A Toby Jug full of piss apparently....
The one show arrived on our screens in 2007 and its agenda was simple: to be a light and airy magazine show with vaguely interesting guests and numerous segments filmed in the Trafford Centre, Manchester’s testament to Liverpudlian shopping.
Since then, it’s evolved from this initial idea to: knowingly be a light and airy magazine show with vaguely interesting guests and numerous segments filmed in the Trafford Centre, Manchester’s testament to Liverpudlian shopping.
Each week, Christine Blakely and, the ginger equivalent of an all knowing git, Adrian Chiles run us through numerous inane stories that serve no other purpose than to fill in the time before Eastenders. Actual stories I’ve seen over the last few months include:
- Pot holes and the repairing of
- Colour and the standisation of
- A warehouse filled with 70’s clothing and the finding of
- Old people and the euthanasia of
- Alan Shearer and the pointless of – Actually this may have been an actual interview with Alan Shearer
Each VT is bookended with Chiles looking off camera and pretending that this is all beneath him.
‘So, that was pot holes then… Interesting, eh?’ He smirks as the studio crew laugh along.
Oh, how they understand their position in life. This is just a bit of fluff. It’s for the old dears that have nothing to do but wait patiently for death, innit? In fact, one could argue it’s like The Word for OAPS. A few more tits and you’d never notice the difference.
As I say though, it isn’t always like this. When the going gets fluff, the fluff get fluffier. After Carole Thatcher’s rather ill-judged comment about a black tennis player, the show piled on the fluff even more. Oh look, here comes Gyles Brandreth with an amusing story about combing squirrels. Where was Chiles’s smirking after this report? Nowhere to be seen. Having been the person who grassed Thatcher’s backstage comment to the heads of the BBC, Chiles proved he knew which side his bread was buttered on. This meant everything went back to being supersweet and inoffensive.
But now we’re back to normal and Chiles, a man once described by Stewart Lee as like ‘being stuck in the buffet car of a slow-moving train with a Toby jug that has miraculously discovered the power of speech… A Toby jug filled to the brim with hot piss’, is back to rolling his eyes and looking off camera and making sure his cheque has been signed properly.
So, imagine my surprise last night, when The One Show took five minutes out from troubles of shaving pebbles to discuss the weightier matter of censorship. In particular, the movie Kick-Ass and the now infamous line uttered by 11 year old Hit Girl, ‘Which one of you c*nts wants to die first’. If you want the full story, do a bit of searching on the net, if you want a knee jerk reactionary version of the current story, here’s a link to the Daily Mail’s article.
Intermission – I don’t want to get into the whole should an 11 year old even be saying that, but just quickly, films like City of God and the Boy in the Striped Pyjamas show children as young as 8 or 9 in severe distress and the biopic Before Night Falls, has a 12 year old child having a 30 odd year old woman simulate a blowjob on him… So, as far as I see it, it’s okay if it’s ‘artistic’ but if it’s mainstream movie then we have to follow a whole new set of badly written rules. When, oh, when, oh, when will the liberals and the lefties and the commies get it.
Back to the show…
So, there sits a very bored looking Matthew Vaughn, the director of Kick-Ass, bracing himself for the barrage of questions.
‘Do you think it’s right for this child to be saying this?’ Christine Blakely asked in a serious tone she’d learnt looking at herself in the mirror
Vaughn responded that if you read the comic book or watch the film and take what is said and done in the right context then there’s really no issue. After this, the journalistic dynamic duo of Chiles and Blakely floundered. Frost vs Nixon this was not.
Chiles managed to lose all respect by telling Matthew Vaughn that he hadn’t seen the film yet, but he’d seen a picture and it outraged him. Chiles even offered the counter-argument that you can take anything out of context which seemed more reasonable to be coming from the defence as opposed to the prosecution. Vaughn suggested Chiles watch the film and Chiles attempted to bruise Vaughn’s ego by doing his usual eyerolling. Blakeley then later admitted that she had seen the film and that she enjoyed it despite its violence. 30 seconds later, Vaughn was thanked for his time and they moved onto the topic of hot curries.
Magazine shows don’t have to be hard hitting, but neither should they be smug or self-serving. However, if you deliberately aim to be like this than you will eventually be exposed. Chiles, a man used to interviewing monosyllabic footballers and Blakely, a woman I’ve yet to find an interesting fact about, were out of their depth. There was only so much hmmmming and furrowed browing one can do before you come out as being ill-educated on the subject you’re talking about. Chiles admission that he hadn’t seen the film showed disrespect to his guest and that’s why the interview began to drown.
One can only hope that next time they want to do a hard hitting interview, they get Carol Thatcher back in and get Chiles to explain why he grassed her up to the boss. Should be a little bit more entertaining than Harry Hill talking male nappies.
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