Did we like it?
A fairly average stab at a new chat show, with an impressive line up for the firstepisode featuring Catherine Tate, Billie Piper and American comedy actor, Kevin James. However, with Jonathon Ross, Graham Norton and Paul O’Grady already busy on the chat show circuit, do we really have any need for another one?
What was good?
• We’re glad that the obvious connection of having two of Doctor Who’s most recent companions on the same show within minutes of each other wasn’t avoided or washed over through the medium of the ‘Doctor-mind’ game.
• Although he isn’t brilliantly well known over here, Kevin James is a big booking. As well as being huge literally, he’s huge in America. His new film Paul Blart: Mall Cop is top of the American box office charts. James arriving on his segway certainly guaranteed him a memorable entrance. It’s shame that he wasn’t on the sofa longer in comparison to Piper and Tate.
• Billie Piper was her usually charming self.
• Err...the set was rather nice.
What was bad?
• From his banter with his house band, his obsession with musical numbers and features incorporating his love of all things retro; the entire JLC show had a feeling reminiscent of Knowing Me, Knowing You... with Alan Partridge. Partridge loves Abba and Bangkok chick boys and JLC likes Rainbow and the Back to the Future Delorean.
• If you thought Jonathon Ross was bad for leering over his guests, then you haven’t seen JLC! Everyone who walked on to the set was greeted with an awkward and lingering snog. Not to mention fondled. Poor Catherine Tate had to physically remove his gorilla hand off her left butt cheek.
• JLC’s energetic style works brilliantly on his Bring Back... series. However, he needs to tone it down a tad when reading autocue seeing as his voice remained at the same pitch and pace throughout the majority of sentences.
• Comparisons were always going to be made with The Sunday Night Project and although Piper and Tate were good entertainment value, allowing them to be booked after their recent appearances on the Channel 4 show looked desperate. Their appearance somewhat gave the impression of them being called in as ‘a favour to a mate.’ With all these attributes present, the only thing missing was Alan Carr.
• Interview questions remained pointless and uninteresting throughout. Such as ‘Have you seen David Tennant’s ten inch?’ and ‘I love you, can I kiss you?’
Saturday 5.05pm Walk on the Wild Side BBC1 – Natural history footage accompanied by the voices of Jason Manford and other comics. 6.50pm Robin Hood BBC1 – A third, 13-part series of the adventure drama starring Jonas Armstrong, Keith Allen and Richard Armitage, plus new cast members David Harewood as Tuck, Joanne Froggatt as Kate, Lara Pulver as Guy's sister, Isabella and Toby Stephens as Prince John. 7.20pm Primeval ITV1 –Third series of the fantasy drama starring Douglas Henshall, Andrew-Lee Potts, Lucy Brown, Hannah Spearritt, Juliet Aubrey and Ben Miller. 8.00pm The Brits Who Fought For Spain History Channel 9.15pm Being Human Unearthed BBC3 – Behind-the-scenes documentary about the fantasy drama starring Aidan Turner, Russell Tovey and Lenora Crichlow. Followed by three episodes. 10.20pm BBC One Sessions – Annie Lennox BBC1
Sunday 7.00pm Blue Whale Odyssey National Geographic 9.00pm Bromance MTV One – US reality show in which Brody Jenner, who gained fame in reality show The Hills, finds a friend to join his entourage. 9.00pm How Britain Got the Gardening Bug BBC4 – Featuring contributions by Penelope Keith, Laurence Llewellyn Bowen, Germaine Greer and Carol Klein. 9.00pm In My Life - Jon Culshaw Biography 9.00pm Nostradamus 2012 History Channel 10.00pm Nitro Circus MTV One – Series featuring freestyle motocross rider Travis Pastrana.
