IF THE REVIEWS are to be believed, Channel 4’s sparkling new Friday night com-edy schedule has turned out to be the televisual equivalent of firing three loud blanks.
Bromwell High was dismissed as “this just isn’t particularly funny”, while
Meet the Magoons was marked down as “The dullest new comedy since Frank Skinner’s
Shane.” The already infamous Tom-Cruise-soaking
Balls of Steel, meanwhile, was being called “an act of aggression” and compared to the unpleasant phenomenon of happy slapping all the way back in July. Once the critics had actually seen it, however,
Balls of Steel was immediately upgraded to “s***-eatingly bad”.
Vexingly, however, the situation is a little more complicated than that. The Magoons is actually all right, despite mainly relying for its laughs on the novelty value of watching Asian characters scream “f***!” and throw trifle at each other. Personally, in these troubled times, I think the world could do with half an hour every Friday night where good-looking young Asian men shout “f***!” and throw trifle at each other, but I admit I have a fairly singular view of Utopia. I am, after all, the inventor of the Cheese Lollipop.
A similarly mixed scatological bag comes with the animated series Bromwell High, the “British South Park”, which centres on a group of 12-year-old inner-city schoolgirls, who spend their days trying to screw their teachers and each other over, punctuated only by a series of “f***s”, texts, illegitimate babies and one-liners. I should imagine it will seem quite realistic and humdrum to most urban teenagers. It’s only the adults who will be gasping: “But that little girl just told her teacher she was fat! This must be scripted by a WILD MAN!”
However, both The Magoons and Bromwell High suffer from being part of the same scheduling squad as Balls of Steel. It’s very easy to call Balls of Steel the worst programme ever broadcast on terrestrial television — primarily because it is the worst programme ever broadcast on terrestrial television. It looks like a summer camp of school bullies made it in Mexico in 1987. The first episode plumbed a low so low that it might actually have fallen out of the other side of the Earth. “The Pain Men” drove nails into each other’s hands — a shot showed the classically amusing sight of a slow line of blood running down a wrist. “The Naughty Devil” covered the buttons on a pedestrian crossing with dog excrement. Olivia Lee interviewed celebrities with a microphone bearing insulting epithets. Charlotte Rampling got “bucket fanny”. Jenny McCarthy got “fishy minge”.
The makers of this programme clearly believe in the dictum “Any reaction is a good reaction”. Personally, I’ve long believed that the only way to cope with people who say “Any reaction is a good reaction” is to drag them from their houses, strip them naked and burn them at the stake. Suddenly, I suspect, some reactions may appear marginally better than others.
Of course, although an extreme and wholly repulsive example, Balls of Steel is broadly fulfilling its genetic destiny as a Friday night programme. It’s simply what you get when The Word (Friday nights, 1990-94) and Trigger Happy TV (Friday nights, 1998-2003) abuse a crate of WKD, have furtive Friday night carpark sex and give birth, nine months later, to a prank show with chromosomal abnormalities. Much like Norfolk, there are certain things that happen on Friday night television that don’t happen anywhere else. Friday night television is a specific genre — so recognisably so that, a couple of years ago, Channel 4 was able to announce that the newly launching E4 would be “Friday night every night”, and we all knew exactly what they meant. This is not true of any other night’s viewing: the slogan “Tuesday night every night”, for instance, makes absolutely no sense at all.
So what is Friday night television? Well it’s just a bit . . . lairy. Friday night TV is renowned for its swearing (Jools Holland’s “groovy f***ers” on The Tube in 1984, Kurt Cobain’s “Courtney Love is the best f*** in the world!” on The Word in 1991, Shaun Ryder’s “F*** me!” on TFI Friday in 1995) primarily because we are simple monkeys. Having spent the whole week at work, or school, nominally attempting not to swear, Friday night is when we can really let our ****s and ****s down.
Similarly, having spent the whole week in uniform, staring at cheap partitions and the clock, Friday night is a time for the outré visual experience. Julian Clary’s drag on Sticky Moments, Graham Norton’s vibrators and showgirls on So Graham Norton, Jesus killing Kenny on South Park, the vomit-eating wannabes on The Word — all of them would have felt forbidding or alarming mid-week, but fit in easily with the messy, drunken, frontier-town feel of Friday night.
However, as the bad reviews of the really-not-so-awful Magoons and Bromwell High illustrate, the irony of Friday night being televisual bacchanal night is that the people who would really appreciate a televisual bacchanal — the young, the feckless, the drunk — are all out, being young, feckless and drunk. The audience actually at home and available to watch Friday night programming are tired parents, tribal elders, and the kind of awkward semi-intellectuals who don’t best flourish in a booming warehouse, screaming “So what do you do?” at an uninterested girl in a bra, ie TV critics. Hence the consensus that the greatest Friday night line-up ever had nothing to do with the genre of “Friday Night” at all — being, as it was, the elegant, unflashy and wry C4 spring/summer 1998 sequence of Father Ted, Frasier, King of the Hill and The Adam and Joe Show. Something for the weary, the wise and those with a word count to appreciate.
Of course, there are ways around this logistical Friday night impasse. In order for the target audience to be correctly serviced, pubs and clubs could start broadcasting Friday night TV on their huge televisions, like the football. Conversely, the TV channels could acknowledge the legions of now-aimless King of the Hill fans having to make a weary pilgrimage to Blockbuster every Friday night, and put something classy on for them, like, erm, repeats of King of the Hill .
However, there is a third Friday night audience that we haven’t yet discussed, but who do solve the mystery of just who watches all this bacchanalian drinking television, when the bacchanalian drinkers are actually out drinking. For with their parents downstairs on the sofa with Monsoon Wedding and their older siblings down the pub, it is children, watching television in their bedrooms, who are, I suspect, the main audience for all this Friday night . . . Balls.
