How Hard Can It Be_ - Jeremy Clarkson [42]
Television companies need to be brave. They need to accept that, because there’s nothing else to do of an evening, especially when money’s tight, they may as well broadcast shows that enlighten us a bit. Unfortunately this is not going to happen, because shows are like nuclear weapons. Once one broadcaster is transmitting a Day-Glo bucket of primordial sludge to suit the average ignoramus, all the others have to follow suit. There can be no unilateral disarmament. They all have to agree to ditch Vanessa. Or it won’t happen.
And so with that in mind I have come up with a proposal for Ofcom, the broadcasting regulator. Instead of removing the chocks of decency from the wheels of human degeneration you must stop thinking of TV as a mirror and insist it becomes a beacon.
Quiz shows should be designed to reward the bright and humiliate the stupid. Chris Tarrant must be banned from commiserating with the contestant who doesn’t know anything and encouraged instead to look incredulous. There must be debates on Ibsen in every episode of Coronation Street, and Stephen Fry will be made to appear on everything. There will be peak-time Greek from Boris Johnson. QVC will be forced to drop the trinketry and sell fine English shotguns. And I want a show featuring Eton boys who go to a different northern city each week to laugh at the people who live there.
Ofcom must be made to remove the pink, the saccharine, the goofy, the idiotic, the cheap and the nasty and replace them all with Paxman. There will be no more traffic cops pretending that what they do is interesting and a lot more Kevin McCloud.
For guidance, I direct all of you to Harry and Paul, the latest BBC1 series featuring Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse. Here we find a couple of performers who presume the audience have a modicum of knowledge and a scintilla of intelligence. If you don’t know what The Duchess of Malfi is or how the Sicilian Defence can be used, you won’t get it. It is not aimed at Jade Goody. It’s not even aimed in her general direction. It is, however, even though they’ve been jolly mean to me, the best television comedy I’ve seen since Monty Python. I’d like to think it’s more than an island for the bright in a sea of purple and blue snot. I’d like to think it’s a launch pad to fire a thousand rapier-sharp Oxbridge wits from the Footlights and into the comedians who strut about on TV these days imagining that they’ll get a laugh if they climb on to Vanessa Feltz and make her eat a centipede.
Sunday 5 October 2008
Play it my way, kids, and you’ll save rock’n’roll
Any slim hope we might have had of a Pink Floyd reunion tour was dashed recently by the death of the keyboard player, Rick Wright. Oh, sure, the remaining members could still settle their differences, find another keyboard player and get back on the road but, and here’s the thing, would I go? Would I be watching Pink Floyd? Or nothing more than a facsimile of the outfit that provided a soundtrack to my life thus far?
We see much the same thing today with Queen. Or ‘the Queen’, as my dad liked to call them. They’re out there now, strumming and banging their way through all the old favourites. They even have Paul Rodgers on vocals – and Paul, in my opinion, is the greatest rock singer of them all. But is it Queen without Freddie Mercury?
As you may know, I am a very big Who enthusiast. I saw them first in 1975 at the Bingley Hall in Stafford, and it was the start of something wonderful. But then Keith Moon shot into the next life through a puddle of vomit, and every time I’ve seen them since – it’s thirteen and counting – I’ve always felt that, despite the best efforts of Kenney Jones and Zak Starkey, I’m not really seeing the band that gave us Who’s Next. And now, with Entwistle gone, the problem will be even bigger.
Over the