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

Seven Fragrance Adverts you Didn't See this Holiday Season

Seriously, fuck perfume ads. Few things fill me quite as much misanthropy. No matter which advert it is, I invariably end up drowning in my own vitriol (a rare phenomenon, the only outward sign of which is a sarcastic remark). If I were Hitler, fragrance adverts would be my teachers in art school. And fragrance marketing executives would be my Jews, travellers, blacks, gays, non-Aryans, people who looked at me funny etc. I’d like to say I won’t do any more genocide jokes, but I’m not going to lie to you. It doesn’t get any better. Not even a little bit.

Anyway, after I’d awoken from a rage-induced coma to find that my pancreas had developed its own sub-pancreas in order to produce twice the bile, I decided that the best way to bring down the perfume advertising industry was to attack from within.

To this end, I created seven new pilot ads for fragrances yet to be created. I hope you enjoy them. At least they can’t be more disturbing or grossly misogynistic than a Lynx/Axe commercial.


1) Gucci Jihad. Interior, night. A boudoir-style apartment, curtains, drapes etc. A woman strikes a ‘come-hither’ pose on a silk-sheeted bed. A man approaches. Close up of their faces about to kiss.
Crash zoom out. The man explodes, killing the woman and taking out a large chunk of the building.
[VOICE OVER]: ‘Jihad. The devastating new fragrance from Gucci.’

2) Republican by Diesel. Interior, night. A well-dressed man acting out of place at a party full of well-dressed people. He moves through a lot of glamorous people, to an antique telephone. He dials a number, and announces in an Irish accent; ‘There will be an explosion on Park Lane at midnight.’
[VOICE OVER]: ‘Republican by Diesel. For independent spirits.’

Bigot, by Nick Griffin. Interior, whatever time. Montage of white dudes applying fragrance. Finally, an Asian dude applies same fragrance and melts, screaming.
[VOICE OVER]: ‘For Aryans only. Bigot, the debut fragrance from Nick Griffin.
Proud sponsors of the BNP.'

Entitlement Complex by Paris Hilton. Everywhere, last Thursday. Close up of a mouth gobbling luxuriant foods and chugging champagne. Strobe-montage of sexualised imagery. Zoom out to Paris Hilton stuffing the planet Earth into her vagina.
[VOICE OVER]: ‘Entitlement Complex. The last-ditch attempt at saving Paris Hilton’s career in fragrance form.’

Melanoma by Calvin Klein. Interior, time is a human concept and has nothing to do with the cold, impersonal drones in the fashion business. A lone woman stands in a spotlight in a dimly lit room. She’s nude, but her modesty is preserved by bits of silk blown around by off-screen fans.
Camera pans around her body.
[VOICE OVER]: ‘Beauty. The final truth. Overcoming time. Breaking the barriers between sight, sound and scent. With it comes conviction. Hope. The promise of a better future.’
Camera stops on an asymmetrical mole.
[VOICE OVER]: ‘Even in the face of the worst thing that can happen. Melanoma, by Calvin Klein.’

Futility by Davidoff. Interior, night. An average-looking young man applies fragrance and leaves a bathroom, entering a fashionable bar. He enters an animated conversation with an attractive young woman. After a short time, a handsome young man joins the conversation, then leaves the bar with the young woman in short order, leaving our hero on his own.
[VOICE OVER]: ‘Futility by Davidoff. Because no matter how nice you smell, she’d rather get ploughed by the cute guy.’


Chloroform by Gary Glitter. Your house, October 1991. A well-dressed man walks through a high class party. People faint in his wake. He climbs some stairs, as people collapse (some plummeting over the side). The man continues, as if drawn by something. He reaches the door to a child’s bedroom. A nanny rushes at him, but collapses when she gets within a yard of him. The man continues towards the child’s bed.
[VOICE OVER]: ‘Chloroform. The incapacitating new fragrance from Gary Glitter.’


So, I hope you enjoyed my take on fragrance marketing. It may be offensive, but I'll come smelling of roses anyway. Or at least of Futility by Davidoff.

Laters,
Nick

Review: Frankie Boyle's Tramadol Nights.

As Frankie Boyle's new stand-up-slash-sketch-show reaches its third episode, I think I've seen enough of it to write a good enough review. First, though, an overview:

Your opinion on Frankie Boyle is largely dictated by how dark you like your comedy. 'Pitch black' is a good phrase for describing how dark Boyle's humour is. A beeter phrase is 'night-time, down a coalmine, during a fucking eclipse. And wearing sunglasses'. With this in mind, I've written two reviews.

For those of you offended by strong language or irreverant jokes that could be taken as 'something-ist', Daily Mail readers, and people who don't like jokes about child abuse, a) welcome to my blog, you won't enjoy it, and b) Your version of this review is here.

For the rest of you, check this shit out:

As you probably guessed, I'm already a fan of Frankie Boyle's. I'm not being paid to do this, so I wouldn't watch his show unless it was good (or so-bad-it's-good. Or Scrubs). So, let's start with the good shit.

The highlight of Tramadol Nights is definitely the sketches. Good lord, this man has no boundaries. Boyle clearly believes that if something's not okay to laugh about, then nothing is, and has made it his personal business that everything under the sun is made fun of. This is pretty admirable, and no-one else would have the sheer balls to make (just for example, because they're all pretty fucking transgressive) You've Been Framed: Too Bleak for TV.

What makes these sketches so good, though, is that after the shock value has worn off, they're still funny. This is a big plus, because you expect (and are therefore less shocked by) shocking material from a man whose latest DVD is titled If I Could Reach Through Your TV and Strangle You, I Would.

Speaking of abusing his audience, it's time I talked about the stand-up aspect of the show. I never thought I'd say this, but Frankie Boyle's stand-up lets him down here. And it's not just because the sketches are so freakin' good. It's because he pretty much just heckles his audience. We get it, Frankie. You hate everyone. Point taken. We've heard enough child abuse jokes from you, as well. Paedophile uncles are only funny the first couple of times. Occaisionally, Boyle gets back to his brilliantly scathing commentary on the world at large, and the stand-up sections just about get a pass because of this.

Overall, Frankie Boyle's Tramadol Nights is, depending on your attitude to sick jokes, one of the best sketch shows on TV right now. In terms of stand-up, it loses out to Russell Howard's Good News, among others. It's definitely worth watching, but not awesome. Too bad you can't reach through my laptop and strangle me until I give you 10/10, Frankie, but you get a pretty respectable:

7/10

Holy fuck, I've done something productive,
Nick