Old published stuff

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 ...