Old published stuff

Posted by Stewart Turner A stern rap over the knuckles for whoever at ITV failed to notice John Sergeant’s new show was a shoe-in for a Sunday tea-time slot. Aimed squarely at the kind of people who find the Antiques Roadshow a little too racy and Last of the Summer Wine a little too blue, it was the perfect show in front of which to crack open a packet of biscuits and sip a cup of tea. Affable John, these days known primarily as “a dancing pig in Cuban heels” rather than a respected BBC political journalist, is on a mission to see the country through a fresh pair of eyes. Instead of the usual celebrity jaunt through the rolling countryside, he assured us he’d be setting out to show us Britain as the millions of foreign tourists who visit our fair isle each year see it. ...

The Daily Mail 's forever foaming at the mouth about feral 15-year-old girls churning out babies to claim benefits, but if My Supermodel Baby is anything to go by, all those pregnant teens are missing an altogether more lucrative trick. Talented toddlers can take around £60 an hour if they land a top modelling job with one of those Mother and Baby mags you see clogging up the shelves at the supermarket. While their career span may be seriously short, there’s more than enough time to pay mum back for those piles and piles of Pampers. This engaging BBC documentary follows three sets of doting parents as they attempt to land lucrative modelling contracts for their tots – and it has to be said, they’re all completely and utterly bonkers. Wide-eyed North London mum Esther is particularly good value as she darts across the capital’s casting cots with her cute son Hadley Jack, while her rivals Jamie and Kelly reel off a list of celebrities their boy Frankie looks like (Marlon Brando, E...

Posted by Stewart Turner The farmer wants a wife, and rather than give internet dating a bash or stick a blonde wig and a frock on one of the friesians, he’s decided to call in the help of Louise Redknapp and her Five cohorts. Proto-Wag Louise, a woman with about as much charisma as a comatose Kate Thornton, introduced us to Derek, a Bucks carrot-cruncher who was lucky enough to get 334 rather fruity responses to his lonely hearts ad on the Five website. After whittling them down to just four, the lucky ladies were marched onto his farm like prize heifers at a cattle market. After deciding to ditch scary Russian Anna, who decided Derek was “the one” solely by a photo on a web page, and another lucky lady whose name escapes me, he picked flirty Canadian Karla and horsey Sarah to move onto the farm for a week. Yes, move onto the farm for a week . Oh, and share a bed. In fact, the whole thing played like some kind of sordid middle-aged male fantasy, albeit one where th...

Posted by Stewart Turner Ever wondered how Jamaican speed machine Usain Bolt manages to smash world records every time he leaves the house? It’s all down to a magical white substance produced on the plantations of the Caribbean, according to his dad. But don’t start haranguing the IAAF to give the big man a urine test just yet. We’re talking yams – a powerful performance-enhancing vegetable according to Usain’s dad, who dropped by this new Caribbean cooking show for a spot of lunch. A scrumptious-looking yam recipe wasn’t the only thing on offer in the opening episode of Levi Roots’ show. Indeed, if you thought the extent of his culinary expertise was getting fearsome dragon Peter Jones all hot under the collar by bottling a gloopy red sauce, last night probably came as a pleasant surprise. ...

The latest piece of Recession TV to be wrung out of the Beeb’s brainstorming bunker, Can You Bank on Me? last night threw two EVIL, COLD-HEARTED bankers head-first into the rabid jaws of a couple of struggling, credit-crunched companies, offering them redemption if they could turn their fortunes around, as well as the chance for us plebs to have a good old moan at them. Griselda Anderson-Wheeler – a cocky Sloane Ranger presumably picked because she has the poshest name BBC researchers could find – was sent off to a work in tatty seaside guesthouse in Blackpool, while Amit Patel, an ex-property magnate, fared slightly better with a week-long trip to an struggling organic dairy farm. Of course, all this was merely an excuse for us to guffaw at poshos having to don an apron and serve up cream of mushroom soup to some Lancastrian pensioners, or tinker with a cow’s udder, and the whole thing was more like the first half-hour of an episode of The Apprentice than any thoughtful look ...

