Having a Popeye Wanting to Eat Some Spinach Moment: All Thanks to Mr Edmonds
Misleading Intro
This is the dark time. The weeks before the big events. The weeks that will zip by in a supersonic swoosh of "now where did the time go? We had so much time. And now we have nothing. Let's cry a little". And then I will be faced with two question papers (no excuses to hide behind; no surgical wreckage and super-duper painkiller blitz this year), and a few days later I will be standing up in a BBC studio made up like a rosey-cheeked rent boy and hyperventilating in anticipation at some potentially LIFE-CHANGING happenings. Then I will explode in a shower of Gap polo shirt scraps, cascades of caramel foundation and strips of cute and cuddly face chops, as rivulets of my sweat mingled blood start flowing down the contestant podium like a macabre stream. Then, at last, I will be at peace. At one with the cosmos.
On the other hand, I may just freeze and choke and smile wanly as others surge past me into the glorious, monetorious light.
You do know that Noel Edmonds is the Antichrist
Sorry. The word "Cosmos" has triggered something irrational in the ranty side of my brain. The phrase "Life-changing" has well and truly entered the game show lexicon and, quite frankly, it can shove off back to the abyssal pits of Hades or as is my more concerted opinion, Noel Edmonds' bullshit-crammed cakehole.
Didn't game shows and quizzes change people's lives before Deal or No Deal? Of course they did. They always have: Going for Gold, for instance, apparently gave Daphne Fowler ME. But now every host and presenter with a fair bit of dosh at their hand bandies it about like a cheap trinket designed to invoke at least one or two people's vague awe, and aping, of all things, the C4 teatime ratings titan, for the purpose of selling the drama and getting more of those hard-to-find viewers out of their cubby holes or underground nuclear bunkers or wherever they are.
It's not A Change. It's a Life-Change. These fortunate TV contestants will be plunged into money, these television creators seem to be implying, the poor sods will puke on the lucre, it will mutate their DNA and brain. Forever. Maybe even in an Incredible Hulk way. If they're LUCKY.
Everything will change. These poor wretches who needed the blessed touch of television from up on high to put their lives right and make them even better. This change may possibly involve the endowment of the chosen few with golden plated skin and flawless diamonds for teeth. Who knows? Change is good. Right?
But were our ordinary lives so humdrum, nay, so utterly and completely meaningless and desperate, that we had to succumb to the contestant calls of the goggle box and let it make our dreams come true AND CHANGE OUR LIVES? As if we were phoning up the local branch of the Samaritans.
This is a hill of cack after all. It's only money. It is not a trio of wishes from the Wishmaster is it? Nor an operation to ensure a lifelong chemically-heightened endorphin rush to our brains, of the kind that will make us smile and laugh and wonder why anyone could ever frown, let alone shed a tear or two.
The only thing it changes is the bank balance. Look at those zeroes go. I don't see the Millionaire winners I am acquainted with acquiring Savile Row suits and an insatiable taste for Waygu beef and driving Porsche Boxsters through Mayfair on their way to Chinawhite's as soon as the cheque swelled their accounts.
They still wear the same clothes and they do the same things they used to do. They seem as content as always and you soon forget natural thoughts like "Jesus Christ, you have a lot of money. Buy me something". Just because they can now afford to buy a three-bedroom flat in central London with wads of notes no less, doesn't mean they will change anything drastically.
People who watch and therefore go on quiz shows aren't the biggest dreamers in the world. Many are pretty happy with their lot and don't feel the need to circumnavigate the world in an entirely new record breaking manner or climb the north face of the Eiger just because it looks like one bad-assed sonufabitch of a mountain and they sure could go a few rounds with the Swiss bastard just to prove they're into feeling alive. They don't have the kind of pioneering and dynamic ambitions that turn thousands into millions. They liked the thrill of the quiz show experience and answering the questions and the bonus is that they get the security of the cash boost and the chances it affords to go on some really decent holidays on a far more regular basis.
