Pick On Someone Your Own Size

Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, Channel 4, Wednesday
Eastenders, BBC1
Pulling, BBC2, Monday
50 Most Shocking Comedy Moments, Channel 4, Wednesday

There has been goggleboxing galore over the past two weeks! I have no idea where I found the time, since my mates have now all happily fallen off the wagon and I have rejoined them in the mosh pits so often since February hit that I fear for my liver and that cooking, as opposed to slinging another pizza in the oven, has become a lost and exotic art. (This is not as bad as the bad consequence though, when my bank card swore at me yesterday at the ATM outside Tesco’s and saw me at the shop not ten minutes ago peering pathetically into the caverns of my purse and wrestling with the age-old decision of milk versus ciggies. I’m sure it would surprise no-one which I chose.)

And what’s been even more fun is that most of my goggleboxing has been done in houses other than my own, meaning not only do I get fed and get to laze around on someone else’s sofa introducing them to the joys of Eastenders, I am also able to watch Freeview and Sky as everyone else on the planet can afford to have more than the terrestrial five channels. (You’d think as a TV critic type person the North Belfast News would pay for a Freeview box for me, but apparently not.)

This of course means I am occasionally forced to watch stuff I would normally rather stick needles in my eyes rather than flick over to, such as last week at the house of one of the news journalists. Lured into a false sense of security by mushroom pasta, a few glasses of wine and Channel 4’s 50 Most Shocking Comedy Moments (which was brilliant), I was then told we were to watch Gordon Ramsay in Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, USA style.

For the happily uninitiated, this has la Ramsay going to failing restaurants in the Land of the Free ™, telling them in his inimitable Gordon style just where they’re going wrong and how being more like him will ensure they’re going right. Hmm.

Many people who know me know I do not like chefs. Most of them pat me on the head and cluck sympathetically when I say this, as they know I once went out with one of the breed and so they assume this is the source of my ire. But it goes back much further than that. Watching a chef like Gordon Ramsay on TV, throwing a hissy fit and a spatula across the kitchen, has for years raised my heckles and my blood pressure as I throw something of my own at the TV and scream my standard chef-hating phrase: "It’s only food! It’s not a cure for cancer!"

So of course I kicked, screamed, moaned and complained about the decision to watch Gordon. And then kicked, screamed, moaned and complained as I got sucked into it and had to draw the life-shattering conclusion that Gordon came off rather well in it.

To be fair (to my hatred of chefs), this was only because Michel, the owner of the naff restaurant Gordon was sent in to save, was even more chef-like than the standard of the species. Just as I will appear relatively sober and normal against the orange-legged hot-panted millies who insist on trying to take over the beer garden in Lavery’s (over my small dead body), so even Gordon Ramsay seemed like less of a colossal prat compared to a small French chef jumping up and down incandescent with rage. Over food.

But fear not, the world has not stopped, for I am back to hating Ramsay once again. This relief came from watching an old episode of Have I Got News For You, which made me feel even more like a pleb because the house I watched this one in had a recorder type thingummy device which meant we could go to the pub on Saturday to watch the footie (Liverpool out, Man U in, oh happy happy day), stay beyond that, and still get to indulge my geekdom afterwards.

If someone is going to rant, stomp and throw their weight about, my reasoning has always been that they should be consistent about it and do it to everyone, not only those smaller or perceived as weaker than themselves. I believe the phrase is "picking on someone your own size".

It was clearly easy for Gordon to be Gordon to Michel the chef, yelling at him in front of and for the cameras, but oh my how he was outclassed by Paul Merton and Ian Hislop when presenting Have I Got News For You, with barely a peep out of him when getting slagged off. The change in him was obvious, cowardly, and genuinely distasteful. Did I mention I don’t like chefs?

Elsewhere, Deano is back in Eastenders, and I found myself actually pleasantly surprised. The whole "I got mean and bitter in prison" thing was completely overdone, but it was a refreshing change to see that Matt di Angelo, as a snarling, vodka-swilling, unshaven wide boy, can actually act. Much more fun to watch. Tiana Benjamin as Chelsea though is still throw-stuff-at-the-TV annoying, and even though new girl Clare deserves a good slap around the face with a gently humming chainsaw, long may she continue to annoy Chelsea in the salon.

I also got caught up on Pulling, which has finally made it from BBC3 to us great unwashed on BBC2. The TV programme Pulling I got caught up on that is, not the other form, which…er…anyway, it is tres amusing, it is, and gets the line of the week from me when the girlies ended up at the bingo on a hen night. Yes, I know. Bingo. On a hen night. I was just as disgusted at this shift in the universal standards of what constitutes a good night out as one of the characters, who loudly bemoaned the fact that a £20 admission fee into said bingo included three whole units of alcohol.

