TV Guilty pleasures [split topic]

[Blue Jam]

Oh yes, marinade also ends up getting reduced into a nice sauce so for me it just makes the prep a little bit easier. That tandoori chicken thing I mentioned, I pot-roast the chicken with some onions and end up with a curry sauce to serve it with.

I still think it's worth doing with fajitas, small pieces of meat absorb more flavour. Also with salt in the marinade I guess it's a bit like brining and it makes the meat a bit juicier.

[Blue Jam]

Got a Tesco Finest pork leg joint here, from the reduced section. It's a good 'un, it's even got some hairs on the crackling, it's proper. Just put it in a pot with white wine, lemon juice, ancho chillies, shallots, bay leaves and Liquid Smoke. Smothered the skin in a little bit of oil and salt and a fuckload of smoked paprika and bunged it in the oven at 150°C. In three hours' time I'll transfer it to a shallow dish, whack the oven up all the way and get that hairy crackling nice and crisp.

Why don't Americans use the metric system? They have barbecuing down to an exact science, why can't they use proper numbers? Hearing these almighty Masters of Meat talk in old money sends my blood to 100°C

[dissolute ocelot]

ITV, Sunday Mornings: Love Your Weekend with Alan Titchmarsh. Filmed on the Titchmarsh farm, montages of the English countryside, discussing trees, interviewing a goat expert, it's basically a cross between This Morning and Countryfile but pitched at an even older and sleepier audience. Eclectic range of guests, including Hugh Dennis and Lesley Joseph, comedy fans.

[buttgammon]

ITV, Sunday Mornings: Love Your Weekend with Alan Titchmarsh. Filmed on the Titchmarsh farm, montages of the English countryside, discussing trees, interviewing a goat expert, it's basically a cross between This Morning and Countryfile but pitched at an even older and sleepier audience. Eclectic range of guests, including Hugh Dennis and Lesley Joseph, comedy fans.

This sounds just like something Alan Partridge would pitch.

[confettiinmyhair]

Channel 4's latest reality tv show The Bridge. Narrated by James McAvoy, starring Trisha's daughter amongst others. It's a bit like Shipwrecked, but set in Wales.

[Blue Jam]

It's a bit like Shipwrecked, but set in Wales.

Like this year's I'm A Celebrity then?

The Trump Show on iPlayer. Just four hour-long episodes recapping everything The Furious Orange did as Leader of the Free World, via news clips and new interviews with some of the major players. Nothing new in it really but it's well put-together and it's one last chance to indulge in my fascination with the mad fucking bastard before he fucks off for good. Also it's just mad to see Steve Bannon there and realise that his liver still has yet to implode.

...and as a palate cleanser, 12 Puppies And Us, also iPlayer. A fly-on-the-wall documentary centring on twelve "lockdown puppies" who were all adopted during the Covid fuck down, following them as they settle into their new homes. Just a load of cute little puppies gamboling around while Rob Brydon lends his soothing tones to the narration. What's not to love?

Trump never owned a White House dog, this alone is proof that he is EVIL. Go and watch some lockdown puppies and chill out mate.

[Blue Jam]

12 Puppies And Us episode 2:

Spoiler alert

Meg the lively little Border Collie puppy with cute ginger eyebrows was showing promise as a sheepdog and her floppy puppy ears were just starting to prick up and she and her young owner were becoming the best of friends... and then a card flashes up to say that a month after filming little Meg got hit by a car and died

[close]

. Properly upset me that did. Actual welling up. You might want to skip episode 2 if you're as soppy for dogs as I am.

[petril]

This sounds just like something Alan Partridge would pitch.

it sounds like something that would end up being commissioned as an Alan thing. with the intent of doing it completely straight up and sincere

[Famous Mortimer]

CSI: Miami

Because I was bored and had the hard drive space, I downloaded the entire runs of the three CSIs (I don't count Cyber because it sounds too silly even for me). I'm trying to watch them season by season, not skipping ahead just in case there are any crossover episodes or backdoor pilots or whatever. I was prepared to be annoyed by Miami, because of the old meme about Caruso saying a really shitty pun while taking off or putting on his sunglasses.

Well, I'm a few episodes into season 2 of Miami and he's only done one pun so far, which is a shame, but...I just like it. Horatio Caine is a surprisingly decent central character, and if you're not annoyed by Caruso's mannerisms, you'll probably really like it. The two main male characters, Adam Rodriguez and Rory Cochrane, are either written to play it like they hate each other, or they actually hate each other, so that's fun to notice. If you have an episodic TV series hole in your life, fill it with Miami.

