ALMOST forgotten, among its many other disappointments, is the fact that ITV once screened two series of I’m A Celeb in the same year.
A failure to observe the simple rules of supply and demand, back in 2004, that saw viewing figures drop by millions and not recover for nearly a decade.
It was a stupid thing to do then and an even more unforgivably dumb thing to do now the same headless ITV chickens have got another hit on their hands.
Facts and figures will never trump an overpaid executive with a bad idea, though.
So they’ve flown all the way to South Africa for the first Love Island of 2020, which started its latest run on Sunday night.
The only time I’ve been remotely excited about this one, though, was on Thursday morning, when GMB’s Richard Arnold revealed the production team were “worried about baboons breaking into the villa”.
Worried why? ’Cos Ollie Williams, the posh one, would shoot them? Or a pair of the baboons might go on to win the £50,000 and then host a Dancing On Ice spin-off?
It has to be a possibility, given the quality of the contestants who were led into the villa by the girls.
First to arrive were Lewis Capaldi’s ex Paige Turley, who’s had a song written about her (two, in fact, if you count Christina Aguilera’s Blank Page), and Siannisse Fudge, which as well as being her name also happens to be the 43rd position in the Kamasutra.
They were followed, sooner or later, by Leanne Amaning, Rochelle Humes’ sister Sophie Piper, tag-team twins Jess and Eve Gale and “democratic services officer” Shaughna Phillips, who, “wants to end up in Downing Street”. And probably will if Boris has got anything to do with it.
First impressions are notoriously unreliable but to these eyes, at least, they seemed neither as likeable nor attractive as standard-issue summer Love Islanders.
UNDERWHELMED
If I was disappointed, though, it was nothing compared to the underwhelmed reaction the boys got from the girls, who didn’t even budge for a couple of the early arrivals at the Coupling Up ceremony and had to be talked into moving for the remaining three.
The pair who drew a total blank were “landowner” Ollie and tiny Nas Majeed.
The others, in no particular order of arrival, were Mike Boateng, Callum Jones and coffee-bean salesman Connor Durman, who “got his teeth in Thailand”, possibly from an elephant sanctuary, thereby putting every serious game poacher in the Western Cape on high alert in the process.
But the most interesting character, professionally speaking, is Mike, who’s a policeman, which could suggest the production team were expecting Caroline Flack to attend, as could the lack of table lamps in the bedroom.
But they’ve got Laura Whitmore, and some people think this is a change of almost cosmic significance.
I do, in as much as she also hosted a South African-based ITV2 “Love Island sister show” called Survival Of The Fittest, in 2018, that was cancelled after one series due to dreadful ratings.
Otherwise, if you had to list the most important things about Love Island, I think Caroline Flack would finish well below the water bottles and only slightly above the bean bags.
The gig belongs to commentator Iain Stirling, who, even if he didn’t already sound slightly jaded by the whole repetitive process on Sunday, would certainly be smart enough to know there’s little public demand for this extra series.
There’s no telling, of course, exactly how badly the excess will damage the network and the brand, but Love Island deserves to fall hard and fast for ITV’s greed and stupidity.
Send in the baboons.
TV Gold
- Freddie Fox’s outstanding performance, as Jeremy Bamber, in ITV drama White House Farm.
- Piers and Susanna re-establishing their perfect “Jack and Vera” relationship on Good Morning Britain.
- Chunk dismantling “everything-is-racist” essay writer Afua Hirsch (re: Harry and Meghan).
- Ross Kemp’s Welcome To Belmarsh documentary.
- And SAS: Who Dares Wins legend Mark “Billy” Billingham opening a constructive workplace dialogue, in line with EU directives and Channel 4’s existing HR procedures, over Chris the Geordie’s failure in the shooting task: “C**khead, get here. What did you just do, you f***ing b***end?”
George is full of bull
TELEVISION proves, time and again, the biggest barriers to saving the planet and veganism are those people most in favour of the two causes.
Insufferable, public school smug-nuts, for the most part, like The Guardian’s George Monbiot who was last seen plotting “the overthrow of capitalism” on Frankie Boyle’s New World Order.
That’s had to be put on the back burner since the election, obviously, but George is now working on something even bigger, as laid out by a Channel 4 documentary with the chortling title Apocalypse Cow: How Meat Killed The Planet.
“It’s a radical plan for preventing ecological disaster”, apparently, which George intends to enable with a bit of retro-farming and some magic pancake dust he’s discovered in a Finnish laboratory.
It also transpired during the course of Wednesday night’s show vegan George has written the rulebook on environmentalism.
So it’s not only OK for him to fly to Helsinki to try some of those pancakes, it’s also fine for him to shoot and eat a deer because he’s decided there are far too many of them in Scotland.
That’s not even the most galling thing about Apocalypse Cow, though.
The real irony is that Channel 4, which financed the two hours covering this show and its accompanying programme Meat The Family with adverts for four car manufacturers, Virgin Atlantic flights, British Gas and Deliveroo (with Burger King and KFC), wants us to give up our addiction to meat eating and all the other carbon-spewing evils killing the planet.
A fair enough position, I suppose.
You first, though.
THE Graham Norton Show, Miriam Margolyes: “This Morning sent me a list of words I couldn’t say and one of them was one I’d never heard of. Have you heard of ‘munter’?”
Heard of it? We’re looking at it.
The mask slips for dim Rita
UNDERNEATH all The Masked Singer’s trippy outfits and other layers of stupidity, it’s now clear ITV has the makings of a promising television show.
Not this one, unfortunately.
It’s I’m A Celebrity . . . Get Me Out Of Here! – a programme that could really use the likes of Alan Johnson, Patsy Palmer and Justin Hawkins, as well as The Masked Singer’s bewilderingly dim “detective” Rita Ora, whose long list of men she wanted to find inside the chameleon outfit (Anthony Joshua, Stormzy, Lewis Hamilton etc etc) definitely didn’t include the lead singer of The Darkness.
The word “crushed” doesn’t begin to sum up Rita’s disappointment at the big reveal and she must now content herself with shouting the first randomly dense thing that enters her head. “Miles Davis?” “Helen Mirren?” “Heidi Klum?” “Ray Winstone?”
That’s the terrible thing about The Masked Singer, though. If you are naive and desperate enough to watch – and I certainly am – you will end up giving a damn about their identity and making a fool of yourself.
So let’s cut to the chase here. The showboating a*** inside the unicorn outfit is definitely John Barrowman.
The duck who once had 850,000 people singing Happy Birthday is probably Kim Jong-un.
Whoever’s inside the Queen Bee outfit will end up winning the thing.
At which point Rita Ora will almost certainly rip-off her own head to reveal . . . it’s Diane bloody Abbott.
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