, all of its timing tricks, dialogue and truncated emotion came not from previous television, but from Hollywood disaster movies. It was Titanic, out of The Day After Tomorrow, by way of The Perfect Storm. Why would anyone want to do that? Why would you, as a writer, director or producer, want to imitate a risibly ridiculous, kitsch and clichéd, overblown, knuckle-headed genre that relies on a screen 20ft wide with 40 decibels of Dolby and a flotilla of special effects that cost the GDP of Kuwait? Why would you imagine that that’s going to be entertaining, engrossing or worthwhile on a TV set? More depressing than television’s genuflecting adaptation of 19th-century novels is its adaptations of 1990s American movies. The news of a real natural disaster hitting Burma may have made the publicists think it gave this shoddy farrago a topical poignancy and a bit of edge, but, actually, it simply made it even more puerilely tasteless.
It would be a poignant litany of catastrophe to point out all the things that were wrong with Flood. Let’s just say that with true disaster-movie predictability, everything that could go belly-up went belly-up, from the frantic camera and editing to the all-star cast desperate for the anonymous water to close over their career-shaming performances. Robert Carlyle, as the small-screen Bruce Willis, finally washed away all the kudos of Trainspotting and The Full Monty. But saddest of all was Tom Courtenay, all at sea with a look of self-inflicted dementia, desperately trying to pretend none of this was happening. He will know all the names referenced above. He made The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, when British drama and documentaries shared a common view and were about something, something else entirely, something we’ve forgotten.
David Attenborough complained recently that there were too many copycat programmes on television. He’s someone you might think would want to do the voiceover for a programme about copycats. He said there’s too much cooking, too much property, too many makeovers, while television can’t summon up a single decent weekly strand on science or classical music or indeed any sort of music. The interests of the nation are apparently reduced to getting fat and getting a sofa to be fat on. He has a point.
This week, we got Grand Designs Live (Sunday-Friday, C4), one of those programme titles Alan Partridge used to think up - an irony that gets made as reality. It was, as he might say, quite literally, watching paint dry in real time. I have never really understood television’s devotion to live broadcasting. Who would want to watch live writing or live cinema? At the beginning, I loved it, because it was a technical feat. I can remember the first transatlantic broadcast, when we were shown Times Square in New York, which might have been Manchester in real time. It seemed an earth-shrinking moment, but it was the idea, rather than the content, that excited. Now, live broadcasting is nothing special, but still editors thrill to the idea of it. If your format needs to be live to be gripping, then it probably wasn’t a very good idea in the first place. Three-quarters of the worst programmes ever made were live, and this one, six days of turgid dross, jumps right onto the cringing heap.
The central bit of the programme, a competition, wasn’t live at all. You had to phone in and vote for a house. Who could care? Who has an opinion about three young smug marrieds’ bathroom suites? Leaving aside the jerry-built extension of the live element, the fundamental problem with Grand Designs is that the buildings and the rooms are so relentlessly repetitive. They’re all as similar as Lego. It isn’t a celebration of remarkable innovation or aesthetic excellence; rather a repetition of tired and tentative received quite-good-taste. The decorations of these rooms all looked like provincial businessmen’s hotels and Habitat windows. Their predictability is only surpassed by the paucity of the vocabulary used to describe them. The language of design is little more than the empty exclamations and threadbare phrases of estate agents’ particulars. Architecture deserves a great deal better than this Pooterish advent calendar of swish little lives. And just as the housing market collapses and half the people watching are waiting sleeplessly for the next mortgage demand, all the good taste seems deeply tasteless.
And, finally, not because I give a damn, but just because I’d like to know: if you have a phone-in competition and you begin taking votes after showing the first contestant and finish a few minutes after showing the last one, doesn’t that mean that being last is a distinct disadvantage? I only mention it because I know lots of people get very excited about phone-in competitions. There are weeks when I despair of television. I would have had difficulty arguing with all those arty prats who say it’s all sop and pap, noise and light for living rooms. I even missed the week before’s Embarrassing Diseases. Staring up some deranged lady’s frilly front bottom would have been more honestly entertaining than this week’s sad flash.
The constant problem with television is that the people who make it watch too much and too little. They see endless window-dressed plagiarism and nothing like enough from the past. So, each generation loses the experience of the previous one. They hand each other awards named for Flaherty, Grierson and Jennings, but have no idea who these people were; and they only know Ken Russell as a batty old end-of-the-pier ranter, because they’ve never seen his Delius or Elgar docu-dramas. They know Lindsay Anderson because of If..., but know nothing of the Free Cinema Movement or the dozens of documentaries he made. Saddest, perhaps, is that hardly anyone making drama or documentary will have seen the work of Peter Watkins. He was the Giorgione of television. Not much is known about him, and he didn’t make much, but what he did is superlative.
Gill thought about Watkins while watching Flood (Sunday-Monday, ITV1). Before the producers start phoning their mothers, let me say this is not going to be a pleasant review experience. You won’t want to share it. Watkins made a television documentary in 1965 called The War Game, about a nuclear attack on Britain. It was the first prototype disaster movie made for television. It was also banned for being too good, too realistic, too frightening, and embarrassing for politicians. So, now, a generation on, someone makes a four-hour film about flooding London, the global-warming, searising version of a nuclear attack, this century’s collective annihilation fear - and they’d learnt little or nothing. Everything that was chilling and gripping and brilliant about The War Game was sodden, flabby and attention-sapping in Flood. All its inspiration, all of its timing tricks, dialogue and truncated emotion came not from previous television, but from Hollywood disaster movies. It was Titanic, out of The Day After Tomorrow, by way of The Perfect Storm. Why would anyone want to do that? Why would you, as a writer, director or producer, want to imitate a risibly ridiculous, kitsch and clichéd, overblown, knuckle-headed genre that relies on a screen 20ft wide with 40 decibels of Dolby and a flotilla of special effects that cost the GDP of Kuwait? Why would you imagine that that’s going to be entertaining, engrossing or worthwhile on a TV set? More depressing than television’s genuflecting adaptation of 19th-century novels is its adaptations of 1990s American movies. The news of a real natural disaster hitting Burma may have made the publicists think it gave this shoddy farrago a topical poignancy and a bit of edge, but, actually, it simply made it even more puerilely tasteless.
It would be a poignant litany of catastrophe to point out all the things that were wrong with Flood. Let’s just say that with true disaster-movie predictability, everything that could go belly-up went belly-up, from the frantic camera and editing to the all-star cast desperate for the anonymous water to close over their career-shaming performances. Robert Carlyle, as the small-screen Bruce Willis, finally washed away all the kudos of Trainspotting and The Full Monty. But saddest of all was Tom Courtenay, all at sea with a look of self-inflicted dementia, desperately trying to pretend none of this was happening. He will know all the names referenced above. He made The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, when British drama and documentaries shared a common view and were about something, something else entirely, something we’ve forgotten.
David Attenborough complained recently that there were too many copycat programmes on television. He’s someone you might think would want to do the voiceover for a programme about copycats. He said there’s too much cooking, too much property, too many makeovers, while television can’t summon up a single decent weekly strand on science or classical music or indeed any sort of music. The interests of the nation are apparently reduced to getting fat and getting a sofa to be fat on. He has a point.
This week, we got Grand Designs Live (Sunday-Friday, C4), one of those programme titles Alan Partridge used to think up - an irony that gets made as reality. It was, as he might say, quite literally, watching paint dry in real time. I have never really understood television’s devotion to live broadcasting. Who would want to watch live writing or live cinema? At the beginning, I loved it, because it was a technical feat. I can remember the first transatlantic broadcast, when we were shown Times Square in New York, which might have been Manchester in real time. It seemed an earth-shrinking moment, but it was the idea, rather than the content, that excited. Now, live broadcasting is nothing special, but still editors thrill to the idea of it. If your format needs to be live to be gripping, then it probably wasn’t a very good idea in the first place. Three-quarters of the worst programmes ever made were live, and this one, six days of turgid dross, jumps right onto the cringing heap.
The central bit of the programme, a competition, wasn’t live at all. You had to phone in and vote for a house. Who could care? Who has an opinion about three young smug marrieds’ bathroom suites? Leaving aside the jerry-built extension of the live element, the fundamental problem with Grand Designs is that the buildings and the rooms are so relentlessly repetitive. They’re all as similar as Lego. It isn’t a celebration of remarkable innovation or aesthetic excellence; rather a repetition of tired and tentative received quite-good-taste. The decorations of these rooms all looked like provincial businessmen’s hotels and Habitat windows. Their predictability is only surpassed by the paucity of the vocabulary used to describe them. The language of design is little more than the empty exclamations and threadbare phrases of estate agents’ particulars. Architecture deserves a great deal better than this Pooterish advent calendar of swish little lives. And just as the housing market collapses and half the people watching are waiting sleeplessly for the next mortgage demand, all the good taste seems deeply tasteless.
And, finally, not because I give a damn, but just because I’d like to know: if you have a phone-in competition and you begin taking votes after showing the first contestant and finish a few minutes after showing the last one, doesn’t that mean that being last is a distinct disadvantage? I only mention it because I know lots of people get very excited about phone-in competitions. There are weeks when I despair of television. I would have had difficulty arguing with all those arty prats who say it’s all sop and pap, noise and light for living rooms. I even missed the week before’s Embarrassing Diseases. Staring up some deranged lady’s frilly front bottom would have been more honestly entertaining than this week’s sad flash.
