Don’t build up your hopes
HE didn’t feature in the main programme but amid the rubble of clips and teases that began LEGO MASTERS (C4) comedian Dara Ó Briain popped up, saying something that almost made me switch over. “Amateur hour is over,” declared the normally-inoffensive Irish funnyman.
“This is no time for people dabbling.” Now that, it struck me, is the problem with a lot of the stuff that ends up on TV. People no longer make bread and cupcakes, they bake, competitively.
People no longer like buying old tut, they are vintage enthusiasts, or they would be except that the enthusiasm has been replaced by a deadly po-faced earnestness.
The harmless pastime of the pub quiz has become a glut of big prize gameshows, and trickled back into the pubs to turn a fun diversion into a grim sport played by know-alls. Even going out for your dinner has become a semi-pro undertaking, with everyone posting photos of their starters online and then penning reviews and getting into internet spats with the chef which then turn them into TV personalities. Lego, it seems, is the final pleasure to be toppled and this show is the slippered foot kicking the bricks into oblivion under the sofa.
Week by week, pairs of enthusiasts will undertake a series of building challenges, judged by a panel of celebrities and experts.
The prize is, well, I expect they’ll win a lot of Lego but they’ll also get to have their winning entry preserved in the Lego museum in Denmark. To be fair, I could imagine this iconic building material (it’s not a toy!) lending itself to a competitive gameshow.
You could have an endurance round, for example, in which people have to walk barefoot through a pitch-black room full of tiny bricks. A diligence round, in which contestants have to find a single yellow three-er in a shipping container full of other bits. There could be beasting play-offs, in which people use hammers to make the final, ill-fitting bit of a vast spaceship construction stick down.
What you can’t do is just have a load of people building stuff out of Lego on the telly and think it will be interesting. The prize isn’t that great and the process not that exciting to watch.
Although it was a brave and important documentary, WASTING AWAY: THE TRUTH ABOUT ANOREXIA (C4) had a somewhat misleading title. It contained all sorts of truth, much of it uncomfortable, particularly in regards to how poorly our healthcare system cares for young people with life-threatening mental illnesses. Broadcaster Mark Austin and his 18-year-old-daughter Maddie, herself a recovering anorexic, uncovered a threadbare system in which sufferers were incentivised to get more sick in order to receive treatment.
‘Care in the community’, that always-hollow phrase, means, literally, nothing in parts of the country where outreach services have been closed down.
We need to talk about it, clearly, and, as the Austins’ candid chat with HRH Prince William suggested, it’s not just the care issue but the whole taboo and stigma surrounding the condition.
A first step might be to explain to a bigger audience exactly what anorexia is and why it happens and what people need to get better. Last night’s film, strong as it was on many counts, rather wasted that opportunity.