Most Haunted

The temperatures are dropping, and the nights are drawing in. Time for the TV Dinners team to stop stomping around London, singing Carmen, holidaying in exotic climes, and get back to the serious business of watching telly and knitting.

I had a few rows to knit while waiting for Saxondale to start: I didn't fancy watching rich people buy a house and fuck it up, so I flicked the remote to FTN's Most Haunted.

Pardon the pun, but I've been dying to watch Most Haunted after seeing the odd clip while surfing channels, so here was my chance. Until Steve Coogan's rather creepily accurate portrait of just about every music biz friend in my dad's address book, anyway.

Most Haunted is the Anti-Antiques Roadshow. Antiques Roadshow takes place during the day, and involves a group of experts in a nice old house, poring over various bits of old tut and talking about them. In Most Haunted, a team of 'experts' in paranormal phenomena walk around a nice old house at night, and talk a load of old tut about ghosties. They even film the whole thing in night vision, so they all look a bit spooky anyway, especially when you see their eyes in negative. Interestingly enough, Derek Acorah's eyes in night vision are pitch black. This, I think, is all the evidence we need that he is in fact Satan.

So here we are, on the lawn of a pretty little medieval manor house, which apparently has been a pub, a boarding school and a family home in its long and turbulent history. I'm sorry, but show me a house over 200 years old in the British Isles that doesn't have a long and turbulent history. That's what history is. Anyway, this long and turbulent history means that there are a lot of disturbed spirits running around the place. Or floating. Whatever it is that sprits do.

Firstly, Yvette Fielding. WHAT HAPPENED? Twenty years or so ago, she was a lovely, bubbly children's TV presenter with eye-scorching yellow jumpers and beautiful curly russet hair. Now she shops for crushed velvet frock coats at Goths R Us, and some demon hairdresser has transformed her tumbling locks into a bleached, straightened mulletty affair that wouldn't look odd on an ageing glam rocker. Yvette (whom Derek Acorah calls "Eveet"...eh?) no longer smiles. She looks grim. And slightly scared. What demon hold does Derek have over her and her loved ones that she is condemned to spend her fading years following him around old houses and going "eek!" at crucial moments?

So anyway, Yvette finds a few middle-aged chaps to talk about strange happenings (footsteps on the stairs, ghostly games of knock-down-ginger...you know the score). Then a 'historian' (I think he might have an A-level) gives a few gory facts: religious persecution (it's 700 years old ffs! Every manor house in the country was involved in some way!), pub brawls, small boys getting roasted over open fires... to whet our appetites before the ads.

After the ads a Parapsychologist - not even the University of Greenwich offers a course in parapsychology, and they're pretty desperate for students - waves a tricorder around and talks about temperature fluctuations.

The purpose of all this flannel is to soften us up for the appearance of the The Silver One himself. Derek Acorah even dresses dodgy. Slicked back silver hair, buttoned up black shirt, diamond ear stud...I almost expect him to start flogging Yvette a dodgy Jag or asking if I've had an accident that wasn't my fault recently. But instead he presses his fingers to his temples and looks troubled.

Derek: "I'm sensing damp...lots of damp"

It's an old house mate. They didn't do draught proofing in 1474.

Then he twitches and genuflects and says that there's a lot of Catholicism about. Well you know, that's what Catholics do, genuflect and say their Hail Mary's all day...no wonder Luther got bored and went to set up his own religion. Derek says there's a lady in white, and she hates her father. He then closes his eyes.

Derek: "I'm feeling my vision going away..."

A subtitle says that a young woman's Protestant lover was murdered by her catholic father in 157something. That's an "ooooh..." moment. For me it's an "oooh...Derek has a researcher..." moment.

The parapsychologist waves his tricorder and reports a drop in temperature. They're standing next to an open window. Derek babbles on about people drinking...Yvette hears a spooky whistle and the crew go off to investigate squeaky doors.

So, we've got a whistling white lady, a room full of drunkards, and...Derek gets "residual energy...thinking energy...like water being thrown over our shoulders..." Even Yvette can't resist a WTF look at this point.

