What is the point of this? Someone somewhere must have imagined Cheryl: Access All Areas was a passably entertaining idea yet it makes Come Dine With Me look like Kick Ass. It’s the antithesis of watchable and a complete waste of time - boringly constructed, badly filmed, jam-packed with nothing revealing, amusing or exciting from start to finish. In short, there’s more fun to be had scraping burnt cheese off your cooker.
The premise is that it’s a documentary about Cheryl Cole’s A Million Lights debut solo tour last month but the actuality is it documents only in the very loosest sense. Cameras point at nothing much, strung together by Cheryl’s talking head, an icon of say-nothing vapidity, looking like a polished porcelain dolly with Daryl-Hannah-in-Bladerunner mascara. A typical section is five minutes of her faffing about deciding whether she dares dive into the arms of her dancers, or the dilemmas raised when her dancer boyfriend Tre Holloway sprains his ankle. The idea seems to be that rather than doing something interesting to be on telly, she’s interesting because she’s on telly. But she’s not. She’s the opposite.
“I’m three dates into my solo tour,” the richest Girl Aloud announces after an ad break that features her ads for hair products, “but it’s not the only big and exciting thing that’s happening – I’m also releasing my autobiography.” This is typical dialogue, run alongside footage of her soulless stadium stage extravaganza, and a world where everyone is a banal, media-trained, light entertainment robot, hatefully designed never ever to say anything of substance.
There was one faintly interesting moment when Cheryl pointed out that getting past the paparazzi was truly hideous, and they did, indeed, seem like vermin, an even lower form of life than this programme. However, such differentiation is redundant, dull and a little disgusting, like grading human shit. There really was nothing here for sentient minds to latch onto, even as chewing gum for the eyes.
Cheryl 'in the zone' going onstage in Belfast in Cheryl: Access All Areas