TV Reviews / Previews

Many depressing things have emerged from the world’s fascination with reality TV - the career of Jade Goody and Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber’s sense of humour rank high among them - but one of the more unexpectedly sad side effects is belief.

Thanks to shows like X Factor, everyone and their dog (honestly, watch Britain’s Got Talent) believe they have what it takes to become the next pop icon/ business tycoon/ celebrity farmer that the world has been waiting for, but the fact is that many of us just aren’t all that good at stuff.

Britain’s Next Top Model is, as it says on the tin, searching high and low in this fair land to unearth the next supermodel, and if there’s one thing that you absolutely have to have here, it’s belief.

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Paris Hilton’s new MTV reality show ‘Paris Hilton’s My New BFF‘ (best friend forever) is in danger of being axed as casting directors are becoming aware that nobody really gives a shit.

This is no doubt something to do with hecklerspray’s article last week, which confirmed to the masses that anyone who wants to compete to become Paris Hilton’s new BFF is a gargantuan retard.

According to Trans World News, an insider said:

“There were less than 40 people there.”

This isn’t much, but is still enough to fill a modest size room and create a scene not too dissimilar from the one’s found in videos of Hitler’s inbreeding experiments, which – it should be remembered – also failed spectacularly. But who knows, maybe MTV is better organized these days than the Nazis were? They’ve certainly got more power.

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In each year's Eurovision Song Contest, there's always one bland-looking middle-aged man singing a hopelessly generic, instantly forgettable disco tune with '16th place' written all over it.

And this year it's us.

Andy Abraham, an X Factor runner-up from 2005, won Eurovision: Your Decision on Saturday night, which means he'll be representing us at the Eurovision Song Contest in May with his song Even If. And that would be fine, except that a) everyone involved in the show obviously wanted Michelle Gayle to win, and b) Andy Abraham's song is a big sack of donkey bollocks. Honestly, not a single homosexual blowjob joke. Who do these people think we are?

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The Osbournes hosted the Brit awards last night, so the show promised to be jam-packed with enough controversy to turn your granny blue.

Is that what happened, though? No - thanks to the Brits' stringent 'don't let Ozzy Osbourne say more than three words in a row' policy, the only vaguely controversial thing the Osbournes brought to the Brit awards was the way that Sharon Osbourne's face looked as if it had been attacked by jellyfish in her sleep.

Oh, and Leona Lewis didn't win any of the four Brit awards she was nominated for. That's sort of controversial, isn't it? Anyone?

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Season 4 of the brilliant legal drama Boston Legal is now airing on UK LIVING (10pm Thursdays), and the latest series proves that it’s probably the hottest show on television!

Revolving around the idiosyncrasies of a group of tough attorneys in a top law firm, this quirky show may be similar in tone to the surreal high-jinks of the similarly themed 90s series Ally McBeal (which is not hard considering that they both share the same gifted writer) but is far more smoother, inventively hilarious and unpretentious than that show ever was.  

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“I don't know what's sicker, animals having sex or you clapping.”

Only Lily Allen and her friends at the BBC could command such an exclamation from Cuba Gooding Jr. Her tasteless attempt at a new chat show can be best described as Heat magazine crossbred with a little Graham Norton-esque audience participation. It was actually painful to sit through Allen’s new vehicle, paper-cut painful.

The interaction with her audience seemed to be nothing more than a passing sentiment. A number of awkward exchanges with the Romford-fashion crowd ensued. Those lucky enough to have been picked out were rewarded with a place at the TFI Friday-style bar to be seldom seen again. The purpose of the bar escapes us, though it probably escapes the producers beyond its function as a holding pen for the banal.

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You might have forgotten that it even existed, but Big Brother Celebrity Hijack reached its dramatic conclusion last night. Well, its conclusion.

And, if you're into that sort of thing, the Big Brother Celebrity Hijack finale threw up all kinds of surprises - not least that John Loughton, the overweight oversensitive perennial outsider ginger politician, beat the odds voted as the show's winner. But last night's Big Brother Celebrity Hijack had an even bigger surprise in store.

Emilia came second. And she was rubbish.

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Sarah is back – wife beater and all.   

The Sarah Connor Chronicles could be a disaster, and not just because the title is really hard to say out loud. It’s from the creators of Terminator 3: The Rise of Machines, which is not exactly a selling point. The show is also trying to tap into a much loved sequel; it's sci-fi, and with sci-fi there are always die-hard fans who rightly or wrongly are invariably hard to please. 

The role of Sarah Connor is also a very big and muscly one to fill – Linda Hamilton owned that character, you believed she could open up a can of whoop-ass at any moment.  She said things like “I'll pump him full of this shit; I swear!” and you believed her. So can a series chronicling her life be any good, especially without the likes of Hamilton and Schwarzenegger?  

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Have you ever watched TV and had that slight feeling of déjà vu? It tends to happen a lot on quiz shows. Be it from the same old sob story about why people need money or the dire way creators come up with a new show.

It now appears that MTV has an equally strong mission to turn its viewers' brains in to mush. And it does this by making one show and then remaking the balls off it in a billion exact same ways. So we had another 'new' programme debuted on our screens last night. We were introduced to MTV’s latest offering, A Shot Of Love With Tila Tequila.  

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It was once said that everybody is doing a brand new dance now, and that we should perform said dance, known as the locomotion. It was Kylie Minogue who made that statement, and it just so happens that she also starred in this year’s epic Doctor Who special as a delightfully downtrodden waitress.

The fact that ‘downtrodden’ almost rhymes with ‘wooden’ isn’t just a coincidence; Kylie’s performance was lacking in parts, but fortunately that didn’t detract from the overall enjoyment. The special was set on board the spaceship Titanic and, you guessed it, something went wrong.

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Forget crocodiles, sharks, or insects that make you bleed through your arse, Bear Grylls is the scariest thing on TV.

In truth, at first glance ex-Etonian Bear, or 'Edward Michael', as his mother likes to call him, hardly looks like the stuff of nightmares. He has an accent that would shatter glass and looks more like a well-intentioned Geography teacher than an action hero.

But anybody who has tuned into his Bear Grylls: Born Survivor series on the Discovery Channel knows exactly what we're talking about.

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Last night saw the finale of the ever-fantastical BBC spy series, Spooks. If you’ve never seen it before, it is about a group of egotistical clerical officers who take themselves far too seriously, and snoop on baddies from largely non-Christian countries.  

In this week’s episode the Israelis airstrike a school located on the Gaza Strip, and while it isn’t really clear why that happened or why it involves the British, it just does. Events do seem to be created on the hoof in this episodic window on the fictional offices of MI5. For instance, the Venezuelans of all people randomly sent a coded message to our boys via the medium of Beethoven’s 7th. This Mighty Boosh-inspired idea was promptly resolved by Adam Carter (Rupert Penry-Jones) and team by replying with Pomp and Circumstance. Perhaps everyone will start sending messages using the songs of Steps instead of texting in future.  

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