Tag Archives: *TV*

The Recipe for Kitchen Nightmares US

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Gordon Ramsey Kitchen Nightmares

I know Kitchen Nightmares is a heavily-manufactured, manipulative piece of reality TV guff, but I can’t help but love it. I also can’t help but notice how each episode is constructed pretty much identically. You’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. But you still watch them all, because they’re immensely entertaining. God bless you, Ramsey, you angry little shit. Here’s how things go down: every single time.

  • Ramsay arrives at the restaurant, and makes some bitchy comments about the decor/menu/the discovery of a rat on the doorstep.
  • The owner tells Ramsay that the restaurant is losing money, which they can’t understand because the food is awesome. Ramsay’s concerned frown and receptive eyes betray the fact that within the hour he’ll have them in tears after shouting at them like they’re the unwanted step-child of a second marriage.
  • Ramsay orders three items from the menu, and declares each in turn the worst dogshit he’s ever tasted in his life. The serving waitress agrees with Ramsay’s assessment, and adds that the owner, her employer, is a waste of space as a human being, and a terrible manager. She’s pretty sure the owner won’t mind her honesty once the show is broadcast.
  • Ramsay rampages into the kitchen and discovers a rotting corpse beside the pizza oven. The owner gets defensive and says, ‘What’s your problem? That’s our mascot: Davey.’ Ramsay then discovers that none of the food is fresh, and all of it is kept in plastic bags beside a heater, next to a cardboard box filled with arsenic and rat shit.
  • Ramsey’s jaw muscles go into over-drive as he unleashes a volley of vile swear words at the owner. The words are bleeped so we viewers are spared the horror, but Ramsey’s such a clever curser that even the rhythm of his bleeps spells out a verbal attack in Morse Code. The owner sulks like a baby, and then tries to blame the staff/their partner/the Norse God Thor for how shit they now realise their restaurant is.
  • Ramsey gathers all of the staff together. He itemises the worst things about the restaurant: the Chef’s Specials written in dust on the wall; the fact that semen is an ingredient of the clam chowder; the twenty-three cats that live in the dining room. He then says ‘bland’ and ‘no passion’ sixty-three times whilst jerking his finger around like a conductor having a stroke. The chef says he was only following orders and blames the owner for everything, including 9/11. The chef goes on to confess that he would rather brush his teeth with bird shit and gargle a vial of AIDS than eat the diseased muck his kitchen serves to customers. ‘Anyway,’ says the chef, ‘I’m a bricklayer and I don’t even like cooking.’ He further confesses that ‘he’s never heard of eggs before.’ Ramsey stares at the chef like the chef’s just sharted on a child, and then calls him a c***.
  • The owner threatens to kill the chef and then accuses the staff of being lazy thieves who spend their time texting instead of working. In fact, it’s so bad that they text the customers asking for their orders, and then text these to the chef, who promptly ignores them. A mouthy Polish waitress tells Ramsey that the owner spends every night crying at the bar, cradling his dead mum’s ashes and throwing olives at customers. The owner throws an olive at her, but a beef olive this time. The rest of the staff just sit there smiling and blinking because they’ve just arrived from Puerto Rico and can’t speak English yet. Ramsey tells them all to fuck off, and storms out.
  • Ramsey observes a typical night at the restaurant. The owner thinks, ‘This is my chance to show that British bastard how awesome my business is.’ We all think: ‘This show’s not called Kitchen Awesomeness, you fool.’ Lots of customers pour in because they want to be on TV. They agree that each dish on the menu is dogshit, and send everything back. A feral cat jumps up and steals some salmon from a customer’s plate, which is snatched from its mouth by a rat. The rat gets involved in a salmon-related mouth tug-of-war with a cockroach, which is only ended when a waiter crushes them both under his heel. The waiter places their fresh remains on a plate and serves it to another customer. He drizzles some sauce over it and says it’s their ‘Vermin of the Day.’ Ramsey rustles up a smile that conveys both smugness and hatred.
  • In the kitchen, Ramsey sees the chef vomiting over a breast of chicken, and then chucking it straight into the frying pan. Ramsey goes bat-shit mental, and the chef just shrugs, and then scratches his balls. With the chicken. The owner, too pissed by now to walk, starts crying because he can’t live up to his dead parent’s restaurant-running standards/is about to lose his marriage/can’t afford to keep his business going/it’ll make good TV.
  • Ramsey screams, ‘Stop what you’re doing! I’m shutting this kitchen down! You’re going to bloody kill someone.’ Sure enough, a customer keels over into a bowl of spunky clam chowder. The owner drags the customer’s corpse into the kitchen and puts it next to Davey.
  • The next day the entire staff watches a film on a giant cinema screen. It features every single person in town telling them how shit their restaurant is, and how much of a cock the owner is. The owner either a) cries and vows not to be such a cock in future or b) says it’s a Jewish conspiracy.
  • Ramsey gets the set designers from Prisoner Cell Block H to revamp the restaurant. Then he devises a new menu and cooks up some samples. Every dish is now ‘rustic.’ When Ramsey uses the word ‘rustic’ we know he really means ‘microscopically tiny portions at double the price.’ The staff are like, ‘Wow, these taste so good it’s like a world-class chef made them.’ The’re right. And we know that there’s zero chance Chef Cum Chowder is going to be able to match that standard once Ramsey buggers off.
  • Despite some before-the-last-ad-break editing that suggests relaunch night is going to be a disaster – it’s not. Well, we can’t have Ramsey’s reputation wrecked by a bunch of filthy plebs. Ramsey tells them they achieved it by themselves, and should be proud, even though they clearly didn’t, and they shouldn’t. Ramsey hugs them all, which is tense and unnerving, like watching a cobra giving somebody a hug.
  • Ramsey strides outside and gives an awkward recap to the audience, during which he swishes his finger like it’s a fencing sword, and keeps jerking his gaze down to the ground and back up at the camera again like a serial killer battling ADHD.
  • The restaurant closes down.

