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TV Guilty pleasures.

Started by rjd2, April 07, 2011, 06:45:45 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

SOTS

Quote from: The Tourist on April 19, 2011, 03:42:48 PM
I never miss Points of View, even though the people that write (and inexplicably, send in videos of themselves) are the most boring set of weirdos alive. I suppose I'm probably a bit more boring for enjoying it, though.

I hope it still has the fantastic theme tune.

The Tourist

Oh, they've only gone and changed it. Same basic tune, but all techno rather than the vocal "blah blahs".

Lee Van Cleef

Put another one down for Wheeler Dealers.  I have practically no interest in cars besides using them to get about, but I find that show quite a pleasant little lark, it's nice to see the cars restored to a degree of respectability, even if they are just whacking some grout on there and painting over it.  Certainly better than the comparable guff from the other side of the pond about the garages that always seem to involve fat blokes who spend more time arguing than doing what they're paid for.

I'm also big on terrible Crime drama.  The likes of Murder, She Wrote, Diagnosis Murder, Quincy M.E.  I suppose it's just brainless entertainment I can watch and switch my thoughts off for, and just spend an hour or so being entertained.

non capisco

Quote from: SOTS on April 20, 2011, 12:48:51 AM
I hope it still has the fantastic theme tune.

Adam & Joe's reaction to that reduced me to tears of laughter on a crowded bus.

Kishi the Bad Lampshade

Quote from: Detective John Kimble on April 12, 2011, 10:13:47 PM
I wouldn't class the original UK Kitchen Nightmares as a guilty pleasure, really - it was good for the format.  Ramsay's more helpful and encouraging (although in the usual Gordon way - he isn't going to break the lifetime habit of swearing at someone for being shit, and god bless him too), and the restaurants generally benefit from him being there.  Never really liked the US one...I'm not sure if Kitchen Nightmares ever topped the first episode though - the nightmare that was Bonaparte's.  The young head chef who'd clearly conned his way into the kitchen and couldn't even cook an omelette right, making Gordon vomit with a rancid scallop...things almost seemed like they were going to go ok by the end, but of course it all went tits up the moment Gordon left.  Bloody magic. 

That head chef at Bonaparte's is one of my favourite people ever to have appeared on TV. The perfect mixture of gormlessness, hangdog-ness and yet an inexplicable arrogance. what a wonderful world.

Blue Jam

Was he the French Pig? I normally find his swearing sounds a bit forced and put on for the cameras but I love this clip, he sounds pretty sincere here:

Gordon Ramsay French Pig Montage

NSFW, quelle surprise.

Ballad of Ballard Berkley

Ha! That's fantastic - a rare example of genuinely angry Ramsay swearing. If he was that splenetic all the time on television, I think I'd actually enjoy his programmes more.

Blue Jam

Censored version, apologies for the poor quality:

Gordon Ramsay kitchen nightmares USA uncensored 'French pig

Talking of great "characters" from reality TV, Bad Lads' Army had several. That show was always good value, every episode was like the Captain Clyde Jackson segment from the Crime episode of Brass Eye, but going for on a whole hour. I always half-expected Sgt. Rae to reveal the Brass Moustache:

Bad Lads Army - Sgt Rae (White Glove/ Dung Smuggler)

Spoiler alert
"I'M THE BUNNY!"
[close]

...and of course "EADINTHEBUCKETEADINTHEBUCKETEADINTHEBUCKETEADINTHEBUCKET":

Bad Lads Army: Private Smith & And His Beasting

MuteBanana

I'm pretty sure the best ever moment in Bad Lads Army is when one particular cretin threw his food tray about and the army guy with the random patches of hair on his face put him in some wrestling hold.

Blue Jam

My favourite moment was when one of the Bad Lads (I'm pretty sure it was Private Smith in the clip above) was accused of wanking in the dormitory. One of the female staff walked into Seargent Rae's office holding a crusty tissue and announcing "I have found evidence of man-juice, Seargent!" The alleged wanker denied the charge and was grilled by Seargent Rae, barking at him and demanding to know: "What do you do when you get the urge?" This was met with "I don't get the urge, Seargent!" and the exchange went round in circles for quite some time.