Who gives a fig about swearing on TV
The Archbishop of Adelaide has his cassock in a twist over bad language on the box. But the real problem is that swear words have lost their power to shock, argues Andrew Billen...
That erudite and precisely spoken quizmaster Robert Robinson used to tell a story about Kenneth Tynan, the first man to use the f-word on British television. A rather grand elderly woman approached him at a party a few weeks after the incident. Tynan feared the worse, but she wanted to thank him. She had, she said, never heard the word before: “But now I use it all the time.”
Forty years on, everybody does, even on television. Anyone who watches Wife Swap will have long since concluded that variations of “fuck” are now the only intensifiers in town. Indeed some people seem to swear more on screen than off. I have never met Gordon Ramsay, but those who have say he rarely swears in private. One of his programmes is called The F Word. Despite the ambiguity that F may stand for food, his catchphrase is “fuck”. In Australia, however, Ramsay's language has sent a bee under the cassock of the Archbishop of Adelaide. Noting that on one show Ramsay used the F-word 80 times, the Most Rev Philip Wilson told a parliamentary inquiry into swearing on television that the episode should never have been aired. The cleric is fighting a rearguard action here, and a rearguard action on two fronts.
The first is a quixotic tilt at the plain fact that swearing, once indulged in mainly by the lower and the upper classes and some intellectuals, is now the lingua franca of the bourgeoisie. What my father called my mother's “kitchen language” is now out in the drawing room. You might say that Australians are fine ones to talk. But the Archbishop is from Adelaide, not for nothing known as the city of churches.
His second battle is to preserve television as a sanctuary inside which people behave better than they do outside. In its early years, television, certainly, was a more formal arena than your average bar. Tynan, when he made history, was discussing censorship. He used the word academically: “I doubt if there are very many rational people in this world to whom the word ‘fuck' is particularly diabolical or revolting or totally forbidden.” Although the BBC apologised, few rational people would today condemn his usage in that context.
The BBC Producers' Guidelines accept that strong language remains “a subject of deep concern to many people” but adds that “in the right context strong language may cause little offence and in some situations may be wholly justified in the interests of authenticity.” The question is what those situations are. A presenter on a live programme who swears at a technical cock-up, not realising that his microphone was on, would surely keep his job. Similarly, perhaps, we can excuse drunks, such as the artist Tracey Emin who in 1998 turned up intoxicated for a television discussion of the Turner Prize and said the f-word several times, even while admitting that her mum would be embarrassed.
“Artistic reasons” can sound like a cop-out for lazy writing out to shock, but you can never safely dismiss them either. In both Jerry Springer: The Opera and the political satire, The Thick of It, for example, the obscene language is so baroquely layered it becomes poetic. It does on The Sopranos, too, although here the language has verisimilitude on its side. How would you expect uneducated gangsters to make themselves understood?
No, the real problem with the Ramsayan over-use of those great taboo twins that begin with F and C, is not that they cause too much outrage but too little. We have lost two powerful invectives. When Johnny Rotten said “fuck” on teatime TV in 1976, the programme's presenter was suspended for two weeks; in 2004, Johnny, now trading under the name Johnny Lydon, used the C-word on I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here! and fewer than 100 viewers out of an audience of 11 million complained. The “worst” words in the language now make programme titles. In 2004 Channel 4 broadcast a documentary about an aristocratic family The Fucking Fulfords. More recently BBC Three transmitted Fuck Off I'm Fat and Fuck Off I'm A Hairy Woman, not to mention last year's The C-Word: How we came to swear by it.
Alas, the C-word. For a while it looked as if 'cunt' would retain its force by offending the fuddy-duddy and the feminist. Yet Ramsay casually includes it. The Archbishop's cause is a lost one. Television is no longer a citadel; it's not even my mother's kitchen. It is Gordon Ramsay's.
That erudite and precisely spoken quizmaster Robert Robinson used to tell a story about Kenneth Tynan, the first man to use the f-word on British television. A rather grand elderly woman approached him at a party a few weeks after the incident. Tynan feared the worse, but she wanted to thank him. She had, she said, never heard the word before: “But now I use it all the time.”
Forty years on, everybody does, even on television. Anyone who watches Wife Swap will have long since concluded that variations of “fuck” are now the only intensifiers in town. Indeed some people seem to swear more on screen than off. I have never met Gordon Ramsay, but those who have say he rarely swears in private. One of his programmes is called The F Word. Despite the ambiguity that F may stand for food, his catchphrase is “fuck”. In Australia, however, Ramsay's language has sent a bee under the cassock of the Archbishop of Adelaide. Noting that on one show Ramsay used the F-word 80 times, the Most Rev Philip Wilson told a parliamentary inquiry into swearing on television that the episode should never have been aired. The cleric is fighting a rearguard action here, and a rearguard action on two fronts.
The first is a quixotic tilt at the plain fact that swearing, once indulged in mainly by the lower and the upper classes and some intellectuals, is now the lingua franca of the bourgeoisie. What my father called my mother's “kitchen language” is now out in the drawing room. You might say that Australians are fine ones to talk. But the Archbishop is from Adelaide, not for nothing known as the city of churches.
His second battle is to preserve television as a sanctuary inside which people behave better than they do outside. In its early years, television, certainly, was a more formal arena than your average bar. Tynan, when he made history, was discussing censorship. He used the word academically: “I doubt if there are very many rational people in this world to whom the word ‘fuck' is particularly diabolical or revolting or totally forbidden.” Although the BBC apologised, few rational people would today condemn his usage in that context.
The BBC Producers' Guidelines accept that strong language remains “a subject of deep concern to many people” but adds that “in the right context strong language may cause little offence and in some situations may be wholly justified in the interests of authenticity.” The question is what those situations are. A presenter on a live programme who swears at a technical cock-up, not realising that his microphone was on, would surely keep his job. Similarly, perhaps, we can excuse drunks, such as the artist Tracey Emin who in 1998 turned up intoxicated for a television discussion of the Turner Prize and said the f-word several times, even while admitting that her mum would be embarrassed.
“Artistic reasons” can sound like a cop-out for lazy writing out to shock, but you can never safely dismiss them either. In both Jerry Springer: The Opera and the political satire, The Thick of It, for example, the obscene language is so baroquely layered it becomes poetic. It does on The Sopranos, too, although here the language has verisimilitude on its side. How would you expect uneducated gangsters to make themselves understood?
No, the real problem with the Ramsayan over-use of those great taboo twins that begin with F and C, is not that they cause too much outrage but too little. We have lost two powerful invectives. When Johnny Rotten said “fuck” on teatime TV in 1976, the programme's presenter was suspended for two weeks; in 2004, Johnny, now trading under the name Johnny Lydon, used the C-word on I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here! and fewer than 100 viewers out of an audience of 11 million complained. The “worst” words in the language now make programme titles. In 2004 Channel 4 broadcast a documentary about an aristocratic family The Fucking Fulfords. More recently BBC Three transmitted Fuck Off I'm Fat and Fuck Off I'm A Hairy Woman, not to mention last year's The C-Word: How we came to swear by it.
Alas, the C-word. For a while it looked as if 'cunt' would retain its force by offending the fuddy-duddy and the feminist. Yet Ramsay casually includes it. The Archbishop's cause is a lost one. Television is no longer a citadel; it's not even my mother's kitchen. It is Gordon Ramsay's.
Sunday, 11 May 2008
Lost in the Cone Zone
Conan O’Brien is not to everyone’s taste. That’s why it was a big risk when NBC decided, in September 2004, to name him the next host of The Tonight Show, effective 2009. Since the announcement, Jay Leno has continued to win his time slot by a wide margin while playing the affable comedy professional to David Letterman’s crotchety uncle. At 58, Leno, the hardest-working man in show business since James Brown, is not ready to hang it up soon writes Jim Windolf.
Another complication arose in NBC’s changeover plan last month, when the modest Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, which holds down 12:30 a.m. for CBS, beat Late Night with Conan O’Brien in the ratings for an entire week. This had never happened before, and it came at a bad time for the network and O’Brien. Out of all the late-night hosts, with the possible exception of the sleepy Jimmy Kimmel, Ferguson seems the least ambitious. Unlike O’Brien, Letterman, Leno, and Jon Stewart— all of whom seethe to be the best in their field— Ferguson seems content to put on a nice little show. A former film director and sitcom second banana, he has the relaxed manner of someone who has already proved himself, at least to his own satisfaction. He’s warm, non-neurotic. He would probably make a great dinner-party guest. But his show, which is friendly, civil, and homey, is more about keeping a time slot warm than creating something new or setting the ratings on fire.
So it must have been a shock to O’Brien and his bosses when Ferguson won the week. Especially given that Leno— who was energized by the writers’ strike, during which he trounced a fully staffed Letterman— continues to pull big numbers, while, not coincidentally, taking frequent on-air jabs at NBC. So, has the network placed its bet on the wrong man?
The executives seem committed to going through with it. If they change their minds and decide to keep Leno on at 11:30 p.m., they must pay O’Brien a penalty of a reported $45 million. (Which they can certainly afford, given that The Tonight Show brings in an estimated $160 million per year, according to Variety.) But word leaked out of NBC earlier this week that the network will formally name Saturday Night Live alumnus Jimmy Fallon as the next host of Late Night, suggesting the plan is a go. The announcement is expected to take place tomorrow, during the network’s upfront presentation.
