Eye Bleaching and Man Tits

FA Cup Final, BBC1, Saturday
Channel 4 News, C4, Thursday
Class of 62: 16 to 60, BBC2, Monday
Football, football, bloody football, as Ma Canning freqently says on Saturday afternoons, as Da Canning is doing that annoying man thing of flicking onto Teletext for the latest scores when poor Ma is trying to watch a cooking show.
 

This is what Eye on the Box feels like this week, what with all the goggleboxing going on in relation to this strange game of men kicking a ball around a pitch. (In shorts though. Although it has to be admitted that the shorts worn in rugby offer a higher perve factor, at least according to our photographer.)
 

The FA Cup Final (BBC1, Saturday) was a pleasant chance to watch the footie at home without having to get out of jammies, although why it started at 12.40 with a kick off of 3.00 I have no idea.

Now, I was happy at this, as I was able to go out from 1 until 3.20, before settling down on the sofa with my pickled onion crisps and Drumstick lolly, but for the love of Og BBC, we do not need two and a half hours of bloody build up before the match. It's called, like, overkill. No wonder Ma Canning starts pulling her hair out.
 

More football with the Champions League Final on Wednesday, and, as I'm writing this on Tuesday I obviously don't know what the score will be, but which I imagine will be immense fun. This one will certainly be watched in the pub and is likely to see me toppling off the no booze wagon in spectacular style – I have already booked Thursday off and will be answering no phone calls before 2pm.

And then there was Channel Four News last week, featuring many Rangers fans rioting in Manchester after their team lost the UEFA Cup. Or after a TV screen broke down, or whatever.

The scenes of these bellytastic, sunburned, topless oiks were quite fun to watch from the solitude of my sofa, although I do think C4 could have added the standard warning that "These scenes may cause some viewers distress". I have bleached my eyes twice and I can still see one guy's chest wobbling.
 

In other news, Cardinal Sean Brady said last week that soap operas are "undermining family life", leading me at first to think "And?", and then to ponder his words more carefully. With Roxy in Eastenders up the duff and not knowing who the da is (although, as Christian helpfully points out, at least she knows it's a choice between her sister's ex and the local psycho), Bianca, also in Albert Square, with her four kids all with different dads, and Eileen Grimshaw in Coronation Street doing her bit for repopulation, I thought at first the Cardinal had a point.

But then I saw the pattern in these cases. It's not about single mothers and feckless irresponsibility, it's about dads not looking after their own offspring. Although I doubt that's what the Cardinal meant.
 

On Monday night, I was surprised and impressed on a level not seen since our editor bought a round of drinks, as I was completely spoilt for choice for goggleboxing. There was some great stuff on, something which happens just enough for me to retain a pathetic faith in the medium of TV.

8pm saw Dispatches on the rise of Christian fundamentalism in Britian, something I'm always interested in finding out about in order to support my agnoticism, although, ahem, I didn't watch this particular ground-breaking study as I was watching Eastenders on the other side. I'm sure it was good though…

9pm on BBC2 had Class of 62: 16 to 60, the latest update on a group of women and what they've been doing since finishing school in 1962. The programme showed updates in 1983, 1995 and 2007, showing the women in a range of post school lives, from marrying in Switzerland and staying there until retiring to Italy, looking after a mother with Alzheimer's for 12 years and then taking a campervan around Europe, and one still looking after her son with Down's Syndrome, now aged 38.

It was brilliant TV – well-made, non-intrusive and even a bit sniffly and heart-warming. Why we have stuff like I'd Do Anything when TV can be like this I will never figure out.

Finally, David Tennant has recently been voted as the sexist male lead on TV, with 24 per cent of people saying one of the reasons they watch Doctor Who is for the eye candy. This should leave me feeling all warm and fuzzy at the idea that 24 per cent of the population agree with me, but actually has raised my competitive hackles at the idea of anyone else daring to go near him. Gerrroff!

Which is no doubt what Mr Tennant would say were he ever un/fortunate enough to meet me in a dark alley

Gyrating Oul Dolls and Hysterical Chefs

The F Word, Channel 4, Wednesday
Radio 1's Big Weekend in Maidstone, Kent, BBC3, Saturday
NI Wags, BBC1, Friday

This sunny weather is great. I have been skipping along the street merrily, not stabbing people when they bump into me and even almost smiling at a baby. (I draw the line however at being nice to those netball-bibbed charity muggers who line up in zigzags trying to ambush me along Royal Avenue. They will feel my wrath come rain wind or shine.)     

But, as it has been gleefully pointed out several times in the North Belfast News office, my writing tends to suffer when things are going my way. A TV page where I've spent the preceding week raging against the world and all the muppets and loser exes in it does, it has to be said, make better copy.

But fear not. No matter how loved up on the sun I am, some people will always be suitable for a good slap around the bake, Captain Hook style. Yes, Gordon Ramsay is back.

I'm writing this on Tuesday morning, ahead of the new series of The F Word starting on Wednesday night, but I'm already approaching levels of take-off not seen on this page since Chelsea from Eastenders got out of jail. This is mainly because even seeing Gordon Ramsay on TV, who makes me wish more than anyone else that I was allowed to swear in the paper, has me screeching at the telly like a demented harpy anyway, even before I listen to what nonsense is coming out of his shouty little mouth. But now he's taken it to even more levels of arrogance.