Probably... it's hard to choose a favourite moment, there was so much comedy gold. I've been enjoying clips on YouTube just now, I wish there was more up there- I only saw the last series and hadn't been aware of its existence before then. I did wonder if it was at all scripted but I was once told by someone who was ex-Army that the Seargent-Majors really do come out with funny lines and the point is to torment the recruits by forcing them to exercise while they're trying their hardest not to laugh.

Detective John Kimble

Quote from: Blue Jam on April 21, 2011, 06:34:48 PM
Was he the French Pig? I normally find his swearing sounds a bit forced and put on for the cameras but I love this clip, he sounds pretty sincere here:

Nah, Bonaparte's was the first English show.  This is one of the only highlights I could find on Youtube (although the whole episode's available on the suggestions)

Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmare - Bonaparte's Restaurant

Keep in mind that this is Ramsay's return visit to the restaurant, after he'd had a week of trying to get the head chef to show any promise at all in the kitchen (and nearly managing to succeed at the end, as I recall).  As I said - the guy couldn't even cook an omelette right.  AFAIK, the owner of Bonaparte's tried to sue Ramsay after the program and claimed that the downfall of her business was his fault, when anyone could see that clearly wasn't the case.

As far as Ramsay putting it on for the cameras...Hell's Kitchen.  A pretty awful show, all told - pretty much none of the chefs would ever be up for leading any sort of brigade ever and it's full of the usual American Reality drama, but it's often worth it for the service section as Ramsay absolutely lays into anyone who makes a mistake (quite right, too - especially considering how insane the mistakes can be, the rancid crab in this video being a prime example):

Hell's Kitchen Season 3 Uncensored Highlights

Of course, he bollocks his chefs for England in real life as well, so it's probably not that further over the top.  Boiling Point was full of Gordon's wiggings.       


Blue Jam

That's great, I do love a good bit of quality swearing. Maybe the UK restauranteurs and the competitors on The F Word just aren't as frustratingly stupid as their American counterparts and he has to force the swearing to compensate.

I see there are a few more compilations of highlights but I'll watch those later, I'm all sweared out after that first one.

MuteBanana

I remember downloading and watching Boiling Point years ago. Was a pretty interesting documentary. Ramsay was raw and harsh. Chances are television probably saved him from killing someone.

rjd2

Quote from: Blue Jam on April 21, 2011, 10:57:01 PM


I see there are a few more compilations of highlights but I'll watch those later, I'm all sweared out after that first one.


All the episodes on 4OD for those who care.

Link to the first one.


http://www.channel4.com/programmes/ramsays-kitchen-nightmares/4od#2922045

Harpo Speaks

Quote from: non capisco on April 20, 2011, 04:16:44 PM
Adam & Joe's reaction to that reduced me to tears of laughter on a crowded bus.

I was listening to that one the other day - 'Come on, that's not the real theme tune is it? "Blah bloobidy blah bah baya"?'

Famous Mortimer

My new guilty pleasure is

Off The Map

It's like Grey's Anatomy (apparently, I never watched it) set in a free clinic in the middle of the jungle. I know it's fairly awful, but by god I've stuck with it through 13 episodes and I'm probably there for good.

holyzombiejesus

Has anyone else seen Channel 4's 'Celebrity Five Go To...'? It's astonishing. Real car crash TV. One of The Supremes, a cricketer, Paula Hamilton, Christopher Biggins and Stuart 'The Brand' Bagges go to South Africa together and the staff of where they're staying have to vote them out. In the first episode, CB tried to get the (black) pool cleaner to iron his shirts. It's on at 5pm for the rest of the week and I strongly recommend watching it, if only for Paula Hamilton behaving really cuntily and weirdly (although I'm pretty sure she'll be voted out tomorrow).

Famous Mortimer

I caught a few minutes of it the other day when they were introducing the people and I did the "who on earth is that?" for three of the "celebs", and figured it wasn't for me.

Feralkid

I generally loathe reality Telly but reserve a strange fondness for Kendra and its parent show Girls of the Playboy Mansion.   Less for prurient reasons (blonde bimbos are so not my thing) but more for increasingly haggard sight of Hef, now resembling a more dapper version of Granpa from Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the escapades of Kendra, who manages to be weirdly likable, her awesome ditziness suggesting a level of humanity and relatability absent in the rest of Hefner's gals.   One glorious episode of Kendra has our heroine showing her new born son to her equally ditzy friends and them having a confused discussion as to whether males are born with testes or whether those develop later...

