Totally Dublin

I grew up on a farm in deepest, darkest Roscommon where, believe it or not, there weren’t many gay bars. Nor, indeed, were there many gay people. As an out, proud and extremely under-stimulated teenager, my only possibility of engaging with gay culture came through books, magazines, the internet and of course, television. While these first three were useful in themselves, one thing I’ll never forget is the feeling of seeing gay culture and people on TV, of having it blasted into the living room while Granny choked on her complan. Weekly, I would pore through the listings for anything remotely gay related, that might help me explain who I was. Not just to my family, but to myself.

This was the late 90s let’s not forget. Homosexuality had been legal in Ireland for all of a wet boom-time weekend, and even Ellen bloody DeGeneres hadn’t hinted at becoming the lesbian powerhouse she is today. What I watched on TV at the time helped to deal with the isolation I felt, but also helped me to identify with something that seemed a million miles from the darkened living room and low volume TV that my fourteen-year-old self was surreptitiously glued to. Admittedly, gay representation at the time left a lot to be desired, and if you were relying on it to understand gay culture it could (and in my fashion sense did) produce some excruciatingly skewed results. It’s heartening then, to realize that things in TV land have changed. Sitting down to watch RTE’s Growing Up Gay on Monday, it was nice to see just how much for the better. (more…)

Back before television became about keeping track of Katie Price’s vagina, it used to be aspirational. Granted, some of it still is, and in our multi-channel world there’s oodles of programming dedicated to the betterment of mankind. Most of it though, is no longer relatable to your average viewer. Sure, some people watch Jeremy Kyle and realize “Oh, so you don’t put the crying baby in the knife drawer” but most already knew that. Likewise for the viewers that watch shows about extreme plastic surgery, or emotional fragile people eating themselves to death. Aspiration television has turned ever so slightly nasty, where the growing possibility of actually appearing on it is nowadays viewed more of a threat, than a chance at realizing a dream. Keep yourself in line or you’ll end up on Living, etc. Back in the day though, it was an altogether different affair, as people looked to TV as an instructional medium towards leading better lives. It had its own problems of course, breeding homogeneity and social snobbery, but for better or ill, these shows shaped our day to day existence, and nowhere more so than in the kitchen.

Cookery shows, of the old didactic style, were at the forefront of this kind of aspirational television, under the steady hand of cooks like the late great Fanny Cradock. With a palpable sense of concern, she led her viewers in culinary adventures that would supposedly elevate their lives and social standing. She even wore elaborate chiffon ball gowns to the stove, forgoing any kind of apron, for as she once proclaimed “only a slut gets in a mess in the kitchen.” In the social warzone of keeping up with the Jones’, this woman was your own personal panzer tank.

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It’s official. The Hills has been cancelled. Applaud/sob as appropriate. Fear not, however, for the end of the show doesn’t mean the last you’ll see of your favourite reality stars. Audrina is already in talks to work in your local Superquinn, while Stephanie Pratt has been signed to projects left right and centre. Petitions, mainly, but… Kudos to Heidi Montag though, who is augmenting herself with further plastic surgery and will be available for hire as a wedding marquee come the summer.

Heading into its sixth season, The Hills has always been an aesthetically pleasing but mentally drab reality show, spewing forth from the sun-kissed Laguna Beach, before in turn giving rise to spin-offs The City and new-comer Kell on Earth, not to mention some A-grade media liggers. These shows don’t form so much a glorious TV dynasty though, as a whirling eddy-pool of MTV inbreeding, and a multi-million dollar cash cow for creator Adam Divello. This coming season has been decreed the last however, as MTV and producers seem in agreement that the story of The Hills has now been told. In fairness, it could have been adequately told about three years ago, given the paper-thin slightness of the spats and spirals of this ‘reality-drama’. If there is a full-on script, you could easily hide the pages amid the leaves of those tiny salads they seem to subsist on.

In many ways though, this is why the show worked. The lulling pace of The Hills drew you in, clutched you to its chloroform-vinegared breast and refused to let go. All of its drama, piffling to the rational mind, is writ large by the fact that nothing else is actually happening. A few months ago, yours truly sat down blearily one morning, with a bowl of rice krispies and a burning desire not to go into the office. Click goes the TV, and cue Lauren Conrad’s words of wisdom. I mistakenly saw my salvation here, thinking “Great, I can watch this for twenty minutes until my brain starts functioning.”

Threes hours later, far from any kind of synaptic higher functions, I was desperately trying to understand why I lived in Rathmines and ate coco pops for lunch when these people seemed to have the world at their fingertips and squandered it all on over-sized accessories. I sat there, my breathing shallow, for quite some time, entranced by the shots of L.A. and intermittent dialogue. Towards the end, any minor event took on the emotional drama of prematurely giving birth on an out of control rollercoaster. A Pampers ad came on and I called my nonplussed mother to tell her I loved her. A bee flew past and I screamed and locked myself in the bathroom, sobbing into the shower faucet in the hope that someone would hear me through the pipes.

The Hills is Valium televised, the equivalent of mixing up your lemsips with brandy, and capable of lulling entire populations into a confused stupor. Why is Spencer such a douche? Why does Heidi love him so? Why is Lo even there? And if I told Audrina that Lauren wanted her to eat this pile of toe nail clippings, would her frozen sex-doll smile even flinch at the first chewy mouthful?

