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Where Feebles Dare!

Posted in American TV (General), American TV Shows, TV Dreams with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 4, 2012 by Tom Steward

Last week I was in Mexico and then I came back and got a little sick (and then I rode the cups again…). My body only started to resemble a burst gravy dam on Friday, the day after returning, but now I’m starting to think that I was in some sort of hallucinogenic fever state the night before because I could’ve sworn I saw Hollywood actor-director Clint Eastwood hold a conversation with a chair while an audience of magenta elephants cheered him on. This was supposed to be a blog about sitcoms but, hell, Thursday night at the Republic National Convention was supposed to be about Mitt Romney! So as live television scuppers the plans-and we can only hope the dreams-of a national political party, it also forces me to reconsider what to write about this week. The delays of being a human colander and a holiday weekend has meant that I’m getting to Eastwood’s RNC speech long after it passed seamlessly into the zeitgeist and changed our everyday language, so that words like ‘chair’ now have new dictionary definitions such as ‘surrogate for American Presidents who are the subject of a race hate campaign by lying idiots’. So I’m only really going to be adding to what’s already been said.

Firstly, I don’t hold with the rationale espoused by many commentators that the 82-year old Eastwood’s display was a by-product of an emergent senility. This man stars in, produces and directs an average of 3 movies a year, none of which look easy to make or star Adam Sandler. He still has his wits about him. Secondly, I’m not sure the performance was as leftfield or bizarre as some newscasters have made out. In the same way you can detect the John Ford and Sergio Leone influence in his many superb westerns, it’s easy to see what Clint was going for on the night. The delivery was reminiscent of the bashful stutter-shtick of James Stewart-an actor who held a few extreme views of his own-and the one-sided dialogue with the chair a homage to the actor’s performance alongside an imaginary rabbit in the classic comedy Harvey. There’s more than a touch of Bob Newhart’s try-and-guess-the-other-side conversation sketches in the way Clint’s responses to Banquo Obama would imply the absurd statements made by the unheard speaker, and cover for potential obscenities.

‘This is my friend Barack’   

No-one who’d seen any of the coverage from this convention could possibly be surprised at the vindictive and guttural tone of Clint’s personal attacks on Obama or felt any discontinuity between Eastwood’s portrayal of the President as a lowdown despot with the vocabulary of an Exorcist-child and the convention caricature of the Commander-in-Chief as a 21st Century black Capone running America as a racket with all the class of a divebar drunk. So why was Eastwood’s speech so remarkable and unusual? For my money, it’s because the debacle was shown live on TV. The Republicans had engineered their primetime line-up with Stalinesque precision; omitting delegates from the extreme wing of the party, bumping up the limited edition minority speakers to create a smokescreen of Republican diversity, and manufacturing (or more appropriately outsourcing) the image of Romney as a human male…largely by having his wife and five children attest to the existence of his sexual organs.

Mitt Romney: he does it with girls

The real-time collapse of this primetime-machine was a wonder to behold. As Eastwood entered against the video backdrop of a silhouetted still from The Outlaw Josey Wales which made Clint look like he has guns for fingers and what sounded like a Kenny G version of Ghost Riders, you’ll have never seen so many happy racists since the Rodney King tape went mail-order. Vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan appeared to have tears in his eyes like a childhood hero was at his birthday party. Within minutes of Eastwood’s live-TV re-make of Fight Club starting, Ryan looked like he’d stumbled upon Eastwood trying to make out with his mother in the kitchen while Clyde the Orang-utan ate his birthday cake. Only live TV can do that. What’s more, for a party intent on editing and re-writing the history the last 12 years of American politics, this was one event that could not be manipulated, because it was seen by millions all at the same time without stops. Eastwood gave an unspinnable speech and the Republicans just had to grin and bear it. And grin they did, and whoop, and egg. They too cannot now pretend they did not enjoy Clint’s despicable behaviour. We all saw you!