Furthermore, NBC Universal recently sold its 34-acre Burbank lot, the longtime home of The Tonight Show and other NBC programs, according to an April 24 internal corporate memo scooped up by Broadcasting & Cable. Major renovation work is under way at the Universal Stage One lot in Universal City, which was home to The Jack Benny Show between 1961 and 1965, and the leaked memo went on to say that “The Tonight Show With Conan O’Brien … will move to Universal Stage One in 2009.” In January, the Los Angeles Times reported that O’Brien had purchased a home in Brentwood—complete with wine cellar, sauna, screening room, and other L.A. amenities— for more than the $10.5 million asking price. So it looks like the changeover is really going to happen, even though Leno will likely receive offers for the 11:30 slot from ABC and Fox and maybe even an offer for an Arsenio-style syndication deal from Sony.
But if O’Brien’s brand of innovative comedy proves to be like a dog whistle that can be heard only by his current group of roughly 2 million regular viewers, NBC could be in danger of losing a time slot, a show, and a way of watching TV that it pretty much invented in the 1950s. All that pressure could be enough to wilt the host’s famous pompadour.
On a wall to the left of his desk, O’Brien keeps framed photographs of his heroes— Letterman, Ernie Kovacs, Steve Allen, Johnny Carson, Jack Paar. There’s no picture of Leno, and that’s significant. Leno is a joke-delivery machine who excels in taking a newspaper story and making it the pretext for a punch line. He hits his target about half the time. He’s a wholesaler, the Wal-Mart of comedy, and he treats his viewers like customers. When a given joke doesn’t work, he dismisses it with a wave of his hand— unlike his predecessor, the nimble Carson, who relished the challenge of charming laughs out of a failed laugh line by taking his audience gently to task, or by blaming his writers, or simply by giving the camera a quizzical look.
O’Brien is no joke-delivery machine. He does all right in the craft of setup and punch line, but he took off as a performer only when he was able to reproduce, before the camera, what had made him so funny in the writers’ rooms where he had worked as a contributor to The Simpsons and Saturday Night Live. And it shows: a lot of Late Night’s bits have the feel of something that made an unshaven comedy writer do a snot laugh at 2 a.m.
O’Brien’s opening monologue is more a series of gestures than jokes. He points to audience members for no reason, performs his “string-dance,” spins on his mark like a fool, paddles an invisible rowboat, and makes a fetish of his hair to a degree that would do Larry Sanders proud. Whenever a female audience member shouts, “I love you, Conan!” he replies with a curt “I love you, too, sir.” It’s a dumb line that always gets a laugh. If the audience seems overexcited, he says, in a falsetto voice, “Keep cool, my babies.” So his opening remarks, instead of serving as a satirical digest of the day’s events, function mainly as a way to establish a goofy atmosphere, which he, in moments of mock grandiosity, calls the Cone Zone.
In trying to pull off this high silliness, O’Brien has more in common with Steve Martin or Andy Kaufman or even Chuck Barris (in his Gong Show years) than any of his fellow late-night hosts. He wants to re-create the mood you fell into when you were eight years old laughing hysterically over nothing with your cousins in the backseat of your dad’s station wagon. On the nights he succeeds, it’s great. When he fails, a dead-air mood falls over Late Night, and we find ourselves in public-access hell.
His contemporary and main comedy rival (to my mind), Jon Stewart, makes a perfect foil to O’Brien. Where O’Brien depends on slapstick, Stewart goes for verbal wit. Where Conan tries to create a comedy candyland that exists at a distance from the real world and its troubles, Stewart and his correspondents take the world head on and do battle with it. The Daily Show draws nearly a million fewer nightly viewers than Late Night, but it seems to be the more talked-about show, and Stewart has gotten Hollywood’s blessing, with two consecutive Oscar-hosting jobs.
Stewart’s comedy is political, satirical, sceptical. Just beneath the laugh lines you find, simmering, a possibly naïve desire to make the world a better place … or at least the need to leave behind a record showing that some of us weren’t falling for the lines put out by politicians and their hack counterparts in the media. O’Brien’s comedy—apolitical, absurd—suggests the world has fallen into a state that lies beyond satire’s reach. Which may be why his sensibility brings to my mind the 1970s comedy of Martin, Kaufman, and the giddy Gong Show: it rises out of a mood of defeat similar to the one that pervaded the air in that gloriously stupid decade.
Stewart’s more hopeful show— which has its roots in the political comedy of the 50s and 60s— pokes holes in the official story and regularly demonstrates the misguidedness of the war through its careful, albeit comedic, examination of those in charge. Running gags on Late Night, on the other hand, have included the Masturbating Bear, the Horny Manatee, and Raymond, a man with large plastic ears (played by Late Night writer Brian McCann) who hands out tubes of Preparation-H to audience members while singing a little ditty about the discomforts caused by haemorrhoids.
If Stewart is fact based, O’Brien is steeped in a world of cartoonish fiction. The real world rears its head on Late Night only in the mundane-on-purpose conversational segments featuring the host and his bandleader, Max Weinberg— conversations so dull they make you think the real world, with its idle chatter between bored co-workers, is no place you want to be. This running gag, like many Kaufman bits, makes its point by overstaying its welcome, which can be tough to deal with at 1 a.m.
Stephen Colbert, by the way, falls halfway between Conan and Stewart, it seems to me. Like O’Brien, who was once a member of the L.A. improv troupe called the Groundlings, Colbert has a background in theatre. The way he runs from his desk to his interviewing chair, with his arms outstretched, like Julie Andrews traipsing across a meadow in The Sound of Music, shows a performer completely at home in the world of physical comedy. And yet The Colbert Report shares with its big brother, The Daily Show, the mission to expose the blow-dried egos that keep things humming along on their idiotic course. It’s comedy with a purpose. Late Night has no discernible purpose, and that’s partly what I like about it.
Like Leno and Letterman, Stewart paid his dues as a stand-up, and it shows— he’s primarily a talker whose moments of physical comedy come out of the Rodney Dangerfield playbook. In a battle-of-the-late-night-stars segment that ran during the writers' strike, O’Brien had a mock physical fight with Colbert and Stewart. If you check the tape, you’ll see O’Brien and Colbert really going at it, the hams, while Stewart lurks in the background, seemingly wanting no part of such improvish shenanigans.
Right now viewers don’t have to choose between O’Brien and Stewart. But that could change: Stewart’s contract with Comedy Central is up at the end of 2010— coinciding with Letterman’s expiration date with CBS. Stewart seems a natural fit for the Ed Sullivan Theatre and may very well end up going head-to-head with O’Brien. (Then again, by that time, people may no longer be watching TV in real time. Time slots could have little importance.)
I think what Conan attempts has a greater degree of difficulty than what Stewart is after. And it’s way more ambitious than the pot-roast-and-potatoes comedy served up nightly by Leno. But Stewart and Leno, although far apart in how hard they hit, are alike in that they’re both public servants: their nightly jokes are useful. They help people make sense of a crazy world. So it makes sense that the workmanlike Leno gets the ratings and the sharp Stewart gets the buzz. Conan’s rarefied sense of what’s funny could leave him with nothing more than his cult of admirers— a group with a high tolerance for arbitrary silliness— even after he finds himself at the revamped Universal Stage One.
Recent episodes of Late Night suggest Conan may be trying to inch his way toward a more plainly relevant style of comedy as 2009 draws near. His monologue is longer, its jokes more pointed and more obviously topical— sometimes even satirical in that banally partisan Daily Show manner. A recently recurring Late Night comedy piece has various members of the cast saying stupid things, only to have the word “Ass,” in large red letters, stamped onto the screen, covering their faces. This is beneath the imaginative stuff Late Night fans have come to expect. Another tedious piece has an offstage announcer with a heavy-metal voice shrieking the names of recent guests whose names begin with the letter J. Those two recent bits are dangerously like the stinko gags that have polluted Letterman’s show since Rob Burnett took over as executive producer, in 1996. And Late Night’s usually sublime 18-minute opening has lately been interrupted by a round of commercials, which breaks the comic momentum. Is Universal really so hard up for cash that it needs to mess with its Tonight Show host-to-be?
I’m hoping O’Brien won’t change too much as he prepares for the big job. It would be better for him to go down in the Cone Zone than in some other place less beautifully absurd.
Another complication arose in NBC’s changeover plan last month, when the modest Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, which holds down 12:30 a.m. for CBS, beat Late Night with Conan O’Brien in the ratings for an entire week. This had never happened before, and it came at a bad time for the network and O’Brien. Out of all the late-night hosts, with the possible exception of the sleepy Jimmy Kimmel, Ferguson seems the least ambitious. Unlike O’Brien, Letterman, Leno, and Jon Stewart— all of whom seethe to be the best in their field— Ferguson seems content to put on a nice little show. A former film director and sitcom second banana, he has the relaxed manner of someone who has already proved himself, at least to his own satisfaction. He’s warm, non-neurotic. He would probably make a great dinner-party guest. But his show, which is friendly, civil, and homey, is more about keeping a time slot warm than creating something new or setting the ratings on fire.
So it must have been a shock to O’Brien and his bosses when Ferguson won the week. Especially given that Leno— who was energized by the writers’ strike, during which he trounced a fully staffed Letterman— continues to pull big numbers, while, not coincidentally, taking frequent on-air jabs at NBC. So, has the network placed its bet on the wrong man?
