Ant & Dec win again, but are Terrestrial TV’s days numbered? (Image: Getty)
My old colleague Jane Moore was first out of I’m A Celebrity. The Loose Women regular was diligent and focused in her Bushtucker trial but sadly resentful and unfocused when it came to washing-up.
Jane left pots, pans, and plates un-scrubbed, attracting rats into the camp. Or quite possibly the production crew released some of the tame rats they use in trials for some staged drama. After 22 years this is nothing that show can do to surprise us. And that’s part of the problem all terrestrial TV has – and which we’ll get to.
The best thing about ITV’s jungle caper is it shows us what people are really like. Famous or semi-famous, you can’t keep up an act for weeks – especially when you’re hungry, tired and humiliated, riddled with insect bites, wearing dirty clothes and have jungle fungus growing between your toes.
The results aren’t always pretty. So far this series, we’ve learnt that Dean McCullough is wet, idle, self-centred waste of space. Melvin Odoom dubbed the Radio One DJ “Houdini” because he always disappears when there’s work to done. Only Adele teeters on the edge of tears more often than he does.
We also discovered that Richard Coles has concave nipples (for Conclave ones see Ralph Fiennes).
Rev Coles has raised the quality of campfire chitchat and has a neat line in unexpected anecdotes, recalling the time he was knocked out by a belligerent homeless man.
Not because the tramp objected to the Communards but because Richard’s dog had scoffed his sandwich.
Coles has also become bosom buddies with Jar Jar Binks, sorry, GK Barry. Their chat about the lesbian practice of “scissoring” must have sparked awkward conversations in living rooms around the country and puzzled High Court Judges everywhere.
“What, pray tell, is scissoring?” “Rubbing your girlfriend up the wrong way, m’lud.”
And to think TV bosses once rationed the use of the word “bloody” lest the nation’s maiden aunts reached the smelling salts.
But the show’s problem is common to the one facing all terrestrial TV. Where are the new ideas?
The big shows are played out. Britain’s Got Talent has been around for 17 years and found their most successful stars in the noughties. is 20 (or 69 if you date it from Come Dancing). MasterChef started in 1990 and has its own issues. And Holly Willoughby will soon be on our screens hosting a revival of You Bet!, a format that began in 1988.
Catchphrase kicked off in 1985 and ran out of actual catchphrases last century. Last weekend they offered us “skinny latte”, “disco nap” and “bed of lies” – the title of a Nicki Minja single which peaked at 73 in the charts ten years ago.
Hardly a phrase on everyone’s lips.
Have I Got News For You is 42 years old and barely fit for purpose. ‘Satirist’ Ian Hislop seems to think it’s his job to defend a government whose dull incompetence would be laugh-out-loud funny if it wasn’t so heartbreaking.
Other long-running formats have been fatally nobbled by the dead weight of box-ticking and virtue signalling. Step forward the now lazily written and absurd Midsomer Murders and the terminally woke Doctor Who.
Like the new Jag advert, this miscalculated sabotage and subversion of once popular dramas suggests the people in charge genuinely dislike their audiences.
In the face of competition from the streamers, terrestrial TV would rather buy in hit foreign formats (like The Traitors) than take a gamble on something new and homegrown.
It’s been a disaster for the industry – I know many talented people who just can’t get jobs, including folk who worked on some of our biggest light entertainment hits. Gutless and clueless, TV as we know it is committing hari-kari.
Terrestrial television’s aversion to risk-taking, passion and imagination is having fatal repercussions.
Watching programmes on scheduled TV channels and satellite TV is forecast to drop to one-in-three viewers in ten years’ time and around one-in-four by 2040. Maybe it’s inevitable, but the lack of fight is heart-breaking.
There are some things mainstream TV still does well. In BBC2’s case, recent documentaries such as Rage Against The Regime: Iran and Britain’s Nuclear Bomb Scandal have been eye-opening and gripping.
Although the Beeb did try to have their cake and eat it on Tuesday by screening Chris van Tulleken’s BBC2 doc Irresistible: Why We Can’t Eating (condemning sweet, carb-heavy grub) up against BBC1’s MasterChef The Professionals where Evan served up Type 2 Diabetes on a plate.
His strawberry compote was too sweet even for Gregg Wallace. Gregg has stepped away from the show following misconduct allegations. We don’t at this stage know the truth of them, but could it all stem from class differences?
Wallace was a market trader turned greengrocer. His brand of earthy banter was never going to sit well with the more po-faced middle-class graduates fretting about pronouns and oldspeak (© George Orwell). The kind of nitwits who take jokes literally, like TV news editors…
Old-fashioned blokes like Gregg have no place in a world where the British Board of Film Censors decides to slap a discrimination trigger warning on the Wicked movie lest green-skinned viewers (The Hulk? The Jolly Green Giant?) are affected by meanness towards the green characters.
Finally, this week’s award for joyous nostalgia goes to Beatles ’64 (Disney+). Produced by Martin Scorsese celebrates the Fab Four’s arrival in New York in 1964, and their legendary live appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show – watched by 73million. For an hour, the US crime rate plummeted.
The documentary mixes unseen hotel room and backstage chat with up-to-Scorsese interviews with Paul McCartney and Ringo. The hysteria they provoked that February electrified young America the way Elvis, Chuck Berry and Bill Haley had shaken up British teens in the fifties. Bruce Springsteen and Alice Cooper were among the thousands of American teenagers who were inspired to form garage bands in the Beatles’ wake.
Their tour also felt like a rebirth, a welcome antidote to the dark depressive mood that had gripped the country following the assassination of JFK in November 1963.
“America needed something like the Beatles to lift it out of mourning and say life goes on,” observed Macca.
Finally, Sir was on his usual sparkling form (trigger warning: this might contain elements of sarcasm) on ITV’s This Morning. He was as awkward and dull as ever, although Keir did reveal that his daughter made him take part in an escape room for her birthday. Imagine. Trapped in a situation he couldn’t get out of, surrounded by the confused and the bewildered, fear and desperation on the rise… it must have felt just like one of his Cabinet meetings.
Small joys of TV: Irish comedian Neil Delamere (The Chase: Celebrity Special). The stunning if often totally incomprehensible Maura Higgins in the ITV jungle. The brilliance of Wolf Hall and Mark Rylance’s giant hands. He keeps them hidden most of the time but watch out for them – they’re the size of dinner plates. If his hands are that big, just think how large his gloves must be…
Random TV irritations: Channel 4’s lazy hatchet job on Queen Camilla (aka The Wicked Stepmother). The Day Of The Jackal, scripted by a committed (and once convicted) Irish Republican, painting the British Army as callous killers – what does Frederick Forsyth, who wrote the original book, make of that? And Channel 5 choosing to repeat Inside Harrods At Christmas at a time when shocking allegation against the store’s previous owners are all over the news. Bad taste. Merry Xmas!