reality TV
Adam Sweeting
What’s extraordinary about Bake Off is not just the staggering complexity of the cooking challenges, but the amount of technical shenanigans that go into turning it into a finished programme (actually, spoiler-averse Channel 4 had teasingly left the ending off my preview version of this week’s show, but you catch my drift).Capturing the elaborate contortions of the bakers as they went about making things like Chocolate Kardemummabullar (with cardomom glaze and pearl sugar), Sicilian Cassatelle or Kek Lapis Sarawak layer cake (“imagine Battenberg with more layers”), never having seen or heard Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Learning support officer. Student. Chip shop owner. Mobile caterer. Gym owner. These were the day jobs of some of the volunteers featured in this week’s portfolio of tales on BBC Two from the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, who would all doubtless deny that they do anything heroic. For the people they rescue, they most certainly do.If there was a moral in this week’s programme, it was “be prepared”. Mind you, that's probably the moral every week. For instance, if you were going windsurfing at Porthcawl, you ought to do a bit of research on its unusually powerful tides, which can rise 10 Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If you’re a farmer who works round the clock to feed sheep, milk cows and so forth, how on earth do you make time to find a partner and reap a harvest of marital bliss? Well you could ask Sara Cox if you can join in her dating game for “lonely rural romantics”, back for its second series on BBC Two, but success cannot be guaranteed.Still, Cox, who grew up on a Lancashire beef farm, makes a cheery and plain-speaking host as she drags together suitors and suit-ees. This week’s contestants were Grace (23), who’s about to take over running the family farm in the Welsh borders when her father Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Is there any challenge that television producers haven't filmed celebrities doing? They won't be happy until they've followed a bunch of them snowboarding down an Alp while baking a cake, conducting an orchestra and researching their family history. And if it involves a little sob followed by a group hug, bonus!But I can't be cynical about Sink or Swim (Channel 4) because it's in aid of the charity Strand Up to Cancer. The programme's USP is that 11 celebrities – using the term loosely – who are all weak or non-swimmers are being trained to do a sponsored relay swim across the Channel next Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In the past, Bear Grylls has taken President Obama up an Alaskan glacier and trekked through the Swiss Alps with Roger Federer. This jaunt with David Walliams (ITV) was on a more modest scale, merely requiring the Britain’s Got Talent judge to be dragged across rivers and down rock faces in wildest Devon.Grylls believes that everybody has a little bit of Bear in them, if they can just screw up their courage and face their worst fears. By the end of this, Bear and Walliams also had a little bit of rat in them, after Bear had barbecued a dead one for lunch. Walliams, togged up in comically Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
In an alternate timeline, Olly Murs - runner-up on a TV talent show a full decade ago - would have faded into obscurity by now. This, as the relentlessly charming performer on stage delights in reminding us, is not that timeline. Some internet commenter remarked, on the release of his first single “Please Don’t Let Me Go”, that it was what Murs would be telling his record company after they dropped him. “Well,” he says, with a gesture a little too rude for the kids in the audience, “I’m still here!”That’s Murs all over: a little lewd, very cheeky, perhaps the personification of the "Lord, Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Olly Murs has done alright for himself. After finishing second in 2009’s X Factor, he’s managed to forge a successful pop career and made a genuinely decent fist of TV presenting (most recently as a mentor on The Voice). Now he’s back with his first album in two years, You Know I Know, which comes with a CD of past hits bolted on. The album proper features collaborations with an impressive list of names, including Ed Sheeran, Shaggy, Snoop Dogg and even Nile Rogers. It’s also predictably, unspeakably and mind-numbingly ordinary. “Move” is, by some Read more ...
Barney Harsent
While Horizon, on BBC2, was telling us that the first person to walk on Mars could well be walking among us now, ITV's 100 Year Old Driving School suggested that the space mission could take a major setback if that wannabe astronaut were to encounter Joan Beech on the roads. She was one of the (mainly nonagenerian) drivers who had agreed to have their driving assessed to see whether they were still roadworthy. In the case of Joan (pictured below), it was a firm "no". Wrong gear, a failure to distinguish between different gears (or, indeed, left and right) and the identification of a Read more ...
Barney Harsent
By the outrage it prompted, you’d be forgiven for thinking that The Great British Bake Off’s move to Channel 4 was a national disaster. If only the public felt so indignant about the sale of the Post Office, or the creeping privatisation of a beleaguered NHS… but hey-ho, cakes it is, then. The news that co-host Mary Berry and presenters Mel and Sue wouldn’t be joining Paul Hollywood in the move led to further disquiet and an unprecedented amount of criticism levelled at the Liverpudlian master-baker, including a series of frankly stunning tweets from former contestant Ruby Tandoh. They Read more ...
Barney Harsent
The latest test of the nation’s perseverance and patience – a snap election called just before the negotiations for Brexit are due to start – seemed like an extraordinary act of hubris at the start. The initial billing of “Strong and stable” vs “Coalition of chaos”, was a statement that implied the Tories’ lead was so big that only by ganging together could the other parties beat it. It also appeared to be an assumption that was probably fair enough.However, a decision for Theresa May to fight the campaign on personalities not policies stumbled upon the realisation that hers is Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The masochistic reality show heralds a culture with an inferiority complex. There have been documentary re-running the race to the South Pole. Countless series place modern Britons in historical contexts where the dietary, sanitary and heating arrangements leave much to be desired. At the heart of them all is an anxiety that mod cons – radiators, white goods, frozen readymeals – have softened us. Are we simply not fit to lace the boots of our forebears?The latest endurance test is possibly the genre’s horriblest yet: a reboot of the journey undertaken by Captain Bligh and his loyal sailors Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Now back for a twelfth series, The Apprentice has recently burnished its reputation as a career launchpad. Not, of course, for the poor contestants, gurning and strutting their way to the judgement end of Lord Sugar’s finger, but for the pointy one himself. A certain D Trump, who presided over the American version, now has much grander ideas for his presiding. As yet, Lord Sugar shows no sign of leaving the programme’s would-be Philip Green-a-likes to hunt down Jeremy Corbyn, cowering in the rhubarb patch. But on the strength of this first episode, Sugar is as authoritative as ever, so Read more ...