5 TV Shows that would Improve Current Programming no end

A lot of my pals recently went to see that Famous and Fearless show, where celebrities (Three out of ten I recognised, so by ‘celebrity’ show standards it was a veritable smorgasbord of stellar names) try various daft sports and stunts. No-one, literally no-one watched it on TV; they all went to see it live. The reasoning was ‘it looked shit on TV, but the live one’s got to be better, right?’

Well, no. The TV version is pretty much the same deal, except there’s better camera angles, no waiting in line, no fat fuck directly in your line of vision and you can change channel whenever it gets too boring. Which is often.

I’m not saying everything’s better on TV. I’m nearly constantly bummed out over not getting to see Jets to Brazil before they disbanded, which is fair play because I genuinely love Jets to Brazil’s brand of pure audio Branston. Who can honestly say they give a flying fuck about a crappy stunt show where the most you can hope for is Jenny Frost getting in a car wreck and having to present the next series of Snog, Marry, Avoid? as a quadriplegic?

It’s a testimony to my loathing of any word the characters of Harry Potter utter that ‘snog’ just got called out by my spellchecker in 2011.

Anyway, back to today’s topic, TV. Rather, the dire state of current programming. Nearly everything seems to be in that queasy hinterland where it’s shit, but not shit enough to be entertaining. With this in mind, I’ve come up with a few new shows that people would appreciate more and/or would get me hauled in front of an international court and tried for war crimes.

1)Every Time I Dine. A reality/food/rockumentary crossover that follows Every Time I Die as they barbecue their way through various uncompromising locations (The Canadian backwoods, the Great Australian Desert, Glasgow). Yes, I pretty much only did it for the title. For added shits and giggles, they must first catch and kill whatever they’re eating, Ray Mears style. Gasp as the boys are forced to murder a hobo because they ran out of chicken! Not only would this show be the best thing MTV (Or Viva. Or I don’t give a shit what you call yourself) has ever screened, but it would clear up the age-old question—Andy Williams versus a fully grown grizzly bear, who’s harder? My money’s on Williams.

2)Avoid! Avoid! Avoid! A Snog, Marry, Avoid? spin-off. Instead of making-over (You will never, under any circumstance, catch me saying ‘make-under’. I just will not do it) slags and gothy freaks, they just get sat in a chair with a camera on their face while the public’s opinion of them is repeated in a dull monotone by a computer. At the end of the show, they’re led outside. Silence is maintained throughout the credits until a single gunshot rings out.

3)Geronimo. A show in which people jump from increasingly tall heights to win a cash prize. Last one alive is the winner, who is then thrown off so the network doesn’t have to pay. The cash then rolls over, making a greater incentive for next week’s lemmings. The fact that I imagine this one doing the best out of all my ideas says a lot about the state of the nation.

4)Your Sketch Shows are Bad and You Should Feel Bad. A Silent, thirty-second clip of me beating Matt Lucas and David Walliams with a golf club. Pure visual Branston.

5)Graduates. A hilarious mock-documentary, which plays like a hybrid of Spaced and The Office. The main character is Jimmy, who lives with a couple of other young professionals in a flat. He works in a generic office environment where it’s never actually made clear what he does. The action is fifty percent him with his young-guns-go-for-it pals doing young professional leisure activities, and fifty percent people in his office treating him like he’s a mental case. At the end of the series, he kills himself and it becomes apparent that he had no young professional flatmates and was, in fact, schizophrenic.

So, that’s how I’d improve television for the average pleb. While most of them are reality TV shows, I should point out that you could make TV better by lowering the quality until it’s so shitty and bleak it’s funny. That’s the stage we’re at. Although, it must be said that some of my shows would be excellent for getting rid of the kind of people who enjoy and/or go on reality TV, so maybe viewing figures would suffer. Culling the nation’s cunts would be worth it, though.

Holding out for a reality/snuff/genocide crossover,
Nick