Beckii: Schoolgirl Superstar at 14
I’m currently on a camping trip in the Scottish Borders, and I was very foolish not to have packed any form of television set to take on holiday. Luckily though, I have with me my computer and my 3G-enabled phone, with the BBC iPlayer mobile application installed on it – so I can at least get a little bit of telly in when I’m camping.
Deary me though, when I got to Scotland, I found there was nothing on the iPlayer I really wanted to watch. So to solve that little problem, I picked the first show the Beeb had on offer, which just so happened to be a documentary titled Beckii: Schoolgirl Superstar at 14 (BBC Three). It didn’t really appeal to me, but I went along with it and sat through the entire programme.
Beckii: Schoolgirl Superstar at 14 follows a fourteen year old schoolgirl called Rebecca, who just so happens to be a superstar – in Japan, anyway. The show tells the story of how Rebecca Flint, an everyday, cheerful girl from the Isle of Man, uploaded several videos of herself dancing to Japanese songs on YouTube, before she found herself an enormous fanbase in Japan and was offered her very own record deal. Since then, she has performed an ensemble of songs all over the country in perfect Japanese. (But then again, how do I know? I can’t speak a single word of that language, so as far as I am aware, Rebecca could be singing about awful, terrible things. Maybe the 2001 Foot and Mouth crisis, or last year’s postal strike. I doubt it though, seeing as she is very, very popular overseas.)
When she is performing, Rebecca turns into Beckii Cruel, sort of making her the Manx equivalent of Hannah Montana, except everyone knows about her real identity and her dad isn’t a pretentious, has-been prick – he actually seems quite nice. EDIT - Holy crap, guess I missed the part of the show when he came across as being quite greedy. I suppose he is kind of like Billy Ray Cyrus after all. Beckii’s dad is a police officer, so he’s obviously knows his stuff when it comes to online privacy, parental controls and everything else of a similar nature. It’s very lucky he is her father, because as you can probably imagine, Beckii attracts an awful lot of bad attention on the internet.
Towards the end of the show, we saw Beckii opening a mountain of birthday presents sent in by her loyal YouTube viewers, most of which are Japanese. We see Beckii unwrap a huge case containing a large bass guitar, which we learn has been sent to her home on the Isle of Man by her supposed biggest fan. We also learn that Beckii and her family have met the man face to face and have said he was “polite but quiet”. We also learn that although Beckii does like him, she does sometimes feel “uncomfortable” in his presence. The picture then cuts to Beckii’s mum, who claims there is a “big age-gap between them” and that the man knows that they “will never be girlfriend and boyfriend”.
At this point in the programme, I literally shouted at my phone (which got me a few looks from the other campers, but I digress). Yes, Beckii’s parents are very responsible and very caring, but that entire scene made for pretty bizarre viewing. It makes me ill to think about it, but no man living on the other side of the globe would fork out a large amount of money to purchase a top-of-the-range Fender bass, put it in a giant case and then ship it to her unless he thought he was going to get some sort of reward out of it. Thinking about it thought, I’m probably jumping to massive conclusions here, and the fan might just be a kind-hearted individual that seeks joy in watching children smile and has absolutely no intention harming her in any way, shape or form. The guy’s probably nice, and I’m just awful and judgemental.
Anyway, after that comes the punchline – Beckii’s just been given an expensive new bass, but she’s only had about two lessons on how to play the instrument. She attempts to play, but gives up after two strums. “I guess I need to learn more,” says Beckii, or something along those lines.
For the final part we see Beckii in the studio recording her first song for British release. Compared to her Japanese songs, which were tolerable and mildly catchy, her new one, titled “You Can’t Kiss Me”, isn’t too good – in my opinion anyway (I don’t want to come across as more of a twat as I already have, just in case there is a very slim chance Beckii is reading this and I have upset her). Her Japanese songs are much more … well … Japanese, with a similar style to Plus-Tech Squeeze Box. On the other hand, her new British attempt is more mainstream pop than her Japanese ones, yet I don’t understand why she feels the need to sing in a nasally American accent. If you watch the show, you will find out that she is extremely well-spoken. Still, you might like it. Watch the show to find out, yeah?
I’d recommend you watch Beckii: Schoolgirl Superstar at 14, just because it is utterly surreal to see a British teenager transform into a Japanese idol, all because of a silly little video sharing website. Let me end this “fantastic” review with a cliché (that just so happens to be true) and say that Rebecca “Beckii Cruel” Flint is one of the few real role-models this generation has. If she can make a decent living in a different country by making her own dances to popular Japanese songs, then surely anyone can. And that’s something we can all learn from.