The executives seem committed to going through with it. If they change their minds and decide to keep Leno on at 11:30 p.m., they must pay O’Brien a penalty of a reported $45 million. (Which they can certainly afford, given that The Tonight Show brings in an estimated $160 million per year, according to Variety.) But word leaked out of NBC earlier this week that the network will formally name Saturday Night Live alumnus Jimmy Fallon as the next host of Late Night, suggesting the plan is a go. The announcement is expected to take place tomorrow, during the network’s upfront presentation.
Furthermore, NBC Universal recently sold its 34-acre Burbank lot, the longtime home of The Tonight Show and other NBC programs, according to an April 24 internal corporate memo scooped up by Broadcasting & Cable. Major renovation work is under way at the Universal Stage One lot in Universal City, which was home to The Jack Benny Show between 1961 and 1965, and the leaked memo went on to say that “The Tonight Show With Conan O’Brien … will move to Universal Stage One in 2009.” In January, the Los Angeles Times reported that O’Brien had purchased a home in Brentwood—complete with wine cellar, sauna, screening room, and other L.A. amenities— for more than the $10.5 million asking price. So it looks like the changeover is really going to happen, even though Leno will likely receive offers for the 11:30 slot from ABC and Fox and maybe even an offer for an Arsenio-style syndication deal from Sony.
But if O’Brien’s brand of innovative comedy proves to be like a dog whistle that can be heard only by his current group of roughly 2 million regular viewers, NBC could be in danger of losing a time slot, a show, and a way of watching TV that it pretty much invented in the 1950s. All that pressure could be enough to wilt the host’s famous pompadour.
On a wall to the left of his desk, O’Brien keeps framed photographs of his heroes— Letterman, Ernie Kovacs, Steve Allen, Johnny Carson, Jack Paar. There’s no picture of Leno, and that’s significant. Leno is a joke-delivery machine who excels in taking a newspaper story and making it the pretext for a punch line. He hits his target about half the time. He’s a wholesaler, the Wal-Mart of comedy, and he treats his viewers like customers. When a given joke doesn’t work, he dismisses it with a wave of his hand— unlike his predecessor, the nimble Carson, who relished the challenge of charming laughs out of a failed laugh line by taking his audience gently to task, or by blaming his writers, or simply by giving the camera a quizzical look.
O’Brien is no joke-delivery machine. He does all right in the craft of setup and punch line, but he took off as a performer only when he was able to reproduce, before the camera, what had made him so funny in the writers’ rooms where he had worked as a contributor to The Simpsons and Saturday Night Live. And it shows: a lot of Late Night’s bits have the feel of something that made an unshaven comedy writer do a snot laugh at 2 a.m.
O’Brien’s opening monologue is more a series of gestures than jokes. He points to audience members for no reason, performs his “string-dance,” spins on his mark like a fool, paddles an invisible rowboat, and makes a fetish of his hair to a degree that would do Larry Sanders proud. Whenever a female audience member shouts, “I love you, Conan!” he replies with a curt “I love you, too, sir.” It’s a dumb line that always gets a laugh. If the audience seems overexcited, he says, in a falsetto voice, “Keep cool, my babies.” So his opening remarks, instead of serving as a satirical digest of the day’s events, function mainly as a way to establish a goofy atmosphere, which he, in moments of mock grandiosity, calls the Cone Zone.
In trying to pull off this high silliness, O’Brien has more in common with Steve Martin or Andy Kaufman or even Chuck Barris (in his Gong Show years) than any of his fellow late-night hosts. He wants to re-create the mood you fell into when you were eight years old laughing hysterically over nothing with your cousins in the backseat of your dad’s station wagon. On the nights he succeeds, it’s great. When he fails, a dead-air mood falls over Late Night, and we find ourselves in public-access hell.
His contemporary and main comedy rival (to my mind), Jon Stewart, makes a perfect foil to O’Brien. Where O’Brien depends on slapstick, Stewart goes for verbal wit. Where Conan tries to create a comedy candyland that exists at a distance from the real world and its troubles, Stewart and his correspondents take the world head on and do battle with it. The Daily Show draws nearly a million fewer nightly viewers than Late Night, but it seems to be the more talked-about show, and Stewart has gotten Hollywood’s blessing, with two consecutive Oscar-hosting jobs.
Stewart’s comedy is political, satirical, sceptical. Just beneath the laugh lines you find, simmering, a possibly naïve desire to make the world a better place … or at least the need to leave behind a record showing that some of us weren’t falling for the lines put out by politicians and their hack counterparts in the media. O’Brien’s comedy—apolitical, absurd—suggests the world has fallen into a state that lies beyond satire’s reach. Which may be why his sensibility brings to my mind the 1970s comedy of Martin, Kaufman, and the giddy Gong Show: it rises out of a mood of defeat similar to the one that pervaded the air in that gloriously stupid decade.
Stewart’s more hopeful show— which has its roots in the political comedy of the 50s and 60s— pokes holes in the official story and regularly demonstrates the misguidedness of the war through its careful, albeit comedic, examination of those in charge. Running gags on Late Night, on the other hand, have included the Masturbating Bear, the Horny Manatee, and Raymond, a man with large plastic ears (played by Late Night writer Brian McCann) who hands out tubes of Preparation-H to audience members while singing a little ditty about the discomforts caused by haemorrhoids.
If Stewart is fact based, O’Brien is steeped in a world of cartoonish fiction. The real world rears its head on Late Night only in the mundane-on-purpose conversational segments featuring the host and his bandleader, Max Weinberg— conversations so dull they make you think the real world, with its idle chatter between bored co-workers, is no place you want to be. This running gag, like many Kaufman bits, makes its point by overstaying its welcome, which can be tough to deal with at 1 a.m.
Stephen Colbert, by the way, falls halfway between Conan and Stewart, it seems to me. Like O’Brien, who was once a member of the L.A. improv troupe called the Groundlings, Colbert has a background in theatre. The way he runs from his desk to his interviewing chair, with his arms outstretched, like Julie Andrews traipsing across a meadow in The Sound of Music, shows a performer completely at home in the world of physical comedy. And yet The Colbert Report shares with its big brother, The Daily Show, the mission to expose the blow-dried egos that keep things humming along on their idiotic course. It’s comedy with a purpose. Late Night has no discernible purpose, and that’s partly what I like about it.
Like Leno and Letterman, Stewart paid his dues as a stand-up, and it shows— he’s primarily a talker whose moments of physical comedy come out of the Rodney Dangerfield playbook. In a battle-of-the-late-night-stars segment that ran during the writers' strike, O’Brien had a mock physical fight with Colbert and Stewart. If you check the tape, you’ll see O’Brien and Colbert really going at it, the hams, while Stewart lurks in the background, seemingly wanting no part of such improvish shenanigans.
Right now viewers don’t have to choose between O’Brien and Stewart. But that could change: Stewart’s contract with Comedy Central is up at the end of 2010— coinciding with Letterman’s expiration date with CBS. Stewart seems a natural fit for the Ed Sullivan Theatre and may very well end up going head-to-head with O’Brien. (Then again, by that time, people may no longer be watching TV in real time. Time slots could have little importance.)
I think what Conan attempts has a greater degree of difficulty than what Stewart is after. And it’s way more ambitious than the pot-roast-and-potatoes comedy served up nightly by Leno. But Stewart and Leno, although far apart in how hard they hit, are alike in that they’re both public servants: their nightly jokes are useful. They help people make sense of a crazy world. So it makes sense that the workmanlike Leno gets the ratings and the sharp Stewart gets the buzz. Conan’s rarefied sense of what’s funny could leave him with nothing more than his cult of admirers— a group with a high tolerance for arbitrary silliness— even after he finds himself at the revamped Universal Stage One.
Recent episodes of Late Night suggest Conan may be trying to inch his way toward a more plainly relevant style of comedy as 2009 draws near. His monologue is longer, its jokes more pointed and more obviously topical— sometimes even satirical in that banally partisan Daily Show manner. A recently recurring Late Night comedy piece has various members of the cast saying stupid things, only to have the word “Ass,” in large red letters, stamped onto the screen, covering their faces. This is beneath the imaginative stuff Late Night fans have come to expect. Another tedious piece has an offstage announcer with a heavy-metal voice shrieking the names of recent guests whose names begin with the letter J. Those two recent bits are dangerously like the stinko gags that have polluted Letterman’s show since Rob Burnett took over as executive producer, in 1996. And Late Night’s usually sublime 18-minute opening has lately been interrupted by a round of commercials, which breaks the comic momentum. Is Universal really so hard up for cash that it needs to mess with its Tonight Show host-to-be?
I’m hoping O’Brien won’t change too much as he prepares for the big job. It would be better for him to go down in the Cone Zone than in some other place less beautifully absurd.
VH1's pale imitation of the Sexual Revolution
This is compelling television to be sure -- after all, we're talking about sex: hippies cavorting in the altogether. Women's libbers brandishing their bras. Playboy bunnies and Hugh Hefner. Helen Gurley Brown and Burt Reynolds's naked centrefold. Suburban swingers. Jaybird-naked couples shedding what remains of their inhibitions at the infamous Plato's Retreat. Drag queens and porn stars. But there's something missing from this made-in-America tableau: Almost every single one of the characters in the spotlight is white, notes Teresa Witz.