Peep Show ’s David Mitchell! Grumpy Old Woman Jo Brand! Russell “why on earth do they keep booking him” Howard! Yep, it’s yet another clever-clever BBC panel show. This time it’s the return of Would I Lie To You? for a third series, with newly anointed flannel-master Rob Brydon taking over presenting duties from poor Angus Deayton, who must surely be wondering if he’ll ever see a quiz show through to its natural conclusion. If you’re not familiar with the format, rather than being a quiz based on the works of ‘90s soul warblers Charles & Eddie, it’s actually a kind of smug rework of gameshow classic What’s My Line? where two panellists aim to convince members of the opposing team to fall for their porkies, while the third is actually telling the truth. Other members of tonight’s rent-a-panel include Larry Lamb, better known as EastEnders pint-puller Archie Mitchell, and dethroned Countdown queen Carol Vorderman, who suffers some rather cruel jibes at the hand o...

Sadly not the warts and all, fly-on-the-wall documentary of life on the road with Lizzie and Phil I was expecting, On Tour with The Queen instead took a look back at her Majesty’s 1953 tour of the Commonwealth, with actor and playwright Kwame Kwei-Armah - aka Casualty ’s Finlay Newton - at the helm for the first of four episodes. The Queen was landed with the lengthy tour of duty just a few weeks after her coronation, the aim being to assert Britain’s position as a world power in the face of a crumbling, unprofitable Empire which it could no longer afford to sustain. With the UK still a rubble-strewn, poverty-stricken mess after the World War II effort, and somebody having to pay to clean it up, it was clear that something had to give. The first port of call was Bermuda, which Kwame s...

Long before Pete Doherty started stuffing deodorant-soaked socks in his gob and penning paeans to supermodels, a young poet named Byron set sail for Europe. With a reckless disregard for cash, he visited the brothels of Portugal, took tea with a brutal tyrant in tribal Albania and hung out in the infamous “buggery shops” of the Ottoman Empire. All in all, a bit like a Saga coach trip, but with a few less toilet stops. This two-part documentary opens with the alarming sight of über-luvvie Rupert Everett splish-sploshing around in an antique bathtub, and as such, it’s immediately clear this show is as much about him as it is his hero Byron. Although he’s clearly in awe of the subject matter – and Byron’s life is undoubtedly as colourful as one could possibly imagine – it’s also strikingly apparent that Rupert sees himself as some kind of pretender to the poet’s Bacchanalian throne. In truth, it’s more like watching a member of the Bullingdon Club rattle through some old Carry On s...

In the recession-ravaged world of advertising, desperate times call for increasingly desperate measures. But rather than shed a few jobs and come down hard on stationery theft, ailing Newcastle company Onebestway has decided to call in the TV cameras and enlist the help of a radical business guru. Well, I say “business guru”, but one presumes David Taylor, introduced to us as a “best-selling author, top trouble-shooter and part-time lecturer at Warwick University”, managed to scribble out “wild, deluded fantasist” from the script in the nick of time. I may be wrong, but I don’t envisage “naked brainstorming” troubling the MA Business curriculum any time soon. Slipping into his impressive “Poundstretcher Paul McKenna” mode, David announces that he’s going to save the ailing company with a radical new plan. “It’s the most extreme technique I’ve ever used,” he booms. “It’s the ultimate expression of trust.” And best of all, it’s also the ultimate way of spicing up Virgin1’s viewin...

Remember those heady days of 2007 when we were slapping foie gras on toast with a trowel and drowning our Bran Flakes in Bollinger? Well MasterChef ’s resident boombox Gregg Wallace is probably still living them, but nevertheless, the Beeb has tasked him with an investigation into how the recession has affected our eating habits. It seems as wages get frozen, so does the food, and the nation has ditched its obsession with all things organic and starting heading for the bargain bins in droves. And against all odds, shoppers have ditched their preoccupation with European upstarts like Aldi and Lidl and are going back to Sainsbury’s and Tesco because feel like they’ve been sucked in by all that sparse, no-frills packaging. Now even Waitrose is getting in on the act. Gregg enlists Nina, a housewife from Twickenham, to help him out with a little experiment. Instead of her usual weekly shop, she’s asked to spend a week living off budget brands – 3p bottles of gloopy, luminous ketchu...

