How not to live your life

I love Come Dine With Me, not so much the arrogant participants specially hand-picked to grate on each other, but more for Dave Lamb’s quite clearly p**s taking commentary. Last nights episode had one contestant questioning the validity of someone else’s food because they hadn’t caught the salmon themselves while they had made their own bread. As if anyone is going to go out of their way to catch a salmon, gut it, set up a smoking facility in their house simply to provide some nibbles for a televised dinner party. I’d have asked whether the miserable bint had grown the wheat herself or cultured the live yeast, before ramming my hand down her throat to retrieve the obviously not-to-her-liking bellinis.

I say last night’s episode, but if you look around enough, it’s on at least three times a day on various Channel 4 stations, all showing different episodes from different series, Mr Lamb’s commentary getting more ascorbic as each series passes.

And this is the problem with Channel 4, lots of time to fill, and not a great deal to fill it with.


Alan Partridge had the best ideas, good names to as yet uncommisioned TV series, ‘Away with the Partridge’ etc, all completely shot down in flames. That was, of course, in the fictional world created by Steve Coogan. When all ideas were shot, he began simply making up names, mixing random words until the only thing he could think of was ‘Monkey Tennis’, an idea so poor, so ridiculous that even Alan Partridge couldn’t believe he’d uttered the words.

So, in a tale of truth being stranger than fiction, one of the programs advertised during the break of Come Dine With Me was an American (shock) program ‘My Monkey Baby’. You have to ask yourself, which programs did they actually turn down before deciding that a program entitled ‘My Monkey Baby’ was a good idea ?

A classic example of a seasoned TV executive, bored to tears by endless variations of the ‘Big Brother / Jungle / Shark / Car crash / Celebrity’ roundabout decides to put words in a bucket and pick put several at random, demanding his new intake of “ I’m completely incapable of learning f**k all else, I know I’ll do media studies” graduates into making said program for the gullible post Big Brother audiences.

The other side of this, of course, is at the BBC where the absolutely stunning Psychoville and the sublimely brilliant How Not to Live Your Life are ostracised off to a deathly 10pm BBC2 slot with no advertising at all.

It’s enough to make you lose control and smack your monkey baby hard enough that’ll eventually it’ll give it an excuse to rip your throat out when it’s old enough. Oh look, it’s a monkey dressed up as a baby, isn’t it cute ? No, it’s a cannibalistic wild animal that thinks nothing of tearing it’s own family to death after the first sign of dominant behaviour or the first pang of hunger, what makes you think you’re so f***ing special, you American retard ?