Sieg Kyle – Daytime TV’s Case for Sterilisation

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I wrote the piece below about four or five years ago. These days, Jeremy Kyle styles himself on a waxwork of a waiter from the Titanic, and has taken his hectoring talk-show to the States, its spiritual home – Jamie

Jeremy Kyle has become what many of his studio guests need: an institution. He is a mainstay of modern British media culture, along with Richard and Judy, Rolf Harris and Howard from the Halifax ads.

His long-running show serves us up a daily dose of poor, stupid and ugly people with which to satisfy our voyeurism, and generally make us feel better about our own pathetic little lives. Jeremy and his production team like to pretend that each edition is a sort-of pseudo trial, designed to expose dishonest behaviour before a furious Jury of the People, an act that will surely take away the need for any real social work, and possibly save the world. It’s all about reclaiming lost dignity, punishing the sinful, mending fences and repairing lives. Is it? Is it really? Then why does it seem that all Jeremy – and, by extension, we the viewers – are interested in is humiliation on a grand scale, with the added bonus of the threat of violence?

The typical guest is from the north of England, or Scotland, possesses little in the way of teeth or intellect, and has usually been – despite resembling a walking tumour – shagging their entire home town. Paternity and lie detector tests are the order of the day. The results of the latter wouldn’t be admissible in a court of law, but anything goes in Jeremy’s daytime Kangaroo Court. That’s why there are so many big, bald men with tattoos on stand-by as security; just in case any of the big, bald men with tattoos featured as guests decide to pop Jeremy’s head off and use it as a football.

The episode I watched featured the usual slideshow of human sputum, tears and tantrums. One of the segments told the beautiful story of an adolescent male who had met and ‘romanced’ a young lady, only to find out after their brief relationship ended that his ex-beau believed herself to be pregnant with his child. He disputed the accuracy of this claim, and thus demanded that she submit to a DNA test. Once his neckless, feckless, and dietarily reckless ex-partner thundered out on to the stage, I too was pretty eager for a DNA test: to prove she was human.

The ex instantly endeared herself to the audience by free-style swearing, and nervously yet aggressively hitting her shoe. I know it’s become something of cliché to describe an inarticulate, chavish girl as being like Vicky Pollard, but Neckless really is the closest match I’ve seen; in looks, speech and mental processing abilities. She couldn’t see any connection between her outright refusal to submit to a simple test that would prove she was telling the truth about her pregnancy, and Jeremy Kyle’s mounting disbelief at her story. As guests often do on the Jeremy Kyle Show, she stormed off backstage. He followed her, changing his tone from hectoring, Hellfire Baptist minister to wise, understanding uncle. ‘Never mind them out there, it’s just you and me, now,’ he said to her, or words to that effect, refusing to let the fact that millions of eyes were on them both destroy the sense of intimacy he was cultivating.

‘Why don’t you want to take the test?’ he asked her softly. Her response almost had me rolling on the floor. ‘I’m not going to go down to his level,’ she said, rolling her eyes and continuing to batter her shoe.

