I am pretending to write my (now six days overdue) conference paper, while watching
Where's Elvis This Week on youtube. It is
weird. It's a sort of panel show hosted by Jon Stewart, filmed in the US but as far as I can tell only aired in the UK. It only lasted for five episodes. This is probably because there is no desk, no clearly delineated rounds and worst of all no points. What were they thinking?
It's from the autumn of 1996, and Diana is alive, Fergie is on the front of newspapers, Tony Blair seems like a hopeful young chap, and there is derision at the idea that John Major could possibly have an affair. The whole point of the show is to talk about British/American cultural differences, and it's okay, but a bit dull and obvious. The guests are odd. Each episode had one woman (out of four guests), but for four of the five episodes the female guest was on the American side, so it was peculiar. The episode with the British woman was also the worst episode. But then the woman was
Lowri Turner, who I'm sure is capable of bringing down any television show you care to name with an appearance. (I love the way the wikipedia article points out that it was surprising that Daily Mail readers picked up on her racism.)
The majority of the male guests were comedians, (Arthur Smith, Armando Iannucci, David Baddiel etc), while none of the women were. This really irks me. It happens a lot on
The Panel as well. I do mostly like the women who are on that, but it's just really obvious that there's this weird split between women and comedians.
Last week's
News Quiz, though, had Sandi in the chair of course, and then Sue Perkins
and Carrie Quinlan! I think that's the first time I've ever heard that. Even before, when Simon Hoggart hosted, it was rare to get two women at the same time (I remember Sandi remarking on it when she was finally allowed to be on a team with Linda Smith), and three is very nice indeed. And it was good, as though it were a perfectly normal occurence and not a hideous feminism-gone-mad, what about the menz tragedy.
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irrtum. I had found out that Urbis is closing at the end of the month (to become the National Football Museum) so we went there. I'd never been before, and I am kicking myself now because it was great. We saw two of their exhibits, one looking back at their best successes, and one about Manchester and television. In the best of there was a series of boxes glued together that you could stick your head in and look at different dioramas, and a show of youth manifestos (Rachel and I were rather dubious about some of them). The TV one was great, talking about Granada as acting in opposition to the BBC and widening the voices represented on TV, showing clips of programmes and news events.
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timeasmymeasure