It’s the show’s main attraction, but also its contagion. Mindless entertainment is all well and good, but it’s a worry when it seems to induce mindlessness itself. In any case, the swansong approaches, after a troubled year or two in sunny L.A. Cast departures have meant producers have had to increasingly hang the show on Speidi, which was no easy task as the newly weds went increasingly off the rails. Spencer is rumoured to be suspended from the set for threatening a producer, though officially he says he’s stepping away from the show to pursue his “new passion” of fighting cyber crime at American Defense Enterprise. An honorable cause, no doubt, but if you’ll believe that, you’ll believe Heidi Montag has healthy body image.

Credit where it’s due though, The Hills has certainly been a pop culture phenomenon over the past five years. At its height, it managed to affect a rapport and loyalty by speaking directly to its audience, taking the original characters from Laguna Beach and facilitating an organic transition to onset adulthood that was easily identifiable. But as the cast has grown as people, the show has stolidly tried to portray them as yet-bedazzled kids, even in the face of their own growing media influence.

Pointedly, Whitney Port’s new vehicle The City has overtaken her old stomping set, by prioritizing the bumpy ride of her fledgling career over her romantic follies, a phase of life perhaps more accessible and interesting to a maturing audience. The evolution has worked; giving The City a first season that outpaced the Hills in ratings and eventually cemented it as the more successful. Or as Whitney would droningly repeat, SO successful.

The Hills airs on MTV and will premiere its final season in the coming months.

Writers and critics often refer to television as an immature medium, a bit of a toddler in fact, which repeats the same tricks over and over again, with a gurgling self-satisfaction. It’s why truly original programming can make such an iconic and instant impact, and spread like a virus from network to network with only minute variations (the rise of reality TV over the last decade is a case in point). Repetition in itself isn’t so bad though, and in a television context usually just means moulding tried and tested formats and genres towards the interests and possible edification of successive generations. Sometimes, you’ll get familiar forms that produce a startling voice. Sometimes, you’ll get Jersey Shore.

If you haven’t heard of the Shore, MTV’s latest assault on youth culture and culture in general, then you should cherish these last few moments of silence. Go watch a sunset. Write a letter to your kids. Build a time capsule and include a smiling picture of your pre-Shore self, so that when it’s opened in a hundred years, people will know there were smiles in the before-time. Actually, sod the photo, climb in there yourself.

With Jersey Shore, you get your standard MTV marathon of young desperados herded into a garish house, before being plied with enough alcohol and off-camera cajoling to guarantee outlandish behaviour. They’ve done it before with The Real World series, as well as dozens of other reality-based shows that involve and revolve around the same simple formula. The perfunctory hook here is that MTV have focused in on a particular ethnic group, namely young Italian-Americans who identify with the (usually derogatory) moniker of guidos. Dragging them all out to Jersey Shore for a summer of filming, in a house that looks like it’s been decked out by an Italian version of a Carrolls Gift Shop, these kids can’t help but wax lyrical about their Mediterranean culture and heritage, though show a poor and easily disregarded grasp of either. Think plastic Paddys with better skin, more muscles and copious amounts of hair gel. 

As Snookie explains, guidos and guidettes are actually “good looking people, that, you know, like to make a scene, like to be centre of attention, and like to take care of themselves.” Far from a racial slur, “now it’s kind of a compliment.” As a politics of appropriation, it’s far from convincing. Nor is it in any way facilitated by the editorial decisions that MTV takes in bringing these characters to the world.

The show’s American debut sparked a level of ire over representation not seen since the Sopranos heyday, as critics and advocacy groups lambasted the furthering of negative images of the Italian-American community. What added insult to injury of course, was the omission of the Sopranos obvious saving grace, a quality programme. MTV’s entire premise seems to be the sneering of an ethnic stereotype already easily chided in popular entertainment, as it feeds these kids enough amaretto and rope to dangle their buff bodies from the reality show pier. There’s no plot, no point, not even a cash prize. Just more idiots behaving like idiots. Repeat ad nauseam, and you’ll entertain millions.

Jersey Shore airs on MTV, with a new episode every Sunday at 9pm. Repeats are shown throughout the week, or can be viewed online here.

YAY! It’s a new series of Friends! And look, Monica’s moved somewhere sunny. She looks great. I wonder where Chandler and the rest are… Oh they’re divorced? Hang on, why’s it called Cougar Town?

Yup, the hopes and dreams of Friends fans everywhere are to be dashed against the rocks of RTE2 this Tuesday, for it’s not actually a new series of Friends, just a new series where Courtney Cox inexplicably puts her Monica hat back on, despite the fact that this is an entirely different character in an entirely different show. She’s not the only one though, in fact for the first few episodes of new comedy Cougar Town, it feels like this is where old sitcom stars go to die. Christa Miller is virtually a carbon copy of her character Jordan from Scrubs, while Busy Phillips reprises the role she’s been playing for a good ten years now, i.e. that of a whorish Barbie doll who’s been left out in the sun too long.

