reality TV
josh.spero
If you're reading this review, you'll probably be expecting a sarky analysis. It invites that - wow, posh girls with unpronounceable names have to work in a Newcastle chippy! - but the programme, which sent four Home Counties fillies up North to compare lives with four Newcastle lasses, hit on something so important that we should force MPs to watch it.Aside from the usual solipsism that all teenage girls have in common - both sides discover that the other has a heart and means well - what GFSG showed is that the divide between the haves and the have-nots in Britain is now so wide that it Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Meet the new Dragon, slightly different from the old Dragons. Or is she? For series nine, the squad of rich, grumpy bastards is joined by “formidable businesswoman and self-made multimillionaire Hilary Devey”, as presenter Evan Davis introduced her.Power-dressed like a Barbara Taylor Bradford heroine, or possibly the new landlady of the Rover's Return, Miss Devey (that’s De-Vay) began by beguiling us with a display of down-to-earth motherliness, as she calmed the panic attack being suffered by Georgette Hewitt, would-be internet entrepreneuse. Trying to get the Dragons fired up about her Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Dan, a tall ginger streak of entitlement, had an issue with the hygiene. Channel 4 were about to lift him out of a five-star hotel in the Gambia and send him off to see how the other half lives. “They’re not going to be as clean as us,” he predicted nervously. Dan worried that he might have to survive sans moisturiser and hair gel. He hadn’t been warned about the lack of cutlery. And of loo roll. Nor that you approached each problem with the same manual solution.Who volunteers to make themselves look like utter tits for these films? Luxury-loving Londoners is who, said Tamsin Greig, slumming Read more ...
fisun.guner
Just as we thought we were getting tired of the format, the BBC rang in the changes. It was no longer an apprentice Lord Sugar was after, but a partner in a business that he would invest a quarter of a million in. The candidates – 16 freshly laundered suits kicked us off – did the usual strutting and rustling of peacock feathers (a large part of the programme’s success is surely due to these cringeworthy failures of self-insight). But still, this year things seemed a little subdued on the bravado/bullshit front – though Northern Ireland Jim, a cliché machine, yes, but an impressively Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Someone had moved in next door to the Palins. There was a camera shot of him, his face pixellated out. Apparently he was writing an exposé of the lady of the house. “I think it’s an invasion of our privacy and I don’t like it,” chirrupped Sarah Palin in that fingernails-on-a-blackboard voice of hers. “How would you feel if some dude who you knew was out to get you moved in 15 feet away from your kids?” I suspect I’d probably do something sane and rational like invite a camera crew into my home and make an access-all-areas reality TV series. That’d teach snoops to mind their own business.Sarah Read more ...
fisun.guner
There’s nothing like a reality TV programme to bring a community together. Or maybe not. The Street That Cut Everything took one suburban cul-de-sac in Preston and shook up its residents thus: if they wanted their bins emptied, their street cleaned, their benefits paid and their elderly and needy looked after, they had to do it themselves. The council were going to withdraw all services - bar the emergency services and schools - for six whole weeks. And if that doesn’t sound terribly long, it was certainly long enough to pit neighbour against neighbour when it came to voting over who Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Oh joy upon joys, as The Apprentice returns. Those of you who watch while playing a drinking game in which you imbibe every time a cliché or preposterous, bombastic or ridiculously inflated statement is uttered will have to check in your livers again sometime soon, but I’m delighted to say that this new series allows another permutation of the game - have a glug every time you can spot the person who has watched every second of the previous six series but Hasn’t Learnt a Damned Thing.And so last night, accountant Edward Hunter weighed straight in as project manager on the first task. PM is Read more ...
josh.spero
Hot on the vulgar, vertiginous heels of The Only Way is Essex came E4's Made in Chelsea last night, where the stars were better shod but about as interesting as shoe leather. The first ill omen was the use of the angsty, vengeful riff from Adele's "Rolling in the Deep" - it wanted the passion and style of the music but could only grasp it on a fast-food level. Things got no better.This show was self-defeating, as is any reality show where "interesting" people have to put themselves forward. Truly interesting people would never want to parade their lives in a flash of fur, so we were left Read more ...
josh.spero
The talent show search - not for another star but for another field to devour - has reached its logical conclusion. Whereas most such shows - The X Factor, for example - are ostensibly about one skill or another as a pretext for marketing, Britain's Next Big Thing last night on BBC Two was a talent show about finding a merchandising opportunity. Artisans were given the chance to pitch their products to major chains, and the first episode was set at Liberty (not Libertys, as most called it).Theo Paphitis of Dragons' Den made fleeting appearances, talking to ambitious artisans queueing up Read more ...
josh.spero
Why were any of us watching Lily Allen: From Riches to Rags last night, about the pop star's move from selling millions of tracks to stacks of vintage clothes? It was not because we need a lesson in the hardships of starting up a business - Allen bought all the stock out of her musical profits and her office was thick with roses. No, it was because the real intruded into a reality show: this was not car-crash TV - it was miscarriage TV.Any rubberneckers waiting to be entertained would have been disappointed by last night's first episode: we had a promise of tragedy at the start, and the Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Channel 4’s new flagship series is essentially a census on prejudice masquerading as a reality TV/game show hybrid. A £300,000 property is being given away in the undeniably pretty village of Grassington in the north Yorkshire Dales, the kind of place where “you have to have at least three generations in the graveyard to be a local”, as one resident put it. And with three times more over-65s than the national average, Grassington's graveyard is pretty much the busiest place in the village.Over the next eight weeks 12 families will compete for the chance to win Sycamore Cottage and live Read more ...
fisun.guner
You might justifiably argue that Jamie Oliver’s lack of academic prowess (he left school with just two GCSEs – we’re not told what in) did him no harm whatsoever. Yet he’s keen that youngsters today should be switched on to education in a way that he clearly wasn’t. So he’s recruited 20 kids to take part in Dream School – kids who, like him, all failed to attain the requisite five GCSEs at grade C and above. And he’s recruited some pretty impressive names to teach them.Who wouldn’t put their hand up for an anatomy lesson with Robert Winston? Or to polish up their Shakespeare with Simon Read more ...