At Least If Joseph Fritzl was in Big Brother, There'd be Cameras in the Basement this time.

This weekend, me and my flatmate Hugh have been able to have a rare insight about how certain aspects of television are made. The decision that we'd embark on this adventure occurred after a tipsy remark on Friday night, where we joked about auditioning for the next Summer series of Big Brother. The logistics were easy enough... the auditions were just down the road from us, and it'd be a nice easy way to kill time on a Saturday. I'm not saying the decision was that easy; we were able to fit in a couple of pints before arriving at the auditions at 1.30pm. To ease ourselves into it, you see.

We arrived at St. James' Park, and found a very interesting sight. Just at the entrance to the audition room stood two people in their mid-twenties, one holding pamphlets and the other with a large camera. As we approached the entrance, they turned to us and asked "Big Brother auditions?". We agreed. We were then asked to pose for a photo of us holding one of these pamphlets. The experience was an odd one. It was only when we walked inside that I realised what they were doing. In the off-chance that one of these hundreds of applicants would finally get into the house, they were able to take photos of them all endorsing their product. Six months down the line when the housemates are announced, they can trawl through the thousands of photos they have to find anybody who is remotely famous holding one of their pamphlets. It's a very arduously planned method for a cheap photoshoot with a potential future celebrity. How tedious.

One claimed to be gay for ten years, and then worked out that he'd only been gay for six years.

Walking inside St. James', we were greeted with a queue of people on the stairs- all of which were about 20-23. It is interesting how many young people a show like Big Brother attracts. In the hour we were in this queue, we then went to join a second queue. This was a task in itself. A queue for queueing. Seemed a bit pointless. After our extensive double-queue, we were asked to join participants in groups of ten to do a number of activites. This included yelling, contact improvisation, knot tying with our hands and me getting acquainted with the insides of people's legs. After our team won (for, it seems, doing nothing), we were all asked through to the next room for the next stage. Hopefully not involving queues.

In our team of ten, we had to get to know each other with interesting facts. I pulled out my gem of "I have no toenails"; but there were a few facts from others that topped this. One claimed to be gay for ten years, and then worked out that he'd only been gay for six years. One person had a glass eye. Another was a fireman. One person claimed to have a wooden leg, then told us that this fact wasn't true. We all thought he was a bit odd. After this, one person at a time had to line up the team in order from "Most" to "Least"., but wasn't allowed to say what the category was. According to the people, I was the least arrogant (which is fair enough) but one of the most likely to have murdered somebody. So, I'm a serial killer, but I don't let it go to my head. At the end of this, the people through to stage 2 were stamped with the Big Brother logo on their hand. Fake-fake Appendage man and Dyscalculaic Homosexual were the only two in our group not to go through to the next round.

Quite happy that both of us were through, me and Hugh went to the next stage- which consisted of having our photo taken and filling in a little form. Questions involved "What do you do" to "What's the most shameful thing you've ever done" and "Is there anything you haven't told your parents?". We both answered the questions with a bit of humour about ourselves, as none of us were taking it seriously. After the form was filled in, we had our one-to-one interviews, which were designed to provoke us:

"So, what's your name?"
"Stephen Frizzle"
"Do you prefer a nickname?"
"Friz, if you don't mind"
"Friz? What if we called you.. Frizzy?"
"Friz is fine"
"What about Frizwald?"
"What? Well.. if you want to"
"Fritz?"
"I'm not German"
"Fritzl?"
"Please don't call me Fritzl"
"Are you posh? You sound posh? Are you posh, Fritzl?"

At least if Joseph Fritzl was in Big Brother, there'd be cameras in the basement this time.

Then, a bit of a wait, until I was directed to another part of another room.. where I was asked if I had a fun time, and then was told that "unfortunately, we won't be requiring you for any more stages. But, thanks for coming". This was good. I'd done what I planned to. At least I could say that I tried. And, at least I hadn't travelled miles to attend like a lot of other people. It was literally a twenty minute walk. I text Hugh to see if he was ready to go as well. I was text back: "Go home, got more writing to do!".

