after the final. If they want music-industry realism surely they should have it so contestants perform with the judges only being able to see the top of their heads.
Not being able to see contestants is an interesting format tweak. If they can just eliminate the other four senses, too, they’ll have really nailed it. Not looking directly at contestants is hardly original. Even now when Simon has a meeting with Susan Boyle I hear he reverses up to her using the reflection in the back of his highly polished shield.
People get snobby about watching The Voice and say, ‘Oh, I want to see REAL singers.’ Go out, then! Go out! You’re watching a reality show where the judges have been picked purely on their ability to grunt in slightly different ways. Danny O’Donoghue said he needed coaching to stop himself swearing on the show. I just have one thing to say about that. Who the fuck’s Danny O’Donoghue? Whoever he is, he has a brutal 80s flat-top. Like Skynet built a special Terminator to infiltrate Cork’s gay community. I think there should be another celebrity on the back of the chair and the chair should keep spinning really fast, so they kind of strobe into a single entity. What a thrill for contestants to have their career ended by a hybrid of Christina Aguilera and Mr. T, who has never even seen their face.
Jessie J looks like someone has pitched the elixir of youth on Dragons’ Den and didn’t mention it had side effects. Bless Jessie for getting her head shaved for charity; but she’s afflicted with a bit of a man-face – she now looks like Action Man has moulted. I believe her when she says it’s ‘not about the money’, so she must be a judge on The Voice because she genuinely hates music. But it does need that Susan Boyle moment, doesn’t it? Someone hitting a note so high that the rest of will.i.am’s hair pops out of his head.
Viewing figures for The Voice started high and then dwindled after they stopped the spinning chairs. To combat this, next series they’re going to keep Jessie J in a centrifuge machine like an inarticulate tranny kaleidoscope. Of course, being on The Voice did wonders for the career of its first winner, Leanne Mitchell – mainly because she now works in MFI as a revolving-chair saleswoman.
I don’t need to watch people recruiting young women on to a ‘team’ without having seen their real faces – that’s just an evening on Twitter for me. Viewers liked it when the judges couldn’t see the acts, so they’re going to speed through the singing and finish the series with a close-up of Tom’s cataracts slowly taking hold. Tom rarely gets all of his favourite singers on his team, as he kept accidentally pressing the large red button on his emergency necklace.
The ‘battle’ round is always very exciting. Last year I watched a fat bloke in a Hawaiian shirt scream ‘Sign, Sealed, Delivered I’m Yours’ into a middle-aged dinner-lady’s face and I’ve never felt more alive.
• • •
The BBC had high hopes that The Voice would put it back on the map in the face of ITV’s dominance of the reality TV space. But for the BBC to flourish it needs its biggest supporters to get behind it. Maybe it’s time to accept we’ll just have to sell it to a group of wealthy paedophiles. Yes, it’s radical, but they’d only have to paint over the bottom bit of that first ‘B’. Toilet signs were among hundreds of items pilfered by souvenir hunters after BBC TV Centre’s final broadcast, as people filled their houses with objects covered in paedo DNA.
Vernon Kaye was escorted out of the BBC when security caught him trying to steal a dressing-room sign. At least, that’s the reason they gave him. You didn’t need that sign, Vernon, you’ve been stealing from the BBC your whole career. I took a lifesize model of George Alagiah, which I keep in my wardrobe. But it’s started to make knocking and sobbing noises so I might have to chuck it out.
George Entwistle resigned as director general. He’d only been in the job for fifty-four days. To be fair, I’ve been in jobs longer than that and still not known where the toilets are. It must have been an awkward leaving do to arrange. I don’t think they do cakes in Patisserie Valerie that say, ‘Sorry, you got the paedophile wrong.’ Trust has been lost in the BBC now. To be honest, I thought that it was lost after the first series of The One Show.
The BBC’s sloppiness reflects badly on all journalists. Not least tabloid ones, as when trawling the internet for stories they often end up copying and pasting from bbc.co.uk.
Tell you who you don’t hear much from lately – that woman who insisted she was the illegitimate child of Jimmy Savile. It seems that almost every day for a couple of years a new, well-known face is unveiled in the relentless Advent calendar of sexual abuse. I, for one, look forward to the mass trial of Britain’s celebrities at some paedophile Nuremberg. Honestly, the way things are going, I wouldn’t be surprised if I heard that Dave Benson Phillips used to wank into the gunge tank. I was never into the celebrity paedo parties. I’d stand in the corner and simulate the experience by having Jeremy Beadle give me a handjob. Once, Mike Reid gave me a Reacharound.
When I heard Rolf Harris had been arrested I thought it was for his performance at the Royal Jubilee. If Rolf goes on trial then at least the courtroom artist won’t feel under any pressure to do a good job. They’ll probably find it hard to resist drawing him with the body of a kangaroo.
The owner of the first time-machine will have a moral dilemma about whether to kill Hitler or bomb the 1988 Royal Variety Performance. It seems when it comes to TV, the author L. P. Hartley was right: the past is a foreign country. Paedoslovakia. Ironically, the only non-paedophile on telly in the 80s was Ian Krankie. Perhaps evidence will emerge that Britain itself is a paedophilic landmass and when we’re all drunk at Christmas, it rams Anglesey up Ireland’s arse.
Footage emerged of Savile defending Gary Glitter. So, he might have been a predatory paedophile but at least he wasn’t a hypocrite. The pair actually invented the platform shoe together, purely as a way of seeing children who were slightly further away.
For those conspiracy theorists who say these scandals will one day be shown to involve our politicians, well, who knows? They kill kids, so there’s no reason to think that they wouldn’t be fucking them. There are quite feasibly politicians alive today who took to fucking kids just to try to give themselves the stomach required for the real business of government.
The Sun’s front page reported ‘Gary Glitter’s 10 hour sex quiz’. Finally, a show you could imagine Justin Lee Collins hosting. I have to say, Glitter didn’t do himself any favours when questioned over child sex offences by trying to bribe police with Top Trumps cards and a Kinder Egg. Officers aren’t expected to question him again for a while. As it’ll take them months to chip open his laptop with a toffee hammer. Savile’s cottage in the Highlands was vandalised. It appears that they’ve scraped off so many of the hundreds and thousands you can now see the gingerbread walls beneath. Jim Davidson said, ‘The Jimmy Savile witch hunt is going a bit silly.’ It’s not a witch hunt, Jim. Remember, witches never existed.
Jim Davidson was cleared of historic allegations that he sexually molested two women. He says he’s ‘a gentleman’ who once gave up his bed for a drunk dancer. ‘I never laid a finger on her, even though she was completely comatose and wouldn’t have had a clue what was going on.’ I always thought a gentleman ‘never tells’ but it appears that a gentleman is someone who could have raped someone but didn’t.
Davidson says he’s not a Jimmy Savile figure. True. People used to like Jimmy Savile.
Davidson was once voted Britain’s funniest man. I can understand this, as when I first heard the news of his arrest I couldn’t stop laughing. He’s previously had brushes with the law after he was banned from driving following a speeding offence. If I were the judge I’d let him keep driving. But ban him from using his seatbelt or his brakes. When he was caught by police and asked if he was the driver he said, ‘Can I nominate someone I don’t like?’ Good luck pinning three points on the entire Pakistani population of the UK. Jim, if the system really allowed us to nominate someone we didn’t like you’d currently have two and a half million points on your licence.
I must say Stuart Hall does look very sad. Either he feels guilty or he used