everyone else was rubbish, and even though our entries (Cliff) were also rubbish, they were less rubbish than the foreigners’ stuff, and so we could simultaneously put forward rotten songs and sneer at other people for doing the same.
Because we kept winning. Fairly often. (All right, we didn’t beat Abba, but we surely knew how to rip them off – Brotherhood of Man, Bucks Fizz, and so on.) And as long as we were winning, that was all right. Britain is, after all, the greatest pop-and-roll nation in the world, apart from America, who aren’t allowed to enter the Eurovision Song Contest.
So we were also allowed to find everything hilarious because we were the best and everyone else was crap. But then something happened. Two things happened, in fact. First of all, the Europeans started getting better. They entered people who could write songs. They had catchy Eurodisco tunes. And they discovered wit (remember that Finnish death-metal band? Noël Coward couldn’t have done it better.)
The other thing that happened – the really awful yet totally predictable thing – was that we went rubbish. We started entering acts that were even worse than, say, Doctor Who in the 1980s. We completely lost the plot. By 2007 you could have entered some human hair in a box and it would have been better than the official British entry.
The solution seems obvious. We must either find someone who can write some decent songs – not easy, in this country – or withdraw gracefully, citing a musical headache of national proportions. Because soon, very soon, Terry Wogan will have nothing to take the piss out of. And that’s got to be wrong.
TV TALENT SHOWS
Note the use of the word ‘talent’. These shows exist as much to display lack of talent as they do ability. And the sight of the ‘judges’ – dull, scripted people who are only there to scrape a bit of money out of the soon-to-be discarded husks of the performers – telling the hopefuls that they are no good is appalling. The judges’ sole qualification for the job is vanity and the ability to talk in clichés that someone else has written for them. Artificial, stiff, egotistical and dull, they make the manufactured groups they represent look organic and thrilling.
TV TALENT SHOWS 2
Worst of all, this kind of drosswallop is a throwback to the days before fun. Talent shows may well go back hundreds of years, but so what? So does smallpox. It’s as though, as the music industry dies (see DEATH OF THE MUSIC INDUSTRY), it acts like that computer in 2001 and reverts to its long-distant youth, dropping all claims to hipness and just being some last naff, desperate Tin Pan Alley attempt to hoick a few groats off the hoi polloi.
CHAT SHOWS – THEN
The Americans seem to have started them. They were always the same. After some gabbling from an invisible man, a bloke in a 70s suit (well, it was the 1970s, fair enough) would come on to the set to the kind of applause that surely only the Second Coming would merit, tell some ‘jokes’ that were really just newspaper headlines rejigged, and then talk to the band leader, who was sycophantic in a way that would have worried Uriah Heep. Then he would interview three famous people, one at a time. (‘Interview’ in this context does not mean grill, debrief or even extract useful information from. It means ‘praise excessively and encourage to promote their latest project’.) Sometimes there would be a band. Always there would be a commercial break.
In Britain – and presumably other countries – this model was not taken up, because in them days all chat shows were on the BBC and the BBC was not the kind of place where you came on and told jokes (see THE BBC VERSUS ITV). The British chat show was therefore a reverential affair, with frequent apologies for being too personal and lots of pauses for the host to laugh his face off at some God-awful showbiz anecdote.
It was horrible, but what replaced it, amazingly, was worse.
CHAT SHOWS – NOW
They’re not what they were, you know. Mind you, what they were was pretty bad, so in a sense chat shows have gone from bad to still bad. What happened was that in America chat shows were evolving in the sense that they were getting smarter. Possibly fed up with the solid wall of gammy gloss and sponsorship horror, the newer chat shows were more cynical, looser and more inclined to send up their guests. This was a good thing, for a while. Unfortunately, they’re still doing it, and some of the hosts have been doing it for so long – sending up guests, mocking the format, and so forth – that the viewer just wonders why they’re still doing it if they hate it that much, and changes channels.
In Britain, as ever, the format was adapted. The new chat shows here had the same mixture of irony and mockery but, with few exceptions, what they also had was a lethal combination of rubbish hosts and worse guests. So instead of the biggest stars in Hollywood being ribbed by the best stand-ups in the world, here you had a ‘star’ you’d never heard of – being mildly insulted by the bloke who’d come fourth in the Perrier Awards three years ago. It wasn’t the same.
And yet, instead of shooting the format and hurriedly kicking it under the carpet, TV bosses stuck with it, believing (wrongly) that they could put any old TV presenter (see TV PRESENTERS) or useless comic or radio DJ into the host’s chair and it would be fine. It’s not fine. It’s never fine.
ANTIQUES SHOWS
They used to be sort of forums where middle-class people would go and be reassured. Now they are used, brilliantly and wrongly, as afternoon fillers. Beefy couples in ill-fitting sweatsuits are forced to go to markets in the rain to look at bits of old lamps and one-eyed stuffed rats. Worse, they are made to hang around with bowtie-faced professional patronizers who apparently make a living running antique shops. The whole thing is not only deeply depressing but also encourages people to buy as much old toot as possible in the vain, dead hope that one day it will be worth a spillion quid. Such things can destroy the morale of a nation.
GADGET SHOWS
Wow. Here’s a man who’d like to be younger than he is. Here’s a woman who’d like to be working on another show and any show will do so long as the man who’d like to be younger than he is won’t be on it. Here’s a set so cheap you can see through it. And here’s the pitch! They review brand-new gadgets. Wow again. By ‘reviewing’ they mean ‘talking about’ and ‘pressing the buttons on’, and by ‘brand-new gadgets’ they mean ‘any old rubbish a pretend Japanese company has got lying around the office’. And this is the future.
BREAKFAST TELEVISION
Who thought it would be a good idea to have television before toast? In American movies we sometimes see people having a coffee and a waffle while watching glamorous presenters interviewing Hollywood stars before 9 a.m. In Britain we have slightly mad-looking people who don’t seem to have had enough sleep interviewing, well, each other. This isn’t too bad – it is, after all, one of the central planks of entertainment – but before you’ve had your boiled egg? It seems excessive.
POP TELLY
It’s over. All the great shows that glided on the ocean of telly when the world was young have been cancelled. The basic idea of getting the groups in to mime and smile to their hits – a fantastic, art-school concept that if it had been thought of by a Slade (the art school, not the group) graduate would be winning prizes everywhere – has been superseded by not one but three rotten things.
1.