• Guest list • Ulrika Jonsson on Piers Morgan Life Stories ITV1, Sunday • Shakatak on Pop Goes the Band, LivingTV, Monday • The Graham Norton Show BBC2, Thursday • Kirsty Gallacher and Ronan Keating on The Justin Lee Collins Show ITV2, Thursday • Emily Maitlis on I've Never Seen Star Wars BBC4, Thursday • Jonathan Pryce on Genius BBC2, Friday • Whoopi Goldberg, Jason Isaacs, Antony and the Johnsons on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross BBC1, Friday • Pet Shop Boys on The Album Chart Show Channel 4, Friday Monday 6.30pm Gone CBBC – A Newsround special exploring bereavement. 6.30pm Great British Menu BBC2 –Return of the culinary challenge. 9.00pm The Sex Education Show Channel 4 – Series two of the programme presented by journalist Anna Richardson, running over four consecutive nights. 9.00pm Young Mums' Mansion: The Dads Arrive BBC3 – Series in which five single mums and five single dads will live together with their children for four weeks. Runs all this week. 9.00pm Crimewatch BBC1 9.00pm Japan: A Story of Love and Hate BBC4 9.40pm Argumental Dave – Return of the John Sergeant-hosted panel game. 10.00pm Spiral BBC4 – Beginning a rerun of the classy French crime thriller series. 11.20pm The Wire BBC2 – Beginning a daily airing of all five series, comprising 60 episodes, of the acclaimed US crime drama, set in Baltimore, created by David Simon. Stars Dominic West, Lance Reddick, Idris Elba, Clarke Peters, Wendell Pierce, Domenick Lombardozzi, Andre Royo, Sonya Sohn, Michael K Williams and Wood Harris. Tuesday 1.00pm Top Design Sky1 – US interior design competition. 7.00pm Did Darwin Kill God? BBC2 9.00pm All the Small Things BBC1 – Six-part drama series written by Debbie Horsfield following the ups and downs of members of a choir in a northern England town. Stars Sarah Lancashire as the enthusiastic Esther, Neil Pearson as her husband Michael, the inspiring choirmaster, Richard Fleeshman as their musically-gifted son Kyle, Bryan Dick as young curate Jake, Sarah Alexander as glamorous soprano Layla, who destroys the harmony in all sorts of ways, Annette Badland as Ethel Tonks, Clive Rowe as Clifford 'Shrek' Beale, Melanie Kilburn as Olive Halsall, Niky Wardley as Louise 'Lulu' Pryke and Roy Barraclough as Reverend Barticle. 9.00pm Trawlers, Rigs & Rescue: North Sea Virgin 1 – Series following life working in the North Sea's stormy waters. Wednesday 8.30pm The Sumo Tokoyama: The Art of Hairdressing for Wrestlers BBC4 10.45pm Queens Of British Pop BBC1 – Two-parter narrated by Liza Tarbuck celebrating 12 female singers who have influenced British pop music . Features interviews with Sandie Shaw, Suzi Quatro, Siouxsie Sioux, Annie Lennox, Leona Lewis, Tom Jones, Lulu, Burt Bacharach, John Lydon, Martha Reeves, Nancy Sinatra, Mark Radcliffe, Henry Winkler, Marc Almond, Peter Gabriel, Claire Grogan, Jarvis Cocker, Kiki Dee and Adele.
Thursday 8.00pm Caravans: A British Love Affair BBC2 – Rerun of a sweet BBC4 documentary. 8.30pm My Family BBC1 – Return of the sitcom starring Robert Lindsay and Zoe Wanamaker. 9.00pm How Woolies Became Wellies: One Woman's Fight For the High Street BBC1 – Documentary about how the closed down Woolworths store in Dorchester was reborn as Wellworths. 9.00pm The Children of Helen House BBC2 – Documentary about a centre which cares for children with life-shortening conditions. 9.00pm The Truth About Eternal Youth ITV1 – With Coleen Nolan. 10.00pm The Inbetweeners E4 – Series two of the excellent sitcom about four teenagers growing up in suburbia. Stars Simon Bird, Joe Thomas, James Buckley and Blake Harrison. 10.35pm David Lean: In Search of the Perfect Horizon BBC1 – Jonathan Ross profiles the film producer. 11.35pm Reno 911 E4 – American mockumentary comedy about law enforcement officers.