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Olympicks

Posted in American TV (General), American TV Shows, British Shows on American TV with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 20, 2012 by Tom Steward

In the last few weeks I’ve been viewing events in my country through a telescope. I don’t just mean that I’ve been watching from a distance but also that I’ve been seeing them filtered through another nation’s television. I’m speaking of course about NBC’s coverage of the London 2012 Olympics. In some ways it’s been a cultural revelation. It’s evident from how our ethnically mixed population was depicted in the coverage that the majority of Americans don’t recognise us as a land of diversity. This was demonstrated most strikingly when two Asian (our definition not yours, US readers) spectators-who to a native’s eyes were clearly British citizens-were picked out by the camera to signify the lengths people have travelled to get to the games. I never thought Dizzee Rascal’s presence at the opening ceremony needed an explanation but apparently-even in the post-Iris Elba era of US television-it does.

Black people in Britain: who knew?!

But this culturally out-of-touch tone to the coverage was not reserved for Brits alone. W. Kamau Bell’s comedy news show Totally Biased re-played some extraordinary footage of NBC’s Olympic anchorman Bob Costas rhapsodising about African-American gold medalist Gabby Douglas. Costas’ rhetoric made Douglas sound like a student at Little Rock in the 1950s and at a time when the demographic of young African-American girls includes the President’s children! Others in US TV were patently embarrassed about how NBC treated British culture and history. Jon Stewart’s Daily Show reported that an opening ceremony tribute to the victims of the July 7th London bombings was cut to make way for a Ryan Seacrest interview with Goldfinger-of-swimmers Michael Phelps. Insensitive, yes, but with such ceaseless spectacle it would have been difficult to know what to cut. I probably would have lost the 10 minutes of Mr. Bean dicking around to Vangelis, but that’s just me.

A fitting tribute to the dead?

Not that I’ve been particularly sensitive to the country hosting me. G wanted me to high-five every US Gold Medal, and why shouldn’t she? Team USA had some shit-hot performances this time round-well, if that kind of superlative commentary is good enough for NBC it’s good enough for little old me. It’s excruciatingly difficult to congratulate the USA for the same reason that people don’t generally root for the Empire in Star Wars or Man United in anything. It’s also hard to explain this without seeming spiteful, or a Communist. Lending my whooping voice to Team China simply because they threatened to topple the US in the medal stakes probably didn’t help my cause, especially when goading G about China overtaking the US in manufacturing. It might seem like post-imperial bitterness (also known as ‘Britishness’) but good things come out of rejecting the prevailing empire, the United States for one.

Go China!

Seeing the Olympics in America is a timely reminder that over here success is unquestionably a good thing. From what I’ve seen of the British media’s coverage of Olympics, ambivalence about the jingoism of commentary on Team GB’s medal victories began to seep in after a while. Some observers were perturbed about the propaganda uses of such rhetoric at a time of political failure while others, such as TV sports anchor Gary Lineker, vigorously defended the national media’s right to admire their athletes’ achievements. No such dilemma in the US. In fact, NBC coverage was so patriotic it even suggested that the USA helped other countries reach their Olympic glory. In a report on the rise of athletics in Grenada, it was heavily implied that the country couldn’t have won a medal in this sport were it not for the US’s intervention against Communism occupation forces in the 1980s.

Brought to you by the USA

In the same red, white and blue vein, I was struck by how little of the other countries competing I saw in NBC’s coverage, particularly in primetime slots. I realise each nation has to privilege its own participation but I expected an attempt at portraying a rounded view of the games, which never came. Isolationism is an accusation frequently levelled at US newscasting, so I suppose it shouldn’t come as a surprise. It certainly wasn’t surprising that the US won a gold medal in all the segments leading the coverage. Other notable tendencies of NBC Olympicasting included the pointless post-event interview in which reporters tried to brainwash the oxygen-deprived athletes with pre-prepared soundbytes which they were made to repeat,  as if they were victims of a lobotomy. Another was the Olympic-branded franchise of teaser trailers for NBC’s Fall schedule in which every cancellation-fodder sitcom was rendered in slow-motion as though prestige is somehow contagious.

