Interesting to see all the
Lovejoy love on here, my parents were fans and I remember watching it with them and enjoying it, but I would have been about nine then and I also enjoyed
Bread. Seeing
Bread a few years back I was shocked at how bad it was and how it could have been so popular at the time, I haven't seen
Lovejoy for close to twenty years, I take it it's aged better?
Count me in as another
Come Dine With Me fan, I'm obsessed with it. Two friends of mine are even worse and have actually applied to be on the show. Both of them are neuroscientists and met my sister at my graduation. When we were all in the pub afterwards she was shocked and probably disappointed to hear all of us supposedly brainy people discussing Come Dine With Me and The X Factor rather than the origin of the universe and the meaning of life. I told her that after a hard day of lab work people just want to watch crap- which brings me to:
A lot of the crap on BBC Three, for sure. Sun, Sex and Suspicious Parents was a real favourite, if a real confirmation that I shall NEVER go to any of the places they visit. See also Don't Tell The Bride.
Shows that don't interest the menfolk as much, I imagine, are things like Hotter Than My Daughter and Snog Marry Avoid. The former is hilarious because of the slaggy mums berating their relatively normal daughters, and because the makeover lot ALWAYS make the daughters look worse than before. The latter, because of the catch-ups, and the sad reality that no-one ever sticks to POD's makeover, or at last go back to fake-tanning the shit out of themselves.
Oh SOTS, how did it take us three pages to get to
Snog Marry Avoid and
Hotter Than My Daughter? They're definitely my guilty pleasures, and that's coming from an unashamed X Factor fan who isn't guilty about very much. I enjoy the cheapness of Snog Marry Avoid, with the crap CGI of POD and "her" voice being provided by Dave Lamb's bitter little sister, and some woman who was in Atomic Kitten (I think). I also like observing POD's terrible misogyny- Public Analysis is shocking- "Of all the people we surveyed, 10% thought you looked Top Of The Class, 50% thought you looked like you looked Bottom Of The Class, and 40% thought you looked Back Of The Bike Sheds". Nice... I'm not sure I agree about the makeunders though, most of the standard ones are good but with some of the drag queens, dandies etc they just boring them up.
Hotter Than My Daughter is exactly the same programme but even worse/better and the mothers just leave you wondering how the daughters turned out to be so studious and well-adjusted, and how they didn't end up sending their daughters to
Brat Camp instead.
For all the criticism of BBC3 it does serve a purpose. I wouldn't miss it if it was scrapped, but... oh alright, I would a bit.
As for more recent programmes,
Love Thy Neighbour is a bit disappointing isn't it? On paper it looks like it would work but it just doesn't. It could be partly because the villagers aren't as bigoted as Channel 4's execs had hoped, and the really prejudiced people are most of the contestants for assuming all people in villages are friendly and happy to be aggressively campaigned at by overly competitive city-dwelling wankers. The first episode was horrible, with the Tory guy who was 100% politician and against the welfare state while wanting to be given a free house, and the other couple showing the massive cracks in their relationship, but somehow the whole thing just wasn't too entertaining.
I think I'll have to check out some of these wedding shows you guys have suggested, I have no interest in weddings and I think that's put me off but they sound fantastically bad.