This isn't Lottery jackpot money - I mean if I had Michael "Lotto Lout" Carroll's cash, maybe I would go beserk in a hilarious and highly visible way by burning fields full of cars and wearing enough gold to OG, just because I had the means to. Or maybe he's even an bigger magnification of the "life hardly bleeding changes" scenario. Carroll buys the same atrocious clothes, the same grease-splatted junk food; in fact the same old tasteless garbage, but in bigger quantities that he can now share out amongst his equally thuggish friends. His tastes stay the same and so his life stays in the same rancid sty of wonderfully, beautifully vulgar trappings. Not exactly an Eliza Doolittle transformation is it?
Now Michael's got loads more dosh than quiz winners. In the game show world it's a few thousand, tens if you play it right and a million if you're bloody lucky with a consecutive chain of 15 questions. If life changes it does so in a sotte voce way - imperceptibly.
Then my thoughts drift back to the Noelster - the source of this catchy, meaningless phrase. Since Noel got hold of a TV show where tens of thousands of pounds can be won in high drama, and where people jump and scream in delight and wither or bite their lips in disappointment on a daily basis, he just knows the audiences at home are eating it up like starved Deadwood pigs and he suddenly becomes the master bloviator (is that a word? It is in Noel's kingdom or sodding dream factory), the pontificating Don King of game show hosting. He can big it up like no man (aforementioned promoter excepted). A man who glides around the set like a bulletproof archangel dispensing the kind of self-help hokey-cokey BELIEVE! BELIEVE! brand of wisdom that would make anyone who had never seen the show and had somehow stumbled onto the set for the purpose of some pre-ordained cosmically divined act of retribution, kick him in the balls and then the head repeatedly for his outrageous and egredious chutzpah. Hopefully, the smackdown would continue that Noel was talking with a Shane MacGowan slur.
But this would not stop him. His Messianic fervour has grown far too strong He would skip over it daintily. Well, not quite so daintily now because if the beating had gone down well enough the now wheelchaired one would be using a ramp and tapping words into a speech synthesiser and still be saying the same outlandish, infuriating things about the gods of fate and chance and how we can manipulate them with the power of our mind!! If we try rilly rilly hard and hold hands.
For Noel has no grasp of the notion of shame (it explains the steadfast face rug and tucked-in shirts - he doesn't know how twatty he actually looks, which means he must be impervious to the mental brickbats everyone else must contend with every day of their lives ... it's a Heroes superpower perhaps?) and therefore a brilliant, brimming confidence added to a psychopathic need to home in on the real and obvious emotional crux of the matter and exploit it to draw the viewers in and make them think "He's so right. Because he sounds like he means it". That's how despotic leaders suck in their loyal flock. He's like Mussolini crossed with Bilbo Baggins. And yes, even I think that is a wild and crazed allegation.
I never used to notice all that bloated clap-trap. In the beginning I only wanted to know how much money the contestant was going to get. Ooh the tension. I always loved it when hopes ebbed and flowed and the crowd cheering drove them on and on, only to see their deals steadily deteriorate to a heartbreaking vanishing point - the vapour of hope makes for a pretty threadbare tea at 5pm. The undeniability of the gambling urge is ever present in the show, and you can see how that particular trait changes lives. Not in the good monetary way, but in the regretful Terry Malloy mewling about what could have been if things went their way. Just as in poker, DOND players get "bad beats" too and the downward spiral was car crash TV entertainment at its best.
But when they won incredible sums, I liked it too. Schadenfreude and empathy can be truly interchangeable things when faced with the fluctuating fortunes of complete strangers. As long as it went one way or the other I didn't mind. And it was brilliant to see someone take a chance and explode in euphoria when it came off.
So I got my daily shot of high drama. One day doleful, the next joyful, the next a bit meh and so on. The unpredictability kept me coming back at the start. Even if after a few viewings you concluded that it was televised bingo, albeit one laced with the scent of mystic dung and beautiful self-delusion.