Long live Beckii Cruel.
Jesus Christ, what a terrible way to end a review. If you would like to watch Beckii: Schoolgirl Superstar at 14, it has been permanently preserved (until gets removed due to copyright violation) on YouTube, with part one right here.
July 30, 2010
My Pet Shame
One thing I will always be grateful for are television catch-up services. Before these existed, it was so difficult to watch a show you had no intention of watching when it was first on telly, but now you can watch all sorts of crap thanks to fancy services like BBC iPlayer and 4oD. They’re also very useful for watching programmes you did want to watch but missed because you forgot they were on or you were busy doing something else, but I’m trying to focus on the negative and the bizarre, not the positive and the practical.
For the first time in about a year, I used Sky Anytime today. Sky Anytime is one of these catch-up services that can be accessed only by Sky+ subscribers from the main Sky Guide, just by simply pushing the pretty red button on their remote control. Unlike catch-up websites, like BBC iPlayer and 4oD, where viewers can pick any of the programmes that have been on any of the BBC’s or Channel 4’s stations in the last week, Sky sends your Digibox a selection of shows in the middle of the night, via satellite, while you’re asleep, without you knowing. When you wake up, you are greeted with a variety of visual treats, courtesy of Rupert Murdoch, which is very nice of him. Proof if proof were needed that not all evil billionaires are completely evil.
Without Sky Anytime, I would never have found about the delightful My Pet Shame (originally broadcast on Sky1), a programme about misbehaving animals that is strangely similar to ones that have already been on BBC and ITV channels in the past. You know the type of programme – it’s like Supernanny, a show about how to control tiny, screaming creatures and how to stop them shitting all over the floor. My Pet Shame is more or less identical to Supernanny, except these tiny, screaming creatures are covered in fur, feathers and scales too. Thank goodness for Sky Anytime, otherwise I would have been completely oblivious of this fantastic programme for the rest of my life.
My Pet Shame is fronted by Joanna Page, the female half of Gavin & Stacey. Despite the fact that Gavin & Stacey was rather quite funny (even though it was written by James Corden), this has to be the funniest thing Page has ever been in. My Pet Shame isn’t funny like the classic scene in One Foot in the Grave when Victor Meldrew is buried in his back garden, just leaving his head sticking out of the ground, but like when a cheap satellite channel keeps experiencing a mixture technical problems and malicious phone calls from foul-mouthed viewers. My Pet Shame is nothing like a glitch-riddled public access show, but it is without a doubt as funny as one.
You might say that it’s unfair to compare My Pet Shame to the programming a low-budget Sky channel. However, if you were to actually sit through a mere forty-eight seconds of the show, you would change your mind, and possibly the channel. The title sequence alone is a rollercoaster ride of laughter – for me anyway. A flatulent dog’s arsehole flashes on the screen, which isn’t something you want to watch at teatime, especially on Sky1 HD. To demonstrate the dog’s illness to the disgusted audience, a little cloud escapes from its anus, turning My Pet Shame into a television re-enactment of a copy of the Beano in less than a minute. After some shots of some grumpy animals, the titles come to a close and viewers are treated to a shot of a terrifying vet holding a tiny little light, looking directly at them as if to say ‘Bend over, please Sir.’ Again, really not nice to watch.
Other subjects on this show are a dog called JD who eats his owner’s knickers and the shit of other dogs, a Siamese cat called Tigerlily who beats up the other Siamese cats he lives with, a bloody big rabbit called Ralph, and a vicious cockatoo called Honkey. Every animal gets about five minutes on the show, with footage showing them misbehaving, talking heads from their distressed owners and some advice and support to said owners from a sympathetic Joanna Page. They are then transferred to the resident vet Mark who then gives the owners a bit more advice and support, this time a little less sympathetic and a bit more practical and useful. I know it sounds bad, but I kept half-expecting Mark to suggest to the owners that their pets should be put down – I suppose that shows how awful I really am. (For the record I am an animal lover. I have a pet cat called Sebastian, who I love very much. He can be a bit of a dick though, because he has an annoying habit of waking up at three in the morning and walking on my head. Still, I like my cat.)
The remainder of the show is then filled up by shots of the animals being very well-behaved and not being bad at all. It’s a lesson all of us can take heed from, I suppose – if the animals can learn how to respect each other and not eat each other’s droppings, surely we can one day live in peace. Who’d’ve thought that such a shit programme could be so inspirational?
