Television Can Blow Me (12 page)

Indeed they did - and what a flabby, spoilt, over-indulged brat early EastEnders was. Social issues crowbarred in with no regard for plot, character or viewer sanity, all set against a rotten combination of cloying sentimentality and unremitting misery.

So back Den came and now he had to go and it was The Witches of Eastwick who would do for him. It all started out promisingly enough. There was genuine tension created as the storyline unfolded but it kept on being undermined by the colossal stupidity of Sam Mitchell and behaviour from Zoe so out of character she was turned into a walking plot device for the writers. An attractive young woman sleeps with a 70 year-old internet pervert she despises. Yeah cool story, broseph.

Meanwhile, The Andy Hunter/Moon family feud concluded with Andy doing a back-flip off a motorway bridge helped by Don Beech from The Bill. I thought everyone knew not to fuck with Don Beech? Never mind, this is Albert Square after all.

The root of the feud was the love triangle between Alfie, Andy and Fat Kat Slater, Albert Square’s finest beauty - a cross between Foghorn Leghorn and Tubbs from the League of Gentlemen.

Den’s sticky end finally came with getting his cranium cracked by a dog-shaped doorstop owned by Pauline Fowler, a nice touch of pathos slightly spoiled by the ham-fisted foreshadowing. Not since Pete Beale has an inanimate object received so much attention - they may as well have written “I Kill Den, Me” in metallic marker on the dog’s forehead and have done with it.

Now that this sorry episode is over, can EastEnders recover? They will come up with something - they always do. When not getting bogged down in such stupidity EastEnders produces some priceless soap moments. The problem is that after such a balls up, the public will be slow to trust them again. And do you blame them?

For all the wack plots, bum lines and blank stares. For every time the scriptwriter has gone off message and on the pipe.... it’s payback.

The verdict on EastEnders:
You’re having a larf intcha? You’re NUFFING you muppet!

Marks out of 10:
5

Skins Season 2

So what’s new in season two? Tony is out of his coma, Maxxie has a stalker, the boring one gets pregnant and Sid and Cassie split up causing Cassie to tailspin into a dark night of drugs and casual sex. Illustrating this on the E4 Skins site there is a video entitled “Cassie swaps sides”. Click on it and you see “Warning! This clip contains strong language and adult themes”. No it doesn’t, fucknut. It contains two pretty girls kissing which is the only reason anybody will be watching. Naturally, this was written because the script writers wanted to see Hannah Murray, the actress who plays Cassie, walking around in her underwear, kissing girls and having casual sex so they can put it on the E4 microsite. And who can blame them? Why, Aerial Telly of course. You’re scriptwriters not pornographers you filthy fuckers.

Skins has, of course, prided itself on introducing young scriptwriters into the mix. One of these bum fluff cultivating chodes Max Gogarty recently took a prolonged ass fucking from the Guardian blog pod people after his hastily written “Max, 19, hits the road” blog went live. Accusations of nepotism abounded when someone pointed out that Paul Gogarty, Max’s father, also wrote for the Guardian from time to time. Aerial Telly felt a little sorry for Max. He was once 19 himself and he was a stupid bastard then as well. Much of the venom came from wannabe writers whose dream job is publishing their god-awful dribblings on the Guardian website. Nonetheless, the blog did suck quite a lot of cock and reflected badly on Skins.

But Skins has to have young scriptwriters, right? Because they know what’s relevant to the kids. So you sacrifice good drama for that abysmal tyrant ‘relevance’. A lot of the show’s problems stem from this. Skins tries way too hard to be cool and ends up looking ridiculous in the process. It doesn’t know what it wants to be. Season 2 kicks off with a contemporary dance set piece in a church. Then it spends much of its time thinking it’s a farce yet it still wants to deal seriously with issues like bulimia, bereavement and pupil-teacher relationships.

Its complete inability to portray a grown-up who is not a grotesque caricature of everything vile about humanity is just laughable. No wonder Harry Enfield is so comfortable in his role as Tony’s dad. Loadsamoney was an understated study of the nouveau riche in comparison. This approach is patronising to its younger audience and sick-making to its older audience. It can’t help feeling like The Young Ones’ young adult show - Nozin Around. “Hey man, grownups are squares yeah?” Did you ever see that in the great American teen dramas Buffy, My So-Called Life, Veronica Mars? The fuck you did.

I’m not really sure what Skins is for. It’s not like it's bad most of the time but when it is bad, it’s practically unwatchable.

The verdict on Skins Season 2:
Needs work. And to grow up a little bit.

