Tip jar

If you like CaB and wish to support it, you can use PayPal or KoFi. Thank you, and I hope you continue to enjoy the site - Neil.

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com

Support CaB

Recent

Welcome to Cook'd and Bomb'd. Please login or sign up.

March 28, 2024, 11:30:45 AM

Login with username, password and session length

TV Guilty pleasures [split topic]

Started by PowerButchi, January 21, 2020, 07:48:41 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

PowerButchi

Doctors is so brilliant it makes me want to cry.

JesusAndYourBush

The Masked Singer.  I normally look down on the various tv singing contests with scorn but there's something compelling about this.

Bently Sheds

The Masked Singer makes me.laugh. The panel are guessing huge names in the entertainment world like Scarlett Johansson or Idris Elba and the singers turn out to be Patsy Palmer and Alan Johnson MP.

lebowskibukowski

Quote from: JesusAndYourBush on January 22, 2020, 01:14:27 AM
The Masked Singer.  I normally look down on the various tv singing contests with scorn but there's something compelling about this.
Agreed. The format is FAR too stretched out, though. Would work much better as a three or four parter over a week. Plus that Ken bloke is fucking awful, or is that sort of the point?

JesusAndYourBush

#4
Quote from: lebowskibukowski on January 22, 2020, 09:23:13 AM
Plus that Ken bloke is fucking awful, or is that sort of the point?

I'm not sure.  He just seems to be pissing about with his guesses and not taking it seriously (Maybe because he doesn't know any UK celebs and that's all he can do).   He was in the American version so I assume he behaved the same on that version.  Yes he's kindof annoying, presumably the Yanks liked him.  Donny Osmond is going to be replacing him for a couple of episodes, but I assume he lives in the US so he'll be just as clueless with his guesses.

lebowskibukowski

Quote from: JesusAndYourBush on January 22, 2020, 12:42:59 PM
I'm not sure.  He just seems to be pissing about with his guesses and not taking it seriously (Maybe because he doesn't know any UK celebs and that's all he can do).   He was in the American version so I assume he behaved the same on that version.  Yes he's kindof annoying, presumably the Yanks liked him.  Donny Osmond is going to be replacing him for a couple of episodes, but I assume he lives in the US so he'll be just as clueless with his guesses.

Good point. The chances of him correctly guessing the likes of Shaun Williamson or Johnathan Wilkes will be very slim indeed.

phes

#6
I dug out the old CaB thread on Skins to check if I have the correct opinion and apparently unanimously not. Stewart Lee also fucking hated it. And I can see that at first glance it looks seriously irritating and shite, but after two series of it I was suckered. Really loved the absurd and fantastical exaggeration of characters and scenarios, and how they pulled that rug several times with horrifically real moments and episodes. A lot of the criticism feels like it has come from a place of not allowing the show to unfold and show its true colours. Lee claimed that shows like Children of the Stones would have brought him -as a nerdy kid- comfort, but that Skins would have made him feel "more alone". This seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of the show, which is about being lonely in a crowd.The other surprising criticism that came up a number of times was that it was a middle-aged exec's wank fantasy about how life was for a young person, but the show was well known from the off as having recruited almost entirely young and inexperienced writers (mostly in their 20s) and consulting even younger people.

Not sure I'll bother past S2 though, with the reset

So I guess that's a guilty pleasure if everyone thinks it's utter shite

Quote from: Bently Sheds on January 22, 2020, 08:05:33 AM
The Masked Singer makes me.laugh. The panel are guessing huge names in the entertainment world like Scarlett Johansson or Idris Elba and the singers turn out to be Patsy Palmer and Alan Johnson MP.

As a Celebrity Reality TV consumer seeing Patsy Palmer, Justin from The Darkness, Teddy Sheringham and Kelis revealed has been amazing. Joel Dommett sucks rotten spider eggs though.

JesusAndYourBush

Quote from: confettiinmyhair on January 30, 2020, 04:05:18 PM
As a Celebrity Reality TV consumer seeing Patsy Palmer, Justin from The Darkness, Teddy Sheringham and Kelis revealed has been amazing. Joel Dommett sucks rotten spider eggs though.

We'll be getting 2 reveals on the next show!

And slightly spoilery, although it doesn't name any names... in a radio interview a couple of weeks ago Davina revealed that one of the people
Spoiler alert
is a professional singer who is deliberately singing in a different voice, and everyone was mindblown when they were revealed.
[close]

Blue Jam

Quote from: phes on January 30, 2020, 02:11:08 PM
I dug out the old CaB thread on Skins to check if I have the correct opinion and apparently unanimously not. Stewart Lee also fucking hated it.

