Sad Noel goes cheap & nasty
THE Big Family Cooking Showdown is the Beeb’s half-baked shot at replacing Bake Off.
It apes the format with minor differences: the contestants are families, they cook as well as bake and there are zero innuendoes.
No beautiful baps, tantalising moistness, or deep penetration...even a mention of “perfectly formed balls” passed without a giggle.
In fairness it does come with a prime cut of ham, Italian chef Georgio Lacatelli. But even so it’s still yet another dull, formulaic show about people we don’t know prepping food we can’t eat, taste or smell.
New ideas in British TV are at famine levels. And there’s still Britain’s Best Cook and Bake Off itself to come... We’re so tied up watching TV chefs none of us has the time to get to the kitchen.
No-one ever stops to ask do we actually need another ruddy TV cooking show.
Or why we don’t concentrate on making the shows we do need, like popular sitcoms, grown-up sci-fi, male-orientated action series and comedians with mainstream appeal.
Too many cooks spoil the telly. CONTESTANT Betty reeled off the ten stages of cooking perfect risotto: “the base, the temptation, the buttering, the sigh...” By coincidence, also the ten stages of Aidan getting off with Maria on Corrie. QUILL singer Joy Strachan-Brain was talking about the band’s lineup on Made in Birmingham when she announced: K.Duffy, of Kings Norton, wins £35 for that howler. Keep ’em coming to the address at the top of the page.
NOEL Edmonds’ Cheap Cheap Cheap is comfortably the worst thing I’ve seen all year.
And I watched every wretched episode of The Loch.
The flop afternoon game show is a two-bob version of The Price Is Right crossed with a laugh-free Open All Hours, which is as random as mixing Baywatch with Mastermind but nowhere near as much fun. Basically, it’s The Price Is Sh*te. Contestants get to guess which of three items – supermarket beans, lotto tickets, meerkats etc – is the cheapest.
The premise is so thin it makes Keira Knightley seem chubby, so to distract us Noel is constantly interrupted by “comedy” characters.
There’s Old Barry, who’s like Arkwright without a script, odd-job man Keith, dippy sales assistant Kelly and a ditzy bird called Marijana, whose name sounds like marijuana so she must be hilarious, right?
Wrong. They’re all about as funny as D-I-Y liposuction. And even if Noel employed decent comedy writers (or sent in Marijana’s cousin Crystal Mess to liven it all up a bit) it’d still be a game about people guessing which branded toilet cleaner costs the least.
Players move up a money board with three “tools”/life-lines to assis... zzz...
At one point, even Noel seemed to lose interest, turning away and talking to furniture, stoking hopes that either he or the commissioner would be leaving the set strapped tightly to Hannibal Lecter’s trolley.
But then he’s getting paid for this, so how crazy can he be? Noel is a superb broadcaster. Few people can host a live entertainment show as well as him, as House Party proved for years.
Edmonds even managed to make a show about guessing what’s in a box exciting. But triple Cheap wouldn’t have merited a three-minute section on Crinkley Bottom.
Even if it was commissioned ironically, it’s hard to imagine stoned students giving a monkey’s toss about such dismal fare.
Seriously, it almost makes you nostalgic for Touch the Truck.
Do you ever suspect some shows are made simply so clips can be recycled in the future? On one of those programmes where smug nonentities mock the TV people watched before they were born.
This, Flockstars, Naked Attraction, Don’t Scare the Hare...it’s tomorrow’s gold dust! C4 could film It Was All Right In The 2010s now. RE Quacks: Historical accuracy is one thing, but aren’t sitcoms supposed to be funny?