Greek, Sunday, BBC3
Top 50 Showbiz Comebacks, Sunday, Sky One WORDS almost fail me when it comes to articulating the levels of irritation and despair which arise from watching pointless list-shows such as Top 50 Showbiz Comeba
cks. This tired genre – for genre it tragically is – has been parodied and pilloried so often in the past, you'd think that both the producers and the idiots who appear in them would be too ashamed to make any more.
But no, here they come, the same old C-listers lining up to vomit the same old redundant observations about the same old tired clips we've seen a million times before. How do hack comedians like Paul Tonkinson – who appears on every single one of these programmes – manage to live with themselves knowing that their career have been reduced to singing along ironically to old Peter Andre records?
Then there are those contributions from mysterious nobodies like "broadcaster" Tara Newley and "comedian" Olivia Lee, who'd have trouble being recognised by their own reflections. These people are so desperate for exposure that they willingly and regularly debase themselves by sitting in a studio for eight hours saying, "yes, I remember Noel's House Party. Noel Edmonds was in it. Will that do?" Ironic that a programme about comebacks should be populated by people who never even arrived in the first place.
I appreciate that the only reason these programmes exist is to serve as cheap schedule-fillers (and to give Neil Fox something to do), but couldn't they at least be put together with a bit of originality and spark? The only surprise here (apart from seeing host Christopher Biggins in a bubble bath) was the bizarre inclusion of Stephen Fry in an otherwise predictable countdown. The man has been a ubiquitous presence on our screens for 20 years! It's like saying, "you don't see much of that John Barrowman on TV these days, do you?" Okay, so Fry's mental breakdown in the mid-1990s was something of a blip, but it's not as if it aborted his career. Likewise, Madonna, who although she may have suffered a mild slump about ten years ago, was hardly scrabbling for change in the gutter before rising from the ashes.
The laughable inclusion of the Royal Family appeared to be based mainly upon the popularity of the Oscar-winning movie, The Queen. Yes, because we all suddenly decided en masse that the monarchy were actually brilliant because of a made-up story about Her Majesty, didn't we? They had to pad out the two-hour running-time somehow, I suppose.
It is a law set in stone that every US teen comedy/drama must air at least one "spooky" episode featuring some form of quasi-supernatural element. And so it was that Disney's Greek turned out the lights to indulge in a chapter set during a stormy night on the fictional Cyprus-Rhodes University campus.
The girls (inoffensively pretty in that bland American way of theirs) held a slumber party during which the Ouija board was dusted down and tales were told of the ghost of a murderous student who apparently haunted their sorority house.
Meanwhile, the boys (wittily geeky in that loveable American way of theirs) held a party at which a fat girl turned "hottie" (ergo, a psycho) ran rampage. A subplot featuring two dudes searching for a mouse featured a shoe-horned point about racial and sexual tolerance (yes, really) and some Jaws-references (comparing scars, "we're gonna need a bigger spatula" etc) which would've been funny had they not been spoofed countless times before. Harmless silliness all the same.
The full article contains 613 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