It was after I had watched DOND for four or five months that I realised the contestants were a consistently great bunch of people; Albion folk in all their weird, life-affirming variety, eyes-shining bright all the time. Meanwhile, the beady-eyed circusmaster was becoming more hideous looking and sounding by the episode. All those spewing geysers of melodramatic crap heightening whatever tension there was, even if there was nowt. His goading and inciting the crowd with well-placed words (oh, he breaks them like horses beforehand, whispering in each of their ears; they be his puppets one and all), and doing down the poor person in the high chair when they got one sucker punch of a bad reveal and then pumping up their chances to utterly unreasonable degrees when a penny blue popped up when you knew the odds of their winning massively had long since receded.
I now thought this Noel, this Channel 4 afternoon reincarnation of the ever-grinning anodyne sweatered gimp that had ruled Saturdays like his own peak time fiefdom, was an absolute dick. Even if he didn't know it (you realise he is all thick skin). He was a truly monumental knob, whose genial shamelessness was manifesting itself constantly in words so bloated and insane I could not watch an entire show anymore (yeah, I can watch the endgame. How much money? How much money?). Not since last summer have I glimpsed more than five minutes. And that is more than enough.
On a nakedly contrarian tip, I prefer the US version: more pizzazz and showmanship and Howie Mandel being the pleasantly bland presence you need in a place where everyone is going hyper American-style, and less of the whole desolate warehouse ambience and ordinary folk/police line-up suspects behind the boxes who aren't Perfect 10 models and who certainly do not flash sweet smiles that could melt your heart in a second; and, I do mean to go on about this: will Noel please stop equating the potential loss of money people never had to that of having your entire family infected with a flesh-eating virus so contagious that the Government has been forced to burn your home down with them inside it? I would go more into the perspective thing, but I may be ready to admit that, okay, maybe it is only about the identically dressed models across the Pond. They're luvverly.
It's the differing images each version projects you see. You can imagine The US Banker being some evil Gordon Gekko genius type eating companies for breakfast, even if this is patently rollocks and he is some ham actor whose sole skill is leaning back in his chair in an especially smug manner. But this was opposed to the British version, who I imagine as a kind of passive-aggressive Captain Mainwaring financial spod whose only vague pleasure in life is his 10-year affair with his mousey secretary Susan and the occasional visit to a dominatrix. One looks at the stars and tries to seize them. With his genitals. The other one's a dreary perv with about as much dangerous allure and cocksure power as a slightly irate water vole.
Noel tries to raise us - the players, the viewers, the entire world - up into the starry sky with all that hyperbolic, well, bollocks about this awesome juggernaut of an emotional game show phenomenon changing lives every day. Then you eventually see through that. We be humble Brits. We like the odd treat; the occasional echo of glamour in our lives. Then Noel steams in with talk of destiny and dreams and you think: what a load of complete rubbish. The Americans have their Dream encoded in their genes, and such blabber makes perfect sense to them, used as they are to furthering their horizons and drinking up gallons of aspiration as Barney Gumble would at a Duff brewery prize winners' party.
The American DOND set screams demented opulence and phrases like "Bright lights! Models! Models!". Our equivalent setting is like a carefully lighted shed with depressing brickwork. It's like the Blue Peter team decided to make their own (i.e. our UK) version of the US set by using materials scrounged from a demolition site and secondhand computer store.
