Picture the scene: imagine you’re a chav. An absolute, grade-A specimen of a chav at that; a sovereign-wearing, Daily Star-reading, barely literate idiot scally of colossal proportions.
Now imagine that it’s Saturday night and, for some reason – maybe you had some debilitating accident while trying to shoplift a twenty-four crate of Stella – you’ve found yourself housebound. There’s no way you’ll be able to make it out; no way you’ll be able to get down your local Wetherspoons and indulge in loud-mouth drunken singalongs with all your idiot pals.
Sounds awful, doesn’t it? Well, fear no more, for ITV has the answer …
… and it came in the form of Madonna Mania. For one brief hour this Saturday, you didn’t even have to venture outdoors to find yourself dead-centre in a relentless haze of Burberry and GCSE failure.
It was all there on screen, pixellated stupidity laid out like some Boschean vision of the damned.
The idea behind the ‘special’? Some crap celebrity idiots – mainly soap stars – have a bit too much to drink and then clamber up on stage to wail out some Madonna hits. And then … actually, there is no ‘then’. Nothing else happened. That was it.
Satirical ‘TV Go Home’ genius Charlie Brooker once invented a spoof programme entitled PlebDazzle Party, which featured ‘lowest common-denominator highjinks and feeble-minded pantomime, laser-targeted at overweight proletarian halfwits lolling around on their gaudy sofas.’
How we all laughed. What a hilarious nightmare vision, we chuckled. Good job that it was never going to happen, right?
Wrong. Because, with Madonna Mania, ITV have finally cracked the formula. Not even the primate-level awfulness of Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway came close to this. The splinters at the bottom of the barrel are flittering away, and guess what?
There’s a big culture-shaped hole under there.
The Real Madonna This Way Lies
[story by C J Davies]