Embarrasing Secrets

It’s about this time of year (read: summer) when I usually find myself watching a quite appalling amount of dodgy “reality” television. Without really trying to, I’ve seen a shocking amount of this year’s Big Brother, but oh, if only that was the worst of it. Recently we’ve been watching another series of the incredibly poor Joe Millionaire, courtesy of that bastion of quality television Fox, via Channel 4, in which a bloke from Texas pretends to have lots of money in order to get women to like him (aided for some unexplained reason by Australian Prime Minister John Howard, pretending to be his butler, who is in on the scam). Because they’ve tried this before, for this second series Fox had to go pimping for female contestants in countries in Europe that didn’t get the original series, but you can tell it’s an American show because they’ve chosen to subtitle everything the women say, for the benefit of the hard of thinking, despite them all speaking perfectly good English (all of which rather reminds me of when MTV subtitled the Gallagher brothers in documentaries back in the mid 90s), but for some reason they choose not to do this with the chap’s Texan drawl (or for that matter, little grinning Johnnie Howard’s Aussie vernacular). At the same time, Channel 4 risk confusing us by forcing us to watch Average Joe, a similar dating-concept show that aims to show how there’s more to love that skin-deep beauty, in which a “beauty queen” gets to choose from a selection of average blokes (and she of course proves that there’s more to love than superficial looks by picking only the best looking ones). It’s worth watching if only for the comedy hypocrisy of the title sequence during which a deep voiceover poses the question: “can there ever really be love between a beauty and a be.. an average joe…?”

And on top of this, Sally (for it is all her fault of course…) is making me watch ITV’s latest attempt to get a slice of the cheap-but-gets-the-ratings reality TV pie by importing Australia’s The Block, a show in which crap telly finally eats itself by combining the twin telly hells of property rennovation and house-related infighting.

Where does it end?

Oh for a happier time when I could waste my life watching a good drama or some new comedy, instead of wasting it watching events masquerading as “reality” but actually just being a cheap way of filling an even expanding amount of airtime on an ever increasing number of channels.