DOND ain't real life. It's TV. British TV. Conveyor belt entertainment. It's neither the Battle of the Somme nor a withdrawal trip to Scrooge McDuck's vault - its a ramshackle studio in Bristol where perfectly pleasant people get to make a nice little bit of dough. And whenever I heard Noel swerve from one end of the emotional spectrum ("Brilliant! Going great guns!) to the other ("this is a bloody disaster you brought on yourself!") in the blink of the eye, I felt cheapened by his undoubtedly skillful act and well-trodden spiel (doesn't he even have an ounce of self-awareness? ... oh wait, if he did he would have long stabbed his eyes out and chewed his own tongue off, and maybe, just maybe, torn off that fruity little goatee and begged everyone for forgiveness for ... everything). You can only raise and raise the expectations of the audience and toy with them for so long before they realise they are being fed the same dish every time and it's getting somewhat tired. Everyone's tolerance levels will start to falter and then freefall to the infintesimal, if they have not already done so. And I would say that in all confidence if we lived in an ideal world. Maybe like the one The Christians once sang about.
But it could just be me. I forget the great British viewing public. They've got their own ideas and critical yardsticks. They are the ones who got My Hero recommissioned and recommissioned and then even got it recommissioned when Ardal O'Hanlon had had enough and thought that guy off Gimme Gimme Gimme AND The Thin Blue Line would do just as well (Camp? Irish? What's the difference? It's a laugh). Oh yes, they are powerful. So very powerful.
That wonderful mass of loyal fans probably don't notice a single thing wrong or even a mite squiffy with it. Maybe it's all about seeing reflections of themselves and the all too human stories and how these get milked by Noel ... wait, that's it. I'm having a Tina Turner moment - "I don't wanna fight no more". I can see when I am beaten, just by muttering to myself and tapping away at my laptop in an increasingly futile and violent manner. You just keep on watching the show. Everyone will. Its heart will go on.
Too many have found the evil genius of the DOND format - what's going to happen next? They're going to pick a random box! What could be in it? I WANT TO KNOW! Because it's bloody random it is! - aided by its evil host genius and master manipulator of drama, too strong to resist. They make an fabulous Emperor and Darth team. Them and simplicity. In every corner and every crevice of this show. Keep it simple. Keep everything simple. Every component that adds up to crushing ratings success. Simple. You know what I mean.
Still, you know in your heart of yours that Noel is a supremely mentalist cockmaster. *he says as he runs away in a playground fashion and giggles at his naughty, phallocentric name-calling*
This is the dark time. The weeks before the big events. The weeks that will zip by in a supersonic swoosh of "now where did the time go? We had so much time. And now we have nothing. Let's cry a little". And then I will be faced with two question papers (no excuses to hide behind; no surgical wreckage and super-duper painkiller blitz this year), and a few days later I will be standing up in a BBC studio made up like a rosey-cheeked rent boy and hyperventilating in anticipation at some potentially LIFE-CHANGING happenings. Then I will explode in a shower of Gap polo shirt scraps, cascades of caramel foundation and strips of cute and cuddly face chops, as rivulets of my sweat mingled blood start flowing down the contestant podium like a macabre stream. Then, at last, I will be at peace. At one with the cosmos.
On the other hand, I may just freeze and choke and smile wanly as others surge past me into the glorious, monetorious light.
You do know that Noel Edmonds is the Antichrist
Sorry. The word "Cosmos" has triggered something irrational in the ranty side of my brain. The phrase "Life-changing" has well and truly entered the game show lexicon and, quite frankly, it can shove off back to the abyssal pits of Hades or as is my more concerted opinion, Noel Edmonds' bullshit-crammed cakehole.
Didn't game shows and quizzes change people's lives before Deal or No Deal? Of course they did. They always have: Going for Gold, for instance, apparently gave Daphne Fowler ME. But now every host and presenter with a fair bit of dosh at their hand bandies it about like a cheap trinket designed to invoke at least one or two people's vague awe, and aping, of all things, the C4 teatime ratings titan, for the purpose of selling the drama and getting more of those hard-to-find viewers out of their cubby holes or underground nuclear bunkers or wherever they are.
It's not A Change. It's a Life-Change. These fortunate TV contestants will be plunged into money, these television creators seem to be implying, the poor sods will puke on the lucre, it will mutate their DNA and brain. Forever. Maybe even in an Incredible Hulk way. If they're LUCKY.