Such is the case with VH1's new, four-part documentary series: Sex: The Revolution, which starts tomorrow night. "Sex" presents a sweeping survey of the seismic changes in 20th-century American sexual mores, and the legal and cultural shifts that resulted from it. A large part of the problem is that it tries to do too much, tossing out historical highlights and lowlights at breathtaking speed. The talking heads who shape the discourse over four hours -- Erica Jong, Armistead Maupin, Hefner and Gloria Steinem -- tend to be the usual suspects, while black and brown folks get shoved to the background. They're the soundtrack through which white folks found sexual salvation. (Cue the Little Richard music. See the stoned sister falling out of her dress at Studio 54.)
"It's true," says Hart Perry, who directed the series along with Richard Lowe. "At one point, we were dealing with the cultural crossover between black and white . . . when we talk about rock-and-roll. I wanted to talk about Norman Mailer, the 'White Negro.' . . . [But] there was too much competition for stories. This is certainly not the definitive story on the sexual revolution."
It is a story of the sexual revolution, shown through "the artifacts of culture," news footage, films, music videos, photographs, with a chorus of white boomers commenting on the action, and reminiscing about times gone by. Melvin Van Peebles, black feminist Michele Wallace, Danny Glover and musician Nile Rodgers make brief appearances; no Latinos or Asians are interviewed. (Glover on San Francisco's "Summer of Love": "It was about taking mescaline and getting laid. Or smoking weed and getting laid.")
Question: How can you talk about the cultural icons of the sexual revolution and not discuss blaxploitation diva Pam Grier? Or extol the significance of a loincloth-clad Jo Raquel Tejada, a.k.a. Raquel Welch, in "One Million Years B.C."? Why is it that instead we are told that the poster girl for the female orgasm was Jane Fonda in "Barbarella"? Or Marilyn Chambers, the Ivory Snow soap model gone bad in "Behind the Green Door"?
In days gone by -- many days gone by -- we as a nation were a buttoned-up lot, having sex but never copping to it, repressed and reactionary. Good girls didn't do it, not unless they'd signed on the dotted line, crossing the great divide between Mrs. and Miss. Good boys never did it with other boys. The bad boys who did were thrown in jail, diagnosed as sick and probed with electrodes in an effort to "cure" them. Throughout much of the country, interracial marriage was illegal, as was birth control -- even for married couples in Connecticut. Fear ruled. You fornicated at your peril. But after Alfred Kinsey, the '60s, the Pill, Stonewall and Roe v. Wade, something changed: Now people were doing it and talking about it.
So where's the full conversation in "Sex: The Revolution"? Perry says he wanted to explore the legacy of lynching victim Emmett Till and the lethal fear of black male sexuality. But largely missing also is the inclusion of African Americans, Latinos, Asians, etc., as participants in the process. Watching the first segment, we see sex anthropologist Kinsey in the late 1940s and early '50s loosening up America with his books, "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male" and "Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female," and we see black-and-white films featuring terrified white kids scared to even kiss. Then the footage cuts to Little Richard jamming with his guitar, and suddenly the (white) kids are rocking and rolling and going nuts. The message: Black sexuality is alien and different from "mainstream" society, contagious and powerful enough to make everyone else abandon all constraints.
When white feminists are talking about being pushed to the sidelines of the antiwar movement by macho males, the segment cries out for a little perspective. Like hearing how Black Power pioneers Kathleen Cleaver and Elaine Brown felt when Stokely Carmichael declared that the only position for a woman in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was "prone."
It's cool that the filmmakers explore the beginnings of the gay and lesbian pride movement, and how the Stonewall uprising of '69 was the watershed moment in the movement. But it would've been nice if the directors had acknowledged that it was black and Puerto Rican drag queens such as the late Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera who got things started back when the cops showed up at the Stonewall Inn.
Sex: The Revolution airs on VH1 at 10 p.m. Monday through Thursday. Uncensored encore showings will be on the Sundance Channel on May 19 and 20 at 12 a.m.
Such is the case with VH1's new, four-part documentary series: Sex: The Revolution, which starts tomorrow night. "Sex" presents a sweeping survey of the seismic changes in 20th-century American sexual mores, and the legal and cultural shifts that resulted from it. A large part of the problem is that it tries to do too much, tossing out historical highlights and lowlights at breathtaking speed. The talking heads who shape the discourse over four hours -- Erica Jong, Armistead Maupin, Hefner and Gloria Steinem -- tend to be the usual suspects, while black and brown folks get shoved to the background. They're the soundtrack through which white folks found sexual salvation. (Cue the Little Richard music. See the stoned sister falling out of her dress at Studio 54.)
"It's true," says Hart Perry, who directed the series along with Richard Lowe. "At one point, we were dealing with the cultural crossover between black and white . . . when we talk about rock-and-roll. I wanted to talk about Norman Mailer, the 'White Negro.' . . . [But] there was too much competition for stories. This is certainly not the definitive story on the sexual revolution."
It is a story of the sexual revolution, shown through "the artifacts of culture," news footage, films, music videos, photographs, with a chorus of white boomers commenting on the action, and reminiscing about times gone by. Melvin Van Peebles, black feminist Michele Wallace, Danny Glover and musician Nile Rodgers make brief appearances; no Latinos or Asians are interviewed. (Glover on San Francisco's "Summer of Love": "It was about taking mescaline and getting laid. Or smoking weed and getting laid.")
Question: How can you talk about the cultural icons of the sexual revolution and not discuss blaxploitation diva Pam Grier? Or extol the significance of a loincloth-clad Jo Raquel Tejada, a.k.a. Raquel Welch, in "One Million Years B.C."? Why is it that instead we are told that the poster girl for the female orgasm was Jane Fonda in "Barbarella"? Or Marilyn Chambers, the Ivory Snow soap model gone bad in "Behind the Green Door"?
In days gone by -- many days gone by -- we as a nation were a buttoned-up lot, having sex but never copping to it, repressed and reactionary. Good girls didn't do it, not unless they'd signed on the dotted line, crossing the great divide between Mrs. and Miss. Good boys never did it with other boys. The bad boys who did were thrown in jail, diagnosed as sick and probed with electrodes in an effort to "cure" them. Throughout much of the country, interracial marriage was illegal, as was birth control -- even for married couples in Connecticut. Fear ruled. You fornicated at your peril. But after Alfred Kinsey, the '60s, the Pill, Stonewall and Roe v. Wade, something changed: Now people were doing it and talking about it.
So where's the full conversation in "Sex: The Revolution"? Perry says he wanted to explore the legacy of lynching victim Emmett Till and the lethal fear of black male sexuality. But largely missing also is the inclusion of African Americans, Latinos, Asians, etc., as participants in the process. Watching the first segment, we see sex anthropologist Kinsey in the late 1940s and early '50s loosening up America with his books, "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male" and "Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female," and we see black-and-white films featuring terrified white kids scared to even kiss. Then the footage cuts to Little Richard jamming with his guitar, and suddenly the (white) kids are rocking and rolling and going nuts. The message: Black sexuality is alien and different from "mainstream" society, contagious and powerful enough to make everyone else abandon all constraints.
When white feminists are talking about being pushed to the sidelines of the antiwar movement by macho males, the segment cries out for a little perspective. Like hearing how Black Power pioneers Kathleen Cleaver and Elaine Brown felt when Stokely Carmichael declared that the only position for a woman in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was "prone."
It's cool that the filmmakers explore the beginnings of the gay and lesbian pride movement, and how the Stonewall uprising of '69 was the watershed moment in the movement. But it would've been nice if the directors had acknowledged that it was black and Puerto Rican drag queens such as the late Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera who got things started back when the cops showed up at the Stonewall Inn.
Sex: The Revolution airs on VH1 at 10 p.m. Monday through Thursday. Uncensored encore showings will be on the Sundance Channel on May 19 and 20 at 12 a.m.
Saturday, 10 May 2008
Schtumbleword Verboten!
Sometimes I think the whole of humankind can be separated into two types: those who pay attention to song lyrics, and those who don't. And those who don't should be rounded up and throttled to death. By robots. With merciless strangling hands says Charlie Brooker.
I'm exaggerating, but only slightly. I love lyrics. If you don't listen to the words, you're no friend of mine. The words are where 50 per cent of a song's meaning resides, and it's shocking how many people just don't seem to hear them, even when they're startlingly clear. I once had to explain to someone what 'Common People' by Pulp was about, even though they'd listened to it a billion times. How wilfully dumb can you get?
Perhaps I find it frustrating because I've been cursed with an almost autistic ability to memorise song lyrics after one or two listens. But rather than recall them accurately, I tinker about and replace them with new words for my own amusement; and it's these re-written versions which ultimately remain lodged in my mind. I can't hear 'Thinking Of You' by Sister Sledge, for instance, without assuming the chorus goes: "I'm thinking of you/And the things you do to me/That make me love you/Now I'm livin' in Exeter".
My current favourite internalised mental replacement lyric is a disarmingly basic one in which I simply substitute the name Eleanor Rigby with "Robert Mugabe", because it scans. Every time I watch the news and something about Zimbabwe comes on, I hear Paul McCartney lament that Robert Mugabe died in the church and was buried along with his name. Nobody came. This is why I'd be hopeless on Don't Forget The Lyrics! (Sun, 7pm, Sky One), a new Shane Richie gameshow whose primary game mechanic is explained in its title.