Not only did he say that restaurants should be fined for the environmental crime of using food out of season – yeah, not hypocritical at all Gordon, when you have a restaurant in Tokyo that imports foie gras from France and lamb from New Zealand – but he then started to slag off Delia for using tins and frozen spuds in her cooking.

"I can understand maybe if you're a student and you have 15 or 20 quid a week to spend on food, but for the rest of us—", he blabbered, showing all the more how pretentious and out of touch the modern chef is about the food we, the great unwashed, eat. When I was a student I had a fiver a week to spend on food; as a single gal I spend about £15 now, and Delia's latest series was about the only cooking programme I have ever seen that reflected how most people on a budget cook. We love Delia.

 

Gordon also said her approach was like kicking chefs 'in the goolies', leaving me slack-jawed in the struggle to know which statement to shout at the TV first – why is Gordon Ramsay so obsessed with his goolies, and that I'd happily kick him there for free.

Elsewhere, Madonna has been annoying me as well, particularly with her antics at the Radio 1 Big Weekend in Maidstone, Kent last weekend. Now, I'm all for women of 50 not having to act like women of 50 – if men that age can pretend they're 20, as this week's hideous displays of bare chests and man boobs (mits) have proven, so too should the gals – but Madonna really just needs to get out of all our goddamned faces. 

It was the gyrating with the guitar, the 'sexy' shoving of Justin Timberlake into a wall two weeks ago (personally I'd shove him under a speeding truck), the 'I'm 50 but I still look great because I don't eat anything but knitted lentils and spend eight hours a day working out' attitude. Go away, Madonna. I tire of you.

Finally, I haven't watched it yet, mainly out of concern for my stress and blood pressure levels, but boy have I heard a lot about BBCNI's latest pathetic offering for  us Northern plebs on a Friday night – NI Wags. Please write about it, pleaded one of the sports journalists in the office on Monday, still visibly in shock by how bad it was. Watch this space for next week. Vacuous millies twittering on about handbags and fashion? I am already cracking my knuckles in anticipation.

Derek's Bloody Dreams

Friday nights, BBCNI

Natalie Cassidy's Diet Secrets, BBC3

It's not often I agree with letters in the paper. Not the North Belfast News of course – we have quite a sensible readership in this neck of the woods – but the likes of the Tele, Irish News and their ilk. If the letters aren't from some mad religious type quoting three pages of the Bible, then they're listing every historical event from year dot as justification of why we should/should not accept/deny some new skulduggery from Stormont. It gets tedious. 

 Not so last week, as some goggleboxer wrote in, in wrath and enraged at BBCNI's output on weekend nights. No, it wasn't me, really. If BBCNI want to make and put on "local" programmes, the infuriated goggleboxer pointed out, fair enough. But show them on a bally weekday night or at some other time, rather than prime time on a Friday night.

This has long been a touchy subject of mine. Here be's me, having a nice quiet Friday night in, ready at 9 or 10pm to sit down and watch something decent. Something that other people were allowed to watch. But what would we get in Norn Iron? Give My Head Peace. Good Dog Bad Dog. Stephen Nolan on TV in Panic Attack, as if he's not annoying and obnoxious enough on the radio. 

Excuse me, but I'm going to shout here – WE DON'T WANT TO SEE LOCAL CRAP ON THE TELLY AT WEEKENDS. Or indeed, any other time. If you must make boring, cringeworthy, tedious crap like Derek's Dreams, show it at 2pm on BBC2 on a Sunday when sensible types will either be just crawling out from under their hangovers, or settling down to watch Easties. Grr.

More grr with Natalie Cassidy's Diet Secrets (BBC3), yet another programme looking at fad diets and the skinny celebrity craze. I started watching this all sympathetic towards Natalie – as Sonia in Eastenders she grew up (and outwards) in the most public way possible, but as the programme went on I started to see it as less an opportunity to explore the prevalence of fad diets and skinny culture on young women today, and more of an opportunity to explore, er, Natalie. 

Natalie went on the maple syrup diet – having only maple syrup to the tune of only 360 calories a day; the cabbage soup diet – self-explanatory, and makes you fart; and the fingernail diet – eating a fingernail portion of food every 14 minutes (who the hell makes these up?). After days of starvation and heart palpitations, she came to the conclusion that fad diets are Bad. Thanks Natalie.

She lost her own four stone by eating healthily and exercising, and fair play to her too. But, in a programme where she derides the magazines like Heat and Closer for obsessing about women's weight and promoting crazy diets (sniff a grapefruit before eating was one memorable piece of advice), she was also buying them. She railed against the diet industry's feeding of myths to women, yet presented her own statement as fact – fad diets make you fat. There is proof that they do, but the way she went up to a group of young women on the street and proclaimed this as gospel, without offering any facts to back it up, shows both that she is a poor documentary maker and that many young women will swallow anything about the diet industry. As long as it doesn't have too many calories, that is. 

She got one thing right though – even if was more by chance than anything else – the extreme skinniness culture has become much more pervasive in the past five years or so. Look at the women in Friends – going from slim in the first few series to genuinely emaciated in the last. Will the bubble burst? Natalie wonders, concluding that it won't, because "people are too into reading about this". Well, stop buying the bloody magazines then, Natalie.

I hence declare a boycott. Not that I read Heat and the like – I do like reading brain mush, but prefer Take a Break and Enid Blyton – but I am watching no more stupid diet programmes, 10 Years Younger, You Are What You Eat or any other sort of nonsense like it. Enough. Maybe I should go back on the drink.