Friday 8.00pm Tim Marlow On... Picasso Sky Arts 10.00pm Arena: Cool BBC4 – Documentary exploring the meaning and history of cool through the American music of the 1940s and 50s.
• Subject list • Timewatch Pyramid - The Last Secret. BBC2, Saturday • Panorama Northern Ireland. BBC1, Monday • Dispatches Boris Johnson. Channel 4, Monday • Horizon Alan Davies And Marcus du Sautoy Go Forth And Multiply BBC2, Tuesday • True Stories Who Killed the Electric Car? More4, Tuesday • Extraordinary People Freak Show Family. Five, Wednesday • Cutting Edge Would You Save a Stranger? Channel 4, Thursday • Unreported World Sierra Leone: Insanity of War. Channel 4, Friday
Did we like it?
Take Room 101 and rip it off with a slight twist, and you’re left with I’ve Never Seen Star Wars. Based on the simple concept of giving celebrities cultural experiences that they’ve yet to experience and seeing if they enjoy it, this was fairly amusing – though that may be because Marcus Brigstocke’s first guest was the witty Clive Anderson. By the time they get around to inviting Jordan on the show (‘I’ve Never Read a Book’) we’ll have probably stopped watching.
What was good about it?
• Anderson has never read Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. And we could only empathise as the realisation dawned on him that women don’t want their partners to offer solutions to their problems – they just want men to listen to them and make appropriate soothing noises. But where’s the fun in that? As Brigstocke pointed out, “Why present me with a problem if you don’t want it fixed? Keep it to your bloody self!”
• Anderson finally got round to watching the excellent Withnail and I, and thoroughly enjoyed it – giving it 9 out of 10 as an experience.
• Watching Clive do judo and throwing a champion to the ground, was curiously satisfying – especially the way he kept checking his opponent was ok.
What was bad about it?
• As it was the first show of a new series, you’d think they’d have made an effort to find a guest who hadn’t seen Star Wars. But they hadn’t.
• The set and seating arrangement is virtually identical to Room 101
Did we like it?
A welcome return to the small screen for Richard Herring’s taller, (marginally) slimmer and deadpan former partner. Mixing standup comedy about a particular subject – in this case, the phenomenon of ‘toilet books’ – interspersed with relevant sketches, this showed Lee at his witty, caustic best. We’ll definitely be tuning in again.
What was good about it?
• Stewart’s critique of Dan Brown’s writing style and how the world really doesn’t need the musings of Chris Moyles was a bit like nuking fish in a barrel, but was still done with his trademark caustic wit.
• Stewart’s comment that after buying six Jeremy Clarkson books on Amazon it needs thousands of man-hours to subsequently correct your customer profile – otherwise you get recommendations such as “Mein Kampf”.
• Chris Moyles had confessed that he had no greater ambition for his writings than just being a good “toilet book”. Stewart pointed out that having a quote from Davina McCall on the front that the book was “butt-clenchingly honest” put paid to that lofty ambition.
• The great Kevin Eldon played William Tyndale (the first man to translate the Bible into English, and subsequently burnt at the stake) translating Moyles book into English, and suffering his eventual martyrdom. “For too long the written word has been the preserve of the elite. Chris Moyles expresses such noble and improving sentiments!”
• After taking the mickey out of Asher D (So Solid Crew and Grange Hill) and his autobiography (a page of pictures for every page of text), Stewart faced the camera and admitted he was ‘disrespecting’ Asher and the So Solid Crew, “Disrespecting you to the max!” We cut to Stewart sitting in his comedy vehicle, whilst a black guy pulled up in a 4x4 next to him. Stewart looks edgy until suddenly the Grange Hill ‘sausage on a fork’ pops into view.
• “No, I haven’t read the latest Harry Potter book, but I have read the complete works of visionary poet William Blake. So fuck off!”