And it's quite bossy, that title. It sounds like the sort of thing an insane Nazi commandant forcing a yard full of PoWs to perform a musical at gunpoint might bark at the top of his voice just before shooting someone for fumbling the chorus of Frosty The Snowman. They should've called it "Nicht Forgetten Das Lyrics!", or "Schtumbleword Verboten!". Or "Don't Forget the Lyrics, Mofo!", which isn't very German, but accurately conveys the urgency of the situation.
Anyway, the show is just like Who Wants To Be A Millionaire only with karaoke instead of questions. Each week, an annoying member of the public comes on and jumps up and down and says how excited they are until you want to punch them all the way to Barbados and back. Then Shane asks them to pick a category of song: pop, say, or glam rock, or TV theme tunes; we're talking crowd-pleasers, OK, so there's no Joy Division or anything. Then the in-house band starts playing, the lyrics come up on a big screen, and the contestant wails the song as cacophonously as possible while maintaining the beatific grin of the thuddingly stupid.
And then! Suddenly! The on-screen lyrics are whisked away! And the singer has to finish the next line FROM MEMORY! If they get every single word right, the pot increases and they proceed to the next round, eventually hitting a jackpot of £250,000. If a contstant gets it wrong, Shane leads them to a desolate, snowblown corner of the stage, commands them to get down on their knees and unloads a single bullet into the back of their head. The body is left in plain sight for the remainder of the programme as a warning to others of its kind: DON'T FORGET THE LYRICS!
Yet another superb episode of The Apprentice (Wed, 9pm, BBC1) last Wednesday, although for some reason no matter how many people Sir Alan ejects, it feels as though their overall number fails to dwindle. Two got the chop last week, and there's still eight of the bastards in there. Still, at least this means you can pick more than one favourite: for me, it's got to be Raef, Sara or Lucinda.
Them to win. Go them. Go them.
I'm exaggerating, but only slightly. I love lyrics. If you don't listen to the words, you're no friend of mine. The words are where 50 per cent of a song's meaning resides, and it's shocking how many people just don't seem to hear them, even when they're startlingly clear. I once had to explain to someone what 'Common People' by Pulp was about, even though they'd listened to it a billion times. How wilfully dumb can you get?
Perhaps I find it frustrating because I've been cursed with an almost autistic ability to memorise song lyrics after one or two listens. But rather than recall them accurately, I tinker about and replace them with new words for my own amusement; and it's these re-written versions which ultimately remain lodged in my mind. I can't hear 'Thinking Of You' by Sister Sledge, for instance, without assuming the chorus goes: "I'm thinking of you/And the things you do to me/That make me love you/Now I'm livin' in Exeter".
My current favourite internalised mental replacement lyric is a disarmingly basic one in which I simply substitute the name Eleanor Rigby with "Robert Mugabe", because it scans. Every time I watch the news and something about Zimbabwe comes on, I hear Paul McCartney lament that Robert Mugabe died in the church and was buried along with his name. Nobody came. This is why I'd be hopeless on Don't Forget The Lyrics! (Sun, 7pm, Sky One), a new Shane Richie gameshow whose primary game mechanic is explained in its title.
And it's quite bossy, that title. It sounds like the sort of thing an insane Nazi commandant forcing a yard full of PoWs to perform a musical at gunpoint might bark at the top of his voice just before shooting someone for fumbling the chorus of Frosty The Snowman. They should've called it "Nicht Forgetten Das Lyrics!", or "Schtumbleword Verboten!". Or "Don't Forget the Lyrics, Mofo!", which isn't very German, but accurately conveys the urgency of the situation.
Anyway, the show is just like Who Wants To Be A Millionaire only with karaoke instead of questions. Each week, an annoying member of the public comes on and jumps up and down and says how excited they are until you want to punch them all the way to Barbados and back. Then Shane asks them to pick a category of song: pop, say, or glam rock, or TV theme tunes; we're talking crowd-pleasers, OK, so there's no Joy Division or anything. Then the in-house band starts playing, the lyrics come up on a big screen, and the contestant wails the song as cacophonously as possible while maintaining the beatific grin of the thuddingly stupid.
And then! Suddenly! The on-screen lyrics are whisked away! And the singer has to finish the next line FROM MEMORY! If they get every single word right, the pot increases and they proceed to the next round, eventually hitting a jackpot of £250,000. If a contstant gets it wrong, Shane leads them to a desolate, snowblown corner of the stage, commands them to get down on their knees and unloads a single bullet into the back of their head. The body is left in plain sight for the remainder of the programme as a warning to others of its kind: DON'T FORGET THE LYRICS!
Yet another superb episode of The Apprentice (Wed, 9pm, BBC1) last Wednesday, although for some reason no matter how many people Sir Alan ejects, it feels as though their overall number fails to dwindle. Two got the chop last week, and there's still eight of the bastards in there. Still, at least this means you can pick more than one favourite: for me, it's got to be Raef, Sara or Lucinda.
Them to win. Go them. Go them.
This telly tosh is another wheeze to tax stupidity
Forgive the cynicism, but one can't help feeling the most fake thing in the whole telly fakery saga is ITV's contrition. On the same day that Ofcom fined them £5.675m for "seriously and repeatedly misleading their audience", ITV revealed that the 2005 "people's choice" British Comedy Award had been given to Ant and Dec, despite the fact that Catherine Tate had polled more premium-rate phone votes. Understandably, speculation has arisen that the broadcaster saw Thursday as a good day to bury bad news - though it was unclear which of these shockers was supposed to be interring the other, says Marina Hyde.
You hear a lot of talk about demographics in television, with timeworn received wisdom stating that the advertisers want shows that appeal to their much-courted ABC1s. Unfortunately, you also hear a lot of talk about there being no bloody advertisers these days. ITV's strategy to counter this seems to have been twofold. First: make shows that appeal to the much-courted gullible viewer demographic, hence the pox of endless phone votes dressed up as "interactivity", even though the last thing people appeared willing to countenance was ceding any editorial control to the plebs.
The second plank of the strategy - and in a minute we'll come to depressing indications that this one is nowhere near as abandoned as ITV would have you believe - was to appeal to the much-courted drunken moron bracket. Yes, I'm afraid it's time to revisit the broadcaster's now defunct phone-in brand, ITV Play, and more specifically The Mint.
Did you ever see this show, which until last year ran for hours on end after midnight, and which asked often obscurantist questions of the few callers taken off premium-rate hold? If not, it is best described as ITV's attempt to construct a 10th circle of hell, then encourage the deeply irksome presenter Brian Dowling to fill it with callers hoping to win "a life-changing amount of money" (£200). Ofcom tartly observed that viewers invited to guess the contents of a woman's handbag could not reasonably have been expected to go for rawlplugs and a balaclava. Yet when the questions weren't wilfully impossible, The Mint was somehow even worse, unable to hide the fact that it was basically a wheeze to tax stupidity. "List any four-digit number," Brian instructed on one occasion. "74,310," the caller replied. Other typical howlers? Question: "Name a county in the UK." Answer: "France." "Name a celebrity quiz show host." "Sheffield." "Name a celebrity with a nickname." "Condoms."
The Mint was a show no ITV executive could have watched without cringing, because even by the standards of call-TV it was shoddy. To my knowledge, some senior staff were sheepish about the vast sums being raked in by such a poor-quality product. Thank God nobody one knew socially saw the thing. Eventually, though, the viewers got it into their thick heads that the call selection system was grossly unfair, and the business with the rawlplugs and all the other telly fakery combined to put them off phoning in. Announcing ITV Play's closure last year, Michael Grade stated: "Viewers have voted with their dialling fingers." And we all know in what sacred reverence ITV hold a viewer vote.
Perhaps it's no surprise, then, that in recent weeks industry gossip has hinted there was a certain impatience on ITV's part for Ofcom to hurry up and hand down their fine. The sooner it was out of the way, you see, the sooner they could start coining it off the viewers again, in one of those late night shows that no one who really matters sits slack-jawed in front of. So now we've drawn a line under the unpleasantness ... eyes down, ladies and gents, for Bingo Night Live! ITV's latest attempt to charm the Bafta judges will go out from midnight on weekday nights, and your host is strongly rumoured to be Mr Brian Dowling. Upsettingly, ITV didn't want to discuss details of this latest outreach programme yesterday, but enough has seeped out to give you a flavour. According to sources close to the project, the TV game will be free to enter (unlike The Mint), but is intended to drive viewers to ITV's gambling website, where they can play poker and the like for premium rates.
Do you see what they've done there? The business of parting viewers with their cash has been bumped off air - where it's regulated by Ofcom - to the web. Where it isn't. As for the show, it will feature an array of guests who "include statisticians who will talk about the most fortunate parts of the country and the luckiest star signs". So they're clearly going after the gullible gambler demographic now. Of course, ITV is a commercial enterprise and it has to make money. But what does it say about a broadcaster that their revenue-generating ideas appear to revolve around getting gamblers or drunks to bung them cash? Until they take the harder route and start making better television, us lowly viewers should take heed of James Bond's sound advice in one of the Ian Fleming books. According to 007, one should never trust a business that makes its money after midnight.