Derek scurries off, apparently that's scurrying energy, saying that he's on the trail of two priests in hiding. Yep, well, it's an old house, and many country gentlefolk resisted the Reformation as best as they could, and there were a lot of deaths. Derek finds a priests' room, and 'sees' lots of blood. Oh, someone died then. Apparently one priest is angry, and the other one isn't. Well, maybe he doesn't like all the drunkard ghosts downstairs. And that white lady must be a bit of a pain too.

Another sweatier and obviously lesser psychic joins them as the producers get bored and switch the camera to night vision, and that's when I noticed the black eyes of demon possession.

I'm afraid I only lasted up until Derek found another spirit chap called Sam who directed them to a room where some bloke called Joseph committed suicide. The magic subtitle appears again, and says that a bloke called Joseph did commit suicide in 1878. Before we switched channeles, I saw the previews begging us to stay, and to expect demon possession (Sweaty Psychic goes "Raaaaorr"), Yvette screaming, and Derek saying he feels a bit tired...

SEVEN AGES OF ROCK PT 2: ART ROCK

Mr P, the guitar geek, has promised to grumble in a separate post about Part one of Seven Ages of rock: apparently they didn't mention that Jimi was practised loads before he was hailed as The God of All Guitarists and...well, I stopped listening...

Anyway, I'm doing Art Rock because I was there. Kind of. My dad went to Floyd gigs and even worked for Nick Mason for a while (Mr Mason is known in our family as That Bastard Mason and loyalty compelled me to shout "Git!" every time he appeared on the screen. He didn't give me a summer job processing his royalty payments either. Git.). We had all the original Velvets' and a few Bowie albums, and my mum officially fancied Bryan Ferry. I also was at the iconic Wall gig at Earl's Court in 1981, so there.

Seven Ages of Rock is also great for playing our favourite TV game, called "'E's Dead". The concept is simple. You need at least two players. The first person to shout "'E's Dead" when a now-dead actor/musician appears on the screen scores a point. If challenged you must name the dead person before you can get your point. Tonight's scores were Sarah: 4, Mr P: 1.

We started with the Floyd in their drippy trippy phase of singing about bicycles and wet posh girls. The rather fine archive footage - seriously, old farts like me only watch these things for the archive footage - was spoiled by arty editing (how can you possibly out-farty the Floyd? Fools!) and updated inserts with clever clever effects. They actually managed to wheel all four surviving members of Pink Floyd, though not in the same room - that would have been fun - and the po-faced narrator managed to slot in a drummer joke ("four musicians and a drummer..."). They all said that yes, they were interested in pushing the boundaries of music, blah blah, and there were shots of them discussing chord changes in a studio, and Syd looking slightly embarrased on a stool while a 1960s BBC chap asked them why they had to play so loudly. More clever effects meant to illustrate the effect of LSD on an archive shot of Syd playing guitar, and a film of one of his lamer pre-breakdown songs that everybody apart from three emo teenagers in Wantage would prefer to forget.

"Meanwhile..." intones the narrator. "Syd's every move was being watched by a young singer from Bromley with funny eyes..." Cue the first bit of archive Bowie footage. According to this lot, Bowie had a novelty hit with Space Oddity, and then was cut adrift in the music scene..hang on, is The Laughing Gnome to be airbrushed from history altogether?

Over in New York, a young and pretty Lou Reed was thrown together with a not as young but very beautiful Nico, a grumpy John Cale and silent, long-suffering Sterling Morrison and Mo Tucker. They tie Mo up in the name art. Nico sings flat. Andy Warhol looks a scream. John Cale appears to remember everything, while Lou purses his cat's arse mouth and claims not to recall if they actually play a psychiatrist's convention (cue shot of Edie Sedgewick - damn...missed that one - et al dancing with the Velvets in front of a group of very nervous psychiatrists). A clever bit of editing makes it look as if David Bowie is taking notes or something.

David returns to the UK, apparently, and comes up with Ziggy Stardust - a fictional amalgam of Syd, Jimi, and assorted other doomed heroes. A horribly overrated album follows, and lots of music journalists make lots of money from analysing the true meaning of Ziggy/Dark Side/Roxy Music.