• Stewart mocking the Irish “real-life tragedy” books. It’s a pity that “The Teats that wept Tears” by Paddy McGinty’s Goat hasn’t been published.
What was bad about it?
• Like an old man repeating himself, Lee’s description of “rappers, the rap singers – you see them on ‘The Top of the Pops’” was initially funny, but he could have cut it short by a minute to get some more material in.
Did we like it?
It won’t lay siege to the gates of police drama and breach them with a battering ram of innovation and convoluted plotting; but it did engage our interest for 45 minutes as a pretty good, low-key, focused show in the vein of Casualty and Doctors – which is both a blessing an a curse.
What was bad about it?
• While it does its best to liberate itself of the acquiescent mire of daytime TV, Missing was hampered by the twin saccharine happy endings. Etienne and Jan were reunited by their love, while Anthony’s mother Sandra, who had been suicidal because her debts, was comforted by her ex-husband who pledged to help out with the financial costs of Anthony.
• While each was a satisfying conclusion to the divergent storylines, we must have seen similar plots a thousand times before in Casualty, Doctors and the like. And while Pauline Quirke’s strong central performance awarded Missing a distinctive voice, the plots seemed to fizzle out into the amorphous mass of mainstream TV denouements.
• Right, we now know it’s set in Dover, so can there please be a moratorium on the bloody images of the White Cliffs. They’re in the title sequence, they pop up at every scenic interlude, and Sandra seemed about to throw herself from them before MJ intervened. Look, we concede they’re very pretty but like the ‘Dreaming Spires’ of Oxford that cropped up in Morse – as an allusive jackboot to the way in which the future of this country will be governed by the nauseating elite who seep through the university walls – it’s overdone.
• The disjointed epilogue in which MJ was a guest on Danny’s first shift as a local radio DJ. As their chat about the role of MJ’s team in locating missing people desiccated, he misguidedly brought up MJ’s own missing sister – thus supplying MJ with a backstory to act as a narrative spine to the series. And matters were made worse when a reflective MJ wandered down to Dover docks in one of those trite contemplative moods that everyone in Home & Away employs whenever they’re feeling slightly unhappy.
Did we like it?
This is such a sweet, charming programme, it's impossibly not to like it. Unless you have an aversion to colourful, cheery dramas and want to stick to dark, depressing tales such as Red Riding.
What was good about it?
• Anika Noni Rose is a real delight as prim secretary Mma Makutsi – and her tottering but rapid style of walking in high heels is hilarious.
• Jill Scott gives a big-hearted performance as Precious Ramotswe.
• The dazzling brightness of the whole production, making Botswana feel like a 1960s English country village transported into the heart of Africa.
• There's a heartening, simple innocence to many of the characters. Patronising? It doesn't feel that way to us, but we're sure there are arguments to be made.
• The embracing of the hairdresser, who is gay (aka "something else"), by the other characters is a nice touch.
• The addition to the detective agency staff of adorable little Wellington.
What was bad about it?
• It's hard to care to much about Alexander McCall Smith's plots – involving a missing dog, missing husband and misleading dentist – so if the jolly characters don't win you over, it's probably a sugary slog.
Did we like it?
For the first time in living memory, it actually lived up to its name.
What was good about it?
• Davina McCall and David Tenant bounded on stage to MGMT’s Kids. It might have been better if Davina had bounded off as well. She now acts like some office receptionist who's got off her head on coke on a Friday night and think she's the life and soul of the afterwork drinks session down the local.
• The recycled Harry Hill’s TV Burp, especially the “shadow of policeman looks like elephant carrying brief case on The Bill”.
• The mini-episode of The Sarah Jane Adventures, with Ronnie Corbett as a flatulent Slitheen.
• The quite difficult Mastermind between Tennant and McCall.
• Notwithstanding some minor gripes, the films about the disadvantaged people that Comic Relief will aid were as informative and moving as usual.
