This is Hell, nor am I out of it
Posted by Charlotte R at 3:57 pm Labels: food, Pomegranate, rant, TVBeing a student, I spend an awful lot of time watching daytime TV. Perhaps more so than most, as I've been ill recently with several exciting victorian-esque disorders (the cures of which usually include brandy, smelling salts and Bed Rest), so I often take up residence on the sofa with a duvet and settle down to watch Jeremy Kyle, drink tea, and rot. However, my parents have sabotaged me on this one, and cancelled our Sky subscription while I was at university. This means I am forced to watch the questionable delights of terrestrial daytime TV.
The horror, the horror. If this is supposedly the mainstream, the items that most people actually want to watch, then I am very very scared. I'd almost forgotten terrestrial daytime TV existed, shunted it to the back of my childhood memories along with things like Ceefax with spanish guitar that was always on TV before the morning programmes started. I'm used to being bombarded with adverts on Sky that assume their demographic is elderly people who want life insurance and a property in Spain, and who have an obsessive desire to consolidate their debts. But the programmes are good - there's music, comedy, debate, films, adventure - and you can easily sit quite happily at any time of day and find something mildly entertaining.
But BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Five are a whole different kettle of weirdness, entirely detached from the preoccupations of most of their audience. Not only are most of the programmes about perhaps the most boring things I can imagine (other people clearing out their attics! people secretly wallpapering their neighbours' bedrooms! the teeth-grinding inevitability of elderly couples being fleeced while buying homes abroad!), but some of them are downright bizarre. Amongst all the cheap rip-offs of prime time TV (Hell's Kitchen -> Rosemary Shrager's School for Cooks is a case in point), you get some proper "How did this get past the commissioning editor?" weirdness.
Food Poker is my current favourite. A selection of chefs are each dealt a hand of cards. These cards have pictures of food on them. They then have to pitch to the studio audience what they intend to make with the food they've been dealt. The audience pick their two favourites, those chefs go and make the dishes in 15 minutes, then the audience decides which is the best. So it's Ready Steady Cook with added gimmick, so far so boring. But this show is made hilarious by the presenter, Matt Allwright, of Rogue Traders and Watchdog fame. He knows nothing whatsoever about food. He doesn't care. His grizzled, tired, depressed, self-hating exterior actually lends the show a bizarre joy - he knows it's the first horseman of the tele-visual apocalypse, and maybe this isn't what the producers intended, but you really start to identify with him. He makes me want to get dressed, inject some coffee directly into the vein and go outside and never ever have to watch people think up three different ways to cook squid against the clock. Ever.*
Daytime TV ain't what it used to be - inanity has taken over, and you won't get anything in the league of Richard and Judy for love nor money. I promise I'm not in any sort of corporate employment, but seriously, get Freeview or Sky or something. I've seen the Dark Ages, and they are a convincing argument for starting my holiday reading.
*Incidentally, if you are interested in squid, this might help.
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How true, how true. Am also a Jeremy Kyle 'fan' :)
Feel free to check out my blog if you're interested, too - it's more of a review centre for beauty products, but I have a more personal one on LJ too.
(Angelil from TSR here!) x
BiancaP said...
Thursday, 13 December 2007 at 09:53:00 GMT
Does this mean you're bo longer using LJ? :-(
Zoecb said...
Friday, 14 December 2007 at 09:58:00 GMT
Nope...LJ is for angst, Blogger is for my reviews :)
BiancaP said...
Friday, 14 December 2007 at 13:48:00 GMT
Erm, I was talking to Char...
Zoecb said...
Friday, 14 December 2007 at 14:49:00 GMT
Hahahaha. But I think Bianca is right, actually - I use LJ to read other people's, and to post in communities, but my actual journal will only really be for private angst. This is for fun and rants.
Charlotte R said...
Friday, 14 December 2007 at 16:32:00 GMT
oops :/
BiancaP said...
Friday, 14 December 2007 at 18:37:00 GMT
Matt Allwright here,
You are a very perceptive person. Nothing I have seen in print more accurately describes my time on Food Poker. I worked 17 hour days back-to-back on that show, clad in wool trousers in a red hot kitchen, only retreating to a bare brick green room, lit with a fluorescent tube for minutes at a time in between recordings: a truly apocalyptic experience.
I knew that there would be someone out there to understand the message coming out through my eyes, and it turns out that it was you. Also Charlie Brooker a little bit, but not quite as well as you.
Thank you for paying attention and recognising my anguish.
Mx
Anonymous said...
Friday, 13 March 2009 at 16:51:00 GMT
Matt - you are welcome. Thanks for playing. I just watched an old episode on YouTube and was amused anew xx
Charlotte R said...
Friday, 10 July 2009 at 17:50:00 BST