The great British piss-off

We Brits are, in many ways, a pretty stoical lot. Matters that would, in other countries, lead to cars burning in the streets or lorry-loads of cow dung being dumped outside council offices, often elicit an online petition or a sternly worded letter to The Times here.

You don’t need to look too hard for examples of our usually measured response to things we don’t like. In the south at least, we put up with an utterly laughable ‘service’ on Southern’s rail network. Certain areas like London and Brighton voted heavily in favour of Remain, only for the rest of the country to disagree. Result of these two things? Protests, yes, but hardly human sacrifice and mass hysteria.

I wonder how long it’s going to be, though, before the masses march on the offices of Love Productions with burning torches because there are some things which are guaranteed to incite British ire, and messing with the Bake-Off is one of them.

Just look at the front covers of the press and you’ll see the country’s response to what’s clearly a national catastrophe. A frenzy of punning the like of which the tabloids reserve only for the most important matters. ‘Going, going, scone’, ‘Stick your dough’, ‘Bake Off starts to crumble,’ etc. Pretty serious stuff, then.

In that spirit, you have to wonder if Channel 4 have bought a soufflé which is going to collapse the minute it’s served. The two presenters, Mel and Sue, have already stated they’re not going to move with the programme. I suspect the two experts, Paul Hollywood and Mary Berry, will follow suit. What exactly have C4 paid so many millions for, if they haven’t bought the very pillars around which the show’s character is built? A format which they’ll no doubt change anyway, and into which they will have to insert adverts and possibly those irritating sponsorship devices which bookend ad breaks.

The BBC, meanwhile, shouldn't find it beyond their wit to put together some other show with this same gang of four and a competition format. A colleague suggested, as a spin-off from Masterchef, it could be called 'Masterbake', but I fear that may be too strong a pun. I think, frankly, C4 have been sold a pup. Which the previous owners have put down before they deliver it to them, knowing they can always breed another one.

The fact is that, even if all four of the main ‘characters’ came over, and the format was left entirely unchanged, it sill wouldn’t deliver the same viewing figures it commands on BBC1 - people simply don’t watch Channel 4 in the numbers in which they do the Beeb, pretty much regardless of what they’re showing. Neither the channel nor the production company may give a damn of course, if they can monetise the programme in a way which you’re unable to on the BBC, but that will serve only to drive even more people away from it and make it even less the show that they’ve supposedly bought.

I’m not afraid to confess that I watch and enjoy Bake Off. I certainly won’t bother doing so on Channel 4 because, to reflect a criticism which I’ve seen more than once on the show when something’s gone badly wrong, the baker seems to have forgotten at least two of the main ingredients. They’ve taken a tried and trusted recipe for a reliably moist, delicious sponge, and they’re going to deliver a half-baked sourdough instead. You need only have a look at Channel 4’s Twitter feed to see that the British public are not amused. The online petition which I mentioned typifies the British response to such things has already started, but I fear that when they see what's actually served up the viewing public may, in this case, behave out of character and go straight to the 'sticking the heads of those responsible on spikes and parading them around London' stage. If they didn't know beforehand what the likely reaction would be, it must already be pretty clear to them what they've done.

Art for money's sake

I've just seen a trailer on one of the digital channels for a show called 'The Next Big Artist', or some such. It's yet another 'reality' show where people are pitched up against each other, and in front of judges, to subject their talent to criticism by those judges and the public alike. You get the idea.

Well, needless to say, I've got a few issues with this 'concept'. Firstly, it's totally, totally unoriginal. Doesn't anybody in TV even care that this is exactly the same as has already been done countless times before? Why do they simply take an idea and wring it out again and again until there's nothing coming out of it, and then keep using it anyway? Like a 10-times used teabag, this will produce a watery brew indeed. And did the producers of this particular strain not notice the inherent contradiction in an entirely formulaic programme being used as the vehicle to 'find' an exciting new artist?

But there's a greater issue with this incarnation particularly. I realise this is an issue with all these 'reality' programmes, but its particularly true of this one. In the case of music or talent shows, they inevitably become popularity rather than talent contests. But art, of all these forms of expression, is surely the most subjective, the most personal of them. One man's profound statement on the emptiness of modern culture and the hopeless nature of being is another man's bog nailed half-way up the wall. How can you make art a competition? It's not 8-year-olds being asked to design a Christmas card, for God's sake – it's going to be rather more earnest, rather more fractious than that. It'd make for even duller TV than it's likely to be if it weren't fractious, at least. And how can you possibly expect it to be judged objectively, even by professionals, let alone by the public, if indeed that's what they're proposing to do? Even if they can indeed be objective, isn't the whole point of art, modern art in particular, about the individual's response to each piece? A direct contradiction of objectivity in the first place.

So the concept is fundamentally flawed from the outset, in addition to all the other faults I've already complained about. So expect bonkers pieces put together by chin stroking, earnest, wilfully odd young artists desperate to make their mark in a crowded marketplace where actual talent is held, to my ignorant eyes at least, at a considerably lower premium than how fashionable an artist happens to be. Expert judges will nod sagely, explaining for us halfwit masses just how important what this glued-together collection of plastic triangles, stuffed kittens and human excrement has to 'say' is.

I say masses – I strongly suspect the audience for this latest clone will be pretty small. The problem TV has is that, unlike an artist, who only needs one influential, preferably wealthy nutcase to find Catshit Plastic And The Pointlessness Of It All worthy of two hundred grand to make it big, it lives or dies by the judgement and attention of the viewers. I suspect I may be with the majority on this one and giving it a miss. Sometimes the public are not bad judges, after all.

I'm an ordinary TV viewer... get me out of here

I can just about see it with X Factor for example, providing you put to one side the preposterous notion that it's a talent show and accept it merely as 'entertainment'. Strictly Come Dancing too, OK, I can see why people like that. But this is both depressingly inevitable and at the same time utterly incomprehensible to me. What the bloody hell do people get out of watching this bilge?

I had the misfortune, for the first time, to catch most of an episode this week. It will be the last time I do. I simply cannot see what's entertaining about watching Z-list celebs, predictably a mélange of on-the-career-down-slopers, people who were famous 30 years ago and people I've never heard of in the first place, subjecting themselves to the ignoble tasks demanded of them by this show. What is anybody, anybody getting out of watching some poor, desperate, overweight, too-many-facelifts luvvie sod dunk their face into a writhing box of cockroaches? I simply can't understand it.

And there's always one person on it who disappoints you by going on there. What the hell does Willie Carson need to demean himself on this for, given the career he had and the esteem in which he's still held by the horseracing community? He can do himself no good on there - he's betting his dignity and it's not a bet he can win on this vehicle.

I also thought that the days of using live animals to create entertainment were largely behind us, so why is it acceptable to watch them eaten alive, crushed, smacked aside, whatever, simply because they're invertebrates? Are the same people who watch this also campaigning against fox hunting? Or telling the Spaniards they can't fight bulls? Morally, what's the difference? Do the producers of TV programmes now get to decide which animals can be disposed of for sport and which cannot?

Throw in those insufferable, smug gits Ant and Dec, and you've got a show which pretty much ticks all the boxes that dictate which TV I avoid. It need only feature contestants sporting Palace shirts as some kind of unspeakable, ersatz uniform, and be sponsored by the latest off-shoot of a mobile phone company (probably some ghastly all-mushroom ready-meal outfit), and you'd have the full bloody set.

But over 11 million people can't be wrong. Can they?