And the winner is….

Telephone companies.  A curious thing happened this weekend.  I found myself watching television – but apparently I needed a telephone to make the experience complete.   On both Saturday night and Sunday night the BBC and ITV were urging me to pick up the phone and vote for my favourite.  

The range of television shows where reaching for the telephone is mandatory is now breathtaking in its scope.  The obvious ones are the big hitters of peak time weekend viewing.  The insufferably smug Simon Cowell knows that there are millions of us out there prepared to pay through the nose to vote for this year’s nonentity.  But the BBC is hard at it too.  I managed to avoid voting for a breakfast show presenter (i.e. celebrity) dancing with a girl in something like a tinsel bikini by the simple mechanism of not watching it. 

But even I have become somewhat addicted to the laughable X-Factor – if only because it provides such excellent comedy. 

And whilst resisting the urge to vote for either a cute, but presumably very forgettable Geordie lad – or a cute and possibly slightly less forgettable Essex lad, we are given the unintentional hilarity of seeing a wonderfully pompous George Michael say his karaoke duet partner rose to the occasion.

That’s assuming you weren’t in a distinct minority watching some self-congratulatory sporting nonsense on the BBC.   Had I watched it, could I have resisted reaching for the phone to vote for a bloke who drives a car that every F1 driver could have won the world championship in this year, a bloke who hops, skips and jumps…a bloke nobody heard of until he avoided being hit by a pantomime giant in a boxing ring.

But it’s not just the peak viewing programmes.  The other day I was quietly enjoying the gadget show, which again makes excellent comedy when you realise that some of these idiots actually believe what they are saying about the useless ‘must-have’ gizmos on offer, when my chuckling was rudely interrupted with an invite to try and win a whole garage-load of items… if only I knew what date Christmas Day fell on – and was prepared to chance my arm with the telephone.

It was a similar tale on the following day when I found myself perplexed at the curious colour David Dickinson had gone on Dickinson’s Real Deals…only to have my musings interrupted with a blatant bribe.  A tenuous link between a ‘cheap as chips’ clock going for £500 and The Duke’s generosity in making  a competition prize of £5000 meant I would get  a juicy £5,000 if I reached for the phone.

 Which reminds me… now I know why my telephone bill is so high – I better pay it.

Beauty and the Geek

I caught my first-ever reality TV show the other day.  Beauty and the Geek.  For those of you not particularly au-fait with this piece of culture – it is a bunch of clever nerds paired up with self-obsessed attractive women.   The rest is no doubt familiar to you…demeaning tasks, contrived scenes – and crocodile tears as contestants are voted out.  It was utter crap of course – but strangely compelling.

 This particular version was American – but I was surprised to find that there have been five series of a UK version.  Presumably the audience for that particular show hovered around zero.   I wonder when and where it appeared.

Big Brother made the news recently because it is being dropped by Channel 4.  Curiously, the chattering classes on television and radio seemed to find this a boring programme no longer worthy of their gilded attention.  This I find rather curious because the viewing figures for Big Brother have always been pretty feeble.  Never, as far as I know have the ratings exceeded Springwatch.

 This kind of puts reality television in perspective.  Even the programme constantly hyped in the tabloid press, vacuous radio and puerile chat shows has less fascination for us than the nesting habits of a blue tit as described by an annoying little man with a beard.

 So reality television has never been much of a turn on for many of us.  Yet the sheer volume of these shows beggars belief.  I see the BBC has even decided that you can become a nature photographer via a reality TV show.  I suppose the thinking is that you combine a trusty standby (cute animals) with another one (people prepared to ridicule themselves) you have a hit programme.  At least in theory.

I have to admit I have never seen a single episode of Big Brother.  But by my reckoning neither have 50 million other UK television viewers.  So I am in very good company.  But the question now is – will I be watching a second episode of Beauty and the Geek.