Scream Queens was awesome too.  An America's Next Top Model rip-off in which aspiring actresses competed for a "break out role in Saw (insert numeral)."   Having auditioned actresses for a low budget horror film once upon a long ago I can attest to the show's relative verisimilitude.   Every type of terrible actress was accounted for.   

Oh and while we're at it The Murdoch Mysteries, an awful Canadian period drama detective thing set in Toronto in the early 1900s and featuring a shop front mannequin of an actor in the lead.   His staggeringly poor performance and the show's utter lack of subtlety often propel it into the realms of inadvertent comedy.   Lately though every episode has him encountering a notable figure from that era like HG Wells or Tesla.   It's also one of those show's where the technology used to shoot it (pin sharp HD video) helps obliterate any sense of period.  Damn it that show needs grain.   

And Nina and the Neurons.   But only because I've some experiments I'd like Nina to help me with.   Crazed Scottish women with voices in their heads are, alas, my type.

   

Braintree

Quote from: holyzombiejesus on May 24, 2011, 11:59:21 PM
Has anyone else seen Channel 4's 'Celebrity Five Go To...'? It's astonishing. Real car crash TV. One of The Supremes, a cricketer, Paula Hamilton, Christopher Biggins and Stuart 'The Brand' Bagges go to South Africa together and the staff of where they're staying have to vote them out. In the first episode, CB tried to get the (black) pool cleaner to iron his shirts. It's on at 5pm for the rest of the week and I strongly recommend watching it, if only for Paula Hamilton behaving really cuntily and weirdly (although I'm pretty sure she'll be voted out tomorrow).

She wishes! Sheila Ferguson was in the Three Degrees. Prince Charles wanted to/did fuck her. She's also appearing in The Apprentice as Edna.

MuteBanana

I love the clips they play at the start of Eddie Stobart: Trucks and Trailers to make it seem more perilous.

"This is the last thing I wanted today."
*DUM DUM DUM*
"I don't know how much more I can take."
*DUM DUM DUM*
"If I screw this up, that could be it for me."

And all they're talking about is a red traffic light or the radio is stuck on Heart FM.

I did like last nights where the man was taking chilled food and his supervisor said 'If you get this wrong you could give food poisoning to half the North West.'. The driver had a mixture of fear and steely determination in his eyes.

Great show.

Detective John Kimble

Quote from: MuteBanana on April 21, 2011, 11:47:32 PM
I remember downloading and watching Boiling Point years ago. Was a pretty interesting documentary. Ramsay was raw and harsh. Chances are television probably saved him from killing someone.

(replying to a month-old post, but...)

As angry and shouty as Ramsay ever got, he wasn't anywhere near the level of Marco Pierre White, the guy who taught him.  The accounts of Marco in his prime are legendary - he made Gordon cry in the kitchen when he was a commis, shouted "if you were a horse, I'd shoot you!" at someone who broke his leg in the kitchen, threw pots and pans everywhere, the whole lot.  And despite all that, he was regarded as pretty much the best chef in the world at the time, and a whole generation of great chefs came up through his kitchens.  Much the same applies to Ramsay's kitchen at the time of Boiling Point - you see a guy like "Sarge" (Mark Sargeant) back then getting a whole load of raging Gordon abuse, and nowadays he's regarded as one of the best chefs in the country - same with a lot of other guys that appeared in that documentary (Marcus Wareing, Jason Atherton...).  Back when Gordon was in his kitchen and earning all those stars, despite all the rage and people tut-tutting at him, there wasn't (and probably still isn't) a young chef out there who wouldn't have chewed their arm off to work in one of his kitchens.   For a start, after a couple of years with him, you'd never need a C.V. again.

biggytitbo

There's no need to be so rude though, manners cost nothing.

#113
Britain's Best Dish

Everything about it is unmissably odd. The three judges sitting back and watching everything unfold on monitors with a running commentary so bland it could be worn by Adrian Chiles ('If he's not careful he may burn his biscuit*'). The contestants constantly give off fleeting looks that hint that their participation is anything but voluntary. All this pales into normality however when compared to the sheer menace of Mary Nightingale. If she's not getting dangerously close to the contestants and whispering to them as they cook in the most sinister way possible, she's walking away from them before checking her stride and looking back as if she's about to devour them.