Coming to us from ABC, Cougar Town takes us into the world of Jules Cobb, a forty-year-old divorcee who’s venturing back out into the world of datin’ and relatin’. She’s flanked by two best friends who hate each other (Miller and Phillips), a dead-beat ex-husband and a perpetually mortified 18-year-old son. Add to this mix her rather winsome neighbour Josh Hopkins (who plays her rather obvious and conveniently just-divorced-as-well love interest), and there’s a recipe here for a slick and sexy series, that could be executed with incredible panache. Like a female dominated version of Nip/Tuck perhaps, where Mrs. Robinson skips the surgery and has the surgeon instead.

Unfortunately though, the first couple of episodes fall horrendously flat. Aside from the séance for dead sitcom characters, the script itself is insultingly stupid, with paper thin plotting that leaves the show feeling like a random assortment of characters with hit-and-miss one liners. If it were funny, this would hardly matter, and rarely does in the better sitcoms, but at times it reads like a transcript of Loose Women, performed by a bunch of beaming Saturday Night Live rejects. It does get a bit better as the series progresses, but takes nearly nine episodes to muster up any kind of heart or humour. This is slow progress even by rookie standards, but when your creators and writers are Scrubs, Friends and South Park alumni, what excuse can there really be?

The sad fact may be that Cougar Town is just another casualty of ABCs reputation for taking great ideas and mismanaging them to the point of abuse. Just look at Flash Forward, a wonderful idea and opportunity that once committed to film became little more than a exercise in keeping Joseph Fiennes out of trouble. Or Desperate Housewives and Ugly Betty. Both had a candy-coloured promise to begin with, and indeed enjoyed great first seasons. But by the time Mary Ellis is corpse-monologuing about the 19th consecutive murderer to move in across the street, you can’t help feeling the writers are like helpless bunnies caught in the headlights of their own success. Poor, dear Betty has met a similar fate, never matching the buzz of her initial storylines, and limping, as we speak, to her finale next month as a result.

Cougar Town seems to fit the pattern sadly, for even when it improves it’s at the cost of its core concept. Which is a shame, primarily because there aren’t many decent roles for older women, certainly not in sitcom land. Cougar Town could have been an empowering little treat that made you laugh and made your spinster aunt feel like maybe a night out in Coppers wasn’t such a bad idea after all, but it seems to be selling out without a dirty, cross-generational weekend in sight.

Unlike her hilarious foil Barb, whose lecherous slapstick is fatally underused, our heroine Jules isn’t long out of the gate before she’s being reined back in by forty something year old men her own age. In fact she doesn’t seem fit for this cougar lark at all, only boffing two young men within the first half of the series, and even then sticking to a ten-date rule that keeps her sheets tediously clean. These young men, as an aside, are some of the most perfunctorily drawn characters I’ve ever seen on TV, recurring in several episodes each but only blessed with only enough depth to facilitate the erections that seem to be their primary function. By nature of their pointlessness alone,the viewer can be in little doubt as to whose middle-aged arms Jules will be falling into.

The problem with Cougar Town, perhaps, is that it’s very, very safe. Cox is as squeaky clean as the surfaces her old incarnation Monica used to obsess over, and destined from the start to have a brief rush of freedom before quietly acquiescing to marriage and insemination by her all-American neighbour. The show will keep running through their romance, no doubt, but by then the whole thing will have beiged into the landscape of rom-sitcom tomfoolery. By contrast, shows like Fat Actress, and The Comeback were unapologetic in their middle-aged hellcat ethos, and suffered network censure as a result. With Cougar Town losing sight of its own ideals and edgy potential in the first few episodes, it may perversely do a bit better. Though if you were looking for a sassy and empowering portrayal of mature women who want to enjoy life and sod the social stigma, you’ll be better off watching Judge Judy.

It’s official. I want Patrick Jane (Simon Baker) to read my mind. I also want him to promise not to be scandalised by what he reads there, it is after all an occupational hazard of mind reading. Personally, I’d love to be able to do it; it’d help me sort out all of life’s little predicaments. But for now, I’ll have to be content with the new series of The Mentalist instead.

Crime dramas are always going to be something that TV stations everywhere are overrun with. Just look at Law and Order – it must be on about series 74 by now. We at Telly Thursday don’t know what it is; after all, if you see one crime drama, you could certainly make a compelling argument that you have in fact seen them all. But yet, they keep popping up, like a malfunctioning Jack-In-Box.

The format of crime dramas hasn’t changed much over the years. The genre itself is for the most part not a particularly inventive one, not to mention reinventing. In short, it’s almost impossible to sit down, watch two separate crime dramas and actually point out the fundamental differences, because there are none. It’s like the studios take a template and just fill in the blanks.

The latest trend in crime drama is to give the main protagonist some kind of quirk or edge, usually something that helps them do their job better but at the expense of their credibility, which they really didn’t care about anyway. Think about it, Patrick Jane reads minds; last week’s Rick Castle is a crime novelist which, for some reason, in a crime show, translates as criminal profiler. Tim Roth reads lies in Lie to Me. Even Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes could be considered in this sub genre of crime dramas.

These quirks do give crime dramas an extra dimension if used properly. Where the problems lie in these subgenres though, is when the shows start to take themselves too seriously. There is the danger of this creeping in with any of these shows, it’s effectively the moment when the quirk, or the science becomes more interesting than the actual show.