Everything will change. These poor wretches who needed the blessed touch of television from up on high to put their lives right and make them even better. This change may possibly involve the endowment of the chosen few with golden plated skin and flawless diamonds for teeth. Who knows? Change is good. Right?
But were our ordinary lives so humdrum, nay, so utterly and completely meaningless and desperate, that we had to succumb to the contestant calls of the goggle box and let it make our dreams come true AND CHANGE OUR LIVES? As if we were phoning up the local branch of the Samaritans.
This is a hill of cack after all. It's only money. It is not a trio of wishes from the Wishmaster is it? Nor an operation to ensure a lifelong chemically-heightened endorphin rush to our brains, of the kind that will make us smile and laugh and wonder why anyone could ever frown, let alone shed a tear or two.
The only thing it changes is the bank balance. Look at those zeroes go. I don't see the Millionaire winners I am acquainted with acquiring Savile Row suits and an insatiable taste for Waygu beef and driving Porsche Boxsters through Mayfair on their way to Chinawhite's as soon as the cheque swelled their accounts.
They still wear the same clothes and they do the same things they used to do. They seem as content as always and you soon forget natural thoughts like "Jesus Christ, you have a lot of money. Buy me something". Just because they can now afford to buy a three-bedroom flat in central London with wads of notes no less, doesn't mean they will change anything drastically.
People who watch and therefore go on quiz shows aren't the biggest dreamers in the world. Many are pretty happy with their lot and don't feel the need to circumnavigate the world in an entirely new record breaking manner or climb the north face of the Eiger just because it looks like one bad-assed sonufabitch of a mountain and they sure could go a few rounds with the Swiss bastard just to prove they're into feeling alive. They don't have the kind of pioneering and dynamic ambitions that turn thousands into millions. They liked the thrill of the quiz show experience and answering the questions and the bonus is that they get the security of the cash boost and the chances it affords to go on some really decent holidays on a far more regular basis.
This isn't Lottery jackpot money - I mean if I had Michael "Lotto Lout" Carroll's cash, maybe I would go beserk in a hilarious and highly visible way by burning fields full of cars and wearing enough gold to OG, just because I had the means to. Or maybe he's even an bigger magnification of the "life hardly bleeding changes" scenario. Carroll buys the same atrocious clothes, the same grease-splatted junk food; in fact the same old tasteless garbage, but in bigger quantities that he can now share out amongst his equally thuggish friends. His tastes stay the same and so his life stays in the same rancid sty of wonderfully, beautifully vulgar trappings. Not exactly an Eliza Doolittle transformation is it?
Now Michael's got loads more dosh than quiz winners. In the game show world it's a few thousand, tens if you play it right and a million if you're bloody lucky with a consecutive chain of 15 questions. If life changes it does so in a sotte voce way - imperceptibly.
Then my thoughts drift back to the Noelster - the source of this catchy, meaningless phrase. Since Noel got hold of a TV show where tens of thousands of pounds can be won in high drama, and where people jump and scream in delight and wither or bite their lips in disappointment on a daily basis, he just knows the audiences at home are eating it up like starved Deadwood pigs and he suddenly becomes the master bloviator (is that a word? It is in Noel's kingdom or sodding dream factory), the pontificating Don King of game show hosting. He can big it up like no man (aforementioned promoter excepted). A man who glides around the set like a bulletproof archangel dispensing the kind of self-help hokey-cokey BELIEVE! BELIEVE! brand of wisdom that would make anyone who had never seen the show and had somehow stumbled onto the set for the purpose of some pre-ordained cosmically divined act of retribution, kick him in the balls and then the head repeatedly for his outrageous and egredious chutzpah. Hopefully, the smackdown would continue that Noel was talking with a Shane MacGowan slur.
But this would not stop him. His Messianic fervour has grown far too strong He would skip over it daintily. Well, not quite so daintily now because if the beating had gone down well enough the now wheelchaired one would be using a ramp and tapping words into a speech synthesiser and still be saying the same outlandish, infuriating things about the gods of fate and chance and how we can manipulate them with the power of our mind!! If we try rilly rilly hard and hold hands.
