First: it looks like I’m getting two weeks off! So, this week’s Telly Addict, although not a review of the year, acts as an end-of-the-year, end-of-the-world edition. Under review are BBC Sports Personality of the Year, BBC1; the finale of Season Three of Boardwalk Empire, Sky Atlantic (no spoilers); The British Comedy Awards, C4; Richard E Grant’s Hotel Secrets, Sky Atlantic; Inside Claridge’s, BBC2; and Little Crackers, Sky1.
Secondly, I was also asked to promote The Great British Bake Off as my favourite TV show of 2012 (incorrectly billed as “the best TV programme of 2012″ in their more provocative headline). You can watch my little three-minute film here. Props to the Guardian website people for, once again, flagging this up on the main page. It’s reassuring to see that the commenters below the line have been instantaneous with their comfort and joy.
I watched this once. The presenters heads are completely up their own arses and it’s about the most tedious, poncy, self opinionated, piece of shit I have ever had the misfortune to view. Baking should be fun, with these arseholes it becomes a ritualised chore. More utter bilge from the increasingly bilge-producing BBC.
The middle-class fetishisation of food at a time of austerity – just what a PSB provider should be doing! What next … four celebrities in a big house with all the heating and electricity on talking about how warm and cosy they are?
FFS. We used to have telly like Kenneth Clarke’s Civilisation, Malcom Muggeridge, Face to Face, Not Only …But Also... Now we have endless cookery crap and people taking DNA tests live on air. Seriously- God help this country. It ain’t the Royals fault, either.
Corn syrup for undernourished brains.
Utter trash. Pointless competitions make for cheap nasty television. The smug presenters and contestants are horrible.
No names, obviously, as that would be playing into their evil hands. (I like the concept of “self opinionated” though.) So it’s “Goodwill to all men!” to those miserable fuckers, and “Merry Christmas!” to the rest of you. Thanks for viewing this year – in increasing numbers, so I’m told, since we moved to Tuesday mornings. Here’s to another year of me sitting at a slight angle and trying not to wear the same shirt two weeks’ running.
Just as the vegetable-growing year has a “hungry gap” in spring, when very little comes up, so, new produce in the TV year tends to drop off around now. As noted in the new, seasonally adjusted Telly Addict, Game Of Thrones, The Fall, Mad Men, The Good Wife, Nashville, all are either done, or close to being done, having been launched in either the autumn or the winter, when people watch telly and don’t go on holiday or sit in the garden or outside a pub in the evening. However, UK-Belgian epic The White Queen is here to save us for the next ten Sunday nights on BBC1; also this week, BBC2′s scientifically pointless but cat-filled Horizon: The Secret Life Of The Cat; Dates on C4; and the triumphant takeover of The Daily Show With Jon Stewart on Comedy Central by John Oliver from these islands (and from the same management as me). The British are coming. And some Belgians.
