I saw you across the dancefloor. You were hot. Sexual. I was the nationally acclaimed softy soft current affairs programme with a brummie and a northern Irish accent. You were the cheap mimicky show presented by a man who use to do carpet advertisements and the one who kept shagging that annoying arse during The Apprentice. You’re half an hour and four channels away before I start babe, but we know from the very start who just ends up on top… (of the ratings).
Yes that’s right TV is back. And yes, that is the worst way to start an article for the new year. But bugger it, it’s freshers’, and you’re probably drunk when you’re reading this.
This is the ongoing flirtations and one-night stands of The One Show (BBC One) vs Live from Studio Five (Channel Five). You’ve probably stumbled into the former, rather than the latter, during the summer holidays. The One Show, as you know, is a show about cats, credit cards and Keith Allen. Presented every day on BBC One, the show is like a fishing rod thrown into the river of mediocre television featurettes, hooking into the throat of any old piece of carp. Nobody wants to watch a whole half-hour programme about dust bins or star constellations, but shove it all together in a sugary concentrated vitamin pill with an introduction by a gospel choir and it manages to scrape together a few billion viewers. As a result of this Five has now attempted their own version, but instead of it being a sugary funtime loving non-dependent drug with ad breaks, it feels like swallowing knives doused in white spirit.
Before now at seven Five used to do the news, but nobody was really watching Natasha Kaplinksky (Kerplonksy)’s serious but sexy but shit programme. What people apparently wanted now was live “popular topical debate” and on the beat celebrity gossip delivered to them piece by piece as if it was some sort of horrible torture, where they cut off your fingers one by one. The hot new thing now is not the serious news, but to have your daily water-cooleresque fountain of knowledge delivered by a woman who used to bounce her bojangles out during Fort Boyard (Melinda Messenger), someone who has and will be selling you carpets (Ian Wright) and everyone’s least favourite number two (Kate Walsh).
You’ve probably haven’t watched Live from Studio Five. Hollyoaks is on the other side for one thing. Plus you’ve got sanity. So let me break it down for you without using the means of rap.
The show begins with bleak communist style budget opening titles, as the camera swings round the studio like it has severe nausea. Then the presenters troop on screaming and yabbering about how this programme is simply, gush, amazing. Clapping and cheering ensues by the production team, but its not like its main competitor. The One Show has a rather cheery woop wooping by the production team on instruction by the presenters, but here there are only occasional claps, and as you can see them on the screen (due to the fact that the studio is bloody small) it looks as if most of them are about to hang themselves during the ad-break.
As the show’s budget is £35.02, most of which goes on counselling support, this means that there aren’t any roving reporter featurettes about pasturising cheddar cheese. Instead we are treated to numerous topical reports that are raised and discussed by the presenters themselves. The topics contain upmarket interviews with those connected to the news (David Hasselhoff), debates about the issues that matter (the toyboy sex shennanigans of Madonna) and reviews about the latest and greatest cultural releases (Holby City).
I was going to end the article giving the inclination that actually, maybe there is a hope, a little gleam of light that makes this show fun and watchable. You know. Sometimes there are shows like Snog, Marry, Avoid that are so gutwrenchingly appaling that you watch week after week to see how orange and outrageously busty the woman are. I’d want to end this article giving the impression that this is a show you wouldn’t mind curling in front of, whilst you are holding a pot of Häagen-Dazs in one hand and have your favourite bedtime book in the other.
But no. This isn’t. It’s shite.