Then of course, there's the ridiculously over the top opening sequences of the contestants back to back and staring down the camera. I'm not even sure what they 'win' for managing to get through a few rounds.


*NOT a euphemism

Ocho

Quote from: Feralkid on May 25, 2011, 05:28:16 PM
Oh and while we're at it The Murdoch Mysteries, an awful Canadian period drama detective thing set in Toronto in the early 1900s and featuring a shop front mannequin of an actor in the lead.

I remember when Murdoch first turned up on UK Gold (I think) in 3 TV movies, serious and downbeat in a glossy, suitable-for-export way.   Colm "Star Trek" Meaney was the boss and was genuinely unpleasant, refusing to believe fingerprinting was any other than voodoo.  Murdoch was introverted and tortured (played by Peter "One episode of Monk and presumably other stuff" Outerbridge).  I also recall that, like the evetual series, he had the hots for the police surgeon, but she wasn't available for the third movie so another character got promoted to love interest.  I was intitiall a bit annoyed when it came back as "Detective Murdoch: Steampunk Detective Who Looks Like He's Wearing Mascara" but after a while I grew fond of how obvious the executive meddling was ("Can we have a silly, young detective like Randy Disher in Monk?  Ooh, how about he meets Arthur Conan Doyle and his boss gives him the idea for Hound of the Baskervilles?").

Detective John Kimble

Quote from: biggytitbo on May 28, 2011, 06:40:29 PM
There's no need to be so rude though, manners cost nothing.

I've always heard that he's a pussycat to his workers outside of service.  It's just his way of dealing with that sort of high-pressure environment, nothing more - everyone's got their own style.  It's understandable - the sort of place Ramsay runs is the place where absolutely everything's got to be perfect.   

Feralkid

Quote from: Ocho on May 28, 2011, 11:10:40 PM
I remember when Murdoch first turned up on UK Gold (I think) in 3 TV movies, serious and downbeat in a glossy, suitable-for-export way.   Colm "Star Trek" Meaney was the boss and was genuinely unpleasant, refusing to believe fingerprinting was any other than voodoo.  Murdoch was introverted and tortured (played by Peter "One episode of Monk and presumably other stuff" Outerbridge).  I also recall that, like the evetual series, he had the hots for the police surgeon, but she wasn't available for the third movie so another character got promoted to love interest.  I was intitiall a bit annoyed when it came back as "Detective Murdoch: Steampunk Detective Who Looks Like He's Wearing Mascara" but after a while I grew fond of how obvious the executive meddling was ("Can we have a silly, young detective like Randy Disher in Monk?  Ooh, how about he meets Arthur Conan Doyle and his boss gives him the idea for Hound of the Baskervilles?").

I caught one of hose TV movies and it was genuinely good.  So yes, the resulting series is a huge step down and full, as you say, of very obvious executive tinkering.   Still there is something weirdly compulsive about how awful it is and its sheer clunkyness is ultimately endearing.   I note that the shopfront mannequin playing Murdoch also appears in another of Alibi's sub-par imports, the Deaf woman is a Fed procedural Sue Thomas: F B Eye.     

Ocho

Quote from: Feralkid on May 29, 2011, 08:56:31 AM
I note that the shopfront mannequin playing Murdoch also appears in another of Alibi's sub-par imports, the Deaf woman is a Fed procedural Sue Thomas: F B Eye.   

Oh, is that on Alibi now?  I used to watch it when it was on Hallmark and the hamfisted cheerleading for the Patriot Act and the War on Terror stopped it being a guilty pleasure for me.

I only saw the first two series of Murdoch before I left England, I find they're up to four so far and they go unashamedly steampunk in the third.  I'll have to rent the DVDs.

Feralkid


Actually its total embrace of steampunk makes me wonder if a smarter steampunk series is something we'll ever see.  Right now I'm watching for the same reason I used to watch bad sci-fi, when a genre you love gets so little airtime you'll watch anything of that ilk however shoddy.

Jake Thingray

I take it I'm the only one watching Britain's Got Talent? Alas, it's now at the point when the nutters have been dispensed with, highlights from that period included a woman whose idea of stand-up comedy was merely saying "Because I'm worth it" and "Garlic bread", then told the judges and the audience to fuck off, and two prats, Scottish I'm afraid, who called themselves The Ultimate Entertainers but spent their allotted time talking about their act instead of actually performing it. Still want to cum in Amanda Holden's face though.