Browned off by cowardly Beeb
DAVE Gorman was talking about how playing practical jokes on a friend had annoyed his wife when he said: M.Edmonds of Gerrards Cross wins £35 for that howler. Keep ’em coming to the address at the top of the page.
LET’S hope the cast of Mrs Brown’s Boys are thoroughly ashamed of themselves.
The ones who were tax-dodging as well...
We live in controversial TV times. As well as over-paid actors and their slippery bookkeeping, Aston got the bum’s rumba from Strictly in a week when Ruth fell over.
But the month’s biggest issue generated the fewest headlines. BBC boss Tony Hall made a speech warning that British TV is threatened by the rise of Netflix and Amazon.
His argument made no sense, but it does show how these clots think. The Beeb see competition as dangerous when they should view it as a fantastic opportunity.
Global streaming platforms need content and our TV industry is perfectly placed to service them. The BBC gets a lot wrong, of course. But when it gets Email me at: garry.bushell@ dailystar.co.uk or write c/o Daily Star Sunday,
10 Lower Thames Street, London
EC3R 6EN something right, the results can be mesmerising. Blue Planet II is head and gills above any other nature show. Doctor Who has a global audience.
Terrific dramas like Line of Duty and Peaky Blinders also prove that distinctive British content can have worldwide appeal.
Even BBC comedy has picked up, with Motherland shaping up to be its best sitcom for years.
Hall’s speech was probably laying the groundwork for yet another plea for more public funding and protection from competition.
This kind of thinking is cowardly and it’s yesterday. Licence fee featherbedding makes executives lazy.
W1A sends up the Corporation’s layers of useless management but reflects a greater truth. These days it takes 20-plus box-ticking executives to commission a sitcom. In 1980 it took one. The BBC cops a lot of stick, and rightly, over everything from mumbling actors to blatant political bias. But the key to its future survival is simple – make more good stuff. More Life on Mars, less How to Orgasm on a Budget with Gregg Wallace.
And if competition means losing pen-pushers and paper-shufflers, good! A leaner, keener BBC making smarter shows might help us forget to ask why three actors playing supporting characters in a sitcom managed to squirrel away more than £2million in public money. OUR tax laws are way too complex and greedy. Make them simpler and fairer and even our TV stars would cough up. MOTHERLAND ...Babylon Berlin (SkyAt) ...The Walking Dead, right, (Fox) ...Blue Planet II ...Tin Star finale. ELIZABETH, The Apprentice, left – they should call her Thrush as she’s an irritating t**t…Len Goodman’s Partners In Rhyme – harder to get shot of than an old pound coin. ONE a terrifyingly camp figure who makes us chuckle; the other is an over-promoted comedian.
‘I was so obsessed with Dick I’d been neglecting my husbandly duties’
BAD enough that Romesh made his Richard Pryor doc all about himself, but playing his own lame stand-up after Pryor’s lewd genius was beyond a joke.
It was like Cheryl comparing her voice to Aretha Franklin’s, or Louis Walsh mentioning himself in the same breath as Brucie.