2013-05-21T09:02:34-04:00 Nick Harrison http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/author/index.php?author=nick-harrison Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Nick Harrison Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.2970190 2013-03-28T07:51:08-04:00 2013-03-30T17:08:14-04:00

Nick Harrison http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nick-harrison/
More than any other member of the cast, the rotating chair experienced the fickle favour of the viewership. Starting life as a lowly piece of office furniture, the souped-up chair was feted as one of the rare successes of the show, with more panache and star quality in its swivel than any of the contestants in front of it. Or behind it, depending on the whim of the judge.

But during the latter stages its fame faded, relegated to its primary purpose: being sat on. Bolted in an outward aspect, the chair was unable to turn back to its default setting and away from the unfolding horror on the stage. It may have been kinder to the judges to loosen the screws and allow them the option of a full 360°. Especially throughout the battle rounds, the infernal noise of which was worse than the sound of high-octane parental sex.

The participants have also trod the undulating path of celebrity. At first they were lionised by the judges, assured they were the next big thing in music, showered with extravagant praise that given their actual pop fate (the winner Leanne Mitchell reached no. 45 with her debut single) now sounds as ridiculous as being told "you're literally the best person in the entire world". It will be intriguing to see if the panels downsize their predictions this time round, something more on the scale of "you're probably going to sell quite a few records" or "based on that performance, I think you're going to be massive in Suffolk".

Poor sweet Leanne, her dreams scuttled by the naïve thought which ignores that a pop star is made from more than the noise that comes from within it. The purity of the concept has been corrupted anyway by a preliminary audition process which seemingly wheedled out anyone with a plain normal face, instead pushing forward bald women, human-shihtzu hybrids and someone who looked like a fat God to take their place among the more conventionally appealing competition.

The makers insist that the requisite changes have been made to stem the alarming haemorrhage of viewers but it remains to be seen whether they've fixed the one epic oversight from the first spin, that being disregarding the unwritten clause of the channel's public service charter that states that all BBC talent shows should be lovably crap, like the rudimentary drawing of a house a child might bring home from nursery school. The Voice has grasped at something more bombastic, more boastful like its domineering cousin The X Factor. It has literally gone above its station.

The template should be provided by Strictly Come Dancing, a programme in which contestants were genuinely exhilarated to qualify for a trip to Blackpool. Strictly revived a grizzled format that died from exhaustion years ago and sequined it with mid-range celebrity contestants, its staples being cricketers and breakfast show presenters. It then asked its audience to tolerate the ill-timed comedy of a man whose best before date expired in 1972. Strictly represents a less ambitious time for talent show contestants, in which the only prize was a trophy to be handed back after a year. Leanne Mitchell would now kill to hand back that trophy.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1427148 2012-04-15T18:13:22-04:00 2012-06-15T05:12:01-04:00

Nick Harrison http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nick-harrison/
And then you started training. And quickly you realized that running wasn't as fun as you previously thought. Staying still was preferable. Your right leg fell out with your left leg and they refused to work together. Soon the rains came and formed puddles and you don't trust puddles because you can never be quite sure how deep they are. And you were always too busy to run, there was always that thing you had to do. And now you are here in the week of the event, looking down at your pristine bionic trainers and sizing up the ethical quandary of accepting sponsorship money for a race run without you.

Do not despair, there are ways. Managing your expectations is vital. Set yourself minuscule targets: like finishing the course without stopping. Or finishing the course without crying. Finishing the course without detouring into a nearby A & E department. If you have previously made vaunting claims to your family and associates about sub-three-hour times then it is possibly sensible to source an antique diving suit and pretend that you intended to complete the marathon in five days all along.

Start slowly. Get slower. Almost like you are walking. Mincing. Mince like you've never minced before. One long triumphant mince through the streets of London. Don't be disheartened to witness the rest of the field stream away from you even if the rest of the field is wearing a half-ton rhino costume or pushing a piano. If you maintain your speed then some of your opponents will come back to you in the latter stages when the race is not a race anymore, it's a queue. A sweaty slow-moving queue. Runners who dashed off too energetically and are now hobbling desperately like an epic trail of refugees in retreat from the motherland. You will pick these losers off.

Take all the onside refreshment on offer. You need the energy. And it's free. And when you finish, which you will, resist the temptation to sink histrionically to your knees and kiss the asphalt. One of your colleagues has probably already vomited there. Celebrate instead with a flute of sparkling Lucozade. Molest a steward. Wrap yourself in one of those tinfoil pashminas and dance a proud jig. Put your medal around your neck and never take it off again. Wear it everywhere. At work, in the shower, in bed. Wear it until an unsightly welt appears on your skin. You've earned that welt.
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Nick Harrison http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nick-harrison/
As part of the Fat Week initiative Channel 4 unveiled the Fat Fighters, a quartet of brazen gym-dwelling fiends whose diabolic scheme appears to be helping their victims shape up by dint of their own offensiveness. One refers to himself as 'Miller the Pillar'. He is a taut, well-honed bollock of a man, a slab of Muscle Beach meat who blurts vacuously "I'm not competitive because I know I'm the best".