I also ought to finish watching Criminal Minds at some point, and as fun as it was having Aisha Tyler and Paget Brewster as the leads (in fact, it must have been a deliberate thing on the show to hire people who had major comedy chops), I gradually lost interest in it. Bunch of reasons - Thomas Gibson left, and although I agreed with them firing him, the on-screen explanation made no sense; it began to strain credibility that Joe Mantegna kept going into the field and being action-y, despite being in his 70s; and Shemar Moore's creepy non-relationship with Kirsten Vangness would have had them both fired from the real FBI, I assume.

I missed a big chunk of Criminal Minds, so just reading back over the Wikipedia page I was surprised that they fucked with the cast as often as they did in the middle chunk of seasons. They brought in Rachel Nichols (who I liked in "Continuum") for a season, but got rid of her due to "fan" backlash, then had Jennifer Love Hewitt for a bit, then Jeanne Tripplehorn...

In summary, I love police procedurals, despite firmly being in the ACAB camp. Well, I don't love "Law and Order", that show played the hounding of a former convict, trying to live a clean life, into committing another crime, as an honourable act.

[paruses]

Big CSI: "fan" (not really the right word) here. Each of the franchises has a different feel for me. A mixture of comfort viewing and guilty pleasure.

CSI:Crime Scene Investigation - comfort viewing extrordinaire. All of the heads of department are great but obvs Grissom is the best. Ted Danson second but a fair way off. I can overlook most of the moral righteousness and it's fairly low on the hypocrisy front. Like all the characters. (5 Daggers)

CSI:Miami - nice and sunny (a friend of mine used to say of Eldorado - "at least it's bloody sunny"). Gets progressively batshit as the series progresses on the unnecessary tech and the lighting in the lab/office would give you a permanent migraine (it's like a permanent twilight where it's neither light nor dark but at the same time very bright). Very high on the hypocrisy and moral righteousness which is a bit hard to stomach.  Dislike Eric the Sneer intensely. The rest are OK but I can only really remember H, Cali, Eric (boooo), the one who didn't clean his gun and got killed, and a little bit of one of the police officers (the woman). (4 Daggers)

CSI: NY - boring. (1 Dagger)

CSI: Cyber - kid's TV. Over-explained technical details (often verging on inaccurate), lots of tech Deus Ex-machina resolutions. Also quite distracting having Dawson off Dawson and The Creek in it. I quite liked Avery (one of the <forgot the name> family of actors and Ted Danson is entertaining if inconsistent - seem to barely understand what a fax machine is for yet in Las Vegas he had little trouble with technology. Fairly moral but not in your face so much and trips along with some potentially interesting storylines (but ultimately not). Extremely light and unlikely pleasurable viewing. (3.5 Daggers)

They have just rolled Cyber off My 5 and replaced it with Miami (up to S2 now). I only noticed the other day so will dig into it.

Out of curiosity - where did you get all the CSIs? Would love to binge through the original one if it's easy to find. I went through a phase of buying part-series on DVD from CEX but they've all been left behind when I moved from Ireland.

I also have thoughts about Criminal Minds but haven't seen it for ages. he Derek-Baby Girl dynamic was weird. Oh - Eric from Miami turned up on CM late-series didn't he to fill the smug void left by Derek when he left to run his BTL empire (which is what happened).

Have we got a police procedurals thread? I would quite like one unless people think it would be too jumbled. In essence I have no-one to share my pithy observations with.

[Bently Sheds]

I loved Miami purely for Horatio's ability to just materialise behind the bad guy at key moments, his sideways stance and his unerring knack of leaving every scene stage left whilst putting his shades on. Hilariously camp.

[Famous Mortimer]

I think I started a procedurals thread a few years ago, but I'd be happy to participate in another one.

There's a DVD clearance place near my house, box sets for $2 so I've picked up most of them from there. The choice is very poor but if you know what you're after it's useful.

Las Vegas is the best, definitely. One of the channels on the Pluto app on the Roku shows CSI, and I've caught a few episodes of New York on there. It seems fine, and I like the extremely New York member of the team, but the references to Gary Sinise's wife dying on 9/11 and him stood outside the WTC (which seemed to happen in every episode I saw) may get tiring after a while.

Miami is just hitting the sweet spot for me at the moment, though. I like Speed (who is, I believe, the guy who dies from an incorrectly cleaned gun in a future episode) and I wish the show was more pitched at his energy level than Eric's, who they really go out of their way to let you know every woman in Miami wants to have sex with. I enjoy that even in season 1 they were trying to do something a little different with the format - different sorts of crimes, episodes starting in different ways, races against time, obvious villains, all that.