You hear a lot of talk about demographics in television, with timeworn received wisdom stating that the advertisers want shows that appeal to their much-courted ABC1s. Unfortunately, you also hear a lot of talk about there being no bloody advertisers these days. ITV's strategy to counter this seems to have been twofold. First: make shows that appeal to the much-courted gullible viewer demographic, hence the pox of endless phone votes dressed up as "interactivity", even though the last thing people appeared willing to countenance was ceding any editorial control to the plebs.
The second plank of the strategy - and in a minute we'll come to depressing indications that this one is nowhere near as abandoned as ITV would have you believe - was to appeal to the much-courted drunken moron bracket. Yes, I'm afraid it's time to revisit the broadcaster's now defunct phone-in brand, ITV Play, and more specifically The Mint.
Did you ever see this show, which until last year ran for hours on end after midnight, and which asked often obscurantist questions of the few callers taken off premium-rate hold? If not, it is best described as ITV's attempt to construct a 10th circle of hell, then encourage the deeply irksome presenter Brian Dowling to fill it with callers hoping to win "a life-changing amount of money" (£200). Ofcom tartly observed that viewers invited to guess the contents of a woman's handbag could not reasonably have been expected to go for rawlplugs and a balaclava. Yet when the questions weren't wilfully impossible, The Mint was somehow even worse, unable to hide the fact that it was basically a wheeze to tax stupidity. "List any four-digit number," Brian instructed on one occasion. "74,310," the caller replied. Other typical howlers? Question: "Name a county in the UK." Answer: "France." "Name a celebrity quiz show host." "Sheffield." "Name a celebrity with a nickname." "Condoms."
The Mint was a show no ITV executive could have watched without cringing, because even by the standards of call-TV it was shoddy. To my knowledge, some senior staff were sheepish about the vast sums being raked in by such a poor-quality product. Thank God nobody one knew socially saw the thing. Eventually, though, the viewers got it into their thick heads that the call selection system was grossly unfair, and the business with the rawlplugs and all the other telly fakery combined to put them off phoning in. Announcing ITV Play's closure last year, Michael Grade stated: "Viewers have voted with their dialling fingers." And we all know in what sacred reverence ITV hold a viewer vote.
Perhaps it's no surprise, then, that in recent weeks industry gossip has hinted there was a certain impatience on ITV's part for Ofcom to hurry up and hand down their fine. The sooner it was out of the way, you see, the sooner they could start coining it off the viewers again, in one of those late night shows that no one who really matters sits slack-jawed in front of. So now we've drawn a line under the unpleasantness ... eyes down, ladies and gents, for Bingo Night Live! ITV's latest attempt to charm the Bafta judges will go out from midnight on weekday nights, and your host is strongly rumoured to be Mr Brian Dowling. Upsettingly, ITV didn't want to discuss details of this latest outreach programme yesterday, but enough has seeped out to give you a flavour. According to sources close to the project, the TV game will be free to enter (unlike The Mint), but is intended to drive viewers to ITV's gambling website, where they can play poker and the like for premium rates.
Do you see what they've done there? The business of parting viewers with their cash has been bumped off air - where it's regulated by Ofcom - to the web. Where it isn't. As for the show, it will feature an array of guests who "include statisticians who will talk about the most fortunate parts of the country and the luckiest star signs". So they're clearly going after the gullible gambler demographic now. Of course, ITV is a commercial enterprise and it has to make money. But what does it say about a broadcaster that their revenue-generating ideas appear to revolve around getting gamblers or drunks to bung them cash? Until they take the harder route and start making better television, us lowly viewers should take heed of James Bond's sound advice in one of the Ian Fleming books. According to 007, one should never trust a business that makes its money after midnight.
Friday, 9 May 2008
Headmistress to the nation
Alan Sugar may be the boss, but Margaret Mountford, his quick-witted aide with the sharp tongue, is proving to be the real star of The Apprentice, says Anna Pickard...
In the quietened boardroom, three great minds are in hushed conversation, their greying heads tipped together. Sir Alan Sugar and his two sidekicks are puzzled by the Jewish candidate who didn't know what a kosher chicken was. "But he's clever, isn't he? Didn't he go to Edinburgh?" says one, Nick Hewer. "Well," weighs in the only woman in the room, and with a slight sneer. "I think Edinburgh isn't what it used to be." And with eight words, a city fell. Well, not quite fell, but certainly wondered what it had done to incur the wrath of Margaret Mountford.
The eminent Mountford is, to the outside eye, a bit-part player in the tremendously successful series The Apprentice. A formidable force in British business, she was born in Northern Ireland and read law at Girton College, Cambridge. Late in her career, she has found a fame she never expected as the UK's favourite disapproving headmistress. As one of the two aides to Sir Alan, she shadows the teams on their tasks, delivers the results to the boss and helps to decide who should stay and who be fired.
Clearly, then, a powerful, public figure. Will Edinburgh University be burning the library down, hanging up its mortar boards and calling it a day? "The University of Edinburgh is one of the UK's most successful and popular universities," replies a spokesman, by email. "It is regularly ranked among the top 50 universities in the world and is currently going through a period of unprecedented growth."
He would not be drawn further into a discussion on the devastating effect Mountford might have on future university statistics. But her withering putdown shows how integral she has become in a show watched by millions every week. As each series develops, the interplay between Sir Alan and his aides - who have both been working with the Amstrad overlord on normal, non-televised business projects for more than 20 years - has a kind of magic that no television producer could have been expecting.
The interplay between Hewer, Mountford and the contestants, meanwhile, often feels like a couple of university professors asked to teach a nursery-school class - or a pair of curious children given free rein to examine the scuttling of some tiny insects with a magnifying glass on a sunny day. While the candidates themselves beetle about performing their ludicrous tasks, the camera cuts to Mountford or Hewer providing a perfect reflection of whatever the audience happens to be thinking - whether it's an approving nod or a stare so fearsome you wonder that the victim doesn't burst into flames.
Mountford's signature look is the rolling of her eyes to heaven. Indeed, most of her loudest comments about the candidates are almost entirely nonverbal. The eye-rolling is frequently accompanied by a heartfelt sigh; in extremis, a sickened pursing of the lips. Her reaction to any act of stupidity is to drop her jaw in shock and amazement. Complete idiocy causes an additional flaring of the nostrils. As contestant Michael Sophocles celebrated his team's Singles' Day greetings cards having won the task - by dint of being the "least worst" product on offer - with whoops, shouts and air-punching, Mountford could not have looked more disgusted had he marched an army of water buffalo into the boardroom and asked them all to fart on cue.
But it's also Mountford's quick-witted plain-speaking nature that we love. Outside a pub, avoiding Sophocles' appalling Frank Sinatra impressions at his team's Italian-themed evening, she commented: "I'm not sure what has more cheese in it, the pizza or that racket." When high-cheek-boned but responsibility-shy Alex tried to avoid claims of having stepped back when asked to be deputy leader, scared of being blamed later, Margaret told the boss, and the world, with a snort: "You stepped so far back from it you were practically out the room."
You wonder how long her patience can last. As she heaves yet another sigh and drops her shoulders another weary inch, it seems unlikely that she would want to sign up for another series where her beloved world of high business is turned into a circus of shiny suits. However, the loss of Mountford would be a terrible blow to the series. She is our voice on screen, our bridge between the unbearable back-stabbing candidates and the real world. Without her, would we still make the leap?
Firm, fierce, witty and wise; aspirational, sensational and eminently sensible. Margaret Mountford, we salute you.
In the quietened boardroom, three great minds are in hushed conversation, their greying heads tipped together. Sir Alan Sugar and his two sidekicks are puzzled by the Jewish candidate who didn't know what a kosher chicken was. "But he's clever, isn't he? Didn't he go to Edinburgh?" says one, Nick Hewer. "Well," weighs in the only woman in the room, and with a slight sneer. "I think Edinburgh isn't what it used to be." And with eight words, a city fell. Well, not quite fell, but certainly wondered what it had done to incur the wrath of Margaret Mountford.
The eminent Mountford is, to the outside eye, a bit-part player in the tremendously successful series The Apprentice. A formidable force in British business, she was born in Northern Ireland and read law at Girton College, Cambridge. Late in her career, she has found a fame she never expected as the UK's favourite disapproving headmistress. As one of the two aides to Sir Alan, she shadows the teams on their tasks, delivers the results to the boss and helps to decide who should stay and who be fired.
Clearly, then, a powerful, public figure. Will Edinburgh University be burning the library down, hanging up its mortar boards and calling it a day? "The University of Edinburgh is one of the UK's most successful and popular universities," replies a spokesman, by email. "It is regularly ranked among the top 50 universities in the world and is currently going through a period of unprecedented growth."
He would not be drawn further into a discussion on the devastating effect Mountford might have on future university statistics. But her withering putdown shows how integral she has become in a show watched by millions every week. As each series develops, the interplay between Sir Alan and his aides - who have both been working with the Amstrad overlord on normal, non-televised business projects for more than 20 years - has a kind of magic that no television producer could have been expecting.
The interplay between Hewer, Mountford and the contestants, meanwhile, often feels like a couple of university professors asked to teach a nursery-school class - or a pair of curious children given free rein to examine the scuttling of some tiny insects with a magnifying glass on a sunny day. While the candidates themselves beetle about performing their ludicrous tasks, the camera cuts to Mountford or Hewer providing a perfect reflection of whatever the audience happens to be thinking - whether it's an approving nod or a stare so fearsome you wonder that the victim doesn't burst into flames.
