A glimpse of the future

Now we can get a 360 degree view of our TVs. Thank you, Toshiba.

Links to The Raw Feed and to the The video.

8.15pm, Tuesday night

Channel surfing. A snapshot:

BBC 1: A televised remedial class for third rate actors. Dreadful script, dreadful direction, dreadful acting, dreadful production values (Holby City).

BBC 2: A woman teaching you how to drink water, inspecting measuring jugs of urine. Surely mankind cannot now be so stupid as to need lessons on how to drink and piss. This programme also appears to feature a punter named 'Gronya' (Dr Alice Roberts: Don't Die Young).

ITV1: Random idiotic members of the public begging on national television for cash handed out by five 'millionaires' who dole out perfunctory insults. It's the televisual equivalent of swearing at beggars on the street (Fortune: Million Pound Giveaway).

Channel 4: A sour faced old bitch inspecting human shit to detect what is wrong with the diet of the 18 stone fat bastards who produced it. And they have to stay in her (show)house. Surely mankind cannot now be so stupid as to need lessons on how to eat and shit (You Are What You Eat: Gillian Moves In).

five: Something about the Titanic. Yawn. This is a documentary which actually just introduced it's thesis with the words "they may not have found any evidence, but..." (Titanic's Final Moments: The True Story).

Colin and Justin on the Estate, Five

This programme looks like it was designed to highlight the total idiocy of the ridiculous features that modern TV requires are built in to any 'factual entertainment' series. One can fully understand how this dross made it to our screens. It ticks all the right boxes on a commissioning editor's imaginary list. In fact, I'm not sure that the list is even imaginary. I wouldn't be surprised if the controllers of today's TV channels had pads printed up with lists of moronic tricks that programmes had to serve up. It'd certainly make their lives easier.

So here's how it goes. The commissioner, probably Ben Frow, was sitting in his office in Covent Garden, weeping quietly to himself about how much money he'd committed to elevating Colin and Justin -- two televisual non-entites -- to the staus of official 'faces' of five. He'd been lured there himself from a decent enough job at C4 where he'd enjoyed some success, only to discover that nobody watches Channel Five whatever you put on it. And now he'd done the same to the property poofs, who'd become even less interesting than they had been on the BBC. It turns out nobody cares about Channel Five. Nobody even cares that it's not called 'Channel' Five any more. They hadn't noticed. They were too busy rotting their brains over on ITV.

Anyway, Mr Comissioner is in his office crying one day, when a proposal arrives in his inbox. He's about to delete it and go for lunch at the Ivy (again) when he decides he may as well read this one first, seeing as its first three words have caught his attention: "Colin and Justin..."

Three minutes later, after he's read the proposal through twice, in his head he's already bough the series. It'll be wonderful: two homos, interior decorators no less, on a council estate in Glasgow. What a culture clash, eh? Moreover, it's regional, it's gritty, there'll be fights, tears, laughter, and soft furnishings. Fucking brilliant. Channel 4 managed to make that fat-tongued loser into a national 'hero' by getting him to whine about school lunches, so maybe five can turn around the fortunes of TV's least interesting cushion plumpers with a rip-off series. Yes! Fianlly, they'll make a difference. Everyone will love this, because it's not just a makeover show, it's a social action programme. It's PUBLIC SERVICE BROADCASTING!

The premise is simple. Colin and Justin, known for their camp but totally unendearing manner, are despatched to some rough-arsed estate in Glasgow to make everything better for the poor peasants who have to put up with the nasty flats and a £50 per room budget to redecorate. The estate is troubled by drugs, litter, decomposing pigeons, crime, gangs, and general poverty. And ColinandJustin (which is which, nobody cares) are going to improve these people's lives through the medium of interior decorating. They're Scottish and gay, and the housing estate is Scottish and repulsive, so it should be a match made in hell (ideal for TV), and they'll even understand each others' accents. It'll "punch above it's weight" and get the channel column inches. Yes... it's a factual TV gem that'll revive the channel's pathetic viewing figures.

Except it's not. It teaches nothing. It is not entertaining. It is predictable. It is dull. It trundles through a formulaic set of format points in such an obvious manner that even the handful of catatonic five viewers who noticed that it had started and the last programme had finished, could see that it was nothing more than the worst kind of TV-making-by-numbers.

So how did Colin and Justin deal with the problem of vandalism and graffiti in the stairwells? They painted them blue. Fucking genius. Why had nobody thought of that before? And when the thugs on the estate came in to rip the heads off the three £2.99 pot plants placed on the window sills and shit on the 'community notice board', you could almost hear the producers creaming themselves as they tittered the word 'conflict' to one another just off-camera. In fact, they'd probably forced a runner to take twice the recommended adult dose of ex-lax so he could crap all over the place for them, and then rip down the charming Ikea window blind (who needs a fucking window blind on a council estate stairwell anyway?).

And how did the interior-decorating faries deal with the disgusting, uninhabitable state of their would-be 'show-flat'? Simple, they shouted at a council official (more conflict) and then knocked down a wall, calling in decorators and plasterers. There was even a hissy fit about the economy biscuits they had to eat. But hang on. Wasn't calling in professionals simply cheating? What of the limited budget that the other residents had to stick to? How could their show-flat be seen as representitive of what a normal resident could manage, asked the council man, dressed in a suit and nerd-specs. Perfect... more conflict, all caught on camera. They even swore. But no actual answer or excuse was given for that one. They just moved on. But hey, it's TV guys!

What everyone making this turd of a programme failed to notice was that we wouldn't care at all. There was no conflict. Instead, there were set-piece TV situations so familiar that five minutes in we were already scrolling through the EPG to find something -- anything -- less irritating to watch than these scotch upholstery experts wretching every time they saw some pigeon poo or a bit of litter.

Pathetic.