If the footie’s on, it’s a good day to bury some awful telly
AS VIEWING figures for Chris Evans’s Top Gear crash, the blame for this relaunch wreckage is starting to fall on the schedulers. Never mind that many feel Evans is the human equivalent of a migraine, or that co- star Matt LeBlanc can’t walk and say his lines at the same time.
The real fault, claim Top Gear apologists, lies with BBC2 execs who opted to revive the show in the build-up to the Euro football championships.
The show lost two million viewers, almost half the audience, in two weeks — because even the biggest petrolheads or car fans prefer to watch footie matches. Blokes will be blokes, after all.
There’s truth in that. Nothing can compete with major international games . . . and that’s why broadcasters choose to dump their dross at the same time. It’s the TV equivalent of ‘burying bad news’.
Born On The Same Day ( C4) deserved to be well-hidden. It took three good stories and botched all of them, in a muddled format that taught us nothing.
We met a trio of 72-year- olds — foster mum Frances Kelly, retired salesman Ewart Rennalls, and explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes – who shared a birthday: March 7, 1944. Nothing else connected them: they’d never met and completely different forces had shaped their lives.
If they had come together at the end, to compare experiences, it might have made some kind of sense. But throughout the hour, the three remained entirely unaware of each other. Ewart’s family emigrated from Jamaica to Birmingham in the Fifties. For a while he sang with a Brummie soul band, but he discovered he enjoyed sales meetings more than music.
Sir Ranulph’s father was killed before he was born, and hero-worship fuels everything he does even now. He seemed sane, until he produced a tin box containing the shrivelled tips of his frost-bitten fingers which he removed at home with a hacksaw rather than visit a hospital.
Frances’s parents were unloving and all but abandoned her after she was badly burned in a house fire. She adopted an abused little girl in the Sixties: the poor child died in her teens from a heart defect.
Each of those stories should have been intriguing and moving, but the juxtaposition rendered them almost meaningless.
Possibly the programme was devised by a depressed French philosopher, because its message seemed existential and hopeless: from the instant we are born, life spirals out of control, and all we can do is cling to the debris as we try to survive.
That’s a cheery thought to go to bed on.
This wasn’t the only show to be disposed of unceremoniously while the football was on. As Yet
Untitled (Dave) is a low-budget chat show where comedian Alan Davies gathers four comics round a table, plies them with alcohol in front of a studio audience and invites them to swap anecdotes.
It has been a Dave favourite for three previous series, but the format relies on Alan having a lively stock of stories to goad his guests into a competitive frenzy of tall tales and outrageous confessions. He’s been doing this so long he appears to have run out, and is reduced to talking about his dogs.
That inspired Liza Tarbuck to reminisce about the labrador she had as a child: it once bit Basil Brush on stage, apparently.
David Mitchell smiled awkwardly and tried without success to look like he understood why anyone would want to keep a pet. This was rapidly turning into one of those conversations after work in the pub that force you to consider the benefits of going teetotal.
It got worse when Lolly Adefope (no, me neither) started telling unfunny stories about a Cambridge University interview that went so badly, she ended up studying in Loughborough.
David’s face froze in a condescending rictus of embarrassment. He went to Cambridge, of course, and it was killing him not to mention it.
This series is such a disappointment for Dave that their schedulers can’t get rid of it fast enough. It’s on seven nights a week.
Luckily, there’s no chance of anybody seeing it even accidentally, thanks to the football.