New Year's Eve TV is Shit

At what point did New Year's Eve TV become so shit? I know it's become the norm over the last few years to channel hop and moan about the state of telly before finally settling on Jools Holland on the basis that it's the least offensive of a bad bunch, but this year's effort takes the piss more than a catheter connected to a vacuum cleaner. My girlfriend and I spent the New Year in a cottage in the Peak District and had the free channels on a Sky box, so we decided, naturally, to check out the telly on the night, and lo, what we found was an abysmal lineup.

On BBC1, Graham Norton was holding the fort, joined by special guests Joan Rivers (who appears to have had so many nips, tucks and lifts that approximately 98% of all of her skin is now stitched between her buttocks), Sarah Jessica Parker (who many people aspire to be / shag, but always seems to me to resemble a fairly normal Boots checkout girl who's been herded onto Extreme Makeover and 'improved' by 'style gurus' and cosmetic surgeons), and Jedward, the freakish teenage duo shat out by relentless media bowel the X Factor. When we tuned in, Jedward had just arrived and were blithering an endless fog of random words, talking over one another and so quickly that even without the distraction of two identical voices competing for your attention, you still wouldn't have been able to decode much. Not that what they were saying should have grabbed your attention; from what I managed to gather, they were basically wittering about bike accidents they had when they were twelve. The random word cloud became so dense that Graham Norton looked as though he realised the error of inviting them to the show, and despite Joan Rivers' face being locked in one vaguely surprised expression due to her years of entire body rebuilding, her eyes were practically begging for the world to end. Only Parker was brave enough to engage them in conversation, gently needling them. Nobody knew what to do with them. On the one hand, there was the mothering "Aww, aren't they sweet" approach, and then when they started spewing verbiage, turned into more of a "What the fuck? HOW DO WE STOP THIS? DO WE HAVE ANY GUNS?"  

While we're on the subject of Graham Norton, what happened to him? How the hell did he get to be mainstream? Am I dreaming, or did I welcome in 2000 with him hosting a show in which the New Millenium's firework display was set off by a woman firing a ping pong ball out of her vagina onto a target in front of a live audience? Now THAT was television. These days he seems to be a fairly safe, mainstream chat show host with a hint of cheekiness.

We got bored with Jedward, and flipped channels. ITV were welcoming in the New Year with a programme about the best adverts of the decade. Good going there, ITV. Keeping up the quality for which you are well known. You've only had ten years to think about what to do at the end of the first decade of the millenium, and what a piece of programming you've managed to come up with. Didn't even last five seconds on it. And that was during the adverts.

Channel 4 had Alan Carr with guests David Tennant and some other people, but Alan Carr annoys the tits off me. He seems to be trying to fill the 'cuddly alternative gay' chat show host vacuum left by Graham Norton and succeeds in just being camp and annoying. 

BBC 2 and Jools came up next. Jools had his usual Hootenanny line up on offer; a couple of trendy interchangeable Indie bands that probably had names beginning with "The", a handful of ageing blues / soul 'legends' that nobody under the age of 40 has ever heard of, some pissed up comedians who were all sat together and who are always so drunk that they aren't really that funny (apart from the year Ade Edmondson stood up and sang with the Kaiser Chiefs in a moment of embarrassing car-crash TV on a par with the best that The Office ever managed - and for a bonus, it was all real), and Tom Jones, who has apparently stopped dying his hair and beard (but not stopped applying the fake tan) and looked, according to my girlfriend, like a sexual mahogany Santa Claus. He may look like he's been Tangoed, but fuck me, that man can sing. He welcomed in the New Year with a rendition of 'In The Midnight Hour' and blasted the weedy newcomers and so-called legends into atoms with his mighty voice, a voice that can stun leopards at fifty paces and rupture concrete dams at twenty.

It's telling that none of the terrestrials kept our attention for long; instead we stayed with More4 for an unnanounced evening of sheer pleasure; a night dedicated to Graham Linehan written shows, with re-runs of Father Ted, Black Books and The IT Crowd, all of which I'd seen before, and all of which were  500% more entertaining than anything the other channels were offering.