[Attila]

_{I am happy that Holby City is back.}

[JesusAndYourBush]

Me too.  It's got awfully dark lately though.  I mean, it was never sweetness & light but bloody hell.

[Attila]

Cameron's storyline intrigues, to be honest -- how evil will they make him, what will he get away this time, and will anyone ever notice his evil deeds? (Considering they've never revisited the time Ric ran over his daughter's ex with a car and got away with it, somehow I suspect Cameron may get away with his deeds, too, when the writers get distracted by something else...or that no one ever caught Oliver Valentine out on faking his medical exams).

Still, the whole year of Paul McGann's mad scientist was a lot of fun. I just pretended he was his character from Paper mask.

[Blue Jam]

Snackmasters. Two respected chefs are challenged to replicate Quavers, Wagon Wheels, Domino's Pizza etc in their posh restaurant kitchens and then present their efforts to the execs of the firms who make the real thing to see if they can tell the difference. Presented by that creepy Fred bloke from off First Dates really really really hamming it up.

To be fair Fred is actually a good choice, clearly loving it and having a right laugh being all pretentious about shite food in his French accent. The show is somewhere between Masterchef and Egg Wallace In A Factory Shouting About Food And Bog Rolls. Five minutes in and I'm already convinced this is a masterpiece of crap telly.

"MEET YOUR CRUNCHY NEMESIS! Can you crack ze Quaver riddle?"

[Blue Jam]

Snackmasters episode 2: Two chefs are challenged to replicate a shite greasy Domino's pepperoni pizza.

One of them is actually Italian (ahahahahaHAAARRGGHHH) and his verdict of the pizza he must replicate is thus: "It's pretty horrible but I will do my best". He then does the sensible thing and goes to every supermarket in the vicinity in an attempt to source only the very shittest pepperoni.

The other chef is a Cockerneee whom Fred keeps calling "pretty boy" and who is so desperate to win the Snackmaster Domino's Challenge trophy that he actually invests in a brand new £8,000 oven

Spoiler alert

only to end up losing and having to flog said oven on eBay

[close]

.

It's fucking brilliant. I think this may genuinely be my second-favourite crap TV programme of all time, beaten only by the sublime Ramsay's Hotel Hell.

[Poirots BigGarlickyCorpse]

Judge Judy.

I don't care if it's all made up.

[Attila]

I'm not into cookery shows (I was more of a huge fan of Changing Rooms and Home Front on my twice/thrice annual visits to the UK back in the 90s and 00s), but that carnage sounds intriguing, Blue Jam.

Meanwhile, huzzah, Casualty is back from 2 January.

Looking at Twitter, fans are hating the Cameron storyline on Holby City, but it are funny, as far as I'm concerned. Sascha coming off the rails is good, too. 40 minutes is not enough for the bonkers storylines happening there at the moment.

[Blue Jam]

I'm not into cookery shows (I was more of a huge fan of Changing Rooms and Home Front on my twice/thrice annual visits to the UK back in the 90s and 00s), but that carnage sounds intriguing, Blue Jam.

It's not really a cooking show, it's more about the chefs trying all sorts of food science tricks and expensive gadgets while the show's resident "Snack Expert" (Jayde Adams, who is also a lot of fun and very enthusiastic and watchable) goes round the factory being shown the real tricks of the trade and the proper big industrial-scale machines to show us exactly how wrong the chefs have got it.

The main thing that makes this watchable is how the chefs get very, very competitive and get deadly serious about trying to recreate the taste, texture and appearance of some junk food, doing actual research and even spending crazy money just so they can take a big trophy with "SNACKMASTERS CHAMPION: QUAVERS CHALLENGE" engraved on it back to their posh restaurant.

Also when Fred tells the chefs who they'll be competing against they'll say something like "Oh wow, I love his food, he's a big mate of mine, this'll be interesting" while you can tell they're really thinking "What, that prick who poached my top sous chef in 2018, just as we were going for our second Michelin star? Right, I'll show him"

Best of all, I have just realised the current series is actually the second. Yep, there's an entire three episodes of series 1 left to watch. That's tonight's viewing sorted, looking forward to watching two Michelin-starred chefs going insane trying to recreate Pickled Onion Monster Munch.

[Attila]

Mmm, sounds ever more intriguing -- we've just run out of series 4 of the Crown, so might give this a whirl.