If you want to learn more about My Pet Shame, click this link to pump some animal-related information into your eyes. Unfortunately, if you want to watch some of this on the Sky Player or indeed on Sky Anytime, you have to be a Sky subscriber, because this show is definitely one of the best BSkyB have ever made and it alone is worth the subscription fee. This actually does show that billionaires like Rupert Murdoch ARE completely evil. In my opinion, just wait a few weeks until it’s on Sky3, which doesn’t cost a thing to watch on Freeview.
July 12, 2010
101 Ways to Leave a Gameshow
Do you ever wonder what it would be like if the BBC commissioned a gameshow that had a set like a giant Mousetrap board? Well stop wondering, because the Beeb have done just that. Let me introduce to you 101 Ways to Leave a Gameshow (BBC 1, Saturday 6:30pm), which seems to be the temporary replacement for funny splashy water gameshow Total Wipeout.
When you hear the title, 101 Ways to Leave a Gameshow sounds like the most original television programme ever made (except for, of course, the first television programme ever made, which would have been incredibly original). TV producers usually use only one method of removing an unlucky contestant from a gameshow, by getting them to quietly shuffle away from their podium and out of the studio. How the producers managed to come up with a hundred more ways to leave a gameshow is incredible.
Except it isn’t. It will take you around ten to fifteen minutes to realise there is only one way to leave this gameshow, and that’s by getting dumped into a big stinking swimming pool. So the production team have to come up with a bit of ‘filler’ in order to hide this enormous space in the programme, which should have been filled up by a hundred other ways to leave a gameshow. The contestants are either forced to ride bikes off the edge of a tower into the big stinking swimming pool; they are physically booted over the edge of a tower into the big stinking swimming pool; and they are smacked in the back by a large padded hammer, which causes them to fall off the edge of a tower into the big stinking swimming pool.
Still, give credit where credit is due, there are some parts of 1 Way to Leave a Gameshow which are staggering. If you just think about the work behind this show for a mere few minutes, I can assure you that you will be amazed. Essentially, what the BBC have done here is built a massive tower which houses a fully-fitted television studio, all these weird mechanisms that plop the participants into the big stinking swimming pool, a mind-bendingly complicated network of staircases (if you look closely during some of the eliminations, you will see this maze of steps), and God knows what else. And that’s just the tower – imagine all the work that has went into planning and building the contraptions in the show, and judging by the title ‘101 Ways to Leave a Gameshow’, they’re probably only going to get used once. A massive, expensive prop, only being used a single time (only one episode of this show has aired at the time of writing, so don’t hold it against me if the same machine comes up twice). Bear in mind, including this expensive tower and all the expensive props, the winning contestant on each show takes away £10,000, bringing the total amount of money spent on this show to an even dizzier height. It’s also worth thinking about how much of the license payer’s money this show eats up, but it will be just too confusing to work out.
1 Way to Leave a Gameshow is hosted by T4’s Steve Jones, a man who is usually very nice when he is presenting his strand of programming aimed towards teenagers on Channel 4, but it seems when he comes out of his shell and starts presenting stuff on BBC 1, he turns into a bit of a prick. He’s not as much of a prick as Hitler was, but he does seem to project a sense of dickery through the screen. His co-host is the BBC 6 Music presenter Nemone, who is more or less the equivalent of Total Wipeout’s Amanda Byram – she stands beside the pool waiting for any jumpers, giggles like a bloody banshee when there’s bugger all happening, and then interviews the soggy contestant about their life-changing experience, as if they had never jumped off a diving board into a swimming pool before.
This show is worth watching, especially if you like Steve Jones, Total Wipeout and people getting wet when they fall into water. It also helps if you’ve had a lobotomy before watching.
Watch 101 Ways to Leave a Gameshow here, if you want.
July 4, 2010
Top Gear
Vroooooooooooooooooooooooooooom!
That’s the sound Top Gear made when it arrived on our screens earlier this week, just before it comically crashed into a wall. There have been many claims printed in the newspapers that the show had become more serious, more dedicated to automobiles, and there had even been reports that it had been axed. Clearly though, the show hasn’t been axed, and it definitely hasn’t grown up at all. It’s still the same Top Gear you love and know, but this series is hosted by presenters that are slightly older than the last series.