Thankfully though, The Mentalist so far remains immune, sidelining the party tricks of Jane in favour of being a highly entertaining, fun hour of TV. So, yeah, we can guess who killed who, who slept with whom and where the family’s lost dog ran off to, pretty much in the first twenty minutes. So what do we do for the next half hour? Well, I actually just stare lovingly at Patrick Jane, but I’m sure other people have their preferences too…

The new series opens with a couple of predictable enough cases: the murder of a woman accused of swindling her boss; and the murder of an intern (sounds like the Totally Dublin office) working for a State Senator. Both cases are solved handily enough using Jane’s box of magic tricks, much to the annoyance of his peers, yet when it appears he is quitting they remark that they think they need him.

The fallout from the last series plays heavily on their minds, and even more so when the Red John case is transferred to a different department who aren’t too keen on letting Jane, or female agent Lisbon know what’s going on. We’ve been promised a darker edge to this series, Jane still hunting for the murderer of his wife and kids, even though the case has been taken from him. Meanwhile Lisbon is indebted to Jane for saving her life.

It’s a funny series in a way. The plots aren’t complicated, meaning it’s not a particularly challenging drama. The supporting cast are likeable as is Lisbon but the usual sexual tension we see in these kinds of shows hasn’t reared its head yet in the second series. In a sense, those are the two things that ensure crime dramas survive – either they have a brilliant narrative drive; or they draw in a different kind of audience who champion the inter character romances, commonly known as ‘shippers’. But The Mentalist doesn’t have either of these factors in abundance. It’s almost as if they’re trying to do everything a good crime drama doesn’t do. And yet it’s still entertaining. That in itself is a rare and impressive feat.

Of course if anyone disagrees with this review, I will argue that the sheer beauty of Simon Baker completely clouded my judgement, not only managing to read my mind, but manipulate it aswell.

The Mentalist airs on RTE 2, Sundays at 9:30pm.

A rather innocuous envelope arrived on our doormat the other day, smelling, as all unopened envelopes do, of hope and potential. As it turned out though, it was a rather stern reminder to pay our TV license. Now, we don’t mind paying up in the least, we just prefer to pay in instalments, coughing up the odd fiver whenever we feel the national broadcaster has actually done something worthy. If after twelve months RTE haven’t earned the full hundred and sixty, well, maybe that just means they’ll have to up their game a bit next year. They learn a lot like this we find, especially if you stick a post-it on each payment, explaining which non-Neil Delamere show was the one that impressed you.

2008 was a tricky year though, as TV3 were awarded 3,000,000 of the license fee fund and we suddenly found ourselves in danger of playing favourites. However much they got from us in the end, we’re sincerely hoping it’s all been spent by now, because if one cent of our money went anywhere near the simply appalling few hours of TV3 ‘primetime’ we’ve just witnessed, we’ll be very disgruntled tax payers.

Celebrities Without Slap was what jumped out at us from Tuesday’s listings, like a culturally vapid jack in the box. “Pictures of celebrities”, read the description, “not wearing make-up.” “Christ,” we muttered, and moved swiftly on. Living in shared accommodation though, Telly Thursday often falls victim to the dreaded zapper politics. With a sink full of dirty dishes as leverage, our steely eyed flatmates easily got their way, and the washed out slebs stayed on,, to rouse our bile and bluster.

It was one of the most insulting, infuriating, and asinine half hours of television I’ve ever witnessed. Running through Hollywood’s female A-listers at a frenetic pace, Celebrities Without Slap made some heavy handed points about what it is to be a famous woman in the media glare. Which it turns out, is bloody hard work. Deploying gossip column talking heads and some on-screen MS paint scribbling worthy of Perez himself, not one of your favourite female performers was safe from the vitriolic gaze of CWS.

Katie Holmes was on a “make up free shopping spree,” looking rancid even though, as we all know, “Holmes can be a hottie, if only a kind clerk would direct her to the cosmetics counter.” Kelly Clarkson was getting on a plane at 5am, but the silly bitch was wearing a green hat that did nothing for her complexion. Even the normally resplendent Julianne Moore was decried as “dishevelled”, although she was given some “credit because she has a baby.” Which was obviously pretty generous of our powder and paint overlords, though luckily for us their altruism didn’t stop there. A photo of Hilary Swank out for a jog was decreed to “prove that you can look great running,” while Nicolette Sheridan of Desperate Housewives fame was admittedly “looking a little rough in that photo, but she’s giving you the abs and the boobs as a distraction. Good tactic!”

Tips and tricks like this came as fast and thick as caked foundation, with invaluable hints such as “”If you’re gonna get arrested, at least make sure you have some concealer for the mugshot.” Later, and with a tad more faith in us perhaps, came instructions about large sunglasses and wearing… um, hats (not you though, Clarkson, obv). Without these life-saving accessories though, you are to appear absolutely flawless and miraculously made-up. Ever the caring cretins, our talking heads even led by example, appearing on-screen to berate you whilst wearing most blusher than you’re ever likely to amass in your average-looking lifetime. The essential thrust of all this, dear women of the world, is that the vast majority of you (even the ones in whose professional interest it is to be beautiful) are actually exceedingly ugly. Did you know that? Can you read this through your oversized sunglasses and pulled down baseball cap? Have you considered a burka?