• The widespread absence of parasites infesting proceedings with their specious altruism, while butting in to ensure mention of their latest tour dates/ film/ album.
• Daniel Radcliffe sounding like Jools Holland.
• The best comedy sketch in the first two hours was the brilliant Outnumbered, slipping superbly from puerile jokes into sharp, observational humour in the blink of an eye.
• We've not seen the movie Mamma Mia and we never will but got a lot of pleasure from the French & Saunders parody (it was very like the real thing we were later informed by a relative who has seen the film).
• If James Corden's slide in credibility was plotted on a graph it would almost exactly match the slump in the FTSE index. But there's a little upward movement tonight, thanks to his sketch in which he harangues England's football team for not qualifying for Euro 2008. We were as amused as David Beckham seemed to be (but our smile isn't quite as shiny white as the Becks grin). Closing market update: Corden's credibility fell again when he teamed up with Mathew Horne for more of their 21st-century Hale & Pace nonsense in the small hours.
• Fern Britton (in terrible frock) and Alan Carr had a certain chemistry ("We should work together after this," Carr told Britton. "Yes, I'll get my people to talk to your person," she replied). They didn't scream stupidly like Davina and Dave although Carr's innuendo (getting the finger from Sir Alan etc) became tiresome.
• The obligatory subversive sketch in which Ricky Gervais acts like an arrogant bastard was a success. Keen thespians wantng to make The Office: The Opera were denied permission by Ricky, who scoffs whole turkeys, shows off his versatility with his Reading accent and is fed up with Comic Relief's 'Please sir can I have some more' pleading.
• The Royle Family was another triumph (we'd like a new series, please). Jim has manflu, being treated by gin and Locketts, so IT executive Anthony rushes back home ("I came as soon as I heard he asked for the heating to be turned on"), only to get caught up in a conversation about the odour emanating from Jim's beneath-duvet balls ("I sprayed round him earlier with the Febreeze but it's only taken the edge"). Dave and Denise had eaten a Fray Bentos pie for tea, by the way (crust for Dave, meat for Denise).
• Catherine Tate, the star of the last Comic Relief in her sketch with Tony Blair, was again in great form, teaming up with David Walliams for a "computer says no" sketch and then emerging as Gran to rant against the donation to her pensioners' lunch club where "you'd be better off putting a bucket of slop in the middle of the room and putting a few straws in it". The cheque didn't impress her much: "A lousy fucking thousand pounds! Comic relief – what a load of shit."
• Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse – whose comedy reputation has slumped very low in recent years – came up with a brilliant idea, a Victorian Dragons' Den, and executed it faultlessly. Highlights included "James Caan and Duncan Crapper have underestimated the fact that people might want to stick their bums out of the window and poo in the street"; the Deborah Meaden/Queen Victoria hybrid insisting: "I have never excreted in my entire life"; and Whitehouse impersonating Theo Paphitis in Stavros style (and Theo then adopting the same voice)
What was bad about it?
• Why was the announcer American? Were 60 million other people otherwise engaged or has Comic Relief swallowed that dubious conceit that nothing can be of any worthwhile significance if it isn’t recognised by America?
• Davina McCall mouthing the word “sorry” after Angus Deayton had used the mild, and acceptable, profanity of “bugger”. Soon repeats of Dastardly & Muttley will be accompanied by BBC chief Mark Thompson weeping with penitence each time Dick mutters, “Drat! And double drat!”
• The Saturdays’ Just Can’t Get Enough. While we’re adamant that no song is so sacred that it shouldn’t be covered, such as this average Depeche Mode ditty, wounding it with that senseless Mariah-moaning halfway through the chorus to try and instil some emotion into the plastic duplicate is folly. The choice of JCGE perfectly encapsulates the record company lumbering behemoth as it dumbly observes that electronic music sung by women is the ‘in’ thing, and then sets about stripping out the imagination, individuality and wonder so you go from the brilliance of The Knife, Crystal Castles and Ladytron to the palatable swinefeed of Lady Ga Ga in one easy step.