The problem with this pseudo academic approach is that it forgets the most important aspect of these chosen groups. Do they rock, or do they not? Aged seven, I couldn't give a monkeys about pushing the barriers of performance. The big question was: could you dance to it? Did it groove? Floyd grooved (especially post-Syd, when they basically let Richard Wright build a groove, and sat on it for 20 minutes); Bowie grooved; Roxy grooved (before they went all lounge).

Genesis didn't. Peter Gabriel popped up with a neat goatee to explain that he felt impelled to take the Floyd levels of performance into a complete new universe of wankery, resulting in an experience that looked like a failed audition for Playaway. The rest of Genesis had enough self-knowledge to look slightly embarrassed.

We return to the Floyd, who are irritated that selling gazillions of albums not only means more Ferraris to buy, but more people to play to. Apparently The Wall was the concept album gig to end all concept album gigs. I just remember lots of inflatables, a dirty great wall being built, and Dave Gilmour doing the solo for Comfortably Numb on top of it, and not being able to speak for 24 hours afterwards.

Thank heavens for Punk. We recovered by playing our favourite DVD of Spinal Tap...that's a proper rock documentary.

SOUL BRITANNIA DRINKING GAME

Work in progress from me and Mr P.

1. Every time Robert Elms manages to shoehorn trousers into an examination of the social impact of post-war immigration policy and its impact on British society = ONE FINGER
   
2. Every time Van Morrison smiles, either in archive or on present-day footage = REST OF GLASS
   

BACK TO LIFE

What gets me about these 'real' reality shows such as The Apprentice and Masterchef, is yes, they're full of bright youngish folk actually learning a craft or how to sell frozen water to Inuits; and no, it isn't just about scratching your arse with a bunch of other misfits while teeny txters send shout outs to their mates along the bottom of the TV screen. But let's face it, why are they really doing it?

If you've always wanted to run a restaurant, then why did you train as an opera singer/marketing executive/graphic designer/merchant banker/lawyer, exactly? There are any number of catering colleges dotted up and down the country that will gladly show you the correct way to hollandaise. You can even do degrees in hotel management and catering. You might have to start the hard way, the same way as Jamie and Gordon and even Ainsley did: washing dishes and burning your fingers on the breakfast service grill. But, you know, give it a few years and a lot of hard work, and you'd probably make a really good chef de partie, or even an exec.

But no...let's be honest...you're not very good at what you do now, you can cook a bit, and you want to be on telly. Why not spend a few weeks getting humiliated by Turner and the Torode, and then start up a home catering company for those who want their canapes prepared by Him/Her Off The Telly. If you do actually win and get the year of washing dishes in a Top Restaurant, then good luck to you, but I'll be surprised and impressed if a) the chefs will have anything to do with you, and b) if you last six months.

The same with The Apprentice. If you've sat in your marketing office, or salesroom, or looked around your lab and said: "Sod this, I've always wanted to sub-contract the manufacture of cheap electrical goods to a Hong Kong factory and sell dodgy home electrolysis kits to Daily Mail readers," then good luck to you. But face it love, you wanted to live in a nice London pad for a week or three, get driven around (you never see Apprentices use public transport - too many youths going "brap" and making rude comments about crappy loudspeaker phones?), and more importantly, it's Telly. After a couple of months of tabloid hounding, you'll be able to set up your own motivational "consultancy", get a cable TV show - or even do a column on the next series...

Take it from a corporate slave of sorts. The reason why the Apprentices are so crap is that anybody who's any good at what they do applies for a job, works steadily and well for a year or two, gets promoted, or moves on to another, better position in another company. Or they start small, grow slowly, and get rich trying. Bit like Siralan. But that's boring TV, so let's get these fame hungry bozos to flog coffee on the streets and sell kisses to dirty old men in pubs, because that's all that they deserve. And we know it.

Anyway, this is what the Apprentice has taught us about Young Thrusting Businessfolk Of Today (YTBOT).

