Saturday, 10 May 2008

Blank Faced Stooge-Bots

Friday night television is rubbish. Why bother even trying? Just churn out some US sitcom mainstay repeats or get a countdown show on - World's 100 Best Ever Things That Might Make You Nostalgic And That, With D Grade Talking Heads Nobs Getting a Fraction Of A Sentence Out Before Their Staged Non-Opinion Is Edited Into An Elliptical Half Gurgle. Or similar. First 50 on Friday, second half on Saturday. If you're not out Friday, then fuck you / thank you! There's no chance you'll be out Saturday either. No fully scheduled programme for you Johnny Not Invited. Go on, try and set your video / sky plus for it whilst you feign a life outside your sitting room. We'll just tinker with the binary and make you tape static for four hours. If you want even a hint of closure stay in. Always stay in. Stare at the light box. Dribble and moan, your fickle mechanical masters have won!

Alternatively (or more likely concurrently) if you're hip, bolshy and yoof like Channel 4 you might even mug the public with a reheated salmonella dripping turd of a programme like Balls Of Steel. Presented by nerdo-fringe face Mark Dolan, and featuring a power ranger team of grasping non-comedians, Balls Of Steel is a catastrophic avalanche of shite. Proper bum jettisoned stinking gut-filth. Want to know how shite? Do you want to know how a pure a strain of absolute radioactive anti-life it is? I shall tell you dear reader (I know there's only one of you), it's POST PUB TELLY!

Post Pub Television is savage TV wizard speech for: "lets not make any fucking effort at all, and just put a load of swears / bumsex in. Our audience are despicable drooling tapeworms, they'll lap it up like dogs and toilets. We're awesome, lets do some coke, yeah!" It's shorthand for all of that. Patterning themselves after very usual post public house delicacies as Kebab Made Out Of Non-Descript Mammal, and the inner city classic: anything-that-might-be-confused-with-Kentucky Fried Chicken / Turkey / Reformed Water Swelled Bird Carrion, post pub telly or PPTV as I can now only be bothered to write is similarly awful and as likely to make your bum dead shitty. It contains no notional nutritional value at all, it's just a swollen puss brick of chemicals and sweaty arrogance. You don't deserve even a fraction better you despicable, loathsome fucking whores. Their words, not mine.

Balls Of Steel is a show with a squad of extreme to the max! / kerrrazzzy fuckers who go out and stick it to (wait for it) the public! Fuck yeah, how awesome. Said members of the public typically just stand there look supremely awkward and confused as Sergeant Awful person screams a themed (and no doubt honed and well rehearsed) obscenity in their face. Ha ha ha. So funny! There's a sexy lady who licks at chap's fingers whilst their girlfriends look on befuddled, there's a joke stolen wholesale from Kevin Smith's Chasing Amy (except nowhere near as funny, and with significantly less handguns), a twat in a hat, and MTV UK'S very own smarm-krieg Alex Zane, and a woman who prods dildos in minor celebrities faces. She's the one who made Tom Cruise have that squeaky little meltdown. There are a good chunk more, mostly involving various depictions of smutty sex tropes. I do not want to list them. Think of ten incredibly short hand ways to make the person closest to you uncomfortable and you've no doubt birthed a comedic notion X Pi more funnier than these jokers would even dare dream. All shitty, all day.

The people under threat of joke (which never arrives, mind you) very rarely react beyond dumb-struck silence, or if you're super lucky screaming swearing as they try to hide their children from the baying donkey-human. It's like assaulting a mime or a stranded pacifist alien. This is why is extra especially super shitty. The day has come were Beadle's About is far enough in our cultural rear-view window to be described as Vintage. Vintage. Shudder Sir. Shudder! Why is Beadle now being positioned as something worthy of a kind of comedic respect by this writer? Simple, Beadle had the canny sense to set up a gag, then retreat like a naughty little boy with a mega-wicked Chinese firework bomb, and just let the sap jitter and sweat their way to injustice apocalypse. That's funny. Seeing how someone reacts to mind-warping hyper-pressure is something approaching a crafted joke. Having a whooping goon in a cowboy hat shout at a distressed washer wife whilst her (asterisked out by production) children cower in the background is not. It's just nasty shitty mob bullying.

And you watch it.

And so did I last night.

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