Some might say that once you’re sitting on Jeremy’s backstage sofa it’s a little too late to worry about dropping a level or two. This is it, Neckless. This is rock bottom.

Let’s put aside our role as collaborating spectators for a moment (yes, I’m talking to you) and ask ourselves why anyone in their right mind (I think I’ve just answered my own question) would want to appear on Jeremy’s show. I see it as a venal circus, from which few emerge with even a shred of dignity; and that’s true even of the protagonists who initially approach the producers to get their pound of flesh from someone who’s done them wrong. Why don’t the guests see it that way? I can perhaps see why a cuckolded husband would want to see an angry audience screaming at his scrawny, cheating wife; but why would the wife want to subject herself to this treatment, and vice versa where the sexes are reversed?

Who gets a phone call from the Jeremy Kyle Show and thinks, yes, yes, I do want to have a middle-aged man shouting at me in-front of two hundred people, who will also be shouting at me, while the people watching at home hiss things like ‘scum’ at me. Well, perhaps you would consider doing it if you were dirt-poor, trapped in a life you couldn’t escape, ill-educated, desperate and sincerely believed that the Kyle show was an institution primarily concerned with helping people and not with exploiting and humiliating them for advertising revenue. Or if you were getting an all-expenses-paid trip to London, and the chance for your fifteen minutes of fame, however grizzly.

Certainly one thing you won’t see on the Jeremy Kyle show is a top-hat-wearing male doctor arguing with his Gucci-clad lawyer ex-wife about who’s going to get custody of their Shih Tzu, Phillip. How do the producers sleep at night? I’m sure the Nazi doctors salved their consciences by assuring themselves that their work was for the good of mankind. Maybe that’s what they do.

Our society, and care industry, must be in one Hell of a shape.

 

 

 

 

 

Postman Pat – Kids’ TV Redux Pt1

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''sup, motherfuckers?'

The first episode of the re-imagined Postman Pat opens on a misty moor on a frosty winter’s morning. Pat and farmer Peter Fogg are drinking strong, home-brew whiskey, as they lie propped up against a dry-stone dyke.

‘Foot and mouth, swine flu, Defra, the wife. They’ve all fucked me, Pat. I’ve got nothing.’

‘I hear that,’ says Pat, hurling an empty bottle and smashing it against a tree. ‘Fucking government. Sixty pence for a first-class stamp? It makes me so angry I could choke Mopatop dead!’

‘Give us a minute, will you, Pat.’

Justice has a long nose and a black pussy.

‘Yeah, sure,’ slurs Pat, wobbling to his feet. As Pat crunches through the frost covered field, he hears the silence broken by a single loud clap. He knows that Peter Fogg’s long misery is at an end.

It’s 2012. The countryside is in ruins thanks to the recession, underinvestment and the exodus of the young and their money. Crime, unemployment and despair are the orders of the day. Chicken rapes are up 200 per cent.

Postman Pat’s seen better days. Especially since the tragic death of his wife at the village fete, crushed under the wheels of a tractor driven by a joy-riding fox.

RIP OAP. Goggins' last stand: mailing her own dessicated jobby to Tory HQ shortly before doing herself in.

A few scenes in, the local post office is closed down by a laughing Tory bastard. Mrs Goggins, with nothing left to live for, takes her own life. She downs a bottle of Gordon’s dry gin, laces her false teeth with paraffin, pops them in, and then lights a petrol-soaked Cuban cigar. The fire is so large it can be seen from the house of the recently-outed Miss Hubbard.

Clutching Goggins’ withered, cooked fingers in his cold hand, Pat vows to avenge her and all of ruraldom. He paints a mural of a black fist on the side of his big, red van; wraps a bandana made from Mrs Goggins’ tear-soaked handkerchief around his head, shaves a mohican into Jess’s skull, claims the shotgun Fogg used to blow open his skull, and rides into the Yorkshire night looking to bring order into chaos.

Ted Glen - or 'The Ferret' as he was known by the SOCS.

The paedophile Reverend Timms is paper-cut to death by a stack of manilla envelopes. I guess he shouldn’t have tried it on with the Thomson twins.

A heroin smuggling ring, controlled by handyman Ted Glen and mobile-shop owner Sam Waldron, is brought to a swift end when Pat pulls up in his van of justice.

‘Package for Glen,’ Pat drawls, slipping an unfiltered cigarette into his badly animated mouth. He hands them the parcel, then makes sure he looks straight into their eyes with a menacing intensity before swaggering back to his van.