Animal Practice: disqualified from the tournament

 

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TV Highlights

Posted in American TV (General), American TV Shows with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 13, 2012 by Tom Steward

I’ve been in the US since June so here’s a round-up of my TV highlights thus far on this visit:

  1. James Holmes in Court (ABC News)

Courtroom footage of real-life Batman villain and ComiConvict James Holmes at his arraignment was broadcast on news programmes just days after shootings in a Colorado cinema. With his Day-Glo-red hair and look-at-me-I’m-crazy mannerisms, it was the most absurd court TV since O.J. Simpson tried to avoid prison by pretending to be Michael Jackson. The Joel Schumacher-worthy performance of mental illness also recalled the trial of New York Mafia boss Vinny ‘The Chin’ Gigante, whose insanity defence was founded on pyjamas. With the orange afro and mad-cap expressions, those who had just woken from a coma they’d been in since the mid-90s may have thought that Carrot Top finally lost it after the prop comedy business went south.

  1. Hoarding: Buried Alive (TLC)

Unlike Bravo who’s every series is a staged-reality variation on Dallas, rival reality network TLC likes to get its hands dirty from time to time. Case in point is Hoarding: Buried Alive which documents the lives of those who by choice-and various undiagnosed mental illnesses-clutter their homes until they resemble post-apocalyptic shantytowns. It’s an archaeology programme of sorts, a search for the lost civilisation of deposit-return. One gruesomely compelling episode saw a mutually-traumatised couple discover a Jurassic Park-quality fossil of their beloved pet Ratcat preserved in faeces betwixt cabinet and wall. In their world of elaborate denial, it becomes disrespectful to put the cat in a bin bag but loving to let him rot for two years in a sewage Breville.

  1. KUSI News Weather Report (KUSI)

In times of extreme weather it’s invaluable to have a meteorological perspective on conditions. That’s why I was so pleased that the weather report on San Diego’s TV station KUSI consisted of the words: ‘Oh wow! It’s really hot out there today’ blazoned across the screen in volcano-red letters with a melting dissolve graphic. Add in a weatherman who squeals like an extra from Deliverance as his signature intro, and you’ve got the kind of local news reporting that would make Ron Burgundy proud!

  1. KFC Online Commercial (ABC.com)

No I’m not turning into Nana Royle! It’s simply that the words ‘Mash potatoes and gravy’ are now etched in my sense memory, following an attempt by G and I to watch an episode of The Bachelorette on ABC.com. As a way of retaining control over viewers’ exposure to advertising in the digital age, networks keep the ratio of content to commercial from broadcast airings in their online streaming. What makes it exponentially more annoying is that it’s the same couple of spots recycled ad nausea. Every few minutes, a KFC commercial which begins with a grandfather asserting his right to choose ‘Mash potatoes and gravy’ as his chosen side, would automatically pop up like a clock cuckoo with bad time management. Has anyone looked into whether James Holmes was a regular viewer of online TV?

  1. Tommy Lee Jones and Meryl Streep on The View (ABC)

Two famously reticent and short-winded Hollywood actors being interviewed by four separate talk show hosts asking questions from all sides? What could possibly go wrong? Presumably as a publicity ritual, stars of relationship comedy Hope Springs Tommy Lee Jones and Meryl Streep were packaged-at what looked like gunpoint at the very least-on to ABC’s late morning magazine show. Streep buried every routine answer beneath deep swallows of nervous laughter and Jones employed the evasive language of a guilty politician to provide the most oblique responses possible. Jones resembled a mute husband on a property programme and Barbara Walters resorted to coaxing elaborations out of him like it was a speech therapy session for a stroke victim. It was can’t-look, how-bad-can-this-get television of the highest order.

  1. Sam the Cooking Guy (Various Stations)

Billed as the ‘everyman’ cook, San Diego-based food writer and presenter Sam Zien’s TV vehicle proposes to ‘make cooking casually understandable’ but could equally be an elaborate ploy to give Anthony Bourdain a coronary. Sam’s cooking philosophy could be described as ‘can-to-plate’ and his method ‘food-arranging’. The production is brazenly shoddy and so is the eat-by-numbers approach to the art of cuisine. In a segment I caught recently, Sam innovated with hot-dog condiments and cursed himself for not buying a turkey frank for his Thanksgiving-themed dog. It’s one thing to lower the culinary bar on TV cooking shows but another entirely to forget the pre-made ingredients.