The prospect of BBC bigwig Alan Yentob fumbling with his spectacles while wittering on about a cutting-edge contemporary dance troupe is usually the sort of thing which has me grappling for the remote control quicker than you can bellow “Isadora Duncan”. But against all odds, Save the Last Dance for Me is actually well worth an hour of your time. The documentary follows the progress of dance group Company of Elders over six short weeks as they prepare for a high-profile performance at Sadlers Wells theatre. It’s no mean feat, for as their name suggests the group has a rather impressive average age of 79. While most OAPs are busying themselves elsewhere up to their cardigans in “bingo and cups of tea and biscuits”, as one dancer puts it, this group of oldies are flouncing around with abandon in the name of art. The Company of Elders is funded by Sadlers Wells, the spiritual home of all things contemporary dance, and it’s easy to see why. As well as being “utterly disarm...

Thanks to the recession, the number of people in the UK living on the streets has risen sharply over the past 12 months – and those community-spirited folks at the BBC want to pay lip service. And this being 2009, a boring old documentary about the plight of the homeless simply won’t cut the mustard. You guessed it; we need a bunch of misguided, simpering celebrities to show us what life on the streets is like. Enter journalists Rosie Boycott and Hardeep Singh Kohli, tennis star turned Treasure Hunt presenter Annabelle Croft, aristocrat James ‘Marquess of’ Blandford and finally Bruce Jones – better known as Coronation Street reprobate Les Battersby – as our game volunteers. As an aside, despite his booming “homeless people are bums” speech, the latter even starts the programme looking like he permanently resides on a bench at Waterloo Station. Oops. After a bizarre Apprentice -lite opening, all swooping shots of the capital with Big Issue founder John Bird stepping into Si...

Posted by Stewart Turner When Wally Tynan retired to his spanking new Spanish villa a few years back, it’s fair to say a life spent sweeping up used tampons and stray faecal matter wasn’t exactly what he had in mind. But since upping sticks from the UK, he lives a life which is something of a cross between that of Sisyphus and Bob the Builder as he plasters, paints and does the plumbing on his Basra-esque apartment complex – because the builders went bust. Of course, the desire to spend your twilight years in sunny Spain has long been the dream of many a British pensioner, wowed by the thoughts of endless days eating full English breakfasts washed down with pints of warm John Smith’s while the temperature barely dips below the 70s. Whether some of the horror stories on show last night will put paid to that remains to be seen. The Spanish coast has seen a glut of development over the last decade, a building boom fuelled partially by us Brits. Before the property crash, when anyone “wit...

Ah, the scent of freshly-cut grass in the air, newborn lambs gambolling giddily in the rolling hills and the gentle sound of a hacksaw slicing its way through the carcass of a newly-slaughtered veal calf. Yes, it’s summertime down at River Cottage , and floppy-haired foodie Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is back with another bellyful of delicious recipes, fun foraging tips and bizarre homebrew concoctions. Oh, and bit of campaigning on the way, of course. A keen champion of welfare rights, Hugh seems to have given veteran Irish comic Jimmy Crickett a route out of the dire comics’ retirement home to lend a hand with the script. As a result, you’re never more than a few minutes away from a pun more excruciating than being smashed round the head with a Le Creuset skillet pan. Particular lowlights include Hugh booming “Give peas and chance!” after dealing with some freshly picked legumes and “Simply the zest!” after grating some lemons. You’ll be familiar with the cosy-as-a-hairshirt...

Posted by Stewart Turner Cheap package deals to Spain, a chronic lack of investment and holidaymakers staying away in droves – the last thing the drizzly seaside town of Margate needed to hammer a final nail in the coffin of its faded seaside glory was the attention of the remaining eight Apprentices. In case you haven’t heard, there’s a credit crunch on, and rather than treat this year’s budding business tycoons to a trip sourcing mosque-shaped alarm clocks in Marrakesh, Sir Alan packed them off to the Kent coast, presumably where he used to hang out with a handkerchief tied over his Brillo-like hair in the days before he could afford to snort foie gras from the walnut veneer dashboard of his helicopter. After Evil Debra bulldozed the entirely reasonable attempts of Howard to head up Empire by teasing him with the hallowed position of “sub-team manager”, they hit upon the idea of rebranding the town as a gay resort, despite local girl Mona’s p...

