I don't believe for one second that Chris Tarrant would still be on television if he hadn't swung the '...Millionaire hot seat. ITV would almost definitely not be consistently recomissioning 'Tarrant on TV' for one thing. I swear that's been on TV for over a decade now. I remember coming home from The Hat Fair in Winchester and finding my parents watching 'Tarrant on TV'. My dad couldn't change the channel fast enough. I don't know what time of year, or day of the week it's still on, but it was on in the pub the other week. Even on silent, pub-goers find mexican banjo-fingered ad peddlars making 'comedy' campaigns involving dogs barking euphemisms for fellatio, or craptacular Japanese game-shows in which a man has to have anal intercourse a squid in a shower unitwhilst it rains jam and tabasco, a right hoot. 'Who Wants to Be a Mllionaire' doesn't cut it anymore. The first signs of death were when it stopped being a three-week long 'event' show and became a weekly hour-long crowbarred inbetween some Ant and Dec shit, an Ant and Dec shit update, and the results of the Ant and Dec shit. One Christmas, they showed an exclusive 'behind the scenes' documentary, which acted like a lethal dosage of information. Not least because you had to watch an hour-plus of Chris Tarrant touring the studio and acting a damn fool, like the sort of boring uncle who wears a 'funny' tie, even at funerals, and then tries to show you magic tricks at the week, but you get the television experience of David Copperfield pulling back the curtain and seeing the matrix of invisible wires and trapdoors which allow him to saw his knob off whilst juggling chainsaws. Basically, the documentary revealed that the show wasn't live. Nowadays nobody thinks this, because they can't keep making the supply teachers and civil servants wait a full 6 days and 23 hours before sitting them back in the chair. But when it was on every day, then there was always a slight suspicion it was live, and you kind of wanted it to be. They didn't do it live, of course, because otherwise the 'phone a friend' didn't work. The 'reveal' was; they stopped the show as soon as the 'fastest finger first' bit was done, and then phoned the contestants 'friends' and basically said 'right, don't go for a shit for the next hour or so' and that was that. Ruined.
There were, of course, many other elements that destroyed what was once a passable, if inane way to waste an hour of your life. My main crutch was when the 'phone a friend' people started offering how sure they were, as a percentage: "Ooh Tristan, I'm sure it's D - Spatular". "How sure are you?". "Oh, about 85%", as if that's an acceptable thing to say. How can quantify how 'right' you think you are on something. I think you're basically offering yourself a 15% get-out clause. Or if the positivity drops below a certain amount, then don't listen to your friend? Once, I'm sure I saw a 'friend' offer only a 60% sure answer on a 50/50 question. I think they were wrong, too. Another problem was adding another 'beat' to the background music so the 'tension' sounded like it has been remixed by Paul Oakenfold. Another is, like most TV game shoes today, in particular Saturday night shows, is the reliance on knowledge of celebrities and pop culture as being 'general knowledge. I think the National Lottery Jet Set is entirely comprised on 'general' knowledge about where Mischa Barton buys her eggs. I remember when Who Wants to Be a Millionaire asked questions about pestles and mortal, and who was 54th in line for the French Throne. I just saw a £50,000 question asking who starred with Jennifer Lopez in 'Maid in Manhattan'. They knew it instantly, of course. I also watched an episode where nobody got the fastest finger first question right. Add to that the fact that someone broke the mystique and won the £1,000,000 and basically revealed that to win you had to be related to royalty, and a complete bell-end, thus ruining the opportunity for the likes of you or I.
Celador are no mugs, however, and well aware of the fact they're now peddling a turd, have made a few changes. Firstly, they've changed the way they money goes up. They think it's to make it more interesting and fast-paced, but I beg to differ. I think it's because even Celador got fed up with having to listen to Chris interview each interesting three times about their mother-in-law's cat before they even had to think before answering one of the questions. Now they're onto the moderately difficult questions long before he's had a chance to bore the universe into imploding. Also, and interestingly, they questions haven't necessarily got easier, and I'm not just saying that because I just got a question wrong about what gargoyles are for. Although, to be honest, the show is regularly up against 'American Inventor' on cable TV, so there's no real excuse for watching it at all, so all of the above is pointless. It's nice to go back occasionally though, it's like visiting a geriatric relative in the last few days before finally reaching incontinence. American Inventor, mind, is utterly ridiculous, although I wish they had a trapdoor onstage so they could just 'crank' the idiots offstage when they realised their device is a load of baloney.
However, if every TV show is relying so heavily on what's happening in the columns of 'Bizarre', then I might be turning into the new Daphne from Eggheads. Not only was I one of the first people in the WORLD to know that Anthony Minghella had died (I was watching New 24 at the time) and Arthur C Clarke (I was listening to the radio). I even did the decent thing and watched Minghella's last hurrah, the BBC's adaptation of Alexander McCall Smith's No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency. I'm pretty sure this was the first 'destination' TV show I've bothered to watch in about six years (I think the last was Martin Bashir's interview with Michael Jackson where Jackson taught Bashir to moonwalk, climbed a tree, and Martin Bashir managed to out-nuts his subject matter by throwing child abuse scandals at the screen in the vain hope it might eventually stick like shit on perspex. Anyway, The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency was completely brilliant, all be it despite, rather than because, the thing was adapted by Richard Curtis and directed by Minghella, who's work has never failed to inspire utter tedium. But still, he put his name behind easily the best thing I've seen on TV in a long time.
I've recently lost my faith in humanity. For two reasons mainly, although I could start listing right here and now the many reasons why either the world sucks beyond all comprehensible realisation, or at the very least, I suck beyond all comprehensible realisation because I don't understand how anything operates in the world in which we live, and this would stop being a blog and start being an encyclopedia. Firstly, Whilst I was out on Friday night, I saw one of my amalgamated backlist of ex girlfriends' currently boyfriend necking someone else. This almost made me sick into my own mouth on sight, but eventually I decided to chunder on the way home instead. But still, it's only when there's personal involvement that two random stangers getting busy on the dancefloor becomes an even more stomach curling sight. Hence I'll commence my fifteen-point plan to not get personally involved with anybody ever again. Either that or move to a new country altogether and poke out my own eyes with a pencil so people can get on with their lying, cheating, vile lives the same delightful and marvellous way they already do, and it won't bother me ever again in the slightest. The other significant happening that caused my marbles to sink even further into the sands of sanity, was seing 'You! Me! Dancing!" by Los Campesinos! being used on an advert for 'Skins'. This seismic shift of lunacy has caused just a densely-coiled spiral of irony that I can't even begin to comprehend whether it's horrible, funny, ironic, expected or what. The more I think about it, the more my mind turns into a choc ice. The entire world's a mess. Forward your solutions to the usual address.
I also, honestly believe, that 'April' by Sun Kil Moon, is a masterpiece.
