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Television Review

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Tuesday, August 23

Review: Horizon - The Nine Months That Made Me

Horizon's hedonists' charter moved Mark Lewis to new health lows

The thing about The Nine Months that Made Me [Mmmmm]... the thing about The Nine [chomp]... The thing [munch]... I’m sorry, let me just finish eating this.

It doesn't matter folks
That’s better. I’ve just been so busy eating packets of deep-fried cigarettes that I’ve barely got time to speak. Since I finished watching Horizon’s the Nine Months That Made Me (Monday, 9pm, BBC2), I’ve just had this real hankering to treat my body really appallingly. I just smoked a cake.

But I’m one of the lucky ones. I have what Professor David Barker describes as a good constitution. "Clearly there are people with good constitutions who live long lives,” he says. “For them healthy lifestyles might not matter so much." Ace! I know I have a good constitution because, according The Barker Theory, there is a sliding scale of constitutional health which can be determined by your birth weight. Little babies have bad constitutions. They will be unhealthy adults. Big babies have good constitutions. They will be the kind of healthy adults who can eschew healthy lifestyles in favour of competitive eating.

If that sounds to you like a simplistically reductive analysis of lifelong health outcomes, then keep it to yourself will you? Since discovering that my baby weight was similar to that of an average Tongan rugby player, I have taken this programme for the hedonists’ charter it was presumably meant to be. As the voiceover man made clear, by the time we are born our health and our age are already largely determined. So all us parents can stop being so uptight as well.

"Parents have to deal with both sides of it,” says Janet DiPietro the most terrifyingly irresponsible developmental psychologist in the history of lightweight pseudoscience. “If your child turns out to be a happy child it's not your doing. But if your child turns out to be a difficult unhappy child, it's also not your doing." Fucking hell!

The rest of this “truly remarkable scientific project,” is spent shuffling off between India, The Netherlands, The US and Saudi Arabia to effectively tell us that good nutrition during pregnancy leads to healthier people. On the grand scale of scientific breakthrough, it is up there with: keeping your hands out of food blenders will leave you with a fuller complement of fingers.

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Thursday, December 16

Review: The House That Made Me: Michael Barrymore

Michael Barrymore's retrospective is as selfish as it is chilling, says Mark Lewis

Maybe it is what made him such a compelling performer. But nine years after a young lad was found dead in his swimming pool with violent anal injuries, Michael Barrymore’s self absorption is ghastly.

In The House That Made Me: Michael Barrymore (Thursday, Channel 4, 9pm) his lack of empathy is as relentless as his self-pity. His bloated old cheeks forcing his eyeballs deep back inside his flesh; his brow furrowed by the years of frowning over his own misfortune, Barrymore does the Who Do You Think You Are bit with selfish gusto.

“My life would have been easier if I didn’t have to be gay,” he says. He goes back to a recreation of his childhood home: “Jumping inside your own life – that’s brave even for me.” The subtext is always the same: Something dreadful has happened to me.E  Why me? He died, but what about me? My dad was violent and fucked off when I was just 11. What about me? I was gay, growing up in South East London in the 1960s. Fuck him. Fuck that dead boy! What about me? What about me?

“Nine years after losing everything, Michael is going back to the beginning to find out where the problems began,” says the voiceover man, complicit in the sordid egocentricity.

“It’s like the night the guy died in my pool,” says Barrymore, “I know my part in it now.

“I’m not frightened to say now.

“My part was I didn’t say no. If I’d have been sober and together and had not thought you have to be good and nice to everyone, I’d have said you’re not coming back to my place”

Smirking: “I was trying to be popular and look what happened. I didn’t say no, you ain’t coming back.

“I was trying to be popular. That’s my part in it. I didn’t say no.”

Neither did Channel 4.

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Wednesday, December 1

Review: Miranda

Stripped of modern gimmicks, Miranda is as old fashioned as crinoline and a shampoo and set, yet still manages to capture single womanhood in 2010 perfectly says Trudi Parton


It shouldn't work but it does. BBC2's Miranda, (Monday, 9pm) following the romantic escapades of the exceedingly tall and exceedingly funny Ms Miranda Hart doesn't have any particular structural quirks to set it apart. There's no first person camera thing like Peep Show. There's nothing like that football commentator thing they do in Pete Versus Life. It's not shit like Two Pints of Lager And a Packet of Crisps. It just has a solid script and great comedy performances.

Miranda works in a shop with her girlfriends and spends a lot of time in the neighbouring restaurant where the object of her affections, Gary, works as a chef. This week's episode focuses on Miranda and Gary's doomed attempts to get it on, despite a brace of lecherous would-be suitors, one of whom just happens to be one of her pal's fiance.