Posted by Stewart Turner It’s a funny old world. Michael Portillo spent the last couple of decades spewing forth rabid, right-wing polemic as one of Margaret Thatcher’s most trusted Rottweilers. Nowadays, when he’s not cuddling up to Labour MP Diane Abbott on the Beeb’s weekly political schmoozefest This Week , he’s being asked to front serious documentaries about extreme ultraviolence. What’s more, despite once firmly planting his jackboot into the Great British Public by launching the Poll Tax, Michael reckons he doesn’t have a malevolent bone in his body. Or at least, he didn’t until he was packed off to the Bolivian Andes to witness the locals’ annual festival of violence, where the previous year’s scores are settled with a few bouts of good, old-fashioned fisticuffs. All this rough and tumble was to facilitate Portillo’s quest to find out what makes ordinary people commit acts of extreme violence. In one of the more interesting studies, he was presented with a couple of life-si...

To men of a certain age, David Hasselhoff will forever be the epitome of leather jump-suited cool and absolutely not a washed-up alcoholic who’s never quite lived down that claim to have single-handedly dismantled the Berlin Wall. And sure enough, The Hoff crops up for a cameo at the end of this series opener, albeit in a scene emitting a more pungent stench of cheese than a 60-year-old slab of Stinking Bishop. Hoffheads will doubtless have serious reservations about this Knight Rider remake, which aired in the US last year. To a certain extent, they’d be right to – but that’s not to say this two-hour pilot is awful. It’s just that after a reasonably entertaining opening, complete with the obligitory high-octane car chases, edge-of-the-seat casino showdowns and a bit of Man v Cold-Hearted Machine banter, it all becomes a little tedious. Of course, there’s some serious suspension of belief required from the word go. One has to wonder whether the Pentagon would really allow it...

Posted by Stewart Turner It was based on a 17th century Jacobean tragedy called The Changeling , but for all its highbrow literary pretentions, ITV’s glossy Bank Holiday drama Compulsion may as well have been based on an one of the more over-the-top episodes of '80s schlock-soap Dynasty, perhaps with a bit of Band of Gold thrown in for good measure. The Dynasty element was all beautiful people slurping Bollinger in bed and spewing forth the kind of dialogue which only ever happens on the telly, while the latter was taken care of by the ever-phlegmy Ray Winstone cleverly referencing Spinal Tap’s seminal Smell the Glove album with a lady of ill repute in the back of his boss’s Rolls Royce. ER and Bend It Like Beckham star Parminder Nagra played Anjika Indrani, a loaded little madam fresh out of Cambridge who enjoyed all the privileges life can offer - except the opportunity to choose her own husband. When her dad Satvik tried to fix her ...

In case you hadn’t heard, we’re in the middle of a recession. But one thing which isn’t feeling the pinch at the moment is the new phenomenon of Credit Crunch TV. Whether it’s Kirsty Allsop discovering a penchant for crafting soft furnishings from old washing-up bottles or the BBC commissioning a hundred or so “gritty dramas” in preparation for its autumn “Recession Series”, you can barely brush the remote at the moment without finding a reference to the economy crowbarred into every available nook or cranny. Oh, and here’s another. After presumably bashing “Skid Row”, “Dead End Street” and “S*** Creek” into Google Maps several times and getting zero results returned, the chaps at Channel 4 eventually settled on Wall Street , of which the UK boasts a respectable 23, although naturally none of them are inhabited by bellowing red-faced Americans in funny-coloured jackets. Instead we get to meet the likes of Ali and Siara from Wolverhampton. Ali’s been for an eye-watering 30 inter...

Posted by Stewart Turner There's a bit of history between the bug-eyed, hungry children of the world and Mr John Harvey Kellogg. For example, at the age of about eight I went through a six-month stint eating carefully disguised clusters of twigs simply because they were plugged by an affable Geordie Olympian named Steve Cram. No matter that I was borderline obese and almost had a coronary just crawling out of bed every morning: by scoffing bowl after bowl of these babies I was convinced I’d become a world-beater. My mum, it has to be said, was less convinced. With this hard sell in mind, Sir Alan Sugar set his budding Apprentices the task of creating a brand, box and TV ad for the vast vats of Baker’s Complete dog food he picked up cheap from a geezer in Romford a few months back. And in a scene eerily reminiscent of the bit where Dorothy finally gets to meet the Wizard of Oz, or the last time the spooky Face of Boe appeared in Doctor Who, the Amstrad mogul’s Cuprinol-hued bonce ...

