“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.
Lily’s first guest was David Mitchell, who was forced to sit in a half tea cup/half bed hybrid. The questions posed were on the most part inane, with Mitchell’s witty and deadpan responses only serving to illustrate the gargantuan gap between their respective levels of talent.
Like Parkinson, Wogan, and other great interviewers before her, Allen has her own distinct style. Where the former two opted for well-researched, probing questions, Allen instead decided on ‘Newsround press-pack reporter’ style. Allen’s attempt at endearing herself to the viewer by giggling intermittently throughout the guests’ replies like a 10-year-old on TV for the first time failed to be anything more than irritating.
Lily Allen & Friends is one of a number of desperate bids from TV makers to win back the teenager from the internet, mobile phones, and gaming. It establishes a TV 2.0 designed to get the viewer involved in the content of the programme, much like Web 2.0 did for internet sites. In this respect it could well be a trendsetter, though it draws heavily from the bleak and almost forgotten world of public access television.
One of the few saving graces of such a format was the independence and anti-establishment rhetoric which made it a bit radical. However Lily Allen & Friends feels too forced, and with an idea which was inspired by MySpace (News International), implemented by the BBC and a production company responsible for gems such as The Wright Stuff and Date My Mom, it is anything but anarchic.
With more gimmicks and novelties than content, we need no more proof that Allen should stick to her music career, and TV execs should stop whoring themselves to regain a lost market.
[story by Keith Emmerson]
nitrogencolonel says
Well said. BBC Three has been shite from the outset so I can’t imagine I would be as hot under the collar about its latest metamorphosis into Facebook TV, were it not for the fact that the Corporation’s restructing is dismembering news gathering operations to bankroll this crap.
This is at a time when media conglomerates – including the Guardian it seems – are reimagining themselves as multiplatform “brands.” Endlesly rolling deadlines, “citizen joiurnalists” and interaction between journalists and readers will take precedence over the time-consuming but unavoidable work of carefully researching stories and knowing their context, inside and out.
If it’s on Google it’s a fact, and if there is any apparent discrepancy between facts then that’s a matter of “opinion”. No one’s just plain wrong anymore… for example about invading places in the Middle East… if mistakes are made ah well. Draw a line under it and move on. No one resigns, admits errors which call their judgement into question in an irretrievable way, or is lynched by an angy mob for lying or being wrong. Because everyone’s perspective is equally valid, right? Especially if they are rich, powerful or pretty.
The “Lily is proposotioned by a member of the audience’ story doing the rounds today is part of the sense that – by making herself open to her audience to a limited degree – there is a slim prospect that she might go out with / be bestest mates with her MySpace “friends”. Incredible to think that some of the 17 year olds who “interact” there may genuinely believe this. Ask your gran: Ringo Starr never did thank her once for that friendship ring she sent him.
Sounds like a conspiracy theory, but I don’t think you need a conspiracy to explain it.. it’s just stupidity and insitutional atrophy. The whizzened ancien regime at White City are clueless how to respond to the world changing and this is their desperate response. Lily is, unwittingly, a Weapon of Mass Distraction from the really shocking aspect of this: the capitulation of a public institution trusted to impartially and independently promulgate information and culture, to corporate interests and a lemminglike pack mentality that says there are no standards – of truth, of talent, of cultural worth – in a digital age.
Nick Davies from the Guardian has a book coming out -flatearthnews.net – about fake news and fake media agendas, which I strongly urge everyone to read. We live in disturbing times.