The Magic of Live TV Not

I attended another BBC TV show recording the other week, but this was for a rubbish “Sound of Musicals” thing, presented by Aled Jones and just perfect for the Saturday 6.30pm slot. It is all very Lite Entertainment. The guests were the two singing coaches off Fame Academy, the blonde bloke ex of S Club 7, Ruthie Henshall from The West End and Captain Jack off Dr Who (who is much better looking in real life, hubba hubba). Also there were cast members from Mama Mia doing lame Abba karaoke type shenans. Oh good.

The plot of the show is ***SPOILER*** that they sing songs off musicals and dance around a bit. Zzzz. With all the reshoots and technical pauses it seemed to last an age and I amused myself by spotting how many gays there were in the audience (answer = many). The highlights were (a) whenever Ruthie Henshall sang – she was v good and I especially liked “All That Jazz” from Chicago, performed with a bunch of dancers and (b) when they were all told that they would have to do a complicated medley sequence again from scratch and Ruthie said “Oh for fuck’s sake” loud enough for the whole audience to hear. I know how you feel, love.

The lowlights were the rest of it, basically. We had to listen to Red Haired Fame Academy Lady murder “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina”, not once but twice. Capt Jack is a very good singer but was given shit songs to sing. I especially hate Maria from West Side Story. Whoever thought it would be a good idea to have a song where someone basically sings “Maria, Maria, Maria” about fifteen times in a row deserves to be shot. I don’t think I’ll be setting my video for this one when it finally airs.

Questions for the LOST

So, where did the crazy French lady come from and how come she didn't hear the plane? Is she crazy, or is there really an island-specific disease that turns human beings into polar bears? How come her hair is so well-conditioned after sixteen years on a tropical wilderness, and is it just the innate French style that makes her wear her castaway rags like Agnes b? Where is that electricity coming from? How come Hurley hasn't lost any weight? How did Sayid escape the murderous forces of Saddam's Republican Guards and make his way to freedom without whatsername (who also had pleasantly tousled locks, even after a month in a desert hellhole prison). What was a nice boy like him doing in a crack psycho military unit anyway?

I kind-of agree with Frank about Lost being a teeny bit crap, but it's nice to unwind to after my evening class. Though it does leave me too tired to watch The Apprentice

Random thoughts on LOST no 324

It's the Hobbit's turn to look dreamily into the distance. He manages to do this while Kurtz is using him as boar bait, which is quite good. Hobbit drifts back to a confessional, where he is busy confessing to some hot groupie action the night before. Hey, hang on a bit, they're from Catholic boys from Manchester (via Glasgow and Brentwood, judging by those accents), there's a wild child singer brother, and his name is Liam. Hobbit plays guitar and writes all the Quo-heavy stadium rocky song. There are blondes, drugs, party shenanigans a-plenty...but Noel Gallagher as a junior priest? Hmmm...maybe I do need some of Hobbit's drucks.

Dr Jack's squeaky little voice messes with the roof structure, and the cave collapses in on him, becoming a cave of DEATH.

Music Television and its Discontents

When I got a freeview box I was very excited about the music channels and used to have them on all the time – basically you get two channels: TMF which is owned by MTV/VH1 etc and "The Hits"; god knows what that one is all about. It was like listening to the radio! But with pictures! Unfortunately that was before I realised that (a) their transmission time is about 50% adverts for the Crazy Frog (from his unequal pupils I surmise that the so called “Crazy” Frog has actually had a stroke or some other brain trauma rather than being “crazy” – thank god those years of watching ER were good for something); and (b) that they only ever play about five videos, three of which are by Usher.