1. A YTBOT never wears a dressing gown. Dressing gowns are for wimps.
2. YTBOT do not know how to make coffee.
3. YTBOT have never owned or walked or dog, and have no friends who own or walk dogs. This is why they think that all dog owners are gay men and mad.
4. YTBOT do not have ideas, they have IDEATION

MAKING YOUR MIND UP

MARK:Yes, it’s that time again, as the UK votes for the entry that will come 16th in the Eurovision Song Contest this year. Wogan is presenting and already seems quite drunk, the way he is glaring at the autocue and swaying slightly. Fearne Cotton is his girly sidekick, wearing a weird shiny dress and terrible blusher – it looks like someone has drawn red circles on each cheek with a wax crayon. The “panel of experts” consists of Capt Jack from Dorkwood and Mel off Mel and Sue. Mel is wearing a bizarre miniature top hat at a jaunty angle – I later decide that this hat disguises a microcomputer that is beaming useless Eurovision trivia directly into her brain. Mel keeps saying “Eurovish”, when once would have been enough really.

SARAH: I like it that they appear to have taken Morrissey at his word and drafted in proper pop singers - well, pop singers that have actually seen the inside of the Top Ten and appeared on the cover of Smash Hits at least once - instead of the usual crew of stage school shriekers, ex X-factor competitors and session musos looking for a last hit at the Big Time. But of course it is all doomed.

BTW. I hate Fearne Cotton, but have to admit that she did a pretty good job managing Terry and the various popstrel types.

MARK:The first act is Liz off Atomic Kitten. She goes on about being a scouser and liking Eurovision and then shows us the bar she used to work before she was famous. It’s a good job she remembers where it is as she’ll be back there before long. She has a weird corkscrew perm and wears a short yet blousy blue dress to sing a bland and forgettable motown knock-off type song – there’s nothing wrong with it and her voice is quite good, but it isn’t anything great. The best bit is when all the boy dancers get overexcited and start doing backflips and somersaults etc. Capt Jack says something weird about her being a “down home girl” that makes him sound like a record exec from a 1950’s Cliff Richard film, as do all his comments tonight.

SARAH: Well, she can sing a bit. It was OK. But nothing special.

MARK:Next is Brian Harvey, the roughest one out of E17. (Sarah: I thought the roughest one was the bloke who looked like a bald fox, but not in a good way. Oh, hang on, they were all bald. Except for the fat talented one...) He goes for the sympathy vote by going on about his accident a lot, though frankly if I managed to fall out of a car I was driving and run myself over I would rather keep quiet and hope people forgot about it. Jesus, what is going on with his hair? It looks like a mohawk that has slipped to the back of his head. That can’t be a deliberate hairstyle, can it? For his song he wears a black suit with weird gold bits on it like circuit connections. Perhaps after the accident they rebuilt him like a bionic man or something and they need those bits to recharge him. The song is like an Alexander O Neill song and his voice isn’t really up to it. Next! Capt Jack says that it has a crazy groove that will make the beatniks go ape, or something.

SARAH: I kept wondering when he was going to get off that stage and come and fix my light fittings like he promised last week. Time to call Learn Direct, Brian.

MARK:Next is Big Brovas, who had a couple of big hits a few years back that melded the Sound of Music to hip hop beatz way before Gwen Stefani thought of doing it. Can I just say that Terry Wogan should never ever be allowed to say “urban flava” ever again. For the performance the women dress like Victorian hookers and wail away over a groovy string sample while the blokes rap a bit in the background and a couple of goth ballerinas act out goth tragedy (ohs noes, my mum told me I couldn’t listen to “My Chemical Romance” until I’d finished my homework. Why does everything rot and die! I wish I was dead, but in a sexy way like in an Anne Rice novel” etc etc) through the medium of dance. It is actually pretty good and I want it to win, even though it would do terribly at the actual ESC. Capt Jack says a few things that are euphemisms for: “it is performed by black people!”

SARAH: Quite liked it. In the way that I quite liked Big Brovas before my crazy next door neighbour started playing their album very very loud at 6am every day for a month.

MARK:Then we get Cyndi, who is a french singer who wants to do well for the UK and drinks some beer (like proper beer, nothing nice like a 1664 or anything) to prove how anglophile she is. She wears a black formal frock and sings a ballad that is an exact genetic splicing of “Wind beneath my wings” and “My heart will go on”. Ugh. It is very turgid and slow and predictable, complete with rousing key change 3/4 of the way through. Her gimmick is that the backing dancers walk on half way through. Awesome!