• The corrosive blight of tedious ‘uplifting’ music patched on to the end of the excellent films about what Comic Relief money is used for. We’re not suggesting they use Dead Souls by Joy Division, but merely employ some innovation so the music matches the viewer’s empathy, rather than having it destroyed by a tune indelibly affixed to images of plump, crumbling faces of pseudo-talented youths losing a meaningless singing competition.
• And the films also weren’t helped by the calculated deployment of slow motion, a technique that liberates the human face of its soul far more adroitly than Faust.
• The T-shirts “designed by Stella McCartney”. Perhaps we should salute the way in which CR ruthlessly exploits the cerebral weakness of celebrity to raise cash, but if these T-shirts were designed by Basil Brush (and they could have been) they would have sold bugger all (sorry, Davina).
• Dick & Dom, we thought they were expunged from the human consciousness about the same time as SARS.
• Simon Cowell visiting Nairobi and pretending to be human, exposing his detachment from feelings with an overuse of the redundant adjective (“I can honestly say...”, “Honestly, it feels…”) Any person who boasts of his wealth with egregious superciliousness forfeits any right to feel pity and hurt when visiting the indigent. If, of course, Mr Cowell was so moved by his visit that he’s sold his yachts, speedboats and two of his mansions to help these people out of the mire then we stand corrected.
• The near-beatification of the “heroes” who scaled Mount Kilimanjaro. The achievement was instantly crippled by the fact it was managed by someone such as Chris Moyles. If this lump of oafen flesh can walk up a mountain, then we must assume it wasn’t too much of a hardship.
• And also the notion that these ‘celebrities’ should be lauded for giving up their valuable time for such an expedition is a fallacy. Every single one of the participants falls in that bracket of fame who aren’t talented enough at their chosen profession and are essentially puppets (Ronan Keating, Cheryl Cole etc), or who crave elevation up the celebrity ladder to a position they feel more befits them (Ben Shephard, Denise Van Outen etc), and as such participation in charity events is simply part of the job rather than some generous extra-curricular activity, and so they shouldn’t be garlanded with praise. This also evokes the spectre that whenever Moyles indulges in one of his unspeakable acts of odiousness, the consensus will be that he is a ‘good person’, and incapable of malice.
• Comic Relief Top of The Pops had little going for it, with Noel Fielding's surreal "jokes", Ferne Cotton's Davina-style hysteria and Reggie Yates's blandness in between the music. Nessa and Uncle Bryn from Gavin & Stacey singing Islands in the Stream is just bad karaoke not good comedy; Franz Ferdinand and Oasis were merely acceptable; Take That, U2 and James Morrison bored us. However, we have been infected by the nation's number one, Right Round by Flo Rida, so it went out on a high.
• The Apprentice: not funny, not interesting and more of a downer amid the comedy than the celeb-cries-over-tragedy inserts. The only good line: Alan Carr talking about never been fired. "I've had them say 'Perhaps it's better if you don't come in on Monday' - is that the same thing?"
• We could just about tolerate the humdrum music from the likes of Adele, Annie Lennox and Take That but were appalled by the Script's mawkishness-laden cover of Bowie's Heroes.
• The terrible twist in the Ricky Gervais-Stephen Merchant sketch which involved Lousy Louis Walsh in a bubble bath with paintings of him naked on the walls. Sick-making.
• The comic who wasted his appearance most was Al Murray, back in his Pub Landlord guise, stranded in a jokeless pub quiz sketch which mustered only three "celebrities" Phil Daniels (he's in a soap), Lemar (he sings some songs) and the ugliest of the Dancing on Ice judges.
• There was a horrible cruelty behind the idea to get impressionists including Rory Bremner to phone people and fool them into thinking someone famous was on the line. And it wasn't even funny.