Lee did a very interesting bit on it in Charlie Brooker's How Television Ruined Your Life. The gist is that if Skins is the teenage life you wanted (sex, drugs and excitement) then The Inbetweeners is closer to the teenage years you got (boredom, getting pissed on horrible gin, and crap cars). For us country bumpkins there's the even lower rung of This Country, but that's another thread.

Anyway, I watched the episodes of Skins that Peter Capaldi is in, expecting him to be good but everything else about it to be shit and I was pleasantly surprised. He plays Sid's dad Mark, who is harsh and angry and takes his frustrations out on his son, but who in turn is the least favourite son of an emotionally abusive father himself. The episode where his dad comes to stay actually really affected me, it's a chillingly realistic portrayal of parental narcissism.

Then again, those episodes may be a bit of an anomaly- the younger characters featured in those episodes are Sid and Cassie, two of the better characters played by two of the better actors. The Actor Kevin Eldon pops up too. I suspect I wouldn't enjoy the rest so much.

Only just realised that Nux from Mad Max: Fury Road is Tony Stonem, blimey.

phes

#10
Quote from: Blue Jam on January 30, 2020, 06:10:11 PM
Lee did a very interesting bit on it in Charlie Brooker's How Television Ruined Your Life. The gist is that if Skins is the teenage life you wanted (sex, drugs and excitement) then The Inbetweeners is closer to the teenage years you got (boredom, getting pissed on horrible gin, and crap cars). For us country bumpkins there's the even lower rung of This Country, but that's another thread.

Yeah I watched that clip and one of the first things he claimed was that the depiction of teens in COTS's and The Changes as uncomfortable, alienated and alone is far more realistic than the selfish, avaricious, sassy, cool and at home with sex and drugs teens in Skins. I'm confident he's not done his research and watched a generation of this show because his ideas about it are all very wrong. Claiming the kids are like anything in Skins and using that as a comparison is wrong, because they're all very different characters. I think he's also well out of touch and must have had a fairly sheltered upbringing. I'm ten years younger, we were inbetweeners, but the circle I grew up in was very much a less exaggerated Skins. And it was a big circle, we lived in a city. We were all very different people, but we danced, drank, took drugs, had sex, became mentally ill, died. It wasn't an unusual way to be

That was a fantastic episode with Capaldi and it wrecked me. The lad who played Sid was outstanding. There were a few arcs where the parents were cartoonish, self absorbed figures. It feels like they developed them from the young people's perspectives of adults and their problems, then wrote the resolutions from an adults perspective. It possibly would be my high point for the show, but it's absolutely not an anomaly. There's plenty of other excellent stuff and if you enjoyed that I'd recommend watching S1/2

Dex Sawash


Skins is one of my favorite shows, due for a rewatch. Maybe Effie has some fucked up kids of her own now.

Icehaven

I'm watching Dinner Date for the first time in ages. Someone's complaining that they've been on 200 dates and they were all awful, which just brings to mind the saying "If you run into one asshole, that's bad luck, if you run into 10 assholes, you're the asshole."

phes

"If you ran into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you ran into assholes all day, you're the asshole."

Raylan Givens

I've never had a bad date, which makes me wonder if I'm just oblivious to being an asshole

Andy147

I'm pretty sure I saw an article by Stewart Lee in which he said he'd changed his mind about Skins and that there was a lot more to it than he'd first thought.

Bently Sheds

The Stranger on Netflix. It's well daft. Set in a strange Americanised version of England that looks lovely but doesn't exist, with characters spouting strange Anglo American dialogue at each other. I'm just waiting for the chief of police to demand results in 48 hours or he'll have the main detective's badge and gun. It also features the world's slowest and least exciting car chase between a high spec Range Rover and a bog standard Honda Civic.

Jerzy Bondov

Quote from: Bently Sheds on February 01, 2020, 11:05:54 PM
The Stranger on Netflix. It's well daft. Set in a strange Americanised version of England that looks lovely but doesn't exist, with characters spouting strange Anglo American dialogue at each other. I'm just waiting for the chief of police to demand results in 48 hours or he'll have the main detective's badge and gun. It also features the world's slowest and least exciting car chase between a high spec Range Rover and a bog standard Honda Civic.
This is bollocks. Just watched the fifth episode last night. The three kids are in a sitcom while everyone else is in a crime drama. Due to a misunderstanding, the girl
Spoiler alert
laced her friend's joint with PCP which made him cut off an alpaca's head
[close]
. Absolutely hilarious. One of the most enjoyable things I've seen in ages.

Bently Sheds

Quote from: Jerzy Bondov on February 05, 2020, 09:40:59 AM
This is bollocks. Just watched the fifth episode last night. The three kids are in a sitcom while everyone else is in a crime drama. Due to a misunderstanding, the girl
Spoiler alert
laced her friend's joint with PCP which made him cut off an alpaca's head
[close]
. Absolutely hilarious. One of the most enjoyable things I've seen in ages.
The way this bollocks ends is utterly astounding. What puzzles me most is the positive reaction this steaming pile of plop has gathered online. Am I watching a different programme?