Marks out of 10:
6

Gong intermission

Aerial Telly Awards 2007

In a year that saw him further consolidate his grip on the worlds of gambling, writing and poon hounding Aerial Telly is proud to roll out his awards ceremony for the year of 2007. Stars from the world of showbiz throw themselves out of limousines in the hope of gaining validation from the world’s premiere authority on the vision that is telly. Most will never receive it - he is notoriously hard to please. But for those lucky chosen few their lives are changed forever - you really can’t buy this kind of career tonic. So let’s get things underway and talk about what you should have been watching when you were going through your girl’s mobile for evidence of infidelity.

Best show: 30 Rock, NBC

You thought the show within a show had been done to death and 30 Rock showed you exactly how dead wrong you were. An object lesson in how sitcom should be conceptualised, scripted and performed, Tina Fey’s brilliant creation showcased a previously unexplored comic talent in daughter baiting Alec Baldwin as deranged studio boss Jack Donaghy.

Worst show: The Peter Serafinowicz Show, BBC2

He had talent and BBC threw money at it like it was a Vegas lap dancer - so why did it suck so very hard? Well Watson, it must always come down to the writing. Ideas so old they needed carbon dating, feeble running gags and, yes, Cillit Bang parodies meant that the show was on to a loser from the start. Even the glorious pie of Belinda Stewart-Wilson couldn’t mask the fact that the BBC were wasting more energy than Freddie Ljungberg’s girlfriend.

Best performance by a male: Michael K. Williams as Omar Little - The Wire

The Wire achieved what many thought impossible this year and made the fourth season the best yet and at the heart of it was Michael K. Williams’s turn as Omar Little, the gay stick-up kid who never swears, shoots citizens or gets caught slipping. In a jail full of guys who want him dead, Omar stabs the first guy who tries to kill him in the rectum for everyone to see. As statements of intent go, that’s as pointed as they come and Williams’s understated presence and charisma give an already strong character mythic status.

Best performance by a female: Tina Fey as Liz Lemon, 30 Rock

Not only did she create the year’s best show, Tina Fey also put in the best performance by a dame as socially inept comic writer Liz Lemon. Fey bases Liz largely on herself and her unflinching portrayal of the “New York third-wave feminist, college-educated, single-and-pretending-to-be-happy-about-it, overscheduled, undersexed, you buy any magazine that says ‘healthy body image’ on the cover and every two years you take up knitting for...a week.” type. The Lemon Pie is brave, engaging and most of all very funny.

TV pie of the year: Katrina Bowden, 30 Rock

Always the category Aerial Telly agonises over hardest, TV pie of the year was once again fiercely competitive. Pielinda Stewart-Wilson set an almost impossible pace as the thinking man’s Catherine Zeta-Jones in The Pieter Serafinowicz Show, smouldering quietly through one duff sketch after another and the return to our screens of diminutive but curvy Scottish pie Laura Fraser in Talk To Me was hugely appreciated and the sight of the lovely Mary Louise Pierker from Weeds getting fucked doggy style over a desk like the bad little milfpie she is resonated with sane viewers everywhere. But it was Katrina Bowden as Cerie, 30 Rock’s effervescently vacant intern slutting it up round the NBC offices that got the nod for 2007. This award instantly raises her modelling rate by $10,000 a day. No problem Katrina - you can “thank” me later.

TV Event Of The Year: Lost Season Three Finale (SPOILERS, bitches)

It will always have its critics but man does this show know how to pull the big episodes out of its ass? In season three’s stunning denouement they killed Charlie, reintroduced Walt and got off the fricking island. For all its dips in form and annoyances, Lost continues to be a triumph of the imagination and walking proof that populist television needn’t be brainless or condescending.

“What the fuck was that?” award - John From Cincinnati, HBO

We make allowances for geniuses and that’s presumably how John From Cincinnati got past the drawing board stages. The wilfully impenetrable religious allegory had Deadwood fans scratching their heads and casual viewers scratching their nuts. The decision not to order a second series was one of the less surprising commissioning decisions of the past 12 months. Candidly, I don’t think even Milch knew what this was about.

Empty gesture of the year: Preston’s Walk Out on Never Mind The Buzzcocks

In this show of adolescent rage as futile as his laughable condescending project to save his “wife” Chantelle Houghton from her chav dreams, the media whore’s attention seeking defence of his “wife” was shown up for what it was a couple of months later when she ditched him, dyed her hair blonde again and had a load of toxic shit stuck in her tits to make her look like the exact same identikit China Whites Nuts magazine cocksucker that he was so desperate to stop her becoming in the first place. Well done fucknut.

And goodnight.

Reality isn’t real: reality TV and the scum sucking rat bastards who participate