As though they do not make enough money from their HALF HOUR LONG advertising slots, the freeview music channels also try and gouge their viewers by making them pay to request videos and also by running lame “love match” type things along the bottom of the screen, i.e. you pay £1.50 to txt two names in and it spews out some random bollocks like “This love has no future. Melinda is a honey but look at James’ pants.” When I was recently on holiday in the Baltics, we would put on German freeview music channels in the hotel and I saw the next disturbing stage to this texting madness – people actually have an inbox and profile and send in pictures of themselves. It is like “faceparty.com” meets “The Chart Show”. From my extensive research, the kinds of people who send their pictures in are goth girls called “drklver”, teenage boys who wish the world “peace” or “love” in txtspeak, fans of Tokio Hotel (shit german band who have apparently been cloned from Duran Duran’s toenail clippings) or pasty faced forty year olds looking for wives. I have seen the future of “The Hits” and it is some spotty 14 year old from Dortmund informing us that “schone madchen sind groovy LOL”.

“The Hits” channel is the worst for this; at least TMF sometimes shows “documentaries” – these mainly seem to consist of old episodes of “Cribs” or “Jessica and Nick: Newlyweds”, or else are about Paris Hilton’s 100 most vacuous moments or the way that Lindsay Lohan once called Hilary Duff a bitch. These list type shows are just like the ones in the UK (ie they have some minor celebrity making non witty comments about the entries) so if you ever wanted to know who is the US equivalent of Paul Ross or Kate Thornton then you should watch these programmes for sure. My boyfriend’s housemates recently won free Sky Plus for a year and so have about three million proper music channels which actually show different genres of music. I am very jealous. We watched the rock chart on MTV and they showed things like Arcade Fire!!! Amazing! Arcade Fire would only ever appear on TMF if Paris Hilton tripped over one of them and her boobs fell out of her dress.

US Apprentice: Crimes of Fashion part 2

I have still been watching US Apprentice but haven’t written much lately as it got a bit dull for a while. I liked the parts when Poison Dwarf Stacey and Irritating Nerd Raj got fired though. Oh yes. I also enjoyed a recent episode in which the teams had to design a promotional catalogue for Levi’s Jeans. It had to demonstrate the brand’s core strengths (um, being overpriced and not fitting very well?) blah blah blah and show that Levis fit a wide range of body types (apart from mine).

Ivana was actually quite useful for once and came up with a nifty wheel design thing where you turn a dial to your body type and it tells you what style of jean to get. I love things like that which rotate and are gimmicky etc so that gets full marks from me. Evil blonde lawyerette Jen took credit for the idea, even though she didn’t actually understand it at first. Ivana accused Jen of casting a “fembot spell” on male team members and made a hilarious “my breasts are like guns” gesture. I am starting to dislike Jen. The team members decided to model the jeans themselves, which is quite vain really, but Ivana and Jen looked very pretty with their fancy make-up on and Kevin (the only remaining halfway decent looking bloke) took off his shirt a lot, so I’ll let them off.

Tall blonde Wes was the project manager for the other team and put blinking maniac Maria in charge of taking photographs and dealing with models etc. Maria went into a sort of Zoolander Fugue State and ran around screaming things to models like “Give me bitchy or give me death!” Comedy gold! There was a priceless interview clip of her saying “I’m not a control freak” and then blinking rapidly about fifteen times. She bossed everyone around, refused to let anyone help her, took ages on everything and basically messed things up on a mammoth scale while Wes sat around looking hapless. Of course they lost, mainly because Maria didn’t manage to take any decent butt shots in her photo session and so left them out completely. Apparently the butt shot is vital for jeans advertising but I prefer a good package shot myself.

In the board room Donald and his Trumpettes had a difficult time deciding who was the most useless out of Maria and Wes. Everyone slagged them off and Maria got so tight lipped that I thought her mouth was going to disappear completely. In the end Donald sacked both of them just like that. Oh my God! When you’re Donald Trump the rules of reality TV mean nothing to you! Nothing!!! Embarrassingly, Wes and Maria had to take the lift down to the lobby together and then share the taxicab of loserdom. I bet there was one hella frosty atmosphere in that cab.