[Jockice]

I've only recently discovered this on a channel called Quest Red that I'd never heard of until I found it while skimming channels while in bed a few weeks ago. We're on seriwa four at the moment. I can handle it though. I've just got a touch of flu.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Strange_Addiction

[Glitch King]

.

[Blue Jam]

How do some of you struggle so much with edit glitches? I never notice glitches. Are you all just crap at cookies or something?

[Jockice]

How do some of you struggle so much with edit glitches? I never notice glitches. Are you all just crap at cookies or something?

Nah, it's just that my typing's shit. It fades into comparison with my handwriting though. You should read my Christmas cards. If they ever get to you.

[Blue Jam]

Nah, it's just that my typing's shit. It fades into comparison with my handwriting though. You should read my Christmas cards. If they ever get to you.

Oh no, I didn't mean that. I'm a vacillating shillyshallyer serial editor of posts myself and I seem to get a lot of these sneery "Glitch King"-type replies but I never notice any glitches myself. Got no problem at all with posts showing up as new when I've already read them.

Will just keep glitching away until you sneery fucks learn how to change your cookie settings then, mwahahaha.

Also why would I need to know when someone last edited a post? I'm not a detective or a libel lawyer, cigs mate.

[Glitch King]

☹

[Famous Mortimer]

Season 1 of CSI: New York now.

That they seem to be shooting at least some stuff in the real New York at least gives it an interesting visual flavour, and it's got a couple of characters that I like a lot (Danny and Donald the cop) but...it's too earnest. If you were that intense about solving crime you'd be a gibbering wreck within a few months of being a CSI.

It's why I think Speedle from Miami is the best character on any of the shows. He admits to a forensics nerd in one episode that he's got no particular passion for it, it's just a job for him, and him slouching round in oversized shirts and permanent stubble while everyone else is ultra-professional gives the show a different feel. Also, he very obviously hates one of his co-workers (Delko), which is a nice wrinkle. Knowing that I've got one more episode in his company (I assume he dies in the first episode of season 3, given the number of episodes he's billed in on IMDB), and that they'll replace him with some hyper-competent bore, is kind of a bummer.

Word round the rumour mill sites is that they're bringing the Vegas version back on CBS, and William Petersen and Jorja Fox will be reprising their roles. I kinda want them to bring Rory Cochrane back in that - have him playing Speedle's identical twin brother, make a vague reference to it in one episode, and then never bring it up again.

[JaDanketies]

Damn all we watch is guilty pleasures. Catfish, Judge Judy, Law and Order SVU, ThatChapter on YouTube...

[paruses]

Snackmasters. Two respected chefs are challenged to replicate Quavers, Wagon Wheels, Domino's Pizza etc in their posh restaurant kitchens and then present their efforts to the execs of the firms who make the real thing to see if they can tell the difference. Presented by that creepy Fred bloke from off First Dates really really really hamming it up.

To be fair Fred is actually a good choice, clearly loving it and having a right laugh being all pretentious about shite food in his French accent. The show is somewhere between Masterchef and Egg Wallace In A Factory Shouting About Food And Bog Rolls. Five minutes in and I'm already convinced this is a masterpiece of crap telly.

"MEET YOUR CRUNCHY NEMESIS! Can you crack ze Quaver riddle?"

Put the first one of these on (KitKat) on your recommendation ,Blue Jam the other day. Very grateful for it. Have now watched all but the Quality Street (S2 - Xmas one) now. It's really good.

Fred is fine - but I always found him a bit weird so he's jut normal to me. Is a good host. Didn't think I would like Jade Adams (Jayde?) but do. Turns out I just don't like looking at 1980s/1950s hybrid fashion. She's very good though.

Was gutted to discover there are only 6 of the things. They tease a lot of stuff like Marathons and Wagon Wheels so I hope they are going to be New Year releases.

I usually end up with a favourite chef - the most competitive ones are the boring ones - Daniel Clifford, and the scouse Monster Munch chef (who was verging on nasty). Faves have been Vivek Singh, the other Monster Munch chef, and Claude Bosi - loved his shameless attempts at cheating and his refusal not to make something that is crap. Also for a visual gag - Aktar Islam's head chef effortlessly carrying a tumble dryer out to the car; he is a big unit. I cant' imagine he does well in a hot kitchen.

BTW - Jason Atherton's oven cost 17,000 - it was Franco Italiano who paid a mere 8,000!

Favourite viewing at the moment. Really wish there were 8 series to plough though.