 

 

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All the Single Maybes

Posted in American TV (General), American TV Shows with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 3, 2012 by Tom Steward

Most American TV is so chaste it makes me feels like I hail from a nation of sexual deviants. If Jersey Shore recalls the buffoonish innocence of an end-of-run episode of Saved by the Bell, the UK version Geordie Shore is more like the grim disillusion of Screech’s sex tape. A lot of this is down to repressive censorship practices in US network television, not to mention the deeply conservative corporate owners of some stations. But TV tends not to reflect the openness towards sex in American popular culture. Comparatively there is far more sexual repression in British attitudes, and this comes out in my vehemently prudish reaction to ABC’s The Bachelorette. Like most of the over-50 relatives that feature in the later stages of the programme, I’m uneasy with the way the show’s design promotes promiscuity whilst pushing the dogma of monogamy-as if one leads naturally to the other.

Does he have brown hair?

As The Bachelor/ette is one of the few hit US reality series that doesn’t have a British doppelganger, some introduction is required. Basically, it’s a dating version of Guess Who? . Each year, one man or woman (increasingly a contestant from previous years) goes through a seemingly endless 10-week process in which they have multiple dates in various spots across the country and globe with several members of the opposite sex who run the gamut from bland to unhinged. As the series goes on, the eponymous singleton eliminates one or a couple of contestants per week by denying them a rose like some demented flower Nazi. After weeks of simultaneous and group dating-in which the show begins to eerily resemble the scene list from a porn movie-the pool is whittled down to two, until a winner emerges and becomes a fiancé. It’s a perfectly normal road to marriage…if you’re James Bond.

No Rose For You!!!

It’s now a cliché of the white noise surrounding the programme that romantic relationships between the contestants are doomed to failure. The marriages are reality TV versions of shotgun weddings, with a digital video camera with high colour contrast aimed at the grooms’ heads instead of a firearm. No-one involved with the show ever seems to attribute this to the fact that the participant is compelled to split their affections equally across partners or that the series gives the contestant a chance to try out each of the four finalists sexually in turn in the sleazily-named ‘fantasy suite’-another nod to the conventions of the sex industry. The situation flatters the producers immensely, with post-publicity in the tabloid scrutiny of the couple’s troubles and splits keeping the brand visible out-of-season. It also makes a hoard of familiar show faces single again, putting them back in the rotation for future series.

Back for a second time!

The bravado and the carefree playfulness of the contestants in the first few weeks are all well and good. But it’s when the contestants start to declare their love for each other and meet their respective families that the façade of true romance starts to look as false as the Vegas-Roman pillars that replace load-bearing walls in reality shows. As if anyone with an ounce of self-respect would continue to go through the motions of a game show with someone they cared for that deeply. It’s hard to accept that the contestants’ families would be comfortable consenting to their loved one being exposed to so much hurt. The show gets a lot of dramatic mileage out of suggesting in the editing that the parents will object to their child’s pluralistic attitude towards love. With some judicious, Bravo-style shot displacement, however, this all seems to come up dung-smelling roses in the end.

Daughter Ricki-the most talked-about child on TV

This past season of The Bachelorette threw a human-shaped spanner in the works. Competitor Emily, a former show winner whose relationship had ended, was now in the driving seat with her pick of suitors. Those in contention for the fantasy suite decided it was too tawdry, not least because Emily has a young daughter at home. Once Emily recognised compatibility and fatherly qualities in Jeff-albeit not before the final show-she ended the competition and sent other potential fiancé, Ari, home. So has the programme finally gained self-awareness about its detrimental effect on long-term relationships? Not exactly. The finale was roundly ridiculed-even by other network shows such as Jimmy Kimmel Live!-for killing the tension of a closing rose ceremony and effectively ending a half-hour early. ABC’s salvage operation centred on promoting Bachelor Pad, a spin-off set seemingly entirely in the fantasy suite with partners for everyone! It’s the Bachelor/ette without piety.

