In the world of hecklerspray, there are very few British celebrities who are worth discussing in any great detail but every so often the opportunity comes up to take the piss out of a ‘celebrity’ who is so noticeably smug that he makes Jools Holland look like Rosa Parks. However, when such an opportunity arises we have to grab it with both hands and tighten our vice-like grip around the throat of said smug celebrity whose face looks like a deflating whoopee cushion.

We’re referring of course to Adrian Chiles but you’d probably already realised that from the picture which is placed next to all the articles. Regardless, we wanted to build up to him in order to replicate that feeling of complete dread that one feels in the moments leading up to Chiles’ face appearing on the television screen. The moments where palms start sweating, teeth start grinding and you realise that if you want to watch the football then you have to put up with his over-paid, self-satisfied face forcing banter with Gareth Southgate, a man so beige that he looks like he was spawned by peeling himself off a nicotine-stained wall.

However, it is Chiles’ work on Daybreak which is notorious for scaring people into vomiting into their Frosties. A (probably fictional) ITV insider, speaking to the Daily Mirror;

“But research is suggesting that ‘Daybreak’ is now damaging the station’s entire daytime schedule. That simply won’t be tolerated. We don’t want these figures to have a knock-on effect, so there are still big changes that need to be made.”

Not only is Daybreak damaging an already reprehensible ITV schedule, it also has the honour of having found a way to be worse than GMTV with its audience finding it lacking in identity and any editorial merit.

We say “its audience”; the 800,000 people who watch Daybreak everyday. When you consider the fact that there are around 60 million people in the UK, that’s not a lot. Of course, it would be wrong of us not to do some maths and work out why more people aren’t watching Adrian “Nobody Actually Watched Working Lunch” Chiles prattle his way through an interview with a furious raccoon-handler who had their benefits cut by the council… or something.

Now. Maths. Bear with us. There’s a graph too.

There are around 60 million people in the UK. 3% of whom do not own a television. That’s 1.8 million people in the UK who do not have access to a television. If you assume that only around 70% of those people with televisions have TV licenses (and we all know that you can’t watch TV without one… obviously) then that leaves around 40 million people who have both television and television licenses and therefore have access to drivel like Daybreak early in the morning.

Okay. It’s not finished yet. Sorry. The current unemployment rate in the UK sits at around 8% of the labour force (or, for the ease of simple maths which has no bearing on anything, the population). It is safe to assume that people who are unemployed are only up in time to watch Jeremy Kyle, which starts after Daybreak. Their removal from the equation leaves around 36 million people who have the ability and inclination to watch Daybreak.

This is where the cohesiveness of the theory begins to break down quite rapidly, much like Creationism which- ironically- Adrian Chiles is a perfect argument against. BBC Breakfast (during GMTV’s run) shaved the ratings getting around 1.3 million viewers compared to GMTV’s 1.2 million. Assuming most of them have gone to other channels, that’s around another 2 million people you can shave off the backs of Chiles’ hands.

The assumption that a good 60% of the British public cannot stand the sight of Adrian Chiles in any capacity, let alone in the morning when they’re feeling hungover and regretful, is a fair one and a further 5% that have difficulty understanding why Christine Bleakley is willing to work with him takes out 65% of that 34 million.

That only leaves around 12 million people, 50% of whom probably don’t mind Adrian Chiles but have better things to do in the morning than have a man from Birmingham witter inane shite at them. 6 million left.

Then we have to take into account the 70% of people who either don’t work a 9-5 or don’t have time to watch television in the morning. It’s coming down every time. Here’s a graph:

We’re beginning to see the trend. There are more factors to explain the decline of Daybreak’s viewers as, we imagine, much of their audience has simply left the television on by accident or can’t be bothered to get up to look for the remote and are stuck watching a double act of Skeletor and a pile of rancid mashed potato who is ironically far better suited to the simplification of mathematics through its work on that business programme than we are.

ITV seem to believe that their only option to save the ailing ratings of its flagship morning show is to jettison Chiles like a particularly belligerent crap from a train toilet and, as you can see from our irrefutable mathematical proof, it might well be.

Of course, there is a far simpler explanation for the downfall of Daybreak actually. It’s awful, Chiles is awful, Bleakley is awful, their rapport is awful, the amount of money that they make is obscene and, as a concept, the show is completely flawed. They would be better served showing a programme where Chris Eubank is chased around on a tricycle by circus performers on stilts. We’d watch that. We’ll never watch Daybreak.

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Daybreak, ITV’s woeful attempt at going head to head with BBC Breakfast, is in trouble as ratings continue to plummet.

The breakfast show, hosted by former One Show presenters Adrian Chiles and Christine Bleakley, is only averaging somewhere around 500,000 viewers per show.

500,000 sounds like a lot, but when you consider that even Channel 4’s god-awful Seven Days experiment is pulling in more viewers per episode, you know that something is going seriously wrong.

