The best of the bad Christmas bunch...
With the last of the Ferrero Rocher finally consumed at tellytunes Towers, it's time to break free of the Christmas-induced vegetative state and get back to normality. Well, as normal as spending half your spare time writing about TV and TV themes can be...
So, how was your Christmas and New Year telly viewing then? If it's anything like mine, pretty dire I would imagine! It's always much easier to criticise though than to compliment, so I'll begin with the positives...
Firstly, who'd have thought that the Vicar of Dibley would take the Christmas TV Ratings crown? And, more alarmingly, who'd have thought I'd have watched it AND laughed at it. Certainly, not I - or, I would imagine, a large percentage of the other 12.something million viewers who, like me, had probably lost the ability to move and stretch for the remote by 9pm on Christmas Day night and ended up watching it by default.
The storyline was as schmaltzy as ever and most advancing punchlines could be spotted more clearly than a Buncefield smoke plume, but somehow it was very laugh-out-loud funny. (I blame the Christmas sherry.)
Channel Four's Big Fat Quiz of the Year also proved a much bigger laugh than originally anticipated - with David Walliams' schoolboy strop at not winning making for priceless TV. After catching various bits of the show again on repeat during the more baron gaps in the schedules, I'm still yet to decide how much of it was a comedy act and how much was genuine sulking.
Through a Christmas spent largely sharing the same TV as my wife, mother, mother-in-law and gran-in-law, the deluge of soaps was unavoidable. But hats-off to Emmerdale who managed to come up with some corking laughs and the best soap whodunnit since JR Ewing and Phil Mitchell were both perforated by gunfire. While admittedly "Who pushed Tom King through the window of his first-floor bedroom?" doesn't quite have the same ring to it as "Who shot JR?", the contrived build-up was still hugely entertaining. Personally, my money's on Batley the dog, back from the dead and out to avenge his previous owner Edna Birch.
Other shows which went down well in chez tellytunes were:
The Sarah-Jane Adventures - proving that Doctor Who spin-offs can work
After Thomas - the perfect Boxing Day night cosy drama featuring the brilliant young acting talent of Andrew Byrne
Doctor Who - still nowhere near as good as is should be but Catherine Tate proved slightly less annoying than expected and it made for a good escape from the post-Christmas depression of December 27th
Derren Brown's 'Something Wicked This Way Comes' - Still can't work out whether I like or loathe the guy, but the show made for fabulous watching.
Right that's enough of the positivity. Now onto the post I really wanted to get off my chest...
~~steve~~
www.tellytunes.com
posted by ~~steve~~ at
1:07 pm
So, how was your Christmas and New Year telly viewing then? If it's anything like mine, pretty dire I would imagine! It's always much easier to criticise though than to compliment, so I'll begin with the positives...
Firstly, who'd have thought that the Vicar of Dibley would take the Christmas TV Ratings crown? And, more alarmingly, who'd have thought I'd have watched it AND laughed at it. Certainly, not I - or, I would imagine, a large percentage of the other 12.something million viewers who, like me, had probably lost the ability to move and stretch for the remote by 9pm on Christmas Day night and ended up watching it by default.
The storyline was as schmaltzy as ever and most advancing punchlines could be spotted more clearly than a Buncefield smoke plume, but somehow it was very laugh-out-loud funny. (I blame the Christmas sherry.)
Channel Four's Big Fat Quiz of the Year also proved a much bigger laugh than originally anticipated - with David Walliams' schoolboy strop at not winning making for priceless TV. After catching various bits of the show again on repeat during the more baron gaps in the schedules, I'm still yet to decide how much of it was a comedy act and how much was genuine sulking.
Through a Christmas spent largely sharing the same TV as my wife, mother, mother-in-law and gran-in-law, the deluge of soaps was unavoidable. But hats-off to Emmerdale who managed to come up with some corking laughs and the best soap whodunnit since JR Ewing and Phil Mitchell were both perforated by gunfire. While admittedly "Who pushed Tom King through the window of his first-floor bedroom?" doesn't quite have the same ring to it as "Who shot JR?", the contrived build-up was still hugely entertaining. Personally, my money's on Batley the dog, back from the dead and out to avenge his previous owner Edna Birch.
Other shows which went down well in chez tellytunes were:
The Sarah-Jane Adventures - proving that Doctor Who spin-offs can work
After Thomas - the perfect Boxing Day night cosy drama featuring the brilliant young acting talent of Andrew Byrne
Doctor Who - still nowhere near as good as is should be but Catherine Tate proved slightly less annoying than expected and it made for a good escape from the post-Christmas depression of December 27th
Derren Brown's 'Something Wicked This Way Comes' - Still can't work out whether I like or loathe the guy, but the show made for fabulous watching.
Right that's enough of the positivity. Now onto the post I really wanted to get off my chest...
~~steve~~
www.tellytunes.com
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