"Three units?" she spluttered. "There’s more than that in my urine. Double vodkas all round!"

This was good enough, until she gently enquired of a more lightweight lady what she would like from the bar.

"What about you love? Something soft? Hooch? Carlsberg?"

A woman after my own heart.

There are many times I feel sorry for myself. All the way through January, any time I have to leave my sofa, and when I ponder whether I am in fact the only person on this green earth not to like Big Brother. But none more so than when I am sick. So Friday saw me on the sofa, under my blankie, bemoaning the TV gods yet again for the lack of telly. It was daytime telly this time, so it was even worse.

It was yet another time in recent months when I found myself in extravagant praise of 4OD. I found Comedy Live Presents, with Russell Brand, which I watched pretty much because it was on the first page of 4OD and I couldn’t be bothered scrolling down any more. But it was very good, it was. I can’t quite explain the origin of the gag that had Russell Brand fantasising about grabbing the Queen’s boob, but rest assured it was very funny indeed. Comedian Michael McIntyre’s diatribe against that strange six day period between Christmas and New Year where you don’t know what’s happening ("Is the TV still good? Do I have to go back to work? IS THERE POST?!!") was very good too, although sorry to say the only Irish comedian on, David O’Doherty, was in fact very poo. (I did like Russell Brand’s pointing out though that as "an Irish gentleman" O’Doherty seemed to have been placed on a little performance area islanded away from the main stage. Heh.)

But Comedy Live Presents was a one-off, according to the moguls at Channel 4, to which I say boo. More please.

I was feeling somewhat better after this comedy therapy, at least enough to ring a friend and demand he come over with Wotsits and fruit juice and sit on the sofa with me to mop my fevered brow. Once again while watching TV with a male friend I found myself fighting for dominance of the remote control, meaning that while I got to watch Eastenders because quite frankly there was going to be an almighty temper tantrum if I didn’t, I then had to watch Derren Brown on Channel 4, because there were horses in it (yes, my friend, like my dad, is a gambler).

I don’t really like Derren Brown, namely because he’s a bit smug and because he spells his name in a stupid way, but he’s not as annoying as, say, David Blaine, so I settled down to watch this without (too much) moaning, although my friend was sent out to the shop to get more Wotsits as penance.

Anyhoo. This new Derren extravaganza was called "The System", where he claimed he could predict the outcome of horse racing and guarantee winners every time. Naturally every gambling type up and down the land was glued to it with notebook and pen, as was everyone on Betfair.com who no doubt thought all their Christmases had come at once.

"Investigating the psychology behind gambling and using his unique combination of skills to create guaranteed success, Derren proves his skills work every time," boasts the Channel 4 blurb. Er, not so.

The programme featured a young woman from London, who had been getting anonymous tips for the races in the form of a "System", and who won her bets five times in a row. After the fifth time, when she was a grand up, she was taken to meet the man behind the system – our own Mr Brown, who was wearing a particularly horrible camel-coloured coat. You know the system works, he told her – are you prepared to risk all the money you can raise on the sixth race?

Four grand was duly begged and borrowed, and put on a horse at Newbury a few days later. Then Derren explained his "system", which wasn’t a system at all but which had seen him take over 7000 people, split them into six groups, and give each group the name of one horse. Five of the groups lost, and the remaining group was again split into six, and again each group given a horse to bet on (come on, keep up). And so on for the five races, when there was only one person left standing.

Personally if I’d been that one person, and had only been told of this scam after putting my four borrowed grand on a horse where there was only a 1/6 chance of winning, I’d have smacked Derren Brown. The horse duly lost, the woman was suitably devastated, and Derren then predictably produced his trump card - he had actually backed the winner for her after all!

This was really stupid TV, and was completely misrepresented by Channel 4. No, I didn’t expect to be able to learn a system for betting on the gee-gees, but unlike most of Derren Brown’s other stuff, there was nothing interesting behind this at all, only a simple numbers game. It was pretty much a scam. I also think that the self-righteous blurb at the end of the show, saying that all the participants had whatever money they’d lost refunded, was a complete cop-out. Nothing at all to address the fact that most of these unwitting guinea pigs had probably never gambled before, and were now very likely going to do it again.

Now I don’t mind irresponsible TV. I don’t even mind sick TV. But bad TV? Pah.

