Bullseye
Australian TV can be pretty rubbish.
The production values on home and away were so bad you could see where cardboard was used for walls at times.
Australia’s next top model has a model with a very dubious connection to being a top model and involves her holding a crappy folder when giving out the results.
I’ve also in my time watched the Turkish Version of the Nanny, seen South African soap operas, and my dad used to watch a racing program that looked like it was shot in someone’s garage with a lamp.
So I know shitty TV.
But England have a show so amazingly bad and British, that no English person could ever look down on any other TV.
It is called bullseye.
And it is a combination of shit easy trivia with darts.
For real.
One dude hits the dart board, and then his partner answers questions for the pound value of what numbers he has hit.
Some questions can be worth 180 quid, most are 80 odd. Life changing money.
The obsession with darts over here has always worried me. And I come from a state that thinks standing on wood and chopping it with an axe is a sport.
Darts just seems odd to me as a spectator sport. I’m sure there is massive skill in it, but there is massive skill in pissing your name in the snow, but few people get paid to do it.
Most Brits will say, well Bullseye was years ago, and we don’t do that any more.
But they do, it has even had a comeback so modern generations can see men in bad fitting shirts fire darts in and then their partners get questions about the davis cup and Michael Caine.
I’ve seen two episodes now, one of the old ones, and one of the new, and the old one actually had the host telling the audience to be quiet while some guy was concentrating on an answer.
The new ones were slicker, but still had retro cash prizes, almost like modern game shows never existed.
Obviously the combination of darts and trivia is the stupidest combination since I tried to put vegemite in vanilla ice cream, but the show does have one redeeming quality, the opening credits.
It seems to essentially be “Scooby Do plays darts”.
I also did research (wiki) on the show, and it turns out the original host was not allowed to come back after he called someone a nig-nog once.
I had to look nig-nog up. What a friendly sounding racist insult it is.
My new Ashes book.
its green, ugly and shaky, they call it Yvette
There is some seriously shit TV no matter where you go in the world.
Except in Turkey, where they have their own version of the Nanny.
One of England’s top shows is all about ghosts.
It’s called Most Haunted, not I’m a ghost get me out of here.
And to say this is a bullshit show is the understatement of the century.
Essentially you get a lot of close ups of people on night vision, and them saying fuck, shit, bloody heck, and then the camera moves around there is nothing there.
They do séances, bump into things and generally look scared a lot.
The ghosts sometimes talk to them, ofcourse the microphones rarely pick them up, and they see ghosts, only the camera always just misses it.
Things are always creaking and shaking, which is obviously proof of ghosts, or production assistants.
The secret of the show is the night vision.
It’s freakin genius.
I wish I had of thought of it, because it would be so easy to fake and make an ass full of money from.
The poms seem to love it, no matter where I go people seem to be watching it, on the edge of their seats, waiting for the ghost sighting.
They never come, at best you will see a flash of something that could be anything refracting on the night vision.
You do see a close up of people holding cameras looking green, and then you hear a noise, and then the camera shakes for a few seconds.
You could do it at a McDonalds or a castle, that is the beauty of it.
It’s fool proof.
For 7 seasons English people have been looking at green people, the occasional green celebrity, and the odd unexplainable light.
They go everywhere from castles to the set of Coronation St, all green, and all scared.
They quite often have a psychic artist on, not the kind of artist i would call him.
Sometimes you can’t explain what you see, but its not like they delve deep into it, other times it’s a fucken moth, quite fucken obviously a moth, and they say its an Orb.
It’s hosted by Yvette Fielding, who has been hired because her eyes are so big and the night vision as so much to reflect off. She is sort of like an old weird heavily made up Dakota Fanning, and who needs that.
What a stinking pile of dung.
Just to prove that everything looks spooky on night vision.
Underbelly
When I was in Oztraya I never watched much TV.
Boston Legal, and whatever ABC popped up on a Wednesday night.
That meant that I had seen Summer Heights High before I got here, which over here is a bit of a cult hit.
I will resist the urge to tell you all about how Chris Lilley came to my production companies opening.
But now I have seen every episode, more than once.
I have also seen the entire series of we can be heroes, lilley’s first show.
As if that wasn’t enough Australian TV, now I have series linked, once I worked out how, Underbelly.
The Melbourne crime drama that was based on the underground killings of Melbourne’s organised fuckwits for a decade or so.
The thing about Australian TV drama is it’s rubbish.
So even though people in Melbourne kept going on about how great it was, I really couldn’t be bothered with it.
I gave up on Australian Drama when Good Guys, Bad Guys went off air, bless that Marcus Graham.
And the whole idea was old news before I saw it.
I lived in Brunswick, right off Lygon St, I’d eaten in the restaurants, I drank in Sydney Rd, and I played cricket at Cross keys reserve.
I knew the stories all too well.
So why watch the TV show.
Well in Melbourne I couldn’t even watch it on TV, you had to download it, or buy it from a woman with a moustache.
Too much effort.
But in London the series got talked up heaps, and it didn’t feel as stupid as watching it at home.
So I watched the first episode, and I tried to resist saying been there, been there, everytime some place came up on the screen.
Until Princess Park came on, and the Carlton Crew were sitting exactly where I sat for a VFL (no I didn’t explain that) grand final.
The show was good, Vince was in good form.
But most importantly it was well directed.
For whatever reason Australian television is all directed in the shittest possible ways, so when you get a show that is well written, it is rendered unwatchable by the directing.
This seems to have all the boxes ticked.
The show could be shit, and I would still watch it, because I really fucken miss Melbourne.
I love the old girl, and I never really wanted to live anywhere else.
While London is being very good to me and feels like home, Melbourne will always be my spiritual home, even if I never go back there to live.
For now, once a week underbelly takes me back to my city, it shows me how she looks for an hour, and that I like it.
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