What I’m driving at here (and rather laboriously, I’ll admit) is that Celebrities Without Slap represents the ultimate in lazy, shallow programming. Offensive not just to women, but to television audiences and humanity in general. It showcases our culture in such a way that we personally can’t decide if we should flee the cities for the uninhabited mountain side, or gather at the heart of the metropolis, gazing skyward and simply willing the bombs to fall. But what, you must now be screaming at the screen, did we expect? These shows are ten a penny and many-formed. Most people wouldn’t even bother putting pen to paper over them. Our reasoning for critique, dear reader, was not so much the show itself, as was what followed.

Without a hint of irony, nor a tongue scarce near their cheeks, TV3 repeated Sasha: Beauty Queen at 11, a BBC production from 2008 about a little girl whose entire life has been consumed by fulfilling modern ideals of beauty. Describing herself as “dumb”, “stupid”, and not “needing a brain”, Sasha’s journey is a piteous one, as a very sweet but clearly mal-nurtured young girl is laid bare before your eyes. The villain of the piece would appear to be Sasha’s domineering mother, whose desperation to live out her limited dreams vicariously has led to the abuse of her 11 year old daughter. She is a woman who feels it necessary to point out that she doesn’t “have aspirations for [her 11 year old daughter] to be a porn star, or anything like that,” but will bleach Sasha’s hair, apply fake tan and acrylic nails, as she likes Sasha to look “like a Cindy doll.” She is a woman who beggars belief, but so is TV3’s complete lack of awareness or savvy in scheduling programming that celebrates superficial celebrity culture alongside that which purports to decry it. The fact that these were advertised prior as a double bill just reinforces the lack of any sort of comment, as well as the perfunctory way in which this content had been considered.

Worse than the scheduling blunder though, are the fractures within a culture which devotes hours of prime time television to picking out imaginary faults in celebrity make up habits, but then has only time to boil the kettle before tut-tutting at the familial dysfunction and cultural mal-adaption of those who buy into it wholesale. The eerie face-on interviews with Sasha’s mother are like an odd foil to the talking heads of Celebrities Without Slap. Her unshakeable belief in her daughter’s destiny as a top model reaches its apogee with her admission that yes, she is actually envious of Sasha’s “really good looks.” With each of Sasha’s insistences that she wants to be a model like her idol Jordan, it’s uncomfortably plain that she’s never really been told she has the potential to be anything else.

This kind of lazy, ill-considered schedule filler is typical of TV3 primetime, despite a three year plan instigated in 2008 that aimed to pull themselves out of these very doldrums. That plan has produced some successes, but the channel has always historically poured its in-house production budgets into daytime news and topical programming, shying away from the drama and fiction production that could build its legacy. As long as they continue this trend, they’ll have a harder time justifying any kind of share of the license fee. This year, in fact, we’ll be earmarking our license fee for RTE, specifically for the reinstatement of High Queen Blathnaid, and the purchase of a solid gold dress for Jean Byrne. Because if the people who guess blindly at the weather forecast don’t look utterly, utterly fabulous, why the hell should we have to pay for it at all?

Celebrities Without Slap and Sasha: Beauty Queen at 11 aired on TV3 on Tuesday 2^nd March, at 730 and 800 respectively.

Sky One better watch its back, because Trisha Walsh-Smith is not a woman to be trifled with. After all, when her big business ex-husband tried to divorce her, she reinvented herself as the Youtube Divorcee, posting embarrassing and intimate details of their dysfunctional marriage online, for the giddy thrills of almost four million people. On the scale of sins against Tricia though, jeopardizing her fledgling pop career is probably far worse than the breaking of marital vows. Hence, while Sky One obviously didn’t intend on making her look like an utter looney toon, they might want to double-bolt the door for the next few weeks. At least until Pineapple Dance Studios has gone off the air, and Ms. W-S has realized that in the grand scheme of this trash and treacle reality show, she has by no means come across worst.

Long before the 30” box in your living room got interested, the Pineapple Studios became one of London’s most well known dance facilities, established in 1979 by Debbie Moore and attracting big name clients like Madonna and Beyonce. Seemingly, the company once embodied the boogie-woogie zeitgeist of the 80s and 90s, though recent years have seen the company take a downhill slide. This decline may be the motivation here, for I can’t fathom a single other reason as to why Ms. Moore would allow her business and name to be stapled to Sky One’s latest assault on quality programming.

Whatever her motive, we’re now blessed with Pineapple Dance Studios, version 2.0 in make-me-famous-television, that has somehow managed to up the ante exponentially. From the beginning, and even watching the early press clips, you can’t help feeling this is all some well-constructed hoax. That people who seem this stupid on TV must be smarter than we are in reality. While you’re busy second-guessing this Summer Heights High meets The Office extravaganza, you can even find the charm and humour in it. Sadly, it’s a charm that quickly fades, once you begin to realize they’re actually serious.

Which doesn’t happen immediately, but has a disheartening thud when it does. The show itself reads like a reality show, with some documentary devices overlaid for form. We get an authoritative, serious sounding voice-over, that on closer listening ranges from being tongue-in cheek to caustically snippy. The show is heavily storyboarded, playing up the camp and not shy of a few celebrity endorsements. Episode one saw Miss England drop by to try on some clothes, to ooohs and aaahs before the narrator deadpanned that she had abdicated her crown a few weeks later, for allegedly punching Miss Manchester in the face.