Excellent! Hugh was let through! Our day wasn't wasted at least. I head off home, prepared for a night out. Hugh joined me later, and mentioned what Stage 3 was like.. basically questions about his life, relationships and creativity. I was happy for the guy. But I was even happier at about 8.20pm when my phone rang.

"Hi Stephen, it's Julie from Big Brother"
"Yes?"
"Hi there. Just thought you'd like to know... at the end of the day, we go through other contestant's videos.. and we've changed our minds about our decision with you. Do you want to come in tomorrow at about 11am?"
"... Excuse me?"
"Yeah, just say that Julie called you back. Okay! Thank you!

Hmm.

Check that out.

I told Hugh the good news, and we both were very happy about the turn of events. And that's where I've been today. Filled out the 52-page giant form of giantness. Had a discussion with other potential candidates; one of which didn't know who Barack Obama was. No doubt he'll end up in the house. I was then taken to an impromptu Diary Room, and was asked questions by one of the Big Brother producers/voices. I was mainly asked about my humour, my background, my songwriting and my veiws on life. I was then asked for a 20-second soundbyte to say why I should be chosen.

It's a weird feeling. Part of me doesn't want anything to do with Big Brother, part of me thinks "this is so funny I've been able to get this far without trying", and the tiniest part of me thinks... this might be fun.

Only time will tell.

Censor Sensibility

The Channel 4 franchise is rubbish. Well, that's a lie- it's excellent, but it's rubbish in one field. Why do they feel the need to censor programs at 2pm because they contain questionable words?

Let me explain further... the other day, they showed an episode of Friends where Ross and Rachel throw their daughter a 1st birthday party. They get her a novelty cake which is supposed to be shaped like a bunny. But it isn't. It's shaped like a penis. Hilarity ensues. However, if you're airing that episode on E4 at five in the afternoon and won't allow the word penis on air, the plot does lose a bit of sense.

The end scene is supposed to go like this:

(Rachel wipes away some tears.)

Ross:
What's wrong? Are you okay?

Rachel:
Oh yeah, nothing! These are happy tears! This is just what I wanted.

Phoebe:
(pointing at cake) Hey, you made it into a bunny.

Joey:
(looking worried) What is wrong with me. It looked more delicious when it was a penis!

Here is E4's version of that scene:

(Rachel wipes away some tears.)

Ross:
What's wrong? Are you okay?

Rachel:
Oh yeah, nothing! These are happy tears! This is just what I wanted.

Phoebe:
(pointing at cake) Hey, you made it into a bunny.

Joey:
(Looking worried) What is wrong with me. It looked more delicious when it was-

(Cut to bizarre audience laughter)

Making no sense at all, but at least the kids watching at home won't question what a penis is.

There seems to be something vulgar about the word "Penis" in the land of Channel 4. Watching The Nutty Professor the other day on Film4 (and being slightly freaked out at the fact it was made twelve years ago), they cut out the line after Professor Klump gets thin for the first time, looks down at his trousers and exclaimed "My penis! I can see my penis!". However, what they decided was perfectly acceptable for 1pm is the scene where the newly thin Klump goes to a comedy club and defends a comedian, claiming his date to "give the nigger a chance"- and then later calls a piano player Niggeraci. What are Channel 4 trying to do here... be too sensitive? Worry that if they edit that out, people will be more offended?

And despite cutting out jokes that end up creating an episode that makes no sense (seriously - try watching a Scrubs episode called "My Dirty Secret" on E4 in the evening. The episode is about Eliot accidentally giving a patient an orgasm during a pelvic exam and then focuses on her inability to say rude words - the edited episode is something like 12 minutes long), Channel 4 still continue this tradition- to the point that they're now airing Desperate Housewives at 2pm, which when recorded without the adverts is now 35 minutes long.

I just don't know who they're trying to protect with most of these bizarre edits. Are they worried that an unattended 8-year old is going to be watching Friends at 5pm and then ask his parents what a penis is? It's silly is what it is.

Kaiser Grief

There's been a show on Channel 4 tonight called "Kaiser Chiefs vs Kaizer Chiefs". In the show, famous Leeds band Kaiser Chiefs met the South African football team Kaizer Chiefs. They played a gig with Kaizer Chiefs watching. They then played football.