Mountford's signature look is the rolling of her eyes to heaven. Indeed, most of her loudest comments about the candidates are almost entirely nonverbal. The eye-rolling is frequently accompanied by a heartfelt sigh; in extremis, a sickened pursing of the lips. Her reaction to any act of stupidity is to drop her jaw in shock and amazement. Complete idiocy causes an additional flaring of the nostrils. As contestant Michael Sophocles celebrated his team's Singles' Day greetings cards having won the task - by dint of being the "least worst" product on offer - with whoops, shouts and air-punching, Mountford could not have looked more disgusted had he marched an army of water buffalo into the boardroom and asked them all to fart on cue.
But it's also Mountford's quick-witted plain-speaking nature that we love. Outside a pub, avoiding Sophocles' appalling Frank Sinatra impressions at his team's Italian-themed evening, she commented: "I'm not sure what has more cheese in it, the pizza or that racket." When high-cheek-boned but responsibility-shy Alex tried to avoid claims of having stepped back when asked to be deputy leader, scared of being blamed later, Margaret told the boss, and the world, with a snort: "You stepped so far back from it you were practically out the room."
You wonder how long her patience can last. As she heaves yet another sigh and drops her shoulders another weary inch, it seems unlikely that she would want to sign up for another series where her beloved world of high business is turned into a circus of shiny suits. However, the loss of Mountford would be a terrible blow to the series. She is our voice on screen, our bridge between the unbearable back-stabbing candidates and the real world. Without her, would we still make the leap?
Firm, fierce, witty and wise; aspirational, sensational and eminently sensible. Margaret Mountford, we salute you.
This lethal peepshow
Journalistic values are often revealed by attitude to foreign news. American television, for example, generally covers few events outside the states, and is even wary of giving airtime to wars fought by America overseas. And, as a rough rule, broadsheet papers will have four or five foreign pages, while red-tops allocate one or fewer.
Unusually, though, this week's Sun front pages have alternated between two foreign stories: the Burmese cyclone and the Austrian cellar scandal. Similar news judgment has been shown by most media organisations here and even in the United States, where the apprehension about events not directly involving Americans has been suspended, although perhaps more for the Austrian family than the dead in Burma. Yet a global village of news is creating not worldwide concern, but voyeurism, notes Mark Lawson.
Because the most common critique of national media is parochialism, this expansiveness of interest could be seen as an occasion for celebration. Traditionally, populist newspapers and broadcasters have applied a version of their attitude to the employment market and immigration to stories from far-flung parts: British stories for British readers. In contrast, the more expensive end of the news stand has implied a moral duty to be globally aware: no reader is an island.
Underlying both these approaches, however, is a judgment of relevance to the consumer several time-zones away. Mass-market outlets have favoured tales that have a direct effect on their consumers (prices, strikes, bombs, celebrities), while niche media prefer stories which, while directly irrelevant to their audience, are argued to make us better people for knowing about them. Widespread coverage of the 2008 American election, for instance, can be defended by either measure, as the participants are famous and the winner may preside over a recession or invasion that will significantly shape British days and the lives of almost everyone in a single-superpower world.
But by no imaginable checklist, other than gruesome prurience, is there any need for us to know so many details of what happened in Herr Fritzl's underground dungeon. Marshall McLuhan - the Canadian academic who prophesied the idea of the "global village", but died two decades before the web and 24-hour news proved his remarkable prescience - hoped that the collapse of boundaries would create a kind of universal human concern, in which, while looking at everyone else, we would also look out for them. But when an Austrian family tragedy becomes home news in the US and the UK, it can seem that the interchange of information has created not worldwide concern but global voyeurism.
The point of journalism is not just to show, but to tell: to explain what is going on. And yet the cellar story - and even the cyclone - are most likely to induce a feeling of impotent bewilderment in viewers. These are stories that can not be accommodated by any theory of god or government. In both cases, I have felt guilty about tuning in to such despairing data. The Austrian material made me wonder if a cinema-style system of age certification may soon have to be introduced for news.
At least the Burmese coverage has an effect beyond a lethal peepshow in the appeals for western charitable cash that are already appearing amid the coverage. This arrangement feels right: a sort of licence-fee for having witnessed this pain in a place that it usually ignored. The risk is that Austria and Burma - or future nations struck by flood or a psychopathic paterfamilias - become of interest simply because of the horrible fascination of their narratives, becoming genres in a schedule of entertainment: real-life horror and disaster movies. At worst, the media may become a version of British high street cuisine over the last 40 years, in which burgers and fish and chips have given way to a UN of food. And so readers of newspapers or viewers of TV news become internationalist snackers, feeding their morbid hunger with Chinese one day, Burmese the next, even occasionally prepared to give Austrian a go if it's really spicy stuff.
And concern for these countries is unlikely to become a habit as common as curry or chow mein. In the last few decades, Austria has appeared in the international media only with regard to men hiding young women in cellars and the possibility that certain of its politicians might be Nazis, with the two sorts of stories now linked by commentators who argue that the forms of Austrian notoriety are linked, with some of the country's men acting out a kink planted by the use of underground bunkers by both the Nazis and those hiding from them. This line of thought is clearly tempting, although most Britons would be unhappy if they switched on the television in Vienna to see a pundit using Fred West as an exemplar of the national attitude to family and sex.
McLuhan used the image of the world becoming a village because he wanted a metaphor for a community in which everyone knows each other's business. But, even in such a place, it's possible to get a reputation as a busybody or gossip. As long as we're rattling the charity tins, staring over the fence at drowned Burmese is fine. But, when it comes to the Austrian monster, sometimes, in the global village, we should mind our own business.
Unusually, though, this week's Sun front pages have alternated between two foreign stories: the Burmese cyclone and the Austrian cellar scandal. Similar news judgment has been shown by most media organisations here and even in the United States, where the apprehension about events not directly involving Americans has been suspended, although perhaps more for the Austrian family than the dead in Burma. Yet a global village of news is creating not worldwide concern, but voyeurism, notes Mark Lawson.
Because the most common critique of national media is parochialism, this expansiveness of interest could be seen as an occasion for celebration. Traditionally, populist newspapers and broadcasters have applied a version of their attitude to the employment market and immigration to stories from far-flung parts: British stories for British readers. In contrast, the more expensive end of the news stand has implied a moral duty to be globally aware: no reader is an island.
Underlying both these approaches, however, is a judgment of relevance to the consumer several time-zones away. Mass-market outlets have favoured tales that have a direct effect on their consumers (prices, strikes, bombs, celebrities), while niche media prefer stories which, while directly irrelevant to their audience, are argued to make us better people for knowing about them. Widespread coverage of the 2008 American election, for instance, can be defended by either measure, as the participants are famous and the winner may preside over a recession or invasion that will significantly shape British days and the lives of almost everyone in a single-superpower world.
But by no imaginable checklist, other than gruesome prurience, is there any need for us to know so many details of what happened in Herr Fritzl's underground dungeon. Marshall McLuhan - the Canadian academic who prophesied the idea of the "global village", but died two decades before the web and 24-hour news proved his remarkable prescience - hoped that the collapse of boundaries would create a kind of universal human concern, in which, while looking at everyone else, we would also look out for them. But when an Austrian family tragedy becomes home news in the US and the UK, it can seem that the interchange of information has created not worldwide concern but global voyeurism.
The point of journalism is not just to show, but to tell: to explain what is going on. And yet the cellar story - and even the cyclone - are most likely to induce a feeling of impotent bewilderment in viewers. These are stories that can not be accommodated by any theory of god or government. In both cases, I have felt guilty about tuning in to such despairing data. The Austrian material made me wonder if a cinema-style system of age certification may soon have to be introduced for news.
At least the Burmese coverage has an effect beyond a lethal peepshow in the appeals for western charitable cash that are already appearing amid the coverage. This arrangement feels right: a sort of licence-fee for having witnessed this pain in a place that it usually ignored. The risk is that Austria and Burma - or future nations struck by flood or a psychopathic paterfamilias - become of interest simply because of the horrible fascination of their narratives, becoming genres in a schedule of entertainment: real-life horror and disaster movies. At worst, the media may become a version of British high street cuisine over the last 40 years, in which burgers and fish and chips have given way to a UN of food. And so readers of newspapers or viewers of TV news become internationalist snackers, feeding their morbid hunger with Chinese one day, Burmese the next, even occasionally prepared to give Austrian a go if it's really spicy stuff.
And concern for these countries is unlikely to become a habit as common as curry or chow mein. In the last few decades, Austria has appeared in the international media only with regard to men hiding young women in cellars and the possibility that certain of its politicians might be Nazis, with the two sorts of stories now linked by commentators who argue that the forms of Austrian notoriety are linked, with some of the country's men acting out a kink planted by the use of underground bunkers by both the Nazis and those hiding from them. This line of thought is clearly tempting, although most Britons would be unhappy if they switched on the television in Vienna to see a pundit using Fred West as an exemplar of the national attitude to family and sex.
McLuhan used the image of the world becoming a village because he wanted a metaphor for a community in which everyone knows each other's business. But, even in such a place, it's possible to get a reputation as a busybody or gossip. As long as we're rattling the charity tins, staring over the fence at drowned Burmese is fine. But, when it comes to the Austrian monster, sometimes, in the global village, we should mind our own business.
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