• Worst sketch of the night – by far – went to "I love you more than..." starring Little Britain plus Robbie Williams. That was followed by the almost-as-bad Friday Night News in which Alan Carr demanded: "It's for charity, laugh!" when the material fell flat.
• Mitchell and Webb and Armstrong and Miller showing that if you double the double acts you halve the humour. The RAF heroes scene was quite funny but Sir Digby Chicken Ceasar is a stomach-turning comic creation (like Frank in Shameless but less hygienic) and the jokes about pissing over the buffet were puerile.
• Kate Moss and Sadie Frost sending themselves up in a sketch with Katy Brand. If they know swanning around London as if they are God's gift to mankind is wrong, why does that talentless pair do so much of it?
• Tiredness had set in by the time we got round to the excerpt from Cage Aux Folles before Graham Norton took over as the post-midnight host; the striptease by fat-bottomed F Listers and Jason Manford's comedy routine. But even if we'd been fresh we don't think any of that lot would have impressed us much.
Did we like it?
Aside from the agitated imagination of Jonathan Ross, this was nowhere near as good as in previous years. The Apprentice thrives on dogmatic egos warring over the pettiest principle, and there was little of that with only the duel droning of Michelle Mone and Patsy Palmer in conflict, while on the boys’ team you could have chiselled more charisma from a granite boulder than the stoical Gerald Ratner.
What was bad about it?
• Michelle Mone is the most vexatious presence on the You’re Fired shows after Vanessa Feltz (but an infectious ogre composed of impetigo is less of an irritant than here, so it’s no great feat), always disgorging patronising, populist platitudes as if writing in the comments box on The Guardian or Times website. She also claimed to be “a perfectionist”, which is a craven synonym for callous megalomaniacs to be grotesquely rude and somehow make it appear a virtue.
• Here, she was initially reluctant to take charge, citing that her husband “would kill her”. But once she was installed as leader, she adopted that sub-human, instinctive disregard for any kind of empathy common to business people and assumed her team to be tools to be distributed like a Napoleonic general shifting round her auxiliary forces to position them as cannon fodder.
• And the most expendable member of the team was Patsy Palmer, who clashed drearily with Mone in an exchange so stilted and rooted in thespian neuroticism that it made the routine between Ross and Jack Dee simmer with spontaneity.
• This was because Dee’s role in the show was to act as a lugubrious foil for the frenetic ramblings of Ross; undercutting him by claiming, “I haven’t been listening for the past five minutes”. It was a limpid imitation of their ‘banter’ on Ross’ chat show. Dee committed the semantic sin of, “I’ll throw a curve ball…”. In Britain you throw a googly not a curve ball; if you wish to appropriate such a heinous vernacular, pop a cap sideways on your head.
• And the teams’ were ignorant, too, in their appraisal of focus groups. When confronted by an adult they know is famous, children invariably are intimidated and agree with everything that adults say, often through leading questions. Here both Ross and Fiona Philips quizzed kids about their projects to an ostensible unanimity of endorsement.
• And while the boys’ idea was pretty good, if a little unoriginal, the girls’ idea was appalling – a Velcro uniform that kids could stick together and fall over; they’ve got a pair of hands for that. And a feeble facsimile was clumsily bolted onto the original idea to award a deluded sense of a game.
• This is what made Sir Alan’s decision to reward the girls’ torpidity with a win, simply because it was ‘viable’ as a product. The boys could have devised party hats with the names of superheroes emblazoned across them, embroidered with cotton dipped in the blood of Gerald Ratner, or a wholly inappropriate kids’ board game version of How To Look Good Naked (“You’ve thrown a three – hug the person to your right with all the insincerity of a fashion magazine editor!”), and either would have been preferable.
• Perhaps Sir Alan’s loins were piquantly curdled when, during their presentation, an arm was placed across Carol Vorderman’s lycra-clad body. It certainly seemed to stir one of the 50something executives, who was so excited he may as well have placed 50 orders for a wife-swapping party.
• Carol Vorderman herself appeared to laugh heartily at everything.
Did we like it? 