Of Damien and Babysitting

Panorama, BBC1, Monday

The Omen, BBC1, Saturday

The TV is still rubbish. I don’t know whether, writing this after the grim dark month of January is just ending, it’s just me at this stage. Perhaps I enjoyed the Christmas telly too much (that’ll teach me to get my hopes up). Perhaps all men should be lined up against the wall and shot (although I did meet a nice one last week, so may reprieve y’all for a bit yet. I said "may").

Or maybe, perhaps I should give up on the TV page, and in fact other such mundanities as work, paying rent, and trying to get out of bed in the mornings (seriously, what for? It’s winter). I keep eyeing my backpack in a wistful, pathetic fashion, imagining it in its proper home on an Australian beach rather than crumpled up at the bottom of my wardrobe.

And what do the TV gods crap upon our heads just as we’re all miserable and depressed and have no money to go out? Crap, that’s what. Striptease what was Channel 4 offered us on Friday night, after School of Rock, which isn’t a bad film but which wasn’t good enough for a Friday night. I was in worse form because I only got home from work at 11pm (damn you, Cassidy’s after work pints), and had a choice of Striptease, Jonathan Ross, Newsnight Review or The Late News.

Thank the gods once again for 4 On Demand, where I watched the last two episodes of the brilliant Peep Show I’d been keeping for just such an emergency, and dipped into different series of Drop the Dead Donkey, which now comes across as a bit dated but which is still very chucklesome if you work in a newsroom.

About the only thing I went out of my way to watch this week was Monday night’s Panorama, where former Blur bassist Alex James went to Colombia to investigate the effects of the cocaine trade there. James was apparently qualified for this as he spent a million quid in his Blur days on champagne and cocaine, so received a letter from Colombian president Alvaro Uribe Velez inviting him to Colombia to see first-hand how taking cocaine in a Western society impacts on the country of origin.

Colombia supplies 80 per cent of the world’s cocaine, to an annual value of £56 billion, and as such is subject to "official" government led measures such as coca crops being routinely sprayed from the air to destroy them, as well as the violence, murder and trafficking the industry creates. James went out with the spraying teams, met coca farmers and dealers, and talked to the Colombian president about what he thought could be done to address the problem.

But the programme was quite disappointing in the end. Given just half an hour, it was only possible to skim the surface of an extensive problem, and sending a celeb instead of an investigative journalist in what just looked like a gimmicky stunt by Panorama, considerably lessened the impact of the debate. James didn’t address at all the issue of legalisation, which, no matter what your views on drugs, would seem a likely way to end the violence and misery caused by trafficking.

He was also very weak on the practical issue of a farmer making $550 per month growing coca, as opposed to $132 a month growing other crops - if the Colombian government, and the White House in their ubiquitous "war on drugs", were serious about ending the trade, they should be asked if they are willing to make up this shortfall to the farmers who grow the coca in Colombia, or the poppies in Thailand and Burma.

James was there much more as an observer rather than a journalist, something which seriously marred the programme in not having these questions asked, and, not too sound too much like Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells, not what I expect from a supposedly serious documentary such as Panorama.

Saturday TV was just as bad as Friday’s (thank the gods for the Crescent Arts Centre monthly night this Saturday so I don’t have to suffer again this weekend). I was babysitting my goddaughter and her brother on Saturday night, making me rue the day I’d offered since it meant a few mates were actually going out at last but I was going to miss it. (But maybe that’s why I was asked to babysit.) The kids were quiet so it was fine, and as my mate has cable I was able to watch Police Academy 3 on ITV4 as well as rifle through his Family Guy DVDs (I think he had the "real" stash hidden).

But then I made the mistake of watching The Omen (BBC1), which was somewhat inconsiderately shown just before midnight, making those of us in other people’s houses and thus not knowing where all the creaky noises were coming from cower under the duvet and think about "accidentally" waking the kids up to use as a shield between me and any anti-Christ type figures lurking at the window.

Although I’m now a committed atheist - yes, yes, "should be committed, more like", move along - The Omen still has the power to scare me witless. Being brought up Catholic means that I actually believed that stuff as a kid, and that even now as an adult I can’t watch something like The Omen without a disturbing thought of "But what if...?" creeping into my overtaxed dome. It’s the music as well. As soon as it starts I have a Pavlovian dog reaction of goosebumps rising, heart hammering, and thoughts of going to mass the next day. My fears were not calmed when I feel asleep on the sofa and was woken at 3am by my scary-looking goth mate arriving home and knocking on the living room window.

Still, great stuff. But I have no idea why the powers that be then decided to remake the film a few years ago. There’s nothing wrong with the original, and that kid as Damien is the most creepy looking youngster I have ever seen. Yes, even more than the ones I was babysitting.