But why are viewers abandoning ITV’s brand new and sparkly magazine show? The fact that Daybreak is one of the most mediocre and drab light entertainment programmes on UK television could be the problem. Even Loose Women is more entertaining than Daybreak, if only because watching 4 decaying hags fawn over Michael Bublé whilst their genitals audibly creak with every chair shift makes all of us here at the Hecklerspray office chuckle every time.

Another problem could be the presenters. Adrian ‘face of a car crash victim’ Chiles and Christine ‘if I show enough leg maybe people won’t realise I can’t present’ Bleakley.

There was a media circus surrounding the two personality deficient presenters when they defected from the BBC to ITV and they’ve failed to live up to the hype.

The One Show was bearable because they were only on screen for half an hour at most, but with Daybreak the audience is subjected to the train wreck that is the chemistry between Chiles and Bleakley for what seems like a lifetime.

Plus there’s no getting over the fact that Chiles has that whole Austrian kidnapper look about him and every time he glances at Bleakley you sense he’s plotting something sinister.

Daybreak will inevitably get a revamp sooner or later, but unless every morning is in fact dedicated to Chiles carrying out the evil plot we all suspect he’s running through in his mind every time he lays eyes on his co-presenter, don’t expect it to amount to much.

If anything, the most depressing fact to emerge from the whole Daybreak debacle is that there are half a million people out there who willingly gaze upon Adrian Chiles’ mangled face every morning whilst eating their breakfast.

What’s wrong with them?

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It’s been incredibly heart-warming to witness ‘Crumpled Morrissey’ Stewart Lee’s commercial ascension over the last few years. Seeing his routine in a half-full tent at Glastonbury 2005 was like a ‘Beatles in the Cavern Club’ moment for hecklerspray.

This comparison falls apart utterly since Lee already had a long and distinguished career in radio and TV, but at that point he had a relatively low profile for his stand-up. Seeing him use such beautifully eloquent and heavily worded analysis one minute and then to make equally successful points by saying virtually nothing at all showed a comedian with such a brilliant understanding of language both in making astute comment, but also getting a laugh for it.

We were so moved by the experience that upon our return home we promptly sent him an email. We simply had to let the man know. We imagine all stalking starts with similar self-justifications.

His 90s Comedian DVD featured the routines that he did on the road after he had been the subject of a logically and morally flawed campaign against him for his part in directing Jerry Springer The Opera. Due to its intensely blasphemous content the DVD very nearly didn’t get a release. If that had been the case, the world would have been deprived of a lasting document of some of the finest, bravest, smartest and most hilarious stand-up comedy to emanate from a stage.

His re-invigorated profile resulted in last year’s TV series Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle. Half an hour of stand-up with the odd sketch, it was a fairly accurate reflection of his talents. It didn’t always work but it was always making a point and it’s clear that Stewart Lee is very comfortable with that balance these days. His act regularly contains different bits that cause laughter to different parts of the audience, but everyone is interested in where he’s going with each subject.

On Saturday, we caught him playing at the Manchester Lowry. Support came from Henning Wehm. Wehm has a nice line in self-deprecation, which sets him up to make observations about the Brits. He’s already a regular on Radio 4 panel shows and his profile is going to continue to grow as the British public love it when overseas cultural commentators settle over here and tell us about ourselves, as Bill Bryson and Rich Hall can attest. There’s something to be said for someone who, unlike most of us, has chosen to live here. It gives people an interesting perspective.

It’s this angle, along with his delivery that allows him to get away with some of his weaker material. When we saw him selling CDs after the show we wanted to steal him and take him home with us, although sadly he didn’t win us over quite enough to buy anything from him.

Lee is road-testing material for his forthcoming second BBC series and so the night took the shape of three 25 minute TV episode-sized routines although since the tour started, certain events have made it look like the part dedicated to Adrian Chiles will fall foul of the censor.

One thing that grates is comedians repeating their well-known routines. Comedians aren’t rock stars- people don’t come to see them play all the hits. Tonight Lee does repeat some of his previous material about the IRA. Although it’s lost some of the mouth-agape power it once had, Lee’s most uses his powerful weapon of  sentence construction, and the lines are re-structured enough to get the laughs.

He also continues his peer-i-cide of other comics by taking aim at Russell Howard. Not quite as brilliant as his devastating attack on Joe Pasquale but a hilariously convincing argument for Howard being evil nevertheless. His finest moments come from his ongoing commentary on his own act, deriving laughs from analysing and setting up predictable jokes and punchlines.

This pre-empting modesty doesn’t quite let him get away with the two songs he plays- his earnest singing voice still sits a little uncomfortably with the dry sarcasm of his spoken words for our ears, but its evidence that he still insists on pushing boundaries and testing his audience whilst exposing himself completely.