‘Ee, thanks, Pat,’ says a puzzled Glen, ‘But tha thought delivrees ‘ad ended.’

‘They have,’ laughs Pat, lighting his cigarette and blowing out a jet of smoke. Out comes a remote control. ‘For you. Privatise this, you drug-dealing cunts!’

Pat slapping them down, Terminator-style.

The resulting explosion takes out Ted and Sam, the mobile shop, three cars, two walls, an electric fence, a pot of cottage cheese, John Craven and fifteen sheep. Wiping from his face the bloody remains of John Craven, and a fragment of sheep’s arse, he looks down at Jess with an uncertain grin. The flames from the explosion reflect in his lenses, lending him the aura of hate and Hellfire. Jess miaows.

‘Maybe we’re too old for this shit, buddy,’ says Pat. ‘But retirement is a choice. My choice. And this letter-posting, big-nosed motherfucker says nobody sleeps till Greendale’s cleaned up.’

Much crime-fighting and indiscriminate fox-murdering ensues.

Pat stands on a desolate outcrop overlooking the hills and valleys of his new kingdom. In the sky above he sees a vision of Mrs Goggins.

‘Pat,’ she howls in her ghostly tone, ‘will the mail ever come back to Greendale?’

‘One day,’ says Pat, cocking his shotgun, ‘There’ll be knock. Ring. Mother-fucking letters through your door.’

Derek Acorah is a Mentalist Pt 1

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The following is a TV review/rant I cobbled together after watching one of medium-extraordinaire Derek Acorah’s shows a few years back. More deliciously fun Acorah poo-pooing to follow over the next week or so – Jamie 

Snakes on an Astral Plane

Derek Acorah and his invisible psychic side-kick, Sam, in happier times.

Most parents keep their children away from gory, overtly disturbing, sexual or horrific TV content: explicit war films; late-night pieces of a pornographic nature; violent gun-and-monster flicks, and anything that has a hint of the red stuff or even a soupcon of rough language. All well and good.

But there are some programmes that slip under the radar, which many families actively encourage their children to watch. Happy, feel-good shows that seem innocent upon brief inspection, but if explored in any depth turn out to be more insidiously destructive and psychologically scarring than a back-to-back late-night marathon of Vampire Gore Splat Anal Destruction Nympho Whores in Trench Warfare Hell.

Welcome to Derek Acorah (broadcast on Sky 3 in the UK), a regular hour-long delve into the spirit world with the eponymous Derek Acorah, ‘Britain’s best-known medium’ – an accolade bestowed upon him by the Daily Mail. ‘Best known’? Yes, he’s ‘Britain’s best-known medium’ in the same way that AIDS is the world’s ‘best known’ sexual infection, and Adolph Hitler is Austria’s ‘best known’ Jew-killer.

'Your gullibility is THIS big, screaming woman.'

So what’s my beef with Acorah and his ilk? Surely it’s all a bit of harmless fun? Doesn’t Derek Acorah bring people comfort and closure, say ‘please’ alot, and thread love, peace and happiness into and around all of his dalliances with the spirits and their living loved ones? Well, yes. But this is why he’s so insidious. What gives a man like Derek Acorah, with no demonstrable psychic powers – certainly none that would stand up to any scientific scrutiny – the right to take people’s raw feelings of loss, hurt, fear and confusion, and attempt to exorcise them with flimflam and lies? Not to mention to extort these peoples’ feelings for money?

There are a few possible explanations for his conduct. The first is that Derek knows he has no psychic powers, and is cynically employing his theatrical tricks to make money from vulnerable punters, or else to satisfy some insecurity or Messianic complex whereby he feels a surge of self-worth or grandeur through ‘curing’ people – even if it is by a sugared deception. The second is that Derek actually believes he possesses both ESP and the ability to commune with the dead, in which case he requires some urgent and far-reaching mental help.

What's it watching? The Hissssss-tory Channel, of course! Belter!

In the episode of Derek Acorah broadcast yesterday (Friday 21st August) Derek brought out a woman and her pet snake. He attempted to read the reptile’s ‘thoughts’ and translate them for its owner.

‘He’s not been himself,’ said the woman. Excuse me? How can you tell that a snake hasn’t been himself? A drop in witty repartee? Not dressing as smartly?

Anyway, Derek was able to meld with the snake and went on to dispense some real psychically-gleaned pearls of wisdom. ‘You’ll need to take him to a vet,’ he told the woman.