What this entire project hinges on though is a handful of the staff and students of Pineapple, who drive the show from beginning to end. The obvious star is Louie Spence, PDS’s Creative Director, who actually seems like a lovely person, but whose relentless energy and seeming determination to make this The Louie Show starts to drag after a while. That said, he is by turns sweet and self-deprecating, and probably the least annoying thing about the show so far.

Which isn’t hard admittedly, stood next to Andrew Stone, ageing would-be popstar and instructor at PDS, who decrees himself to be a better dancer than Justin Timberlake, and as good a singer as George Michael. “There’s an old showbiz saying,” he confides, “It takes ten years to be an overnight success, and I’ve been working at this now… Well, for fifteen years”. Lacking any semblance of self-awareness, he refuses to give up on his dreams. Which would be inspiring if it weren’t so painfully obvious that he’s at least barking up the wrong genre. As it is, his narcissistic, deluded fear of being overshadowed is only thinly veiled by his blunted sense of humour, which he no doubt uses to sharpen his ‘edgy’ haircut.

The aforementioned Tricia doesn’t seem to be as self-centred, but certainly seems to grow her own crazy. She’s pouring her divorce settlement into jumpstarting her pop career, though like Andrew’s band it doesn’t appear to be going anywhere fast. The lady’s got drive though, and will push herself to the limit. Sadly, at best this blinkered ambition makes our 40-soemthing wannabe seem a touch desperate, and at worst, more than a little unbalanced.

Trisha however, is where this car crash TV gets uncomfortably graphic. Her Youtube videos were made by a woman under severe emotional stress, with mad-eyed, yet mirth-inducing results. While that pressure is lessened here, she has still been left a damaged and possibly self-destructive person. When asked if she’s happy by researchers, she point blank admits she isn’t, and that what she’s been trough has left her depressed and lacking direction. True to form, her expression of this is both mental and hilarious, with song lyrics such as “I found a cliff to jump off in Devon, hope God still lets me into heaven.”

The show itself takes Trisha’s confessions, and edits and narrates them just short of sticking a ‘kick me’ sign on the woman’s back. PDS is like a sadistic rabbi, feigning support and guidance before shafting the local idiots for the shetl’s entertainment. Nothing new there of course, but the audience/wannabe disconnect feels stronger than ever. Trisha et al see this as an extended audition on their inevitable rise to stardom. The Pineapple Studios no doubt expect this to be a coup in terms of advertsing. Though while most reality shows of this ilk try to at least be impartial, Sky One seems willing to trade blood for ratings. The wannabes are presented as mental enough to be actual celebrities yes, but as we’re constantly and blatantly reminded, they lack even the modicum of talent it takes to rouse a record producer into warming up the auto-tuner. Pineapple Studios, for their part, looks like a run-down youth club. A shambling, fading institution reminsicent of an infinitely less charming Grey Gardens, but with multiple Little Edies, extra double-stuffed with fame hungry dramatiques doing pirouettes. Even dear sweet Louie doesn’t get out clean, managing to look a bit of a tit in the badly executed dance sequences that you can’t help but feel were actually his own idea. Overall, the makers of Pineapple Dance Studios have chosen to make fools of wannabe princes here, with a callous hand and mean spirit.

Then again, does anyone care? We should, by rights, have had enough of this kind of programme by now, but ratings prove otherwise. If watching fragile people crack like microwaved porcelain is your thing, I guess the question becomes whether this particular show is actually worth the bad karma?

For our money, well… yes, at least for a bit. It’s funny and shocking in that “omg is this real? I must text Gemma” kind of way. A full episode though, is a little like being at a kid’s birthday party, when you don’t actually have any kids yourself. You can only laugh at their sugar-hyped hell raising for so long, before the need arises to creep upstairs and raid the ritolin cabinet. This being Sky One though, the show is being shown nightly, with 8 prime-time repeats a week of the exact same episode being thrust into your living room. Of the top five places that we never want a pineapple shoved, our telly box is now number one with a bullet. Let’s just hope it doesn’t give Trisha Walsh-Smith any ideas…

 Pineapple Dance Studios airs Sunday at 6pm on Sky One. If you miss it, it’s on again at 8. Then again on Monday. Then Tuesday. In fact, it’s repeated every single day of the week. Don’t watch it too much though, if Sky one get the ratings they might just throw the rest of the schedule out the window.

Alright fine! We admit it. We killed Archie Mitchell. Us, TELLY THURSDAY! We left the Christmas table, crept into the fictional universe of Eastenders, and ‘done him in, right proper innit’. Can you blame us, after what he did to poor Peggy? And former Eurovision starlet, Samantha Janus? Not fine rightly sunshine, he had it coming.

This is a rough transcript of the voice mails we’ve been leaving on police station answering machines in and around London for the last few weeks, along with our contact details and preferred methods of bodily search. Our admission of guilt seems to have fallen on deaf ears though, for we remain free men, and the storyline trundles interminably on. It’s been quite a success for the show admittedly, and one of its most expansive whodunits, with half of Albert Square implicated. Unfortunately, it’s well in danger of having gone on a bit too long, in breach of one of the great laws of the soap opera. A real life murder enquiry can keep us gripped for months on end, but in soapland anything longer than a fortnight has us looking at our long-disinterested spouses with vague thoughts of conversation.

