Friday, December 30, 2005

Goody Goody Yum Yum

I know I normally try to avoid writing about whatever's on telly at any given moment (otherwise it's too easy to use it as an excuse to run out of imagination and not think about what to put in this thing), but I'm watching something at the moment that makes me think "My god, this is awful!"

It should be good, too - it's a 90-minute special about the Goodies, the long-running, popular and very funny TV show from the seventies. They produced somewhere in the region of 40 hours of material over the course of the series, so there should be just about enough reasonably entertaining stuff to fill this special by itself. What they've done instead, though, is show a barrage of two-second clips that would have been funny if they were shown in the context of the 30 seconds either side of them, mingled with new footage of the Goodies themselves reminiscing in painfully unfunny style (worse even than the Two Ronnies in their recent series) and the usual list of celebrities all saying in identical words that they liked watching the Goodies when they were younger.

There isn't even enough of THAT to fill an hour and a half, so they've resorted to showing everything twice, padding out the show with "Later on, Rolf Harris will be saying this about the time the Goodies mentioned him on their show..."

Just repeat the flaming episodes, for crying out loud! It wasn't the highlight of British comedy history that everyone seems to be saying it was, but it was still usually funny enough to be worth watching, and every now and then it was hilarious. This, on the other hand, is rotten. I wonder if they're doing it on purpose, in line with the usual BBC policy of not repeating Goodies episodes? They're trying to convince people it wasn't worth watching in the first place.

Honestly, I'd stop watching it if only I could be bothered to get up and change the channel. I need to get over this laziness thing. I'm not planning anything for the new year, I'll do a whole load of memory training over the long weekend. Then, I suppose, I've got to go back to work. Ah well, could be worse.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Next time you come round to our place, we'll have to tie you to the sofa and force you to watch all 4 DVDs worth of Goodies stuff(including 'bonus crap' which is mainly the episodes repeated but without laughter track or with commentary)...