picture from UK Gameshows

Saturday teatime has been dominated by Harry Hill for a long time now and he is partly responsible for a big improvement in the standard of light entertainment on ITV. Harry Hill’s TV Burp was at its best a work of genius, I don’t think anyone would dispute that, and was essential viewing at the end of the week as we all watched to see a twisted take on the last seven days of television. Even the weaker episodes were worth watching for that one gem, although unfortunately the last series had more than its fair share of weaker episodes which is why it had to go. Now that it has gone we miss it and wish we could have Harry’s thoughts on the shows we watch, especially when we see something that is crying out for the TV Burp treatment. You’ve Been Framed was a show that had looked stale for a long time until Harry breathed new life into it; I had long thought that shows like that didn’t need an on screen presenter breaking up the clips and slowing things down and it seems I was proved right, not that I can take credit for it. ITV obviously have a lot of faith in Harry Hill’s style of comedy because he is now in charge of another revival of a show that didn’t really need reviving, Stars In Their Eyes.

I only caught a bit of the first episode and none of the second as I was busy doing something else at the time, but from what I did see the format has been remodeled to cater for Hill’s excellent comedy styling. Whether this reboot can stay fresh remains to be seen, it appears to have got off to a good start but even the best ideas can be stretched to breaking point if they run out of ideas and take a shark jump into laziness; look at Harry Hill’s TV Burp for example. Stars in Their Eyes is synonymous with Matthew Kelly so Hill needed to do something to put his stamp on it. The phrase “tonight Matthew I’m going to be…” is well known, even uttered by mistake to Harry Hill’s face. This means that Cat Deeley’s short tenure after Matthew Kelly had been forced to stand down has been forgotten about, so powerful was the association. Last night, Challenge (a TV channel dedicated to repeats of old game shows) announced that it was going to be showing, no doubt scheduled to not get in the way of the shiny new offering over on the ‘proper telly’, the original version of the show. Mandi told me that they were showing old Matthew Kelly shows  but what they actually broadcast was two episodes of the very first series from 1990 presented by Leslie Crowther (without his trademark glasses, an attempt by the makeup department to make him look younger – true fact).

If nothing else, this gave me an opportunity to be proven right about something that had been bugging me for years and nobody seems to remember; there had been a Chinese man doing Tom Jones and winning the show. I was beginning to think I had made this up or dreamed it. However, it was true, and he looked a bit like Fred West.

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This week’s edition of The Sunday Alternative is here.