Box jocks giving it large
SO GOGGLEBOX is back tonight (C4, 9pm). Shall I pretend to be pleased? I always feel I ought to. Everyone seems to love Gogglebox. If I were to admit that I actually find it quite annoying, you might think it’s because I dislike hearing other people’s opinions, particularly their opinions on TV programmes.
Obviously I do dislike that – it’s hard enough deciding what my own opinions are, without other people chipping in with theirs and confusing me – but that’s not the specific reason I’ve never been a Gogglebox fan.
The reason I’ve never been a Gogglebox fan is the same reason I’m struggling to warm to some of the contestants we’ve been watching on GORDON RAMSAY’S BANK BALANCE, which ploughs on tonight (BBC One, 9pm) and will possibly never end. Namely, the fact that everyone’s acting larger-than-life.
I do wish they wouldn’t. It’s exhausting. I realise this kind of behaviour is what television producers demand these days when they put us humble members of the public in front of their cameras.
They don’t want us looking like rabbits in headlights, the way people used to do on Sale Of The Century. Remember that?
They want us to play up, to “make good TV”, to crank our personalties up to 11.
But couldn’t TV spare a little more room for members of the public who aren’t larger than life, and have no desire to be?
Maybe even feature some who are smaller than life, or at least approximately the same size as it. Right now it feels as if the only show where we’re allowed to see normal-sized behaviour is The Repair Shop, and if I watch too much of that I’m a blubbing wreck.
Before tonight’s Gogglebox, mind you, there’s a larger-than-life person I’m more than OK with, and that’s artist Grayson Perry.
He’s back with a second series of GRAYSON’S ART CLUB (C4, 8pm), the show where he encourages us locked-down viewers to tap into our artistic potential and send him the results so that he can put these on the television like they used to do on Vision On, albeit in this case without the nice bingy-bong vibraphone music.
Grayson’s larger-than-lifeness is different because there’s clearly nothing fake or forced about it.
It’s just who he is.And beneath it he’s engagingly grounded, matterof-fact and no-big-dealy.
I’d like to think that if a television producer ever ordered him to act any differently, Grayson would poke him in the eye with a paint brush.
As for the show itself, it’s tremendously inspiring.
I can’t paint for toffee, and yet it makes me want to paint something in any case. It’ll probably just be the bathroom.