Television Can Blow Me (2 page)

Like all models she is a laughable narcissist. “In my time I have been as round as a Reubens and also a little slip shadow of a creature” Yeah, like anyone gives a fuck you've gone through a couple of dress sizes. She makes a peanut butter fudge so loaded with calories that if you set it alight it would burn for months like a Californian forest fire. Yet a look at her pinched face and skinny wrists confirms that Sophs last saw a carbohydrate around the time of the Incas.

She drops in little anecdotes like the one about the eight-year-old boy called Bertram eating sushi at one of her book signings. She wanted to be his friend but he disappeared off into the ether. Track the smug little bastard down - he'll probably get its own show, Bertram on Sushi.

I spent some time watching this trying to place who Sophie Dahl reminds me of and it's Rita from Arrested Development. Played by Charlize Theron, she was Michael's beautiful but special needsy English girlfriend. Blinded by her beauty and English accent, Michael only realises she's a 'tard when he's played a video of her eating some plastic fruit. Don't be surprised if there's similar footage of Sophie on a cutting room floor somewhere.

Sophie comes out with some bizarre stuff. She is quite possibly crackers. She seems a nice enough lass. The food, for what it's worth, is fine. Edie Brickell, Emiliana Torrini and Nouvelle Vague soundtrack this bizarre little magical mystery tour around her mind. She's away with the fairies, this one. On a starvation diet in real life yet living an alternate reality in front of the cameras where she hogs out on expensive dairy product, kettle chips and chocolate.

I didn't mind this, actually.

The verdict on The Delicious Miss Dahl:
You've seen worse.

Marks out of 10:
7

Celebrity Big Brother 2010 - Vinnie Jones can drink mares' piss

Bullyboy thug, man-of-the-people shitbird fraud, nose biting suicide contemplating one trick pit pony Vinnie Jones spent the first two weeks of Celebrity Big Brother being the surly, menacing, unpleasant twunt you always knew he would be - picking on poor old Alex Reid's insecurities, giving it the wise man of Hollywood bit and using the kitchen as his own personal fiefdom. This, combined with his homespun charm and winning grin
¹
, eased him into favourite in the betting. So far so blehh. But this week the lovable rogue mask slipped and revealed an exposed arse, leaving him looking rather like the Vibrating Bum-Faced Goats from Viz.

It started when Vinnie heard the drunk as a skunk cornball Sisqo CHATTING SHIT about him. By which we mean expressing the valid opinion that their residence had become “Vinnie's playhouse” and that Jones might not be the greatest man who ever lived. Incensed by this savage attack, Jones burst into the diary room, rulebook in hand and demanded Big Brother take action. Sisqo was offending him and worst of all, his faaaaaamily. Say what?

The moment anybody mentions their family in these situations you know they are a piece of shit. It's the classic calling card of any thug before an act of violence to say he's doing it not frimself but
por familia
. In a hilarious diary room meltdown he told Big Brother that he would be hearing from his solicitor. Come again, Vinnie? I thought hard men didn't snitch?

When speaking to other housemates he said,
“If the cameras weren’t on that'd have been sorted out last night”
implying that he could beat up the 3 foot tall Thong Song man. He felt like throwing him
“through a window”
he told them. Wow, you're hard Vinnie. Sisqo isn't the toughest guy in the world. He isn't even the toughest guy in Dru Hill (that honour going naturally to Nokio the N-Tity)

It was a turning point for the turd who has been drifting in the betting ever since and even sweeter is that his favourite fish-in-a-barrel target practice Alex Reid, who Jones is plainly convinced cannot win, is the new favourite. It would be a fine way for the final Celebrity Big Brother series to end if Jones could watch himself beaten by somebody hated just three weeks previous, someone clearly pussywhipped to within an inch of his life by salmon pink freakshow Katie Price but someone essentially decent and quite good fun.

So Aerial Telly is backing the Reidernator. He feels it is the choice of the righteous.

¹
Winning in the sense of winning a prize in a raffle and discovering it's a broken travel iron with a handle smeared with shit.

I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here 2009

Say what you like about Big Brother at least it provides different varieties of tedium. They vary the tasks, switch things up, have fun with them. And every now and again it produces something brilliant. The Box task, the Electrocution task, the Wedding task - all inspired in their own ways providing moments of slapstick, pathos and emotional sadism for our entertainment. But as I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here enters its 9000th year it still relies primarily on our primal fear of creepy crawlies. Spiders, locusts, maggots, dung beetles, Christopher Biggins - they’re all here and you’d better get used to it. Because if you don’t like watching a minor celebrity pulling cockroaches out of her shorts then you’re fucked.