So far, so terribly old school one might think. Hell, it even has canned laughter and Miranda talks to camera - yes like Ferris Bueller does in his Day Off. But why should sit coms have to have gimmicks, when they are as charming as this, and deal with the dating dilemmas that face the modern-day Bridget Joneses (yes it was that long since the books). After all, overbearing mothers and smug marrieds never really go away do they?

Miranda and Gary's first date doesn't go well, though they do have velour-covered menus in the restaurant 'you know you're somewhere posh when they look like a smoking jacket' says Miranda. Quite. After a dessert-based fire, they then decamp to Miranda's pad where the moment is killed by a bout of indigestion and the word 'Wind-eze'.

Then, after a botched session of al fresco bonking, afternoon delight ruined by leg wax stuck to the bath  and a denouement that ends up with nearly everyone naked, 'It's just like a French farce' mugs Miranda, our unlucky in love couple never make it past first base. And then it's time for the credits to roll with the announcement that 'You Have Been Watching' (yes, like they used to do in Dads Army and Hi-De-Hi!) and another thirty minutes of shamelessly underrated sit com draws to a close. No doubt the BBC will pull it like Pulling, so enjoy it while you can.

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Sunday, November 28

Review: I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here

I'm a Celebrity remains the best reality show on TV, despite turning us all into callous POW camp guards, says Mark Lewis

The cruelty on I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here started off like a Japanese game show. It has become like a Japanese concentration camp.


Shit inspecting demon

At the beginning, eating bugs used to be a rarity; an uber-trial late on in the programme which separated the men from the boys, then made them all eat mashed up cockroaches anyway. Now in its ninth year, eating bugs has become something the celebrities have to do just for the authorisation to take a shit.

This weekend, (Saturday and Sunday, 9pm, ITV1) a vast woman called Alison from Birmingham and a Playboy bimbo with a voice so grating she makes you want to dip your ears in a food blender, had to keep live insects the size of Hugh Hefner in their mouths for twenty seconds, while two Geordies who used to be PJ and Duncan shouted numbers from the sidelines. Had he still been alive, Commander Tatsuji Suga of the Batu Lintang POW camp would have been taking notes. And wanking like teenager.


But IACGMOOH nevertheless remains the most compelling of reality shows. Perhaps it is because you know it will only last three weeks. Perhaps it is because once you have abandoned every concept of human decency and bought into the spiteful voyeurism, you may as well enjoy it. Most of all it is because Ant, Dec et al have completely nailed the concept. Voting to keep a person in, rather than voting to kick them out, guarantees the monsters remain and the dullards go. Gillian McKeith – a woman described by Jenny Eclaire as “a ghastly creature. Ghastly!” and Shaun Ryder as “an ‘orrible, nasty fucker,” remains. “Lovely rock,” Cheryl Gascoigne (a woman so nice that had she been chief of Northumbria police, would have let erstwhile husband, Paul, have a crack at talking down Raoul Moat with a fishing rod and six beers that time) was the first to go.
Lembit (Limp Bizkit) Opik, Alison Vast, and Britt Eckland have all followed.

So as we go into the final week, here are the Television Review odds on the probably victor:

Gillian McKeith: So poisonous she teaches wickedness classes to Mephistopheles and his evil hoards, and on Saturday night, forced Ryder into such a state of tautological incandescence that he screamed at her, “not only are you full of bullshit, you’re a lying bullshitter.” Could cast a spell to force a victory.
150-1

Aggro Santos: Tremendously tedious. But with the idiot charm of a simpleton. “Do I look like a Korean?” asked fat Caucasian, Dom Joly on Sunday night. “I don’t know man,” replied Santos.

90-1

Kayla Playboy: Voice like a corkscrew drilling into your brain. But showed some mettle. And some cleavage. Unlikely victor still.
30-1

Dom Joly: funny favourite. Masterful liar, and unapologetic bastard.
Evens

Stacey X-Factor: Unpretentious, surprisingly sharp, big-chested, supposed dim-wit. Joint favourite
Evens

Shaun Ryder: Innate decency, and charming bumbling of a cleaned up drug-nut, could see him walk out in the crown. Might end up killing McKeith, though, and see him dragged out in a police van.
2-1

Linford Christie: Extreme masculinity make his trials dull to watch. Body of a god, despite being 50. Very scared of cold water.
20-1

Jenny Eclair: Good value comedienne. Could do quite well. But not as funny as Dom, or nice looking as Stacey.

12-1


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