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Watching Telly with Americans

Posted in American TV (General), American TV Shows, Americans watching British TV with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 11, 2011 by Tom Steward

Over the past few weeks I’ve had a taste of my own media medicine. I’ve been watching British TV with an American and absorbing rather than catapulting those oh-so-clever anthropological field notes about the bizarre idiosyncracies of a national TV culture. And what’s even more humbling is that I’ve been doing it with someone far, far better at it and more succinctly expressive than me (see-that sentence only needed one ‘far’). G stayed with me in July and from time to time we embarked on the daunting prospect of sitting down to watch British TV. I say ‘daunting’ because I want G to move here next year, and it felt like the onscreen lack of Real Housewives after their most recent divorces and Kardashians sporting the previous week’s surgical alterations might set back the emigration propaganda campaign several ages. G found a lot of British culture in catch-up mode, especially when it came to fashion, so finding programmes on TV we had watched together in the states months before weren’t too much of a surprise for her, though it was pleasantly for me. I thought we were at least three or four years behind. Turns out we are on the meat (great drama, comedy and reality) but not on the gristle (celeb fucking and shitcoms)-thanks ITV2!

 

Keeping up with the Kardashians...barely.

 

 

But we had a bigger problem than an out-of-date hat. British TV was ‘weird’, ‘so weird’ and ‘weird’. For G, it was as if Britons had collectively decided to substitute a working TV set in the corner of the room for a 19th Century ventriloquist dummy with its mouth sprung to repeatedly gawp the word ‘Mummy’. I vigorously protested this as a case of cultural alienation but didn’t exactly have the backing of the TV stations themselves, who throughout the month defected to G’s side by broadcasting footage of old men arguing with Simon Cowell about the existence of a Worzel Gummidge musical before Pertwee-lisping through pop hits or swapping their tried-and-tested flagship mobile spectacle reality shows for season finales where half, quarter and minus wits get berated in four rooms by several regional accents. Round One to G.

The Apprentice Indoors

 And Round Two to her as well. It was through G that I realised something that had never before occurred to me; that American TV, even the rough stuff, is by and large far more innocent and sanitary (I mean this more than sanitized-you’ll see why when I tell you what show made me realise) than British TV. What was the breakthrough programme? Why-eye, Geordie Shore, the Return-to-Oz style dark sequel to Byker Grove. An identically-designed British re-make of MTV reality hit Jersey Shore, it eschews the likeably harmless original premise of laughing at mutantly muscled, beboobed and tanned buffoons for an exponentially grotty and lewd indoor dogging video and creepily crass cock-size discussion show. All the lovably hare-brained schemes and dopey catchphrases of the original sunk  sewage-like into ruthless dirty-dicks campaigns of professional fornication and fuck-punctuated verbal cesspools. I initially thought this was just censorship differences but it’s also about our predilections as a nation for sleazy Sodom-and-Gomorrah docs set in seventh circles like Ibiza and late-night town centres. Why we want these on TV baffles me just as much as why we want them in reality. G said all that in one word: ‘nasty’.

Byker Grove was never like this...

Some of G’s confusion derived from how British TV was scheduled and broken down. She found the advert breaks interminably long, which at first I refused to accept from an American, until I realised that US TV commercial interludes are short but frequent, and just because UK TV is covertly irritating in its spread of adverts doesn’t mean it’s any better, worse in its sneakiness possibly. US TV timings are rigorously routinised-all programmes begin on an hour or half-hour. We’re far more casual with our timings, at least on terrestrial TV-a 10-minute documentary on bees here, a 10 no 12 minute news spot there, oh look, there’s an independently-made short film that’s exactly 3 minutes long for some reason. I can see how it would irritate someone brought up on regimented TV time, but I was left feeling rather proud of our irregular randomness.

There were some notable successes. G was an instant addict of Come Dine with Me, proving that it is a faultless universal formula (something like ‘Idiot + House + Cooking x4=Compulsive Sneering’) and that the world is brought together by its response to the show’s contestants with the global chant ‘Where do they get these people?’.

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