After all those years spent squirming in the spare rooms of Sir Jimmy Savile, Paul Daniels and the Hamiltons, the BBC evidently feels poor Louis Theroux deserved a bit of a break. For the latest instalment in his gradual reinvention as a Proper Serious Journalist - less eyebrow arching, same interview technique - he was packed off for a week’s holiday on the sunny West Coast of America to spend time with 800 or so of America’s most notorious sex offenders. Coalinga, California is the site of a controversial mental hospital for paedophiles, where 800 offenders are locked up indefinitely despite already serving their prison sentences. Eager to quench the placard-waving, “cut off their balls with a rusty penknife”-bellowing public’s demand to keep these people off the streets, the authorities have exploited a legal loophole and reclassified ex-prisoners as mentally ill – in effect giving themselves carte blanche to incarcerate them indefinitely. ...

Posted by Stewart Turner He famously boomed that “business is better than sex” a couple of weeks ago, but last night’s Apprentice proved that for braces-sporting Belfast boy Ben Clarke, a bit of how’s your father actually comes a very close second. When he wasn’t slapping his bum suggestively in the John Lewis boardroom or cooing seductively down the lens of a camera, the brash trainee stockbroker was busy persuading his colleagues to market a fitness tool into which they could somehow incorporate the act of coitus. “Resistance,” he purred. “Something under your a*** to make it spring”. Quite. Last night Sir Alan challenged his band of would-be employees, now whittled down to an unlucky 13, to come up with a new piece of gym kit and flog it to the bigwigs down at the local fitness centre. After Sir Alan had a quick dabble with the teams, Evil Debra put herself forward to lead Ignite, while James, the man with a permanent expression of a wounded puppy, headed up Empire. ...

Posted by Stewart Turner “What’s the problem with nudity?” asked the boffins at BBC2 on last night’s episode of science show Horizon. Well, clearly not a great deal if the producers of this show are anything to go by. The BBC cameramen had a veritable field day with the eight hapless volunteers in an, er highly scientific study, waltzing them up and down the stairs of a terraced house to maximise the effect of gravity on their various wobbly bits. It’s enough to put you off your serious science documentary. And therein lay the problem. At the heart of the show, there was a seriously important scientific conundrum. Why is it we humans have developed a penchant for wearing purple loon pants and gold lamé jumpsuits when all of God’s other fair creatures romp around naked as the day they were born? Well, Charles Darwin put it all down to sexual selection, and asserted that we’re instinctively attracted to the less hirsute of our fellow mankind fo...

Posted by Stewart Turner It’s only the first week, but have we already found this year’s heir to the Katie Hopkins Throne of Evil? With her piercing, blue-eyed icy stare, raven-black hair and permanently pursed lips, Debra Barr looks to be a formidable opponent. And she's not afraid of a fight. Indeed, dastardly Debs seemed to positively relish last night’s boardroom battle, if only because it gave her a chance to show off the shiny new trouser suit she picked up from Zara for the occasion. As this season's 15-strong bunch of budding tycoons set about bellowing out the usual guff about giving 110%, a number of pressing questions immediately sprang to mind. Does Ben really think making money is better than sex? And has he borrowed Raef Bajyou’s lucky braces to wear for the rest of the series? Have Oasis record sales really slumped so much that poor Nicole Appleton has to find work with Amstrad to pay for Liam Gallagher's new desert...

Our verdict: Posted by Stewart Turner Crop circles, unidentified flying objects, and the enduring popularity of Radio 1 DJ Chris Moyles – just three of the great mysteries of our age. Last night, scientists at Channel 4 ran a series of tests on the latter by devoting 50 minutes of Sunday night TV to the man they call Moylesy, presumably to see if hosting one of the biggest piles of steaming nonsense ever to air would manage to dent the big man’s stock. Have you ever popped into your local pub for a quiet pint only to find you’ve stumbled into a ropey quiz presided over by a question master with about as much charisma as a half-eaten packet of pork scratchings? Well, it seems that’s the experience the producers of Chris Moyles Quiz Night set out to emulate. The show saw three hapless celebrities – Mark Ronson, Louis Walsh and Barbara Windsor, all of who are doubtless on the phone firing their agents this very minute – compete against Moyles in ...