Come this Friday though, the house of Cluedo cards is due to come tumbling down, as Eastenders celebrates 25 years running with a special live broadcast. The evening promises both the revelation of Archie’s killer, as well as the fairytale nuptials of low-wattage Ricky Butcher and resident harpie Bianca Jackson.

Live broadcasts aren’t new of course, not even in soapland. Coronation St actually started out as live, and reprised the format for its fortieth birthday celebrations back in 2000. Plot was thin on the ground however, with most of the cast staging a location friendly sit-in at the Rovers, in an effort to save the street’s cobbles from the menace of modern tarmac. Yeah, cobbles. No murder, no grand soap weddings. Just reliable actors, doing reliable things. But while Audrey Roberts was conspicuously written out of Coronation Street Live (only appearing at the beginning and end, stumbling over her line and a half), Eastenders is far more likely to take a few risks.

In the contemporary battle of the soaps, Eastenders has been pretty much winning hands down for a while now, and for various reasons. Primary though, is that old fixture of the soap matriarch, a figure that has lately been disappearing from our screens. Since Maggie Jones’ sad death last December, Coronation Street has been bereft of anything like her. Her iconic Blanche, though reduced to comic asides in recent years, was the last great matriarch that the show seemed capable or even inclined to use. Eastenders, by stark contrast, is full of such characters and, even more importantly, ready and willing to use them. While it’s true that head honcho Barbara Windsor (Peggy Mitchell) is hopping into that big black taxi for the final time in the coming months, there’s plenty lined up to take her place. In Coronation Street, and in British Soap across the board, the few potential candidates are all being deployed for comedic value, rather than the steely-eyed control and determination exuded by dames gone by.

Friday’s episode will definitely attract viewers, as the Archie storyline finally comes to its convoluted end, but whether the broadcast goes down as a technical success or failure depends on too many factors to prejudge. Bookies however have been busily tabulating the odds of who killed Mr Mitchell, with favourites changing daily. The problem is, with such a large cast of suspects, the sheer scale may end up making it less satisfying once the actual killer is revealed, like a reality show without the whittling down approach. Coupled with this is the sheer incredulity of some of the accused. 4^th favourite, at 7/1, is ten-year old Ben Mitchell. Even at a stretch, how a four-foot-nothing spaghetti armed tween could manage to bludgeon a grown man with a heavy bronze bust of Queen Victoria is a little perplexing.

So, given that the nature of modern entertainment is escalation (it is, we checked), Telly Thursday is offering Eastenders producers the following suggestions for who could’ve killed the late Archie Mitchell. Free of charge, no need to even thank us, here’s how we think you should make the 25-year celebrations go off with a bang.

Who did kill Archie Mitchell?

Iris Robinson - Would anyone actually be surprised at this stage? Political intrigue has always been lacking in soap opera, so maybe Eastenders could lead the way. Iris, tormented by her recent political scandals, tracks down the man who ratted her out to the press, and wreaks cold-blooded, brutal revenge upon him. It turns out to be totes fine though, as she has a latte with God Almighty in the cafe directly after, and he said she was dead right.

 The Church of Scientology… is an entirely valid and benevolent religious organisation that certainly doesn’t bully, brainwash or otherwise ruin the lives of its members and their families. But if Tom Cruise just happens to use all that Mission Impossible training to bludgeon a fictional pub landlord in the East end of London, well, they can’t be blamed, can they?

Bianca Jackson - Along with her ever-growing brood, she may actually be the only cast member not fingered as a potential suspect. Certainly she’s one of the few that William Hill aren’t offering odds on. Making her the killer would at least be a surprise, and have a nice plotline cross-over if the police turn up at her wedding. Although personally, if she shows up to the church in a side-ponytail, we’ll be switching off. Miss Jackson needs a gentle word that those different coloured scrunchies just make her look like a head in a stripy ginger sock.

Ke$ha - For the love of Dot Cotton, this girl’s liable for anything. I mean, she brushes her teeth with a bottle of Jack for Christ’s sake. You’d certainly attract the youngsters, and can you imagine the trial? Ke$ha sitting in the dock (with swagger), explaining how she kicked Archie to death (because he didn’t look like Mick Jagger).

T2 - A nice genre side step for the soap, as well as a guest star coup as Arnold Schwarzenegger reprises his Terminator role for a spectacular once-off. The story could run that Archie, despite his meagre ambitions to just own the Queen Vic, actually would’ve gone on in later life to challenge the nascent Skynet (currently known as Google Buzz). The finale could be an incredible homage to the original film, as Pat Butcher rugby tackles Arnie into Ian Beale’s industrial deep fat fryer, before the square uses the molten metal from her earrings to build a memorial playground.

Eastenders Live Broadcast airs on Friday, 8pm on BBC1 and RTE1. For your final chance to gather clues and watch for Arnie’s bright blue ball of time travel electricity, tune in tonight from 730.