In the first jam-packed episode of new ‘sensible’ Top Gear, a few cars were destroyed, two photos of spray-painted phalluses were shown to the audience, Jeremy Clarkson made a joke about Richard Hammond’s testicles being close to his bottom (‘yet (he) plays with them all the time’), James May drove a 4x4 up the face of an erupting Eyjafallajökull – the Icelandic volcano that closed European airspace earlier this year -, some Robin Reliants were flipped over and over (more on that later), and some celebrities drove a Kia cee’d around the Top Gear track at Dunsfold Park, but in a very silly way.
Don’t expect the rest of the series to be any more sensible either. I’m writing this just a few hours before the screening of episode two (I left it way too late to write this), and the synopsis listed on the Freeview EPG for the next episode reads ‘Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May attempt to find a trio of cars which are equally at home on the race track as they are transporting a family to the shops’. This could be a mature experiment, but when you imagine Jeremy Clarkson saying ‘oh no, now look what’s happened – I’ve run over somebody’, you know it couldn’t possibly be a serious test.
I must say, episode one was very, very funny though. No matter how many times Clarkson flipped over his Robin Reliant (according to question answering service 63336, it’s almost impossible to flip a Robin and Clarkson made it look very easy) whenever he turned a corner too sharply, it was still hilarious. The bizarre cameos from obscure celebrities were equally hilarious – you will probably never see Peter Stringfellow (‘out of strip clubs’) tip a three-wheeled car back onto its wheels on television ever again, unless he was competing in a charity strongman event. It was also very funny to see James May sheepishly edge towards the mouth of an active volcano in a Toyota Hilux with his hand dangling out of the window clutching a broom handle with a trowel taped to the end of it, so he could catch a falling piece of scorching hot volcanic rock. The fear of May having has hand burned off/grotesquely disfigured provided a truckload of excitement during this (otherwise pointless) experiment. It was also very funny to see the show’s loyal Chevrolet Lacetti being crushed by a huge tumbling chimney, and Bill Bailey, Johnny Vaughan and some other famous people made quite a few funny appearances. Judging by the quality of episode one, I predict tonight’s will be a corker.
Top Gear is on tonight (Sunday) at 8pm and will be on the BBC iPlayer shortly afterwards.
July 1, 2010
Operation Repo
There is some nasty stuff knocking around on television. Do you remember The Saturday Show, the BBC’s Saturday morning kid’s show that was replaced by Dick and Dom in da Bungalow? During its first incarnation when it was hosted by Dani Behr and Joe Mace, they had a pretty cruel game on it called Risk. In the game, the apparently child-unfriendly hosts would invite a little kiddywink onto the stage with one of their most treasured belongings. They would then present the poor unsuspecting sod with a massive electric wire loop game, shaped like the word ‘RiSK’. They would then tell the innocent child, who only wanted to be on television so they could tell their mates at school on Monday that they met Dani Behr, that they had ninety seconds to complete the puzzle before their possession (which had now been placed on a large conveyor belt) would be dumped into an industrial shredder and would be cut up into a million billion pieces, hence the ‘risk’.
Not very nice at all, especially considering that this was shown on a live Saturday morning show made solely for children. I remember being seven years old and watching the first Saturday Show, which I thought was very entertaining until about an hour or so had elapsed. Then Risk made its debut, and the entire programme had been ruined for me when some poor girl was reduced to tears when her oversized Winnie the Pooh soft toy fell into the destructive machinery. Risk was burned into my memory, and I’ve never been able to forget it. I still know the exact place of the blades on the shredder, the scary dramatic music they used to play in the background, and the consolation prize that contestants would receive should their favourite item be shredded (the ‘Risk-it Biscuit’, which was just an ordinary digestive biscuit).
And that’s kid’s telly. Grown-up telly can be mean too, especially stuff from the States. The Jerry Springer Show and The Maury Povich Show are famous for blatantly and brutally taking the piss out of thick participants, right in front of their faces. And news programmes are always full of bad things too. This isn’t necessarily the fault of people working in the media (apart from this, this and this), but it’s still getting airtime. All of this awful telly mentioned above isn’t scripted, at least not entirely. Just imagine what it would be like if someone was employed to sit in an office somewhere in Los Angeles and write nasty happenings, as if they were in a reality TV show.