I’m calling this now: I’m A Celebrity is done. I’m as over it as it’s possible for a boy to be. Over it, under it, through it - the very mention of it depresses me. I cannot watch Katie Price get covered in wasp mucus again; I don’t want to see another Hollyoaks actress crying into her sleeping bag; I don’t want to see the 1984 Superstars Champion being thrown out of a helicopter; I don’t want to see kangaroo spunk drool from the mouth of Paul Burrell as he noshes on Skippy’s balls; I don’t want to see Darren Day’s Frank Spencer; I don’t want to see Dean Gaffney ever; I don’t want to see a fake pair of tits smeared with fish guts, tits that come complete with the implicit notion that I should enjoy the schadenfreude while I can because, you know, glamour models and fish guts - it doesn’t happen every day.

Do they ever imagine that there might be reason it doesn’t happen every day? Unlikely. I’m A Celebrity producers are not a complicated bunch. Getting celebrities to sign up for the show is their biggest challenge and this is a particularly brutal year. If you’ve appeared in the paper in the past three years then you’re probably too famous. There’s her who used to be in Eastenders, him from Hollyoaks, that gay design couple, someone who was in a band and Jimmy White. He was last famous when snooker was fashionable, before your Internets and your mobile phones. It’s pitiful.

Ant and Dec present in the exact same tone they always have and that’s fine as far as it goes but it can’t save this dog of a show from the knacker’s yard. Totally bereft of ideas, irredeemably dull and hopelessly fixated on animal’s cocks, it is as broken as the careers of its participants. In the name of all that is holy, end this nonsense now.

The verdict on I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here 2009:
Enough.

Marks out of 10:
3

Jordan and Peter: Marriage and Mayhem

Around the time Jordan was confirmed to be entering the jungle for I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here you couldn’t move in the quality press for people lauding her arrival like it was the chance to show our finest unacknowledged business genius to the world. “A consummate businesswoman” said The Guardian; “a natural beauty, imbued with empathy, humour, maturity, brains and charisma” wrote The Independent on Sunday, “a 21st-century goddess” said lovely Victoria Coren.

“Ooh, you’ll see” the received wisdom went, “She’ll surprise a lot of people. She’s going to show what a classy, sassy business laydeh she is. She’s NOBODY’S fool and HIGHLY intelligent.”

When the time came, of course, she spent her whole time hiking her knickers out of her arse and scratching her tits. This must have been a huge disappointment for the broadsheet columnists who were apparently expecting a cross between Indira Gandhi and Bill Gates.

Let’s get this straight about Jordan. She paid thousands to get a load of shit stuck in her tits and become a grotesque parody of femininity that men would want to wank over. She then fucked a load of celebrity turds, one of whom pumped his defective sperm deep into her belly and gave her spawn. She then fucked the brains out of stammering Pop Idol loser G-Gareth G-G-Gates while six months pregnant - a fact he understandably denied for some time.

None of the above makes her a Harvard MBA, or Joan of Arc or even Linda Lusardi. Her success means her agent knew the right asking price for photographs of her ridiculous motionless tits. That is all.

And now she’s cashing in on her relationship with Peter Andre by making Jordan and Peter: Marriage And Mayhem a warts-and-all fly-on-the-wall. Nothing wrong with that just, please, no more of that “shrewd businesswoman” shite.

Intriguingly voice-overed by Janine from EastEnders the show apparently gets an access all areas pass into the lives of Peter and Katie. It seems to act chiefly as the vehicle for Jordan’s patented checkout girl candour. She helpfully tells Andre “I’ve told them - you didn’t always shoot in me all the time” while explaining her pregnancy to the camera.

Katie’s make-up artist tells how she enters his room as Katie and he magically transforms her into Jordan. Throughout the show people talk about the Jordan character as if it was some magnificent Peter Sellers creation. How could two such different people co-exist in the same body? No matter that the engaging vacuous tramp Katie is indistinguishable from the engaging vacuous tramp Jordan.

There’s loving footage of Harvey the fat, blind, diabetic son of misunderstood serial shagger Dwight “so good they named him Dwight” Yorke. Peter plays well with Harvey which is more than Dwight ever did so good for him.

We are treated to a unique insight into Jordan’s obstetrics. Things go well until shortly before the delivery when it appears there’s a membrane above the cervix that isn’t shifting like it ought to. You wonder briefly if this will slip into Bodies territory but an emergency c-section does the job.

Jordan gives the 411 on post-natal care. “They wash my fanny, put a catheter in it. I won’t tell Pete, and I’ll say to him “Pete, do you fancy some?” And I’ll pull the covers off and he’ll see the bag there!” Cue: much cackling laughter.

It’s not all laffs though as Jordan’s sciatica has forced a lull in their love life during her pregnancy. “He just got a suck and a feel of the bollocks” she explains. Well, marriage is all about compromise.

In any event, Katie is on top of it. Her legendary business acumen will no doubt see her ousting Sir Alan Sugar as The Apprentice guv’nor for the third series. Don’t think her agent hasn’t already made the move.

The verdict on Jordan and Peter: Marriage And Mayhem:
You had Burton and Taylor and we get this?

Marks out of 10:
5

Love skunk Vernon Kay sprays his rat jism in the general direction of Skank Central. Misses.