David Quinn » television

Richard Whiteley RIP

David Quinn — Fri, 30 Sep 2005 11:30:50 +0000

Consonant, Vowel, Consonant: RIP

Black+White

September 2005

Dave Quinn reflects on the life of Richard Whiteley

As supposedly the most watched man on British television, having made more than 10,000 appearances, Richard Whiteley didn’t exactly need to raise his profile.

That’s why it’s surprising that the genial uncle of teatime telly made time in the autumn of 1999 to be interviewed by me, a fresh-faced journalist on the now-defunct Liverpool Student newspaper.

The assignment is something of a cliché – the editor, like many before him, wanted a slightly quirky piece on Whiteley’s student appeal. But it proved truly valuable to me as the main reason I got my first “proper” job in journalism.

Having joined the audience for the recording of Countdown at Yorkshire TV’s studios in Leeds, I was ushered backstage to Whiteley’s dressing room.

Before the interview could begin, Whiteley – taller and fatter than I expected – nipped into a sort of en suite cubicle, similar to the bathrooms found in caravans. My defining memory is of this giant man loudly pissing while I sat petrified on the other side of a paper-thin door.

Business over (ahem), we talked for over an hour about how he ended up hosting Channel Four’s longest-running programme (apart from the news). Whiteley spoke about his time editing Cambridge’s student paper in the 1960s, how he moved to ITN and then to Yorkshire TV. He was nothing but charming.

We then moved on to the inevitable conversation about why students love Countdown, and how the make-up of the studio audience varies between rowdy busloads of twenty-year-olds and half-dead coach-loads of grannies.

I asked him about the infamous puns. He shocked me by saying the producers wrote them and he just read them out.

When I applied for my first job as a trainee journalist on a business magazine in London, my degree counted for absolutely nothing. Instead, all my editor was interested in was Richard Whiteley. At my interview I was asked: “What was he like?”That’s why I was strangely touched by Whiteley’s death. T

To an extent, I owe a little of my career to this bright, friendly bloke I once met at a TV studio in Leeds.

Richard Whiteley, born December 28 1943, died June 26 2005.

Television – Doctor Who

David Quinn — Fri, 30 Sep 2005 11:00:26 +0000

Black+White

September 2005

Predictable, lazy, amoral, simple-minded garbage – this is what we are told modern mainstream telly has become. Doctor Who was pretty much the opposite.

There wasn’t a ginger bloke in a neck-brace bellowing nonsense about ’sex wee’. There weren’t any wannabes or minor celebrities punching each other, eating maggots, stripping naked or having sex. There was no Scottish nutritionist examining anyone’s shit. And no-one bought, did-up or sold a house.

While ITV’s spring/summer schedule struggled with Celebrity Wrestling, Celebrity Love Island and Celebrity Cannibal Taxidermy Experiment (one of these is made up), the BBC, almost by accident, managed to re-energise the “family drama” genre with such simple qualities as clever writing, decent acting and bloody big alien invasions. And hooray for that.

The significance of the success of Doctor Who could just reinvigorate the schedules. We’ve been told the concept of the family gathering around the telly for a weekly series is as dead as a dalek in this ‘multi-channel’ age. That the only television kids will watch is Channel U (try it – Sky Digital channel 467) or programmes where they can text in to have someone shot dead. Doctor Who, with up to 10 million viewers, has gone a little way to shattering the theory.

From the opening episode where wheely bins and shop dummies sprang to life, to the final regeneration of Christopher Eccleston’s grinning northern Doctor into David Tennant’s grinning Cockney one, this was about as good as it gets.

Much of it is down to the vision of Russell T Davies, who, as the creator of the all-new Doctor Who, as well as Queer as Folk and Second Coming, has surely proved himself as one of television’s most talented and valuable auteurs.

A little known fact about Davies is that he once wrote scripts for 1980s kids programme Why Don’t You?, turning a ‘try this at home’ magazine show into a slightly bizarre drama. He was also responsible for the completely forgotten Breakfast Serials (it was on telly in the morning, see?). While working on that, Davies confesses to making up random one-sentence Radio Times programme synopses, involving non-existent characters in ridiculous scenarios. Evidently no-one noticed.

Clearly Davies has come a long way since then, and notwithstanding the obvious brilliance of much of his earlier output, Doctor Who is arguably his greatest triumph.

But I would say that, wouldn’t I? You’re probably thinking I’m some kind of bearded Doctor Who fanboy who has every episode of the landmark Peter Davison series on Betamax (like the editor of this magazine, for example). But I’m not. I had no particular hopes for this latest incarnation, and that’s why it was so refreshing.

OK, so some of the aforementioned fanboys have whinged about the farting in the ‘Slitheen’ episodes. Perhaps they need reminding that this is essentially children’s telly with the occasional sly gag thrown in for the enjoyment of their parents. My girlfriend’s six year-old nephew thought it was great. Perhaps the geeks should stick to watching re-runs of The X-Files and other such po-faced shite.

