12^th December 1998

Yes, it's that time of year, boys and girls. The erstwhile Christian, originally Pagan and now global celebration of marketing and consumerism. A time when Pagans celebrate the availability and good distribution of nature-brand products; when Christians celebrate the coming of the great profit Jesus with the giving and receiving of specially marketed toys and electrical goods; and where all other races and religions of the world, except perhaps the Jews who aren't too keen on the whole Jesus as Messiah thing, jump on the whole Christmas bandwagon.

Big gifts this year are children's dolls and teddies that have guts you can pull out.

For the noble cause of this very column, I have been watching TV at al sorts of times. Today, I bring you news of Saturday daytime kids shows. In particular, NVS (LWT). NVS stands for North Versus South, and is a pop quiz where the gimmick is that the two teams come from different ends of the country. This is the only gimmick as everything else is a direct rip-off of other shows. From the credits to the set. Even down to the appalling jokes that the male co-host tells. These jokes are written by the slightly less-hip son of the guy who writes the jokes for Countdown's Richard Whitely. The show has a female co-host, who wisely eschews jokes, leaving it to her better qualified partner.

The teams are made up of ugly, stupid kids, who have an even worse knowledge of popular music than I have. In fact they must handpick them for their abject stupidity and their serious bad looks. And to find kids of that age who know next-to-nothing about pop music must be an achievement, unless they scour the country's disused garages for children who started experimenting with drugs earlier than the rest. Even so, these kids will generally be able to answer any question on the musical careers of Orbital or Underworld.

Maybe I've just lost touch with my youth.

Channel 4's offering for kids into music is a lot more cool. Well, both try to be but, by serious design, The Young Person's Guide To Becoming A Rock Star does actually come a lot closer to achieving this aim. It's the story of four, or five, young wannabe rock stereotypes and their indoctrination into a world peopled by the already big rock stereotypes. Of course, there are sub-plots about members of the band fancying each other, etc, or else we wouldn't watch, would we? I have judges that it is a comedy-drama, for although the format is comic, the dramatic lack of comedy means that it surely can only be comedy drama.

As well as the central characters and the comic/dramatic side-characters, there are cameos by well known pop figures, past and present. From Chrissie Hinde right down to Liam, or is I, Noël, Gallagher from the overrated boy-band Oasis. As yet I haven't noticed there be a cameo by Cameo. But then, who remembers who they are now?

Maybe I've just lost touch with my youth.

I have come to a revelation. I have seen more than my usual allotted episodes of 90's sci-fi series recently. Such series as Star Trek: The New Crew; Star Trek: Boyarder; and Rivers Of Babylon 5. Having seen these I have come to a startling conclusion that they merely take their plots from cheap, 1950's, social-drama B-movies. They take these heavy-handed, overly-moralistic plots about racism, choices between family and money, etc, and apply them to people with excessive amounts of prosthetic makeup.

Thus any episode of Rivers Of Babylon 5 could have been written (and directed) by Hugo Haas or starred Sidney Poitier. And Star Trek: Boyarder seems to only consist of large-chested aliens helping poor, useless humans out of tough situations created by the evil Baadaktor.

This is just my opinion, and it could just be that I've lost touch with my youth.

Last night, the much-publicised will-they-won’t-they wedding series finale of Friends made it on British terrestrial TV. I could only watch the first half, as there was a new series of Goodness Gracious Me! on the other side. I don’t get to see these so-called friends that often, and as such, I’m interested in an overall idea of their general antics, but the specifics I don’t need. I want a regular update, say given to me by a mutual friend over a couple of pints, I no longer want to dip into their lives once a week. Anyway, they are too pretty and too bland to be my friends. Who, actually are they trying to kid?

[Bah Humbug - Bah Humbug - Bah Humbug - Bah Humbug - Bah Humbug - Bah Humbug - Bah Humbug - Bah Humbug - Bah Humbug - Bah Humbug - Bah Humbug - Bah Humbug - Bah Humbug - Bah Humbug - Bah Humbug - Bah Humbug - Bah Humbug - Bah Humbug - Bah Humbug - Bah Humbug - Bah Humbug]

30^th December 1998

Every now and again, the media has to become obsessed with a couple. It's the closest thing it can have to forming a relationship. The couple don't even have to be an item, they just have to be two people. The last big couple was Johnny Vaughn and Denise Van Outen. If you don't know who they are then I'll explain. Johnny is a TV 'personality' an amusing man who has only after several failed attempts, found his forte: Taking the piss early in the morning. Denise's forte: is having the piss taken out of her early in the morning. But all this piss-taking is done with a lot of affection, and the TV company has done it's best to sell the world on the idea of Johnny and Denise as an item. They're both attractive, outgoing. And they both do mornings. Johnny does funny early in the morning, and Denise does low-cut tops early in the morning. Comedy and Cleavage. Two things guaranteed to get the (heterosexual) male workforce off to a good start.

Now the reason I mention this pair (as in Johnny and Denise, stupid) is that they have released a single for Christmas. It's a version of Kylie [Minogue] and "Big Gay" Jason Donovan's Especially For You, if any of you kiddies are lucky enough to remember this song. What Johnny and Denise's version of this song does is to remind us all how truly talented and gifted Miss Minogue and Miss Donovan were. If only this version had been released at the time, we would have known this fact then.

I must point out that the modern version is for charity, so any comments I make about it being shoddy, sub-standard and quite, quite dreadful, are in very poor taste. I hope you understand this.

No Edinburgh report this week. It's just too long ago.

Turrah!

(c) December 1998 Peter R. More.