Being omniscient, I can remember my own birth in perfect detail, and can I just say, dear readers, that on the 24th July 1984, oh how the Heavens themselves did sing! I gave my dear mother no trouble at all (“like a bit of pleasant wind” she said), several Palestinians arrived bearing gifts of unrivaled bounty, international conflicts ended in mutual rejoicing and just for that one, magical Tuesday, the moon itself changed shape.

Well, actually no. I was born into a ward named after St. Jacinta, in Portiuncula Hospital, Ballinasloe, thus confirming my faux-skanger status for all eternity. Not much is really known about the event itself (indeed my own mother seems hazy), and with a lack of baby photos, I’d actually always suspected I was adopted. Until it became clear that is, that I had inherited the absent-mindedness and fleshy eyelids of my dear old dad. When pressed about what my birth was like though, both of my parents still get wistful, before vaguely mentioning that it had been particularly warm that July and turning the TV volume up.

It would’ve been handy, of course, if I’d been born, not at the site of the world’s oldest horse show and original Supermacs, but at Princess Anne’s Hospital, Southampton. Here, for a show they’re calling One Born Every Minute, Channel Four have installed 40 automated cameras, to capture the miracle of birth in all its terrazzo-floored, antiseptic-stinking glory. A fly-on-the-wall documentary, the first episode followed two women through the labour process; 37 year old Tracy (accompanied by her witless husband Steve and son Liam), and 22 year old Lisa, with partner Will in tow for what turned out to be a rather complicated birth. The show, if we’re frank, could’ve been awful, and indeed on paper it sounds like it very well should be. Not so much a programme in its own right perhaps, as a desperate attempt by Channel Four to find an off-season use for all those Big Brother cameras. Thankfully though, and perhaps surprisingly, it’s actually pretty great.

Directed by Lisa Smith, One Born Every Minute accomplishes itself as an emotive and well-positioned documentary, that takes the everyday miracles of maternity wards and lays them bare on the small screen. It opens (terrifyingly) on a long shot of a busy hospital corridor, where nurses and midwives are busily running in and out of rooms, tending to their patients. What they seem to be ignoring however, is an animalistic and sustained howl of pain and anguish that’s slowly wearing down the walls. Whether you have a womb or just used to live in one, this noise is blood curdling, a sound more akin more to wartime torture films than how we like to envision modern medicine. It’s at this point that you begin to wonder what exactly you’ve let yourself in for, as nightmarish visions trip through your head, of gynecological reality TV that shoves the camera where only fee-charging websites have gone before.

But Smith is clever, and forgoes the idiot reference of her programme’s title. There is, in shows like this, a thin line between serious documentary and one note reality TV, yet OBEM seems to know as much, and treads carefully on the side of the former. The editing is seamless, and manages to avoid cheap tricks or obvious manipulation. No doubt makers have storyboarded the footage to some extent, in the interests of pacing etc, but ‘contributors’ Tracy and Lisa actually seem strong enough as characters to do most of the leg work themselves. Tracy, expecting her fourth child, has an endearingly pleasant nature, feeding the audience back story in pre-recorded interview snippets, while cheerfully panting her way through husband Steve’s bizarre sense of a bedside manner (at one point while Tracy is off screen in the bathroom, mid-contraction and in obvious pain, he tries to jimmy the door open so the cameras can catch her on the toilet). With both women, their good-natured capacity for mirth, even when they have a human being crawling out of them, is heartily cheering. So much so that for parts of the show you’ll feel like labour is just a walk in the park, and that your own mother’s unresolved anger issues towards you really are completely unfounded.

Lisa’s story is less straight forward though, as her unborn child has a condition causing his bowel to form on the outside of his abdomen, and leads to an emergency caesarean 11 days premature. There’s a palpable anxiety in these scenes, especially as the camera trains on Lisa’s worried face, seconds after the birth of her still silent son. It’s tense and even terrifying, like a somehow heartwarming version of the Saw franchise, where you actually care about the people getting cut up on screen.

OBEM handles these gearshifts well, from the good-natured banter to the grim realities of hospital life, and keeps its audience buckled in tight along the way (you can insert cliched stirrups joke). One thing that shines through all this horribly though, is how utterly surplus to requirements us men are to the actual business of birthing. Steve and Tim seem completely at a loss regarding what to say or do during the entire process, in a space dominated by professional and commanding women. Even Steve’s cutting of the umbilical chord seems perfunctory and a little awkward.

Yet OBEM doesn’t alienate its male viewership. Actually I’d go as far as saying that it manages the neat trick of cross-demographical appeal. Some of this is in its subject matter, undoubtedly, but most is in the crafting. Smith has produced a documentary here that is intelligent without being elitist or agenda-driven, human without veering into the ditch of sentimentality. Even in its depiction of understaffed wards and services stretched to their limits, it comments in the telling rather than the telling off. This quiet, non-judgmental approach is at the core of One Born Every Minute, and the main reason why it excels at portraying families on what must be the most incredible yet vulnerable days of their entire lives.

One Born Every Minute airs Tuesdays at 9pm on Channel Four, and is available for catch up online at

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/one-born-every-minute/4od

On a completely unrelated and arbitrary side note, someone at Channel Four needs to do a spin off on Nancy the clearly bonkers but brilliant receptionist, stat.