The only let-down was the BBC’s PR department, which managed to botch the announcement about Eccleston’s departure. It was almost certainly the intention of both Davies and Eccleston to keep the regeneration at the end of the series a secret, and imagine how great it would have been if they had. Sadly, a bit of over-zealous spin-mongery – complete with made-up Eccleston quotes for which the corporation was forced to apologise – put paid to that.

But that’s nitpicking. Here was a programme that was thrilling, entertaining, witty, clever and – gulp – cool. Bring on The Christmas Invasion.

Television – Nathan Barley

David Quinn — Thu, 31 Mar 2005 10:00:59 +0000

C***

Black+White

March 2005

Ashcroft yells desperately at the crowd: “You’re all fucking idiots! Shut up!”, as Barley raps about a “9/11 of the mind”

Nathan Barley is one of the idiots. What type of person rides around on a tiny kids’ tricycle and implores strangers at a bus-stop to “check out the website, it’s well fuckin’ futile”?

Barley, that’s who. A self-proclaimed ’self-facilitating media node’ who spends his days ‘working’ on a website he calls ‘trashbat dot cock’.

About the worst thing you could say about Nathan Barley, the eponymous Channel 4 sitcom character, is that he is an idiot: a clueless, pointless dreg; a toff pretending to be ’street’. But it wasn’t always that way, which is why Nathan Barley, the sitcom, is almost – but not quite – disappointing.

Written by bona fide TV genius Chris Morris and his mate Charlie Brooker (incidentally, the finest TV columnist ever), Barley started life as a character on Brooker’s satirical website, TVGoHome.com. This foul-mouthed, often highly surreal parody of the Radio Times, which later became a book, featured listings for an imaginary TV programme simply called Cunt.

Barley (the sitcom character) and Barley (the star of Cunt) are, annoyingly, different beasts. While the former is a simple-minded berk, the latter was a far more obvious scumbag, with peculiar penchants for both porn and prostitutes.

When I heard Morris and Brooker were making a ‘real’ TV version of Cunt, I became extremely excited. Morris, after all, is responsible for the 2001 Brass Eye “special” on paedophilia, which still holds the record for the largest number of complaints ever about an original TV programme.

The finished version of Nathan Barley, however, doesn’t quite live up to its potential as the darkest sitcom ever made. Instead, Barley has been transformed into an almost loveable dunce with a nice line in playground-friendly catchphrases.

There are other problems, too. For a start, it’s a bit late. The Barley character was conceived on Brooker’s website at the height of the late 1990s dotcom boom. Six years on and the context doesn’t quite ring true.

And the passage of time hasn’t helped the form, either. At the time the project was conceived, the hyperbolic sitcom format must have seemed like the only choice. Today, following the low-key success of Nighty Night and Peep Show, it all looks a bit OTT. Nathan Barley would have suited a mock docu-soap format, but of course The Office defined that genre four years ago.

Despite all that, however, Nathan Barley is better television than 95% of all other programmes, so it seems churlish to complain. Morris is a master wordsmith and much of the dialogue in Nathan Barley is jaw-dropping. At one point, Barley is heard to describe his website as like “two people leaping from the Twin Towers, fucking on the way down”.

The Dan Ashcroft character is similarly excellent. The morose Ashcroft (played by Julian Barratt) is trapped in a sort of Kafka-esque nightmare, wherein the more he derides his peers, the more they love him. Witness the scene at the end of episode two where, from the stage of a Trashbat club night, Ashcroft yells desperately at the crowd: “You’re all fucking idiots! Shut up!”, as Barley raps about a “9/11 of the mind”. Their response is to cheer wildly.

It’s the sort of genuinely chilling moment that makes the whole exercise worthwhile.

Stuff to watch or avoid over the next month:

Comic Relief Does Fame Academy

Ok, so it’s in aid of charity. But watching Jenny Éclair, Sam from EastEnders and that twat from DIY SOS prat about on stage every night for week is enough to make you want to down five packets of Anadin and slide towards an excruciating death. I’d cash in my ISA and give Comic Relief a grand just to make them go away if I thought it would make any difference. And it’s presented by Patrick Kielty!! Jesus.

Verdict: Don’t watch (but donate cash at www.comicrelief.com)

The Ann Widdecombe Project

Ann Widdecombe is a national institution. A virgin, a moralist and a purveyor of outlandish dresses, here she acts as an agony aunt, solving family and workplace dysfunction with her no-nonsense approach to the universe and hectoring womanly shouting.

Verdict: Watch (or is it witch?)

Property Ladder

I can’t get enough of this type of thing. The format is virtually flawless and now that the property market has gone tits up, this new series should be highly entertaining. Goodbye profits, hello financial destitution. Highly addictive.

Verdict: Watch

Doctor Who

Dum-de-dum. Dum-de-dum. Dum-de-dum. Dum-de-dum….

Verdict: Watch!