Is this really worth half an hour of airtime? I attempted to count the amount of times they mentioned that both had similar names, but got too bored. I'd also like to know whose idea it was to commission this show. I didn't even learn anything from it. The one fact that had was that Kaiser Chiefs borrowed their name from Kaizer Chiefs. And this fact was uttered again and again.

What next? Franz Ferdinand studying the reasons for World War One?

It Made Me Clench My Fingernails

The Channel Four continuity announcer before Derren Brown today promised that tonight's would be "the most uncomfortable Peep Show yet". In fact, he said it would be "toe-cringingly funny".

That does sound uncomfortable.

...

I honestly, now that I come to think of it, don't really know what specifically cringing is, but surely you curl your toes. That's the saying.

This New Service Isn't All It's Cracked Up To Be..

Studio Simpsons on the South Park Missed

Channel 4 are brilliant. They buy the rights to air South Park and don't. They buy the rights to air Studio 60 and stick it on an obscure digital channel that people avoid because it's aguely intellectual. They buy the rights to air The Sopranos and stick the new episodes on at 1.30am.

The latest way that they're screwing up the schedules is buying the rights to The Simpsons, airing a series of new episodes only to suddenly cease showing the new series half way through, sticking on an entire season that's ten years old, and then start showing the second half of the new series. ON A SUNDAY AFTERNOON.

Well, I say "new series". The "new" episodes are five years old by now.

The Good Kind of Countdown

Today, Channel 4 celebrates their 25th Anniversary. This is a fact that I don't much care for. Sure, they've had a lot of hit documentaries and shows, but all of that becomes pointless when you compare it to the amount of old Simpsons repeats, spectacularly irrelevant chat shows and Big Brother. The channel has had a lot more misses than hits.

However, a fact that does interest me is that it is also the 25th anniversary of Countdown. This game show, for people outside the UK, consists of two people choosing an assortment of letters and trying to make words out of them. It sounds horrendously dull, but it is in fact the perfect game show. And because it is perfect, it has lasted so long.

It's a simple set, the rules are easy and it's a game that people at home can also play. It can be patronising at time, but that's so the old people watching with their cats feel like somebody is visiting them. It's never controversial, never pointlessly mean to their contestants and best of all, the grand prize at the end is a set of dictionaries. Dictionaries! You know what this means? You''ll never get greedy gits who are only on the show for big cash prizes like you get on Deal or No Deal.

I mentioned how it is such a simple premise. Nowadays, when a new game show is commsioned, it has to be original and fresh. My flatmate, JoeyJ, watched the entirety of Brian Connely's new vehicle Dirty Rotten Cheater yesterday, and still wasn't able to explain what the rules of the game were.

Countdown seriously cannot compare with other game shows. It's in a class of it's own. Not only that, even the dumbest of individuals like myself can take 45 minutes out of their day where they can pretend to be smart. And when you compare the fact that the first question The Weakest Link today was "What is the first letter of the alphabet", you realise that you really are talking about two different shows.

If you've missed this post, catch it from the start now on Channel Flip + 1

Something that's annoying me recently about the otherwise entirely welcome Channel 4 + 1 service is a tendency for the continuity announcers at the end of hour-long shows to say words to the effect of "if you've missed this programme, don't worry; it's starting now on Channel 4 + 1". This is good and well, except that they don't seem to fully comprehend how the timeshifted service works. They broadcast exactly the same thing an hour later - the same sound, the same pictures, the same thing. This means an hour later, they'll tell all the people watching Channel 4 + 1 that if they've missed the programme that just finished (on Channel 4 + 1) then it doesn't matter, because it's just about to start on Channel 4 + 1, which it manifestly isn't.

You'd think a company capable of broadcasting television signals to an entire country could invent a little button they can press if the announcement they're making won't make sense on the +1 channel, and then the announcement doesn't broadcast on the +1 channel. But apparently not.

Deal of the Century

I like it when Deal or No Deal feature very odd offers from The Banker. Today's episode had the very odd offer of "£8,000 and a dead magpie".

