Tuesday Night's TV (9/5/06)

Right. I suppose it's about time I addressed the plague which is sweeping our night-time viewing at the moment. The epidemic of Quizmania, The Mint, Cash Call, etc - a whole raft of programmes which constitute a single phenomenon; a cycnical attempt by the makers of TV to get money by targeting viewers at their most vulnerable/drunken/stoned hour. The idea is to phone in and provide an answer for some facile top 10 list such as 'Bands beginning with "the"'. While I'm sure that a whole host of people are calling in (with partners in the background shouting, "What about 'The Doors', Eileen ? I bet noone's said that!" - in fact people HAVE said 'The Doors' - about 53 times), the telly studio remains eerily devoid of interacting viewers. The primary sounds are the yelps of false bonhomie being emitted by the hospital radio DJ- presenters, and the cackles of Nadia from Big Brother as she falls off the wagon for the fourteenth time. Because whilst the poor, unsuspecting phoner-inners wait in a neverending queue for their six seconds on air and a potential £250, the producers gleefully rub their hands together knowing that each gullible, unsuccessful fool has contributed at least a fiver towards their all-inclusive this year. And when you combine the average intelligence of the viewer (one woman phoned in yesterday and said, "I'm going to go for......The Queen") with the obscurity of the actual answers (number two in this "Bands beginning with 'The'" list was THE SIMPSONS), you end up with a 'so bad it's very easy to watch for three hours at a time' form of telly. One host, Craig Stevens, is a metonym of the shambles which is The Mint. A man who resembles one of Buffy's vampire enemies, Stevens spent the majority of last night's programme sexually pestering his female co-host, making "ooh, look at her bristols" faces at his remote audience, and generally veering dangerously close to a harassment charge. Light entertainment indeed. This programme is like a digest of all society's worst vices compressed into one tawdry, depressing bitesize chunk. Still at least it keeps ex-Big Brother contestants out of prostitution, seemingly providing the sole source of PA's for the poor buggers outside of provinicial British nightclubs called 'Hollywoods' or 'Sha-Zam!'. We can only hope that such telly vanishes as quickly as it appears but the fabric of desperation which holds the whole thing together is too strong and I fear that there will never be a shortage of substandard presenters, compromised viewers, despairing ex-reality show contestants and greedy producers to ensure that this abomination stays on our screens for a long, long time.