SARAH: Bu...buh...she's FRENCH! It's a neo-Napoleonic plot to take over our airwaves with their wavy-armed torch singing! A bas les chanteuses ennuyants avec les key-changes mediocres!

MARK:Then we have Scooch, who are the Fast Food Rockers that time forgot. There is a fat blond bloke with horrid hair, a weasel faced dark haired gaylord and two women who look like make up sales ladies from Debenhams. They are all wearing nasty cheap looking air steward type outfits and sing a song with an aviation theme so they can talk about flying over lots of European cities in a cynical attempt to get inhabitants of those cities to vote for them. It is all v sub Steps, complete with moronic “I’m an aeroplane” dance moves and camp interludes for the gayest bloke to say things like, “Would you like some salted nuts” in a suggestive voice at regular intervals. For the finale they wheel some trolleys around to show that they have a union jack flag on the back. This is really awfully cynical stuff. Capt Jack goes wild in the aisles, in case you were in any doubt that he is also gayer than Christmas.

SARAH: God, I hated this knowing try-hard camp nonsense with a passion. My husband quite liked it.

MARK:Finally we have Beverlei Brown (who??) and Justin out of the Darkness. Justin obviously could not want to be there less. There song is very weird, starting off like a track from an Austin Powers movie and then ranging over a wide number of musical genres, none of them any good. Justin’s high pitched cat strangling vocal does not go with Beverlei’s voice at all. There is a pointless guitar solo. There is a funky horn section. I really do not understand what is going on with this song. Capt Jack praises its “Euro funk style”. I don’t really understand what that means either.

SARAH: I willed this to be good. And my will failed.

MARK:Fearne chats to some foreign people who are in the audience – a Maltese guy and a Ukrainian girl both rate Big Brovas! We want them to win at home too! They show clips of other Euro entries. All I can remember is that there seem to be lots of trannies and also a bloke pretending to be a vampire. My brane cannot process this as yet.

SARAH: Terry mentions that Ireland have already secured their place in the bottom three by choosing something with tin whistles that makes My Lovely Horse look quite professional. Actually, I think My Lovely Horse would do really well if it went into Eurovision. Imagine all those Ukranians and Uzbekistahnians wondering about horse dentists...

MARK: There is a break for the phone voting and then we are back. Fearne is now wearing a different black dress that he makes her rack look plasticky and flat like an Action Man’s chest. Weird. Wogan is now clearly drunk – he drops into a chair like a sack of potatoes, does a link standing on a step with Fearne on the next step down (so she comes up to his elbow!) etc etc. whoever is directing the show also seems to have had a few. We get odd cuts to cameras that aren’t pointed at anything and interviews with people who are basically in total darkness. My BBC working boyfriend is shocked at the poor quality (his exact words “I would expect something like this on BBC3 but…” !!)

Lordi perform again from last year and amuse me and then Brian and Liz get the chop. Byeee! No surprise there. Then Big Brovas get the chop (Noooo!!!) followed by Justin/Bev. Justin races from the stage in record time, no doubt off to instantly sack his manager. We are down to Cyndi and Scooch and they have a “sing off” – both songs sound a lot worse the second time round. They have a little break for more voting and then announce the winner, only Wogan and Fearne each shout out a different name so that no one knows who has won. What a shambles. Fearne has a quick word in Wogan’s drunken ear and he shouts, “Oh right, it is Scooch after all!” and we all shake our heads in disbelief. After Jordan and Daz Sampson I always think that this show cannot get any stranger. I am clearly very naïve.

SARAH: What with all the allegations of phone vote tampering flying about this week, I suppose they couldn't possibly have fixed this one. I fear for the sanity of the Great British Public. Next year, I think the hopefuls should perform in front of a panel of deaf/blind performing monkeys who will then cast their votes by pushing the failed entries into a crocodile-infested lake. That would work as well as any, and possibly solve the unemployed ex-popstrel problem too!

Next up – the semi finals, where they try and whittle down the 60 or so entries into a reasonable number!