Ant & Dec Scoop More Tele Awards

 I see  that those loathsome Geordies that seem to infest any crap television show on ITV have won some awards. This time they really did win them apparently. The allegedly popular telly presenters picked up a hat-trick of prizes at London’s Dorchester hotel, including Best Entertainment Show for Saturday Night Takeaway and rather hilariously, an Outstanding Contribution award to mark their 20 years on our screens.

 

The pair said it was ‘a huge honour’ and said they ‘feel very privileged to work in telly’, adding that they’d like to continue for another 20 years. What a ghastly thought…. I’d pay good money NOT to have Ant & Dec on my television. It takes their tally of TV Quick trophies since starting out to an impressive 16.

Now I have to admit that I have no idea what a Quick is… but it can’t be too impressive if two studiously amiable Geordies keep winning them for being themselves interspersed with some unwatchable television.

Maybe there is a link here between Ant & Dec’s awards and the catastrophic decline in ITV’s viewing figures and advertising revenues.

Every year we are told by an overpaid executive who pockets a huge salary to accelerate the decline that people have more choice nowadays.

Well yes, Mr Man in Suit, we do… but if you could actually get around to producing something not totally puerile you might actually find that people quite like to watch it. I can’t remember a show on ITV that I actually want or wanted to watch.

And Ant & Dec aren’t the answer… it only takes the sight of them for me to kick the dog and throw the remote controller at the screen.

Seeing this Ant & Dec fest – which presuamably only exists to fill some yardage in a hideous ‘celebrity’ magazine got me thinking. How come the silent majority don’t get their own awards.

These would actually be genuine and mean something. Perhaps they could be gilded dog turds – which is just about the only award Ant & Dec and their ilk actually deserve.

Whoopee – X-Factor is back

The good old beeb was advertising the new series of X-Factor this morning – which struck me as pretty curious.  I’d have thought by now that this much-hyped money-making machine for Simon Cowell might have slipped off our screens… but no, now the BBC apparently can’t get enough of it either.

 

Weirdly, the BBC’s excuse for promoting a crap programme on a rival channel was that they had an undercover reporter auditioning for the show.  Extra comedy value was then added by the floozie in question being titled ‘on-line reporter’ whilst sneering that some people will do anything to get on to television.

 

Further shocks were revealed. Apparently producers hand out banners and get the audience to behave like performing monkeys.  Who would have thought?  Rather tastelessly, the BBC then got right into the real reason most people watch X-Factor… the fact that it is an updated version of a Victorian freak show. 

 

I’m not sure quite when it became good TV to laugh at unfortunate people (probably when Big Brother was invented)… but it doesn’t make it any less unpalatable.  Granted, there is the convenient excuse that the people in X-Factor know what they are letting themselves in for.  But this is balanced out by the BBC pretending that what goes on in that puerile show is somehow newsworthy.,

 

However, it struck me that there is something newsworthy about X-Factor.  People seem to think it is a talent show… when it is actually a lack-of-talent show.  It is highly formulaic as well.  Even before the show starts you know there will be a kid who looks like a puppy dog, a shouty girl in a short skirt – and a talent less Scotsman….plus a few other wannabees to make up the numbers.

 

I think even Simon Cowell has given up the pretence that this is a search for talent.  Virtually every winner is quietly dropped once income from their Xmas number one has been banked.  Which just goes to show that if something is pushed hard enough on television….people will buy it even when they already know it complete rubbish.

 

This brings us back rather neatly to the new series of X-Factor.