It’s easy to see why he is called the comedian’s comedian but that tag of esotericism isn’t fair- really he’s just part of the long tradition of intelligent people, from Oscar Wilde to Bill Hicks, showing us the world for how it is, in all its naked, absurd glory via the medium of wit.

Apologies for the Bill Hicks reference but European legislation means that all articles about stand-up comics must contain at least one Hicks comparison.

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We say toh-mah-toh and you’re wrong.

Folded:

• Ladies man Adrian Chiles quits the BBC (this is great news. What do you mean he’s gone to ITV? Radio, we said. RADIO!)
• Students – we love ‘em (Cameron gets it in the boat race)
• Bento Box (served on a tray, usually, but still very tasty)
• Ash cloud excuses (“it’s the wrong type of ash, my car won’t start“)
• Fairy cakes or buns? (this is worth arguing about because both are delicious. Just so you know where we stand, fairy cakes look like THIS, buns like THIS)

Creased:

• Politicians’ tour buses (huge, space age, gas guzzling, it’s almost like they are a complete waste of money)
• McDonald’s Monopoly game (look, enough with the flippin Play vouchers, okay? We want the house, the car, or £500k. Failing that, a Caramel McFlurry)
• Katy Perry’s ‘moves’ in the If We Ever Meet Again video (cringe with embarrassment as she cringes with embarrassment doing the ‘hands’ near the end)
• This awful David Morales remix of Back in My Life (Leave. It. Alone)
• Lindsay Lohan…again (just last week. Now really turning things round for herself)

Thanks to his talent for shuffling around on a shiny floor, panting and wheezing like a saggy weeble having a coronary, John Sergeant has never been more popular.

And, now that the big hoo-hah about his resignation from Strictly Come Dancing has finally died down, the world of slightly tawdry opportunities has been opened to him. John Sergeant can now do whatever he likes – he can release a lazily-ghostwritten autobiography about his time on Strictly Come Dancing, he can take Kerry Katona‘s place as the face of Iceland, he can even bring out his own perfume if he likes. But only if he decides to call it Gout by John Sergeant. That’s a dealbreaker.

But, no, John Sergeant is far too classy to try anything so shallo… what? John Sergeant isn’t too classy for any of that? In fact John Sergeant has such an inherent lack of class that he’s bringing out a Christmas single? And it’s a duet with Adrian Chiles from The One Show? Here’s a challenge – you’ve got all day to think of a worse idea than that. You won’t be able to.

As everyone knows, the traditional figurehead of Christmas is a jolly old fat bloke who can just about manage a single day’s worth of strenuous activity a year before needing to take several months off afterwards to recuperate. Everyone loves him, even though he looks like he’s enjoyed so much free booze and food in his life that he could keel over clutching his chest any minute.

But enough about John Sergeant, Christmas is also about Santa Claus, too.

John Sergeant’s talent for dancing like a hobbled pensioner trying to discharge himself from hospital without anyone noticing meant that he quickly became the people’s champion on Strictly Come Dancing. Or at least he was before he decided that he didn’t like lady Scousers with faces like sunken bread dough being nasty to him and resigned from the show in a flounce a couple of weeks ago.

But that happened a couple of weeks ago – a lifetime in reality TV shows. Now the people’s champion is Martina Navratilova or that bloke from Dollar or any number of the utterly interchangeable WAGs on I’m Not A Celebrity But I Still Expect You To Care About Me, and that leaves John Sergeant in something of a pickle.

With all the public goodwill towards him evaporating at a devastating rate, John Sergeant knows that he has to make a bold move to stem the tide; an all or nothing roll of the dice that will either consolidate his fame for years to come or see him wheeled out to the dustbin like a pile of broken-veined rubbish. So that’s what he’s done. And, as the News Of The World reports, the result literally doesn’t make any sense at all:

Strictly hero John Sergeant has swapped Cha Cha Cha for La La La – and recorded a SONG in a bid to be the Christmas No1. We can reveal that the flat-footed political journalist has teamed up with Adrian Chiles and Christine Bleakley of The One Show to make the charity single. An insider said: “John is such hot property right now and The One Show is delighted to have him involved. As for whether his singing is better than his dancing, the great British public will ultimately decide that.”

Oh, brilliant – a Christmas single. A Christmas single performed by the dreary-voiced man who used to be on the news and the dreary-voiced man who does the pointless show that comes after The Apprentice that reminds everyone exactly what happened on the episode of The Apprentice that they were just watching. Singing a song that reminds people about human suffering. Sounds like a winner to us.

Actually that’s slightly unfair of us – we haven’t heard this Adrian Chiles/ John Sergeant Christmas song yet, so for all we know it might be brilliant. To be fair, the primary reason we haven’t heard this Adrian Chiles/ John Sergeant Christmas song yet is because it almost certainly won’t be brilliant and we’ll end up wanting to hang ourselves by the start of the second verse, but still. Christmas, eh?

Read more:

Top Of The Chops – News Of The World