TV REVIEW: Celebrity SalonTV3, from Monday. Big Brother's Big Award ShowChannel 4, Tuesday. Mary Queen of ShopsBBC2, Monday British Academy Television Awards BBC1, Sunday Coronation StreetTV3 and UTV, Thursday
THE NUMBERS in my house don’t look good. One telly, one enormous World Cup fixture poster in the kitchen, two soccer-keen males and my own zero interest in watching even one minute of it. Yes, the biggest TV event of the year began yesterday with the opening ceremony and several matches hogging the schedules as a grim sign of things to come for us footie-phobics.
A whole month of Wayne Rooney looming down over the dinner table from that poster and on TV, countries you'd have a hard time finding on a map having a kickabout. And try idly suggesting that surely nobody'd be bothering watching Serbia v Ghana (see how handy that fixture poster is) and you're met with a look of complete incomprehension and an "of course we'll be watching, it's the World Cup", as if you were some sort of witless idiot recently arrived from another planet.
And that's not all. Big Brotherstarted this week – mercifully for the last time as its 10-year run is coming to an end thanks to dwindling viewing figures. So, between World Cup coverage and the inanity of Big Brother, it's going to be a challenge this month to find something decent to watch on the telly.Though, as an exercise in media studies, it'll be equally interesting seeing what TV programmers consider suitable World Cup antidotes. Not interested in football? Must be a girl: expect to see at least one Jennifer Aniston rom-com; or you must be a pointy-headed arty farty type: give 'em a couple of documentaries and they'll be as happy as any sad footie hater can be.
TV3 have gone for the "must be a girl" option with their reality (and I use that term loosely) series Celebrity Salon. The idea is that, over the course of 12 days, six Irish celebrities will be turned into – as the TV PR bumph says – "hardened beauty professionals". Best not spend too much time pondering whether you would want your beauty professional to be hardened. I missed the first five minutes of the first programme on Monday night when the celebrities were introduced – fatal, because I only half-recognised three of them. So much for the celebrity bit.
There's the woman who plays a doctor in The Clinic; the Irish guy who won (or maybe didn't win – who can remember?) Big Brotherand the woman who runs a model agency in Limerick. Putting the six through their paces is a very strict (though not apparently hardened) beauty professional called Elaine, the best thing about this astonishingly silly show. Well, that and the funny scripted voice-over. In each episode, the six learn how to do a couple of beauty treatments, and yes, in episode one that did mean watching six fake tans dry – even less entertaining than the famously boring paint version.
The contestants seem to be having a whale of a time, which is never a good sign as it's always in inverse proportion to viewer enjoyment. With his gurning and eye-rolling, the Big Brotherguy comes over as the love child of Widow Twankey and Kenneth Williams, and clearly thinks he's vastly entertaining. I thought the actor from The Clinicwas going to need sedation, she was giggling so hysterically at the sight of a male model in his underpants. And her supposed to be a doctor.
Then the contestants go back to "the house", a glamorous place somewhere in Dublin with its white leather padded walls and giant round bed where, in the way of these reality shows, they stay for the duration. It's as cheap as chips: on The Apprenticeon the BBC the contestants who win the task get to go on helicopters to Michelin-starred restaurants; here they get their breakfast made by the others, "and not just cornflakes," instructed Elaine. Things are so tight (or maybe I'm missing the point here) that some of them have to share the big roundy bed. It's enough to make you glance at the wall chart for an alternative.
AS THIS IS the final series of Big Brother, much is expected. It's been so long since the show made the headlines (the Shilpa Shetty versus Jade Goody racism controversy in 2007, or BB7, as fans call it) that the 14 oddbods who made it on to the show on Wednesday night will really have to deliver the goods. A murder maybe, graphic sex, an onscreen wedding, brain surgery with a few kitchen utensils . . . a nation expects.
To get fans in the mood – and remind the rest of us why it is to be avoided at all costs – Big Brother’s Big Award Show featured past contestants squeezing out a last couple of moments of screen fame by arguing in their gobby, self-important way which was the best series. Awards were given out in various categories including Biggest Bitch (BB8’s Charlie in case you’re interested) and Biggest Bad Boy (Nasty Nick in BB1). If you can remember these people – or worse, still care whether they win a Best Bitch Award or not – it’s a sign you need to get out more.
A REASON TO stay in and attempt to take control of the remote (it clashes next week with Italy v Paraguay; really, that wall chart is invaluable) is Mary Queen of Shops. This is retail guru Mary Portas's third series and this time she's attempting to turn around the fortunes of small high street shops which are losing customers to supermarkets.
In the first brilliantly entertaining programme she took on the very old-fashioned Mahers and Sons bakers in London. The suburb is yummy mummy central where the demand is for sourdough bread and foccacia. So why is battleaxe bakery owner Angela persisting with white loaves, sloppily iced buns sprinkled with hundreds and thousands and smiley-faced biscuits the size of saucers? (“I haven’t had one of these since I was six,” said Portas gloomily.) However, the woman who successfully turned around the image of Harvey Nichols thought it would be a doddle. “If Angela is half as sweet as her cakes, we should be fine,” she said, giving the sloppy-looking jam tarts the benefit of the doubt. What could be easier: bring Angela to a hugely successful artisan bread maker, show her the modern way, and the business would be transformed. Job done. But Angela knew better. “You don’t know anything about this trade,” she barked, ever-protective of her French fancies and shiny pine shelving. And, eyeing Portas with her sharp haircut, big clanky jewellery and fashionable clothes, she carped, “she doesn’t look like she eats much cake herself”.
Angela never missed an opportunity to say she had been in business for 36 years. It was like a mantra, and she called Portas “darling” in a way that made it sound positively threatening. She resisted every suggestion of change, much to Portas’s mounting frustration; it left the viewer wondering just why Angela volunteered for the makeover in the first place.
In these programmes it always comes right in the end and Portas has had some spectacular successes. Not this time. “My job was to make the business more profitable. I haven’t done that. That’s the exam failed,” she said, sounding genuinely defeated. After one bruising encounter in the bakery with Angela – and the programme was entertainingly full of them – Portas said, “That’s it, I’ve had it, I’m going to put my head in that oven,” and then, with a sly glance at the camera, “after hers.”
Murder on the street: Soap star rivals await verdict
As host at the British Academy Television Awards last Saturday, Graham Norton played a blinder: funny and fast-talking with enough quips and asides to fill a French farce. But they’re a grim-faced lot, these TV luvvies.
Very little laughter from the audience – though maybe his humour was a little black.
Introducing the one-off documentary section, he remarked that it’s a category the British are famous for, “well, that and binge drinking and cut price sofas”.
In TV land the losing nominees don't even pretend to look pleased when the winner is announced. Coronation Street's Ken was stony-faced and Gail murderous when the cast of EastEnderstook to the stage to pick up the best soap award.
Gail, incidentally, in Thursday's Coronation Street, was found not guilty of the murder of Joe in the flattest bit of courtroom drama ever seen in a soap. Though things are
changing on the street. There are new opening titles: no more knicker factory, fewer back street alleys and more oddly blurry modern images of Manchester. There are still the
rooftops and the marmalade cat jumping off the wall, and the new arrangement of the famous theme tune is less soulful and a bit more jazzed up – a sign of plotlines to come, maybe.