Jerzy Bondov

HA HA HA! What a crock of shit! Absolutely risible. My eyes hurt from rolling. Hilarious television.

DrGreggles

Quote from: Bently Sheds on February 01, 2020, 11:05:54 PM
The Stranger on Netflix. It's well daft. Set in a strange Americanised version of England that looks lovely but doesn't exist, with characters spouting strange Anglo American dialogue at each other. I'm just waiting for the chief of police to demand results in 48 hours or he'll have the main detective's badge and gun. It also features the world's slowest and least exciting car chase between a high spec Range Rover and a bog standard Honda Civic.

"This programme is: suspenseful"

Blue Jam

"NOVELTY FUNSY"

Thank you. This is even "better" than V Wars.

Poirots BigGarlickyCorpse

'Allo 'Allo. I know it's p r o b l e m a t i c and I'm ashamed of myself for laughing at it. But I like the characters, I like that they're all low-key shitty people, I like two or three overly complicated ludicrous plans colliding in hilarious ways. I like that it started as a piss-take of a Very Serious Drama and then became its own thing. And I'm a sucker for Doomed Love.

paruses

Quote from: Bently Sheds on February 01, 2020, 11:05:54 PM
The Stranger on Netflix. It's well daft. Set in a strange Americanised version of England that looks lovely but doesn't exist, with characters spouting strange Anglo American dialogue at each other. I'm just waiting for the chief of police to demand results in 48 hours or he'll have the main detective's badge and gun. It also features the world's slowest and least exciting car chase between a high spec Range Rover and a bog standard Honda Civic.

Haven't seen this one but it's a sister (or brother, you sexist) of that one with Dexter in. Someone with a production company really likes Harlan Coban novels and thinks they would be better set in, as you say, an Americanized Midsomer. They aren't. His books just about work with twist after twist read at a pace while you're waiting for a plane or having a troublesome shit. I don't think they translate to this slowed down mini-series format.

There are also a couple of his made as films and set in France that were a bit better because it was a continuous piece.

God know what they would do with a remake of Lovejoy - maybe set it in the future where antiques would presumably be more expensive.....

Blue Jam

Watching a bit more Plastic Surgery Unwrapped and I've just remembered who presenter Vogue Williams is. FFS, why would anyone marry Spencer Matthews?

Sebastian Cobb

Quote from: Blue Jam on February 10, 2020, 06:51:24 PM
Watching a bit more Plastic Surgery Unwrapped and I've just remembered who presenter Vogue Williams is. FFS, why would anyone marry Spencer Matthews?

Is that done by the same Food Unwrapped chump that phones up supermarket helplines and asks the phone grunts what's in specific products in a hectoring tone?

phes

I have started watching Waterloo Road when it came on iPlayer after something else. It's not always great, swinging between awful stilted/hammy shit and properly hard hitting stuff, but there is a certain relief and satisfaction in something that knows exactly what it is, after the last five years of highfalutin prestige nonsense

Blue Jam


Ham Bap

Been off work all week. Noticed that Darling Buds of May on ITV3 yesterday. Downloaded 8 episodes or so yesterday morning. It's one I've looked at on Amazon for a while but never bought.
Was on TV when I was 11, remember watching it on a Sunday night.

Nearly as close to the time the show is set (1950s) and since the show was on TV (1991) give or take a few years.

Anyway got a half bottle of vodka and sat and watched every episode yesterday.
Was fantastic. Nostalgia fest. Always sunny in the show and they're always pissing around in the sun drinking cider and what not.
Was snowing and pissing down with rain all day yesterday as I had a blast of sunny nostalgia from 1991 having a few vodkas.
Best day of the year so far.

keir

Quote from: Sebastian Cobb on December 30, 2018, 10:25:34 PM
Not really bad or ashamed of it, but I rather like Abandoned Engineering.

It feels a bit cheap - just some talking heads and drone footage for the most part, it'd look great if Yesterday was viewable in HD.

My favourite thing about it is that a lot of the talking heads are 'experts' given a Barry Shitpeas script, so they've got them in because they know stuff, but they're mainly saying "and you look it and you think cor, what's that? It's like something aliens would have done or something"

Sebastian Cobb

Quote from: keir on February 22, 2020, 09:53:11 AM
My favourite thing about it is that a lot of the talking heads are 'experts' given a Barry Shitpeas script, so they've got them in because they know stuff, but they're mainly saying "and you look it and you think cor, what's that? It's like something aliens would have done or something"

The military woman with the red hair is terrifying. Always at 100% WAR mode.