For Noel has no grasp of the notion of shame (it explains the steadfast face rug and tucked-in shirts - he doesn't know how twatty he actually looks, which means he must be impervious to the mental brickbats everyone else must contend with every day of their lives ... it's a Heroes superpower perhaps?) and therefore a brilliant, brimming confidence added to a psychopathic need to home in on the real and obvious emotional crux of the matter and exploit it to draw the viewers in and make them think "He's so right. Because he sounds like he means it". That's how despotic leaders suck in their loyal flock. He's like Mussolini crossed with Bilbo Baggins. And yes, even I think that is a wild and crazed allegation.
I never used to notice all that bloated clap-trap. In the beginning I only wanted to know how much money the contestant was going to get. Ooh the tension. I always loved it when hopes ebbed and flowed and the crowd cheering drove them on and on, only to see their deals steadily deteriorate to a heartbreaking vanishing point - the vapour of hope makes for a pretty threadbare tea at 5pm. The undeniability of the gambling urge is ever present in the show, and you can see how that particular trait changes lives. Not in the good monetary way, but in the regretful Terry Malloy mewling about what could have been if things went their way. Just as in poker, DOND players get "bad beats" too and the downward spiral was car crash TV entertainment at its best.
But when they won incredible sums, I liked it too. Schadenfreude and empathy can be truly interchangeable things when faced with the fluctuating fortunes of complete strangers. As long as it went one way or the other I didn't mind. And it was brilliant to see someone take a chance and explode in euphoria when it came off.
So I got my daily shot of high drama. One day doleful, the next joyful, the next a bit meh and so on. The unpredictability kept me coming back at the start. Even if after a few viewings you concluded that it was televised bingo, albeit one laced with the scent of mystic dung and beautiful self-delusion.
It was after I had watched DOND for four or five months that I realised the contestants were a consistently great bunch of people; Albion folk in all their weird, life-affirming variety, eyes-shining bright all the time. Meanwhile, the beady-eyed circusmaster was becoming more hideous looking and sounding by the episode. All those spewing geysers of melodramatic crap heightening whatever tension there was, even if there was nowt. His goading and inciting the crowd with well-placed words (oh, he breaks them like horses beforehand, whispering in each of their ears; they be his puppets one and all), and doing down the poor person in the high chair when they got one sucker punch of a bad reveal and then pumping up their chances to utterly unreasonable degrees when a penny blue popped up when you knew the odds of their winning massively had long since receded.
I now thought this Noel, this Channel 4 afternoon reincarnation of the ever-grinning anodyne sweatered gimp that had ruled Saturdays like his own peak time fiefdom, was an absolute dick. Even if he didn't know it (you realise he is all thick skin). He was a truly monumental knob, whose genial shamelessness was manifesting itself constantly in words so bloated and insane I could not watch an entire show anymore (yeah, I can watch the endgame. How much money? How much money?). Not since last summer have I glimpsed more than five minutes. And that is more than enough.
On a nakedly contrarian tip, I prefer the US version: more pizzazz and showmanship and Howie Mandel being the pleasantly bland presence you need in a place where everyone is going hyper American-style, and less of the whole desolate warehouse ambience and ordinary folk/police line-up suspects behind the boxes who aren't Perfect 10 models and who certainly do not flash sweet smiles that could melt your heart in a second; and, I do mean to go on about this: will Noel please stop equating the potential loss of money people never had to that of having your entire family infected with a flesh-eating virus so contagious that the Government has been forced to burn your home down with them inside it? I would go more into the perspective thing, but I may be ready to admit that, okay, maybe it is only about the identically dressed models across the Pond. They're luvverly.