If it was me, I'd have dealt at that offer. It's a win/win situation. If they don't give me the dead animal, I sue them for false advertising. If they do give me the dead animal, I sue them for cruelty to magpies.

Can I Poke a Friend on Facebook, Chris?

A new series of blog favourite Deal or No Deal started on Monday. (I use the phrase 'blog favourite' only to annoy everyone else who contributes to this blog.) I found it slightly disturbing watching it really. You see, I occasionally have dreams where I'm watching TV shows, and these shows are invariably different in subtle, slightly freaky ways. These are really astonishingly mundane dreams, but that's not the point. The point is that Deal* has been made slightly different in largely the same way. These are not changes what would concern any normal person - the set is slightly new, the opening credits are a bit different, some new incidental music, and the phone-in competition has been changed to appease ICSTIS (see How Dare You Mislead The Very Stupid? below) - but they concern me. Why can't everything just stay exactly the same?

In a move desired to drive lovers of routine and of slightly tired game show formats to nervous breakdowns, the same has been done to ITV1's premiere quizzer Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, only, this being ITV1, they've done it to a much less forgiveable degree. When Millionaire* returns on Saturday (with a special celebrity edition of course; this is ITV1) some changes will be afoot. Most notably, contestants will only have to answer 12 questions to win the prize. Cleverly, this has been accomplished by removing the first three questions that are pathetically easy anyway, so that the first question is now worth £500. Hopefully, this has been done with an eye to getting through more contestants and more interesting questions, but a more worrying and likely scenario is that it is so the show can be padded out with more crap like the 'text game' that has blighted recent series.

Not content with this change, the middle rungs of the money ladder have also been messed with. instead of the pleasingly mathematical-looking £4k-£8k-£16k-£32k-£64k-£125k-£250k-£500k-£1m, it will apparently proceed: £5k-£10k-£20k-£50k-£75k-£150k-£250k-£500k-£1m. While I can see some kind of logic in switching things around to put a smaller increase after the last milestone (now £50k) where there's no effective risk anyway, this clearly is just change for change's sake. It's wrong. I'm personally too old to be said to have grown up with Millionaire, but I assume kids today are born with an innate knowledge of the rules of the show in the same way I was with The Crystal Maze or Family Fortunes. I'm sure ITV1 will say they're trying to 'refresh the format' and 'shake things up', and the falling viewing figures may seem to justify this. That's all well and good with The X Factor. But there's a higher responsibility here. ITV are messing with our culture! (More specifically, 2waytraffic are, having recently bought the rights to the format from creators Celador. Just so you know who to write in to.) I frankly don't care if their viewing figures fall to three people and their pets. This sort of fiddling isn't going to help. Neither is finding contestants by audition as is now going to happen - it would take an entire new rant to cover what's wrong with that.

So stop it, ITV. Stop being useless. Please.


*Why anyone uses abbreviations like DoND and WWTBAM is beyond me. Look how stylish I look referring to Deal and Millionaire like that. Lovely.

How Dare You Mislead The Very Stupid?

I read today that Deal Or No Deal's phone in competition has landed the producers with a hefty fine because "some viewers of the Noel Edmonds-hosted show may have been induced to take part because they thought it was broadcast live, whereas it was actually pre-recorded".

And maybe they could have, but those viewers would have to be quite monumentally stupid. Because they watch Noel in his bad shirt refer to the winning caller whose name is on the screen now while carefully avoiding using the caller's name or any personal pronouns, a blindingly obvious sign of a pre-recorded show, but perhaps not as blindingly obvious as that time the newspapers reported the results of the quiz days before it was on TV. And they see him, wearing the same bad shirt, ask an audience member to pick a box and then have it opened and then he reads out the amount of money. Nobody could possibly think this is a live broadcast, and if they do they are so stupid that Channel 4 probably should have their money because they're likely to put it to better use.

And in any case, even if the boxed sums of money were predictable, given the right information, they were still random, so nobody has been misled. Besides which, at no point have Channel 4 ever pretended the show is live, and at no point did anyone claim the contents of the selected box weren't known -- except people in the pre-recorded show, who genuinely didn't know what they were.