Well you don’t need to imagine it, because it actually happens. Welcome to the crazy, crazy world of Operation Repo (Bravo, Sky 123), a 100% absolutely fake, total bullshit, not in the slightest bit real programme that has been made to look like one of the many reality TV shows out there, but comes out looking a bit crap and clearly staged. Every episode of Operation Repo begins with a disclaimer stating that ‘the stories that are portrayed in this program are based on real events’, which could mean that one of the plots could be inspired by the time one of the writers stole a nice sports car on Grand Theft Auto IV, or by the time they cooked some tomato soup in the microwave. You get the idea – the makers of Operation Repo have the freedom to make a show about absolutely anything they want, without having to verify any sources of inspiration. They say it’s based on real events, but how can we prove that?
Operation Repo follows a (fictional) well-built, brutal, foul-mouthed, and Dog the Bounty Hunter-esque family-come-repossession team. They have a nasty habit of bursting in on (staged) events (like weddings, family parties and other happy happenings), spoiling the mood by taking away the occasional car/motorhome/electrical item, and then sodding off back to their compound. And then they give talking head interviews to a camera as if what has just happened on screen is real, but of course the material in this programme is as real as the stuff in a Ladybird book. The team might as well be repossessing unicorns from castle-dwelling princesses and then take them to a stable located on top of a rainbow. It’s worth watching, especially if you like nonsense.
Operation Repo – you couldn’t make it up.
June 28, 2010
James Corden’s World Cup Live
Blah blah blah, England are out of the World Cup. Big deal, it was bound to happen anyway, so don’t pretend to be shocked because you knew it was inevitable. There are still many more football teams in the tournament that are much better than our crummy old one, so why not support one of them? Brazil just won their game against Chile 3-0 this evening, so they’re a good team to follow. Or why not root for Ghana? Imagine how nice it would be for an African nation to win the first World Cup held in Africa. It would be lovely, yeah?
Anyway, there is obviously a lot of football-based television on currently. Tune in to ITV1 at some point between now and 11 July and you’re bound to come across James Corden’s beaming face, shouting enthusiastic quips directly at you, like a drunken man wailing at passing buses. No, this isn’t the televised mental breakdown of one of Britain’s newest and most popular BAFTA-winning actors and writers – this is James Corden’s World Cup Live, a cross between TFI Friday and the scene of a car crash. This show usually airs after every evening football game broadcast on ITV1, and at the time of writing, the latest episode is still on television. Woah.
This particular episode of World Cup Live had a very different introduction compared to the rest. It started with an emotional montage containing clips of Corden and his production team shaving beards right off their faces. If this segment only contained tear-jerking footage of strangers trimming their facial hair, you wouldn’t have thought this is a programme to do with football, but you would think it’s a terrifying abstract art piece on the subject of the vulnerability of men when something upsets them. This is bollocks, of course. The show started in this way because Corden set up a campaign titled ‘Back the Beard’, a scheme to get the entire male viewership of the show to try to resist the temptation of shaving their mush shrubbery until England were inevitably booted out of the competition. This campaign didn’t work for two reasons: 1) Nobody was really bothered about it, not many viewers sent in photographs of their chops and it seemed that only Corden and some of his on-screen crew were the only people in the studio growing out beards. 2) England didn’t stay in the World Cup long enough for anyone to get an astonishingly large beard, so Corden’s efforts were more or less a massive wet fart compared to other campaigns.
After this montage, which ate up about a minute and a half of airtime, Corden launched into the show as cheerful as ever, but with an amazing comical twist – you see, instead of introducing his chat show about the World Cup, he introduced a fictional chat show about Wimbledon! This took up another eight minutes of the show (filled with mediocre tennis clips and cheers for Andy Murray) before Corden gave one of his trademark inspirational talks before finally starting his actual show. In total, nearly ten minutes of time had been wasted on an unfunny joke. Ten minutes, which could have been replaced with ten minutes of other programming – say, entertaining programming. It’s not too much to ask.
Now I’d like to take this opportunity to say that I’m not exactly the first to comment against this show. It’s got a lot of stick, as does nearly every other show, but James Corden isn’t the worst presenter on the planet. He knows how to work a crowd, he knows how to crack the occasional joke and he is a charming personality. It’s just a terrible show. It’s the Live From Studio Five of sporting shows. It feels like it should be shown on CBeebies after the Tweenies. And I do seriously think there is a possibility that the show will get axed before the end of the World Cup. It could even kickstart a new competition amongst British chat show hosts, “Who Can Get Axed First?”, held every four weeks with Ofcom as the governing body in place of FIFA and refereed by Des Lynam. Let the games commence.
Watch James Corden’s World Cup Live on ITV Player here.