Well, Mr. Pillar, you are not the best. I cup my manly bosoms at you. The only actions this show motivated me to was to look down to my spreading trunk, caress it like a beloved pet and thank it for insulating me from the hoary ravages of winter. And then perform elegant truffle-shuffles in front of the mirror by way of private protest. I am a Fat Defender, ready to take up my Toblerone as a weapon against those who seek to oppress bellies and bingo wings.

According to NHS stats, most British adults are overweight. We are a nation of fatty-boom-booms. We are Fat And Proud, to echo the title of Channel 5's contribution to Fat Week, in which folk brandished their off-the-hook obesity as an aspirational lifestyle choice. Although if fat pride is manifested in sad-eyed dancing to the sound of a hundred fetishists rubbing their thighs then maybe the Pillar's outlook should be re-appraised and I should sheath my Toblerone. It featured Big Girl's Paradise, an event intended to provide a sort of disco sanctuary for large ladies. But the promoter only sources venues without windows. Have fun, but do it underground and out of sight. Some aspiration.

Naturally a programme such as this isn't designed to provoke empathy or sympathy or any pathy for that matter. It just invites us to point at jiggly people with their boobs flopped out of their camisoles. It inspired me to look down again upon my stomach, and ponder that perhaps it still sits within manageable proportions.

The 74-Stone Babysitter on Channel 4 told the unfortunate story of a woman accused of killing her nephew. Its pre-occupation was not only with the intense finagling of the her legal team, but also the raw logistics of moving a person boasting the dimensions of a Ford Ka to and from the courthouse. I glanced again at the bulge above my belt, and thought at least I've got only one.

Fat Week is not an educational endeavour, it's an exercise in 'point and giggle' television. If anything is to be gleaned then it's to invoke the puritanical mantra, "moderation in all things". But with a modern adjunct, "complete abstinence from lifestyle programming".
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Nick Harrison http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nick-harrison/ Frozen Planet series was filmed in a zoo in the Netherlands and not the Arctic as the show purported. I was duped. I didn't spy the snot-nosed schoolchildren pressed up against the perspex barrier. Or the queue for Calippos at the snack shop. Or the immediate boredom etched on the little polar babies' faces as they realised they'd been born into incarceration and a life of being pointed at in the Low Countries.

This presents an issue for the type of person who feeds off the regurgitated scraps of the television fakery debate. I happen to think that sometimes the feel of wool pulled over one's eye is a pleasant sensation. The charm of the scene would have perhaps withered somewhat had David Attenborough been required to pronounce the joyless addendum "oh and by the way this was all shot in a plasterboard cubicle near Arnhem". We don't need this gobbet of administrative detail if we want to preserve the allure of gawping at suckling polar bears in the great white wastes.

Nature documentaries never aim to project complete realism onto our screens. Killer whales don't actually chew on penguins in slow-motion. The Antarctic landscape doesn't glisten and sweep like a David Lean epic, its inhabitants are not permanently viewed through a cinematic filter that would make a tramp's mongrel look like the most majestic of all God's beasts. There is always a hardy gang of cameramen on hand to boo a snowgoose into action, and a team of editors to snip together the most vibrant clips. Because animals can be humdrum too. I've been on safari. I've watched on agog as a wildebeest calf chowed down on its mother's droppings.

It's like an episode of The Only Way Is Essex. Except that the creatures in the wild are more capable of rational thought. In fact nowadays the BBC wildlife documentary producers are happy to break down the mystique and broadcast segments which uncover the mechanics of the filming process. Attenborough himself is wheeled in front of the camera in his parka, looking as if he's just been disinterred after centuries entombed under the permafrost.

Above everything, there is no sinister agenda to shooting fake polar bear-snuggling. We should laud the ingenuity of the technicians that created this ecological peep show. We shouldn't expect our film-makers to conquer the very obvious impracticalities of creating a shaft in the packed snow and then dangling an ill-starred cameraman into the icy lair of the polar bear. Attenborough explained today that there would be a risk that mummy bear will kill her own litter if approached by a human, or lunge for the unwanted visitor. I suppose watching a man have his face tugged off by a miffed polar bear might be viscerally entertaining. Bit too real perhaps.
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Nick Harrison http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nick-harrison/ MasterChef is venerable. It was born in 1990, when it was shown on Sunday evenings. Contestants would mash, grind and dice their ingredients. The host was Loyd Grossman. He would mash, grind and dice his vowels. Loyd left to make tomato sauce. But MasterChef flourished.

Today, there are versions of MasterChef shown in 26 countries. In the United Kingdom there have been 38 series. There are masterchefs on every street corner. You are never more than six feet away from a masterchef, armed with a tuile and a dollop of mash to smear artfully across your plate.

