Britain’s Naff Talent

I don’t watch much TV overall, although there’s some pretty hot and interesting stuff on Channel 4 now and again, but I did watch Britain’s Got Talent tonight by mistake.

Hmmm. Another programme with three judges and an act being thrown off each week by the public (although one being saveable by the judges). What a fantastic concept for a programme. Not. When will this ever end? Why is everything on TV this format?

Yes, I realise the whole thing is really just a vehicle for finding another recording star (‘cos the finalist is always going to be a singer and never a juggler) for Simon Cowell’s record company to make Simon Cowell Billions of Dollars out of, but there’s a bit I don’t get…

Why do we have to have the sob stories? People are either bullied at school, had their entire family eaten by termites, or, as in tonight’s programme, have some how been forced to leave their children in the Philippines whilst they seek work over here as a club singer in order to send money back to them.

Oh, come on. Stop it with the bloody sob stories. Why didn’t this women bring her kids over with her? Everybody else does! And why didn’t she try to get a real job instead of thinking the answer to her financial problems would be to audition for singing contests? (OK, it’s not officially a singing contest, although we all know it is.) She could have got some training and maybe got a reasonably well-paid office job or something, got a little flat and lived quite securely with her kids. But no. She wants to do the sobbing on a talent show bit instead. And worse, singing bloody annoying Whitney Houston songs to boot.

Here’s a slightly better format for this winning formula programme: As soon as somebody has a sob story they should immediately hear three buzzing noises, the stage trapdoor should open, they plummet down ending their obvious misery in life, and we never ever see or hear of them again. They should then be replaced by a contestant who wants to use only their talent to win the show, not emotional blackmail.

Stupid programming ideas #807732: Cristo on LBC

Ok, so there’s this ’showbiz’ show on the talking station LBC in London, presented by ‘Cristo’ in the weekend early evenings. Despite his constant menuing and barkering, nobody calls in.

Now then. The mainstay feature of the programme is that he and his guests actually watch whatever current Simon Cowell-esque talent show (you know the one: the judges comment, the public votes, one ‘act’ goes each week) that’s live on TV right at that moment and they talk about it as its broadcast and debate it. They even play just captured short clips from it.

WTF?

Hello? Mr LBC Programme Controller? Surely, anybody remotely interested in who’s going to be in Oliver, skate well, ballroom dance well, or has got laugh out loud fun fun fun talent, is going to be, erm, watching it on TV! Those that are not watching it, but have turned to the radio for entertainment are not watching it for a reason. They hate it. They want something else.

I mean, who in their right mind says to themselves, “Ooh I mustn’t miss lovely Ant and Dec talking to fun fun fun people who can whistle using their armpit. I know what I’ll do I’ll turn my telly off and listen to the radio for some people jibber-jabbering away like old people in an old people’s home about the show I’ve just deliberately switched off.”

No, it just doesn’t happen. The reason you’re getting no calls Mr Cristo is because the people who are likely to be listening are not likely to be watching or slightly interested in your commentary about a live TV show. Those that might be interested are busy watching it, ffs!

And another thing. If you’re listening to the radio and the presenter and guests are ‘talking up’ a programme that’s on TV right now, making it sound exciting and interesting, what are you going to do? That’s right, switch the radio off and go and watch the TV! Even more reasons why nobody’s calling in. Pathetic.

Somebody sack the producer and put something sensible on instead. Stuff aimed at people who have chosen not to watch the current TV ‘talent’ finding programme!

I’m waiting for the Man in the Morning

I don’t suppose anybody here is still following the Man in the Morning’s blog http://breakfastdj.blogspot.com/ are they?

Now, this surely must be building up to being published properly. It needs a bit of subbing but there’s more than enough words there for it to be a huge book and a monster read already! Yet, every day out spurts yet another episode.

With Global now owning almost everything, ultimately we will have quasi-national (or regional) networks where once we had individual self-contained radio stations. (Remember when ITV1 was a collection of regional TV stations?) This means that in truth we will slowly start to have less radio in the UK. The only people that’ll be
welcomed onto this tier of networked radio will be people with TV careers, already in the public eye. The radio man (or woman) won’t exist except in a few of the old folk who are still on the air, and have only ever done radio. Once they’re all dead, there’ll be no new radio-only stars.

Anyway, the Man in the Morning’s daily blog is charting the slow death of a bland radio station as it slips away down the route I’ve just discussed. Brilliant read. I wanna start a Zak de Luxe fan club.

The case of the RICKMOBBING of Liverpool Street Station

I’ve just been listening to a discussion on t’wireless about Friday’s  Rickmobbing of Liverpool Street Station in London.  They were desperate to make sense of it all.  I was laughing into my late night bowl of Coco-pops at them going on about not getting it, or assuming it’s all some viral publicity campaign for the re-release of the record.  It isn’t!  It’s a thousand people all having a laugh and enjoying themselves.

Ok, just to fill you in if you’re a virgin to this whole Rick Astley thing.. .

Firstly, there was ‘Flash mobbing‘.  This is where random collections of people who don’t know each other all descend on a particular place but are mingling in the crowd.  At a precise given time, they all start performing a specific action.  The ‘action’ might be to all start mooing or pretending they are goats, or whatever. At another precise time they stop, and immediately dissolve back into the crowd.

There’s now also this Rickrolling phenomena that won’t go away.  It was at first the art of giving people spurious links on t’internet that would always end up at a video of Rick Astley singing ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ rather than the ‘hot pictures of John McCririck nude’ or whatever had been the promise.  This has also mutated into a protest song, typically sung outside the Church of Scientology’s indoctrination and recruiting centres which are now regularly ‘Rickrolled’.

So, you get ‘Flashmobbing‘ and ‘Rickrolling‘ and you put them together and you have ‘Rickmobbing‘.

Yep, random people getting together in a given place and at a given time all suddenly starting to sing ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’.  That’s what Liverpool Street station got treated to on Friday (11th April).

And the media just doesn’t get it.  Commentators are discussing the psychology of it, or trying to.  They’re writing about it.  Debating it. Dissecting it.  But, in the end they just don’t get it.  In their world everything has to make sense, and this just doesn’t.

Well, good, I say.  This is something that can’t be picked apart and analysed by late night ‘experts’ nor should it be.  It is something fun that should be encouraged, enjoyed and joined in with.  And that’s all it is.

Ok, ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ will be number one in a couple of weeks, and commentators will say this Rickmobbing was all a plot by those involved in remixing / re-releasing the song to engineer that.  But they’ll be wrong.  Rick will be there because of the power of the people to make it so.  Not because they love the song, far from it.  It’ll be because it was fun to make it so.  A laugh.  And, the song was re-mixed / re-released because of the rickrolling and rickmobbing and not t’other way round. Power to the people, man!

Blimey, we so need a radio station in tune with this.  When was the last time a radio station managed to get a mob to Liverpool Street station?