Essentially, this is a rather chilling precedent: producers are now liable for the consequences of any insane nonsense that morons may choose to infer about their shows. I think I shall sue the producers of Heroes because I may have been induced to panic because I thought it was true, whereas it was actually fiction.

Dealing With Loss

I promise I watch other shows than daytime telly, but today I saw Win My Wage on Channel 4. It's on in the afternoons after Countdown, in the normal Deal Or No Deal slot. Yes, despite what it may seem like, Deal Or No Deal is in fact only on for 48 weeks of the year. Presumably Noel Edmonds needs the time off in order to go on a worldwide bad-shirt-buying spree. Shirts that bad can't be easy to amass. Probably he visits secluded tribal societies whose sacred writings tell of a fabric of unparallelled ghastliness that he might take back to his blind tailor.

Anyhow, Win My Wage. It's quite a surreal experience watching it. It's as if Channel 4 genuinely hopes that the viewers won't realise that Deal Or No Deal isn't actually on, and have therefore constructed a crude simulacrum to put in its place. There's one contestant who plays sat in a chair facing away from the audience, and some more people who face the audience concealing amounts of money that the contestant can win. The contestant chooses between these people, hoping to eliminate the smaller amounts in order to claim the top prize. The difference (and I use the singular purposefully) is that the amounts of money are on cards instead of in boxes, and represent the annual pay of the person concealing them. Host Nick Hancock (who has the same numbers of letters in his names as Noel Edmonds. Coincidence?) drip-feeds the contestant with information about the 'wage-earners' to help them inform the choice. The amounts of money in play are arranged on a vertical game-board that looks strikingly similar to something else I can't quite put my finger on. When three amounts remain, the contestant chooses the remaining wage-earner he or she thinks makes the most, a correct choice resulting in them winning that amount. Before they decide, they can take Nick's offer to play for a lower prize in return for being told what the three occupations are that the remaining wage-earners do between them.

Astute readers may have noticed that this final decision would be easiest (insofar as it's not just a blind guess coloured by prejudice) if the three amounts left are the original highest amount and two lowest amounts. So it's probably not in your best interests to just get rid of the lowest amounts, leaving you with a tricky choice between three people all earning similarly. But they still cheer the low amounts going and boo the higher ones, because that's what they do on that other show. That other show will be back in a month's time. Maybe nobody will have ever noticed.

It's Richard Madeley Gone Mad

So, this week a new series of Richard and Judy's show, Richard & Judy, has started on Channel 4. (Yes, I'm at home in the daytime.) Now, Richard Madeley is an opinionated man. There's not many an issue that he doesn't havean ill-thought-out position on. Today he's successfully masking this by bringing on guests with even dafter views than him, but often he gets quite angry about the many injustices he percieves in the world around him; an interesting tack for a man who was happy in his programme to fleece his viewers in rip-off £1-a-go phone competitions up until the time they were shown to actually be fraudulently conducted.

In this new series, he has launched a war on "the twin nightmares of political correctness and 'elf and safety." Presumably, Madeley envisages a future utopia in which all mankind lives in harmony together, confined to their hospital beds following workplace accidents, hurling racist epithets across the wards. In any case, it's unclear at this early stage exactly what form this righteous crusade will take. But I would suppose it's safe to imagine that it will consist of a large amount of pointless sniping at individual stories about the crazy decisions of local councils, and very little in the way of constructive suggestions to in any way alleviate this terrible scourge beating its evil path across the nation, leaving only ruin and misery in its wake. Poltical correctness is very easy to poke fun at, but it seems a very stupid target for a full television assault, seeing as it's almost always harmless (his pet examples include a council who replaced a parkful of benches because they were three inches to high or too low or something, and an old school building where they leave the lights on at night so that trespassers don't injure themselves) and it at least springs from good impulses - who doesn't want everyone to be treated equally and for us all to get along?

Anyway, I suggest that we hereby start a War On Richard Madeley's War On Political Correctness. There'll be no objectives or structure to this campaign; it will consist solely of pointing and laughing at Richard Madeley. If you agree, well then there's no need to do anything. Just be sure to point and laugh at Richard Madeley.