MasterChef has provided us with good chefs, bad chefs, celebrity chefs, amateur chefs, baby chefs, big chefs and little chefs. The current run is MasterChef: The Professionals, featuring participants who cook for a living. It is shown four times a week, which makes it almost as rabidly prevalent as Hollyoaks.

Masterchef: The Professionals is the most formulaic talent show on the television, even more so than its brasher comrades in the primetime slots. It follows a recipe, to use the weak culinary metaphor. It probably avoids public opprobrium because it lives in the salubrious environs of BBC2, next-door to learned neighbours University Challenge and programmes about geology.

The contestants are all the same: plucky, sweaty, shaky, identically ambitious. They all want to open their own restaurant, no-one just wants to make their lunch. They package their food in smudges, humps and tiny shards strewn across the dish like they've just sneezed up some venison. They tend to avoid the customary talent-show journey, they don't compete in remembrance for a dead step-aunt, although some of them do look like they learnt to cook in prison. When disaster befalls them, they are always gutted, always blame themselves and sometimes complain ruefully that "they put themselves on the plate", which can only make you speculate what they put in their hollandaise sauce.

The first challenges are designed to end in comic failure: veering from the barbaric, cutting a pigeon's head off with a pair of scissors, to the surreal, creating something that the producer just made up, like a Ukrainian meringue. All under the erratic eye of sous-chef Monica, who appears to be the victim of some tragic palsy which compels her to unfurl a bewildering facial firework display distracting her charges. It's like Phil Cool came back.

Clamber across that barrier and chef Michel lurks. Michel is like a kindly driving instructor. He enthuses and cajoles and encourages, but every word comes with the grave subtext that if you get it wrong you will die. Once Michel has spoken, Gregg repeats what he has just said but in a more earthy vernacular. And louder. Every episode he will bark "big flavours" at the unsuspecting hopeful, like he's selling big flavours on his market stall at Covent Garden.

If there was a MasterChef: The Professionals drinking game, a sort of bingo for familiar elements in the show, it would cause a cataclysmic run on new livers. You can boil an egg by it. Or as Gregg would put it: YOU CAN BOIL A BLINKING EGG BY IT. Before shoving it down his gob with a spoon.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.1117997 2011-11-29T03:52:20-05:00 2012-01-28T05:12:01-05:00

Nick Harrison http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nick-harrison/
But reality television has evolved. Structured reality is more ambitious. It sprawls. It has battered down the sides of the shoebox. The gerbils have escaped the laboratory.

Structured reality is a neologism created to make the distinction from actual reality, just in case any viewers thought it was a coincidence that a cameraman is present at every emotional juncture of our heroes' existences or that they gather in theatrically-lit discotheques. This persuasive sub-genre has scrabbled up the cathode ray and clamped itself onto our screens so durably the arbiters at BAFTA have instigated a new category to honour its successes. And a thousand flouncing thespians snip their academy membership cards up in protest).

Desperate Scousewives is the latest entrant into the fray, flying up on the standside rails like a thoroughbred at Aintree Ladies Day. Presumably the title preceded any format development, perhaps bounding forth from a list that included Home And A Weymouth and a racy chronicle of the Libidinous Residents of Ruislip, Middlesex And The City.

The show has already proved itself to be impressively offensive. A Liverpool MP has expressed his distaste even before the first episode has been aired, warning that this type of programming serves to bolster regional stereotypes. He is clearly familiar with the conventions of structured reality television, and the requirement to gather its protagonists in small herds of class and geography. Obviously he must watch The Only Way Is Essex in the TV room at the House of Commons. Or brought up to consider that televisions shows are like hair salons, never trust one with a pun in its name.

The first thing to note on watching the programme last night is that no actual wives appear during the action. So if you've tuned in to nurture your strange fetish for married women then switch over to Wife Swap or The Good Wife. There are, however, an abundance of Scousers. All of whom, it hardly needs commenting, are desperate.

Judging by its opening gambit, Scousewives clings safely to the template laid down by its southern cousins in Essex and Chelsea, opening with a conformist series of oddly stunted conversational scenes resembling the awkward preliminary stages of a porn film, and concluding with some party or function to usher in the histrionics. Which were provided in the large part by Amanda Harrington, who like the remaining desperate Scousespinsters, looks as if she fell through the trapdoor at the Hollyoaks auditions. Provoked by some unflattering tweeting by a man purporting to be 'officially Britain's most brutal blogger' (although he's yet to offer the correct documentation to support that claim), she flung a beaker of booze at him. And missed.

It remains to be seen whether the series will miss. Based on the relative popularity of its progenitors, it will probably scrounge together a suitable digital audience. Guilty folk who claim to hate everything it stands for, while furtively flicking over to it, like a vegetarian nibbling on bacon in the shadows of the pantry. And its cast will take their steps on the road to minor celebrity. Maybe finishing up, like their tangerine gods Amy Childs and Mark Wright before them, back in the shoebox.]]>