Later, Derek added that his long-time spirit guide Sam was sure that the snake wanted to watch more television. The woman looked enthralled. During her own straight-to-camera moment, away from the studio audience, she made excuses for Derek. ‘It can’t have been easy reading a snake. I think he tried his best.’

Derek did little better when he moved on to bipedal mammals; although the audience didn’t share my assessment. He appeared again to have convinced them that he was a spiritual savant and all-round psychic miracle worker. This despite the fact that any person with a little common sense and a lot of balls (or a psychological condition) could come up with an achingly similar ‘reading’ and enjoy a chorus of oo’s and aah’s from any number of poor misguided souls. I’m being diplomatic here.

Derek after being told how much he gets paid for this shit.

His subject was a woman called Sharon, aged between 50 and 65. He amazed by asking if she knew anyone called Jack, Betty or Anne. She did. Incredible. Who would have thought that a woman born between 1945 and 1960 would know people with some of the most common names of that era? He moved on to wow her with such startling and specific questions as ‘Do you know someone who died of breast cancer?’ and ‘You’ve had to counsel someone recently who’s been through a break-up, haven’t you?’ Shockingly, she had. Who would have thought, given how long she’d lived, that there would be a statistical chance of those two things having happened? Certainly not Sharon or the tearful studio audience.

‘You’ve not had an easy life, have you?’ oozed Derek, staring at her like some demented hypnotist.

‘No,’ she agreed. I was almost out of my seat by then. This was getting spooky.

‘But you’re a star,’ he told her, almost on the verge of sobbing himself, ‘I know you’re a star. And they (the gaggle of dead communicating with him) know you’re a star.’

Who knows what frisson of sexual excitement was zapping through his balls at that moment as he held this deluded woman’s happiness in his huckster’s hands. He was probably thinking: ‘Ha! Jesus can suck on my big Liverpudlian throbber.’

Don't let your children watch Derek Acorah.

Have you ever heard noises in your house late at night? Probably just the pipes, or the radiators, or wood or cement expanding or contracting, right? WRONG, DICKHEAD! It’s ghosts. They’re there to talk to you, silly. Only they’re not going to make it easy for you. If your death has been foreseen by your loved ones on the other side, what are they going to do? Simply tell someone like Derek Acorah in plain, uncluttered English so that you can do something to prevent it? Rap out a warning in Morse Code? Use telekinesis on the fridge magnets to spell out ‘GO TO HOSPITAL’? No. They’d really rather prefer to make pots fall on the floor until you get the message.

Sharon had heard things in her house at night.

‘You’re confident you’re psychic, aren’t you?’

‘Well, yes, I’ve heard things. But I’m not scared.’

‘You’ve got an innate receptiveness,’ he told her. ‘You’re sensitive to spirits.’

What I like most about Derek Acorah is how he listens to all the facts, forms a hypothesis, looks at it from all angles, contemplates everything deeply, conducts a thorough investigation, follows through with an experiment, and then arrives at a wholly logical and scientific result. Inspiring.

The best part of the show, however, was when he grilled an old lady (not literally, although that really would’ve been entertaining) and claimed to have one of her acquaintances from the other side jabbering in his ear. The old lady had no idea who the person was.

‘Not someone in your family?’

‘No.’

‘Someone you know?’

‘No.’

‘If anyone in the audience wants to jump in, if you know them, please raise your hand.’

"You know someone called Morag, don't you?"

Even that little bit of fishing never made the audience in the least suspicious. Even when he moved on and left the old lady on spiritual call-waiting to entertain another spook they were still on his side and in full support of his miraculous powers. And still no one raised an eyebrow when he pretended to be in conversation with the spirit and said: ‘What’s that? You’re saying someone here does know who you are? OK, but we’re going to have to move on now, please. Step to one side, please. Thank you.’ Yeah, fuck off, ghost, nobody likes you!

It’s quite telling that after the end credits roll a message flashes up that reads: ‘All views and messages relayed in the show are for entertainment purposes only.’

Wouldn’t it be reasonable to expect someone who sincerely believed himself to possess genuine supernatural powers to fight the government and the media regulators tooth and claw to remove such a disclaimer from the end of his television broadcasts?

Just a thought. I’d like to lobby to have the message displayed throughout the entire show, in huge block capitals at the top of the screen. And force Derek to shout it at the end of each reading.

If you’re looking for something mildly diverting and inspiring for your children to watch on television as you organise lunch or dinner, don’t be tempted to expose them to Derek Acorah.

In the true spirit of the medium, simply go over to the other side. Or put on a DVD double-bill of the Hostel films which they can watch while you beat them with a fucking spade.