It's the differing images each version projects you see. You can imagine The US Banker being some evil Gordon Gekko genius type eating companies for breakfast, even if this is patently rollocks and he is some ham actor whose sole skill is leaning back in his chair in an especially smug manner. But this was opposed to the British version, who I imagine as a kind of passive-aggressive Captain Mainwaring financial spod whose only vague pleasure in life is his 10-year affair with his mousey secretary Susan and the occasional visit to a dominatrix. One looks at the stars and tries to seize them. With his genitals. The other one's a dreary perv with about as much dangerous allure and cocksure power as a slightly irate water vole.
Noel tries to raise us - the players, the viewers, the entire world - up into the starry sky with all that hyperbolic, well, bollocks about this awesome juggernaut of an emotional game show phenomenon changing lives every day. Then you eventually see through that. We be humble Brits. We like the odd treat; the occasional echo of glamour in our lives. Then Noel steams in with talk of destiny and dreams and you think: what a load of complete rubbish. The Americans have their Dream encoded in their genes, and such blabber makes perfect sense to them, used as they are to furthering their horizons and drinking up gallons of aspiration as Barney Gumble would at a Duff brewery prize winners' party.
The American DOND set screams demented opulence and phrases like "Bright lights! Models! Models!". Our equivalent setting is like a carefully lighted shed with depressing brickwork. It's like the Blue Peter team decided to make their own (i.e. our UK) version of the US set by using materials scrounged from a demolition site and secondhand computer store.
DOND ain't real life. It's TV. British TV. Conveyor belt entertainment. It's neither the Battle of the Somme nor a withdrawal trip to Scrooge McDuck's vault - its a ramshackle studio in Bristol where perfectly pleasant people get to make a nice little bit of dough. And whenever I heard Noel swerve from one end of the emotional spectrum ("Brilliant! Going great guns!) to the other ("this is a bloody disaster you brought on yourself!") in the blink of the eye, I felt cheapened by his undoubtedly skillful act and well-trodden spiel (doesn't he even have an ounce of self-awareness? ... oh wait, if he did he would have long stabbed his eyes out and chewed his own tongue off, and maybe, just maybe, torn off that fruity little goatee and begged everyone for forgiveness for ... everything). You can only raise and raise the expectations of the audience and toy with them for so long before they realise they are being fed the same dish every time and it's getting somewhat tired. Everyone's tolerance levels will start to falter and then freefall to the infintesimal, if they have not already done so. And I would say that in all confidence if we lived in an ideal world. Maybe like the one The Christians once sang about.
But it could just be me. I forget the great British viewing public. They've got their own ideas and critical yardsticks. They are the ones who got My Hero recommissioned and recommissioned and then even got it recommissioned when Ardal O'Hanlon had had enough and thought that guy off Gimme Gimme Gimme AND The Thin Blue Line would do just as well (Camp? Irish? What's the difference? It's a laugh). Oh yes, they are powerful. So very powerful.
That wonderful mass of loyal fans probably don't notice a single thing wrong or even a mite squiffy with it. Maybe it's all about seeing reflections of themselves and the all too human stories and how these get milked by Noel ... wait, that's it. I'm having a Tina Turner moment - "I don't wanna fight no more". I can see when I am beaten, just by muttering to myself and tapping away at my laptop in an increasingly futile and violent manner. You just keep on watching the show. Everyone will. Its heart will go on.
Too many have found the evil genius of the DOND format - what's going to happen next? They're going to pick a random box! What could be in it? I WANT TO KNOW! Because it's bloody random it is! - aided by its evil host genius and master manipulator of drama, too strong to resist. They make an fabulous Emperor and Darth team. Them and simplicity. In every corner and every crevice of this show. Keep it simple. Keep everything simple. Every component that adds up to crushing ratings success. Simple. You know what I mean.
Still, you know in your heart of yours that Noel is a supremely mentalist cockmaster. *he says as he runs away in a playground fashion and giggles at his naughty, phallocentric name-calling*
posted by That Quiz Guy at 12:10 PM
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