Posted by Christopher Gibbons (Deputy Entertainment Editor)
As part of the BT Vision team, I spend a large amount of time writing and editing stories about the latest films, TV shows and music videos on offer to customers. It’s important to stay on top of your game in this field, so to keep abreast of the latest developments in the weird and wonderful world of entertainment, I’m forced to sacrifice a few hours of my daily existence to television watching. It’s a hard life.
This week, I decided to keep a log of some of the televisual treats I’ve witnessed. Here’s my review of the last five days…
Sunday
Settled down to watch a much-hyped new MTV series called Jersey Shore. Apparently there’s a US demographic who refer to themselves as ‘Guidos’. From what I can make out, they’re a group of macho, 20-something, Italian-American males with a penchant for protein shakes and lip gloss. That’s right - lip gloss. They clearly spend a lot of time on sun beds and in front of mirrors. One of them, ‘Pauly D’, carries around 40 tubs of hair gel with him at any one time, while another, Mike, calls his abdominals ‘The Situation’ and talks a lot about various situations involving The Situation.
MTV’s bright idea was to stick them, along with some Guidettes (the wannabe WAGs of the Guido world) in a swanky pad on the ‘happening’ Jersey Shore for a summer to see what goes down. I probably don’t need to include a spoiler warning to tell you there is very little debate about modernism or the deconstruction of reality. This isn’t highbrow TV. But when you see a screen full of idiots saying things like: “You just take your shirt off and they come to you, it’s like a fly comes to sh*t,” it makes you feel a little better about yourself.
Monday
The highlight of Monday night’s TV was Sky One’s Pineapple Dance Studios. For those of you out of the loop on this one, it’s a fly-on-the-wall documentary set in a place where, according to Sky’s programme guide, “careers are made, dreams are broken, bitching is an Olympic sport and everyone is fabulous!”
In short, it features more people camping it up than you’d see at a World Scout Jamboree. Pineapple’s artistic director Louie Spence seems to find his way onto camera more than anyone, but when he’s coming up with soundbites like “I’m not in showbusiness, I am showbusiness”, that’s hardly a surprise.
Tuesday
Decided to surf the music channels for an hour and ended up watching VH1’s Guess The Year. This show is pretty self-explanatory - VH1 spins a music video, you guess the year. I played along with mixed success - apparently, Feargal Sharkey’s A Good Heart was a hit in 1985, not 1989 as I’d wildly predicted. But I clawed back some pride (or brought shame upon my family name, depending on how you look at it) by correctly asserting that Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up was a number one smash in 1987.
Wednesday
On Wednesday evening, my attention was drawn to Bravo’s enlightening documentary 1000 Ways To Die. This show features re-enactments of bizarre, real-life deaths, experts offering scientific insight into each subject’s demise and, it being Bravo, plenty of flesh. This week, a nurse fended off a gun-toting drug addict desperate for pharmaceuticals by taking her clothes off (there wasn’t really a sufficient explanation for why she did this) and turning on a nearby MRI machine. This created a powerful electro-magnetic field, which sucked the assailant in by a metal plate he just so happened to have embedded in his head. The impact, according to the science expert, would have been enough to make his brain explode inside his skull.
While the evidence given by this specialist was highly convincing (it was accompanied by computer graphics featuring splattering brains), I had reason to doubt the credentials of some experts. Later, when a coffin crushed a necrophiliac morgue worker, the lab dweller informed us his death “would have been instantaneous… in minutes”. I’m pretty sure something happening over the course of a few minutes isn’t considered instantaneous, but when the voice-over artist ended the skit with the words “go to hell you f**k!” I realised the documentary makers probably aren’t graduates of the David Attenborough school of film making.
Thursday
I must confess, I'm not a regular viewer of the New Beginning TV channel. In fact, I'd never even heard of this lifestyle station before Thursday night. I put this down to a lack of exposure, perhaps because their quality of programming isn’t anything to shout about. When I sat down to watch Yoga For Grandparents, I discovered a half-hour show featuring, from what I could ascertain, two old people bent over touching their toes. All the while, two young 'helpers' were slowly and gently punching them on their back, neck and legs. When they were finished, a voice-over proclaimed, "That's it! Give them a hug if you like!" and the helpers embraced their ‘yogic’ partners. It got me thinking - how would my grandparents feel about this? I concluded they probably wouldn’t appreciate it. I mean, being gently punched while bending over isn’t as enjoyable as, say, watching Countdown. Then again, don’t knock it unless you’ve tried it, eh?