Television Can Blow Me (16 page)

The upshot is we are in an ad agency. Billy (Iain Lee) is the ideas man; Greg (Adam Buxton) is the no-ideas man; Emma (Daisy Haggard) a pretty vacant trollop; boss Clive (Jarred Christmas) is a larger-than-life Australian; Keaton (Simon Farnaby) is a madcap foreign office lothario (think Kramer meets Colin Hunt). As if you need telling, it’s a wacky ad agency where anything goes.

It’s located firmly in Sitcomland - that magical place where people say and do things you only see in sitcoms. It’s trying to be The IT Crowd but Graham Linehan is a master who has an atomically precise grasp of sitcom fundamentals and plays with convention brilliantly. The Persuasionists principals just butt up against each other like West End holograms appearing in different shows. Behavioural non sequiturs abound.

Simon Farnaby as Keaton is one of the worst cases of miscasting since Christopher Ryan was hastily shoehorned in as Mike the Cool Guy in The Young Ones. It’s a shit name choice too. You’d be surprised how important the character’s name is. You know Nicholas Lyndhurst is Rodney Trotter before you’re even introduced. But none of the characters here resemble their names. Turdly writing again.

Jonathan Thake seems to have gone “wouldn’t it be funny/weird if....?”, collected a load of quirky, unusual and incongruent things and included every single one on the off chance that one might be funny. Loser Greg dates a model. The agency promotes Cockney Cheese. Emma sticks the ugly people in the boiler (geddit?!) room. He strikes out because none of this is funny. It’s a waste of a talented cast. It’s highly derivative. It can go fuck itself.

The verdict on The Persuasionists:
The slag of all sitcoms.

Marks out of 10:
4

Extras Christmas special

Aerial Telly is a big Extras fan and always has been. Ricky Gervais is a comic genius and the sniping at him is mere envy from the dispossessed and that hack Jerry Seinfeld is not in his class. And as for those of you saying that The Office US is better than the original - blow me, you skunks. Motherfucker, it ain’t even on a level. The final ever Extras episode finds When the Whistle Blows continuing its underserved commercial success, theatrical agent Darren Lamb as clueless as ever and Andy as misery personified.

Why? Because success isn’t enough. It never is. He wants to do something classy, doesn’t want to be remembered as a man in a stupid wig spouting stupid catchphrases. So he dumps the hapless Darren for Tre Cooper, a young thrusting agent who promises to get him onto the A-list if he is willing to play the fame game TO THE EXTREME. Andy thinks he can have it all. He is so, so wrong.

The final Extras is about how we square our integrity with increasing success. Andy hates himself for churning out his desperate cookie cutter sitcom but he can’t tear himself away from the benefits of fame. He becomes a cynical industry operator, too snotty to talk to the herd of extras from which he emerged, too typecast to get respect anywhere else. He shitcans his sitcom to do work with more credibility and ends up playing a space slug on Doctor Who. It was never meant to be like this.

After his new agent stops returning his calls, Andy goes down the path of least resistance and enters Celebrity Big Brother among such luminaries as Lionel Blair, Chico, June Sarpong, Lisa Scott-Lee and an actress playing a celebrity who is clearly meant to be Abi Titmuss (boyfriend accused of rape, sex tape, lads mags, glass-eyed fame-hungry scuttling). You wonder if Stephen Merchant and Ricky Gervais asked Abi to do the role herself. How would that conversation go?

As you would expect, the Celebrity Big Brother house is a hellish three-ring circus where the palely notorious seek to raise their profiles. The pressure cooker environment begins to take its toll on the celebs. “You know what I look forward to these days?” Lionel Blair tells Andy “Death”. Isn’t everyone looking forward to Lionel Blair’s death? KIDDING!

After Abi Titmuss talks about the politics of selling her wedding to Hello! magazine Andy finally snaps and delivers a brilliant monologue on the insanity of celebrity culture. “You open a paper and see a picture of Lindsay Lohan getting out of a car and the headline is “cover up Lindsay we can see your knickers” - of course you can see her knickers! Your photographer is lying in the road pointing his camera up her dress to see her knickers. You’re literally the gutter press”. Has this ever been better put?

He delivers a heartfelt message to Maggie, apologising for being mean to her earlier in the episode. “You’re my best friend... you’re my only friend” he says, choking back tears. Under normal circumstances it would be quite moving.

The problem is that Maggie is not a great friend. She is an appalling friend - a vile, poisonous cretin who undermines Andy at every turn. Not once does somebody call him fat and ugly without her nodding in agreement. Not once does she miss an opportunity to imply he has no talent or is shit with women. Too cowardly or talentless to pursue her own dreams, she spends her time mocking and undermining his.

A weaselly shitbag who nearly ruined Andy’s big sitcom break by running her mouth to the gay producer she nonetheless spends her time leeching off his success, getting extras roles she is not entitled to, eating dinner at swanky restaurants she never pays for and meeting stars she would never have met were it not for the friend she routinely abuses.

Not only passive aggressive, disloyal and undermining she is also an industrial strength whinger. Andy needs to get out, make some male friends and start using his celebrity to get some primo pie of the kind Aerial Telly would consider entertaining during one of his barren patches
¹
.

