Is anything less sexy than the Full Monty in Slough in January?
For a nasty moment it looked as though Alexander Armstrong was going to keep his clothes on. As the urbane gameshow host belted out a raunchy Tom Jones hit and his celebrity mates sent a raucous audience wild with their full striptease on The All New Monty: Who Bares Wins (ITV), Xander didn’t remove a stitch.
Surely telly’s most unstoppable exhibitionist hasn’t suddenly come over all shy? That’s like Alan Sugar taking a vow of silence.
Thankfully, as the music hit a climax, Xander’s entire costume simply flew off at the twitch of a string, and left him standing in his silver lamé thong. That didn’t stay on for long either.
We know how this show works by now. A bunch of blokes you sort of recognise, including one you haven’t thought about since 1987, arrive at a dance studio to be told they have six weeks to master their bump ’n’ grind routine, before a live performance.
Laddish banter gives way to the realisation that dancing is hard work. everyone goes to the pub for a heartfelt chat. Later, one man has to pull out and his replacement worries that he’ll never fit into this tight-knit team.
Another chap has a fit of nerves and threatens to quit. But the big night is an inevitable triumph, because everyone knows there’s
LIVING DEAD OF THE NIGHT: For sheer number of laughs, Ghosts (BBC1) is the best comedy on telly at the moment. Puns, slapstick, double entendres, it packs them all in — and pays no attention to the current trend for bleak, sexually explicit sitcom.
nothing a bunch of lasses wants to see more, after a few bottles of Lambrini, than a nineties footballer and that one off Love Island flashing their buttocks.
Formulaic it may be, but there’s no denying the format is effective. discussion of men’s cancer is usually too awkward and depressing to be sustained for longer than a soundbite or two, but this show is so boisterous that the fun never flags, no matter how often the talk returns to grimmer topics.
Most of the celebs had suffered cancer themselves or seen close relatives fight the illness.
one especially moving segment followed comedian Joe Pasquale visiting his 88-year-old dad, Joseph, who was dying from prostate cancer. The old boy matched his son joke for joke, but sadly he didn’t live to see the broadcast.
Above all, Xander’s naked gang shows work because they are completely unsexy. This one opened with the caption: ‘Slough, January.’ It’s difficult to think of two less erotic words in the language.
nothing could be less erotic either than the ordeal of 18- year- old college student nikki Yovino in Bridgeport, Connecticut, who was lured into a toilet by two men intent on having sex with her at a party.
Yet police and lawyers insisted stony-faced to the cameras, in the U.S. legal documentary Sex On Trial (C4), that nikki had submitted willingly. even though she didn’t know the men, her plea that she had been raped was dismissed.
Thanks to the current trend in true crime documentaries for giving viewers all the evidence, we were able to hear nikki’s police interview — with a detective lying blatantly that the whole incident had been videoed. Therefore, the (non- existent) film proved, he said, that the sex was consensual.
Confused, nikki faltered. She was no longer certain what had happened.
The rape case collapsed — and nikki was sentenced to a year in jail for making false allegations.
Incredibly, it’s permissible for police in the States to lie when questioning witnesses.
one prosecutor called it ‘ an established tactic . . . an acceptable interrogation technique’.
This was a shocking indictment of how justice can work in the United States. Any legal system that approves of lies is surely broken.