Damp eyed reconciliations with someone who represents and embodies all his failures are not what Andy needs for redemption. He needs to be using his fame for good and that means picking up strumpets in exclusive clubs and getting all the sex he missed out on when he was banging Ronnie Corbett lookalikes. Now that would be a happy ending. Andy being blown by the Abi Titmuss character while he snorts a line of cocaine and crushed Ecstasy off her Prada handbag.

Aren’t they the real benefits of fame?

The verdict on Extras Christmas special:
Impressive farewell to an excellent show

Marks out of 10:
8

¹
Aerial Telly barren patches? Fuck out of here.

PhoneShop

Nothing can really prepare you for how bad E4's new shitcom PhoneShop is but my advice is to keep the volume as low as you can. Because above all it is an aural assault as gratingly unfunny turds Ashley (Andrew Brooke) and Jerwayne (Javone Prince) employ cloddish Ebonics in exchanges that seem to never end. The idea that urban argot is intrinsically funny is as persistent as it is false. Like Coming of Age before it, it chases the youth demographic with as little dignity and as much desperation as it can muster. It's fucking pitiful.

Let's get this straight one last time. Young people are scum - selfish, illiterate, mewling, gump-ass mopes with no more right to walk the earth than a parakeet has to own a condo. Their opinions don't matter, nothing they say or do is of consequence and they should be ignored totally by all broadcast media across the board in every circumstance. Aerial Telly has schooled chumps on this before but apparently television wasn't listening. So he would like to make it clear to the next person ignoring one of his fatwas that he will personally amputate their face with a knife dipped in shit the next time they make a program pandering to that 16-24 slime.

Incidentally, a reviewer in a national tabloid writes of PhonePlop “viewers outside London whose ears aren’t assaulted by urban youth-speak every day might want reassurance we are still in Britain”. I'm from Birmingham, what the fuck else do you think I hear when I pass shitbag schoolkids? Thundernause hack bastard.

It barely matters but the first episode introduces us to Christopher (Tom Bennett), the New Man in the shop - a graduate but hopelessly lacking experience in the field. Seasoned retail humps Gashley and Turdwayne give him impenetrable, useless and interchangeable advice (these two are exactly the same character, a character replicated again by some freak looking skank from a rival shop who materialises spontaneously from the show's insatiable need to stick more shit street talk in a mannequin's mouth and hope that the audience are too dipshit stupid to notice what a turd is being served up).

There's so many ways PhoneShop is bad. People do stupid shithead things people only do in sitcom. Boss Lance (Martin Trenaman) keeps a shrine to previous star employee Little Gary Patel. Nobody ever has or ever will do this in real life and it isn't consistent with Lance's character so it just isn't funny. Timid underling Janine (Emma Fryer last seen in Home Time) also venerates Patel. No one does this; nothing in their characters suggests they ever would. Yet more character points sacrificed to the false god Zany. The death toll rises with each new shitcom.

Ricky Gervais edited the script and, assuming this isn't an honorary credit, I would hate to see what it looked like before he saw it. As is increasingly the case these days, there are a lot of commentscum suspiciously defending it online as if they have some kind of stake in it. They can all go fuck themselves as can this absolute dog of a show.

The verdict on PhoneShop:
This is about as bad as television gets. This is about as bad as
life
gets.

Marks out of 10:
2

No Heroics

Aerial Telly has pretty much had it with superheroes. He has no idea who goes to see The Hulk, Spiderman 1, 2 or 3 or who the fuck Tobey Maguire is. He understands perfectly well why small children would want to see such films but these screenings are attended by adults. What the frak is up with that? It puts you in mind of those people whose favourite book is Harry Potter - a Band-Aid placed over the slashed jugular of their illiteracy. But I suppose a sitcom about superheroes could have potential? For the sake of No Heroics, we better hope so. It’s an ITV sitcom after all, the television equivalent of being born with no arms or legs in Johannesburg’s darkest slum to an abusive meth head father and schizophrenic crack ho mother who killed her last 14 children with scissors to the head.

No Heroics is ITV2’s first original sitcom and features a group of off-duty superheroes drinking, whingeing and fucking up together in The Fortress - the superhero hangout with three immutable rules: “No Masks, No Powers and No Heroics”.

There’s Alex, “The Hotness” (Nicholas Burns) who produces heat at will. Stupid, vain and cowardly, his search for the hero inside himself seems to be taking longer than usual. His ex-girlfriend Sarah (Claire Keelan) is “Electroclash”, blessed with the power to control machines with her voice. She usually uses this to fuck up her dad’s car batteries and steal from ATMs. She’s a stroppy dark haired piece of pie who, it must be said, looks pretty good in superhero slut boots.

Electroclash once formed one half of the brilliantly named Ladytrouble duo with Jenny, “She-Force” (Rebekah Staton), a fat lass with superstrength, a sunny outlook and no clue at all about anything.

Perhaps the weirdest of the bunch is Don, “Timebomb” (James Lance) an alcoholic Spanish homosexual into no strings sex and torture who can see 60 seconds into the future. The scope for planet saving heroics with this particular combination of traits is pretty limited but Don is a funny fucker and quite insightful for a sociopath.