TV without pity

[millionreasons]

That Space Cadet thing has to be a double-bluff hasn’t it? Either all of the participants are actors or they are really gonna shoot them off into space, maybe for 10 metres or minutes or something. I can’t believe that Ch4 is willing to possibly ruin these people’s lives for ratings; at least Big Brother contestants know what they’re entering. Punished for being gullible – what are we going to have next? Housewives who enter the GMTV £1 a minute quizzes being egged on live TV? The stocks for pensioners who are conned by burglars pretending to be the gasman? Witchtrials for poor people wanting a high cost loan at their inconvenience? The powerful mocking the less powerful. Maybe I’m being naïve in thinking that comedy shouldn’t be about cruelty. We’ve already had Skinner and Baddiel, Little Britain, Adam and Joe laughing at grocers’ apostrophes (“Do the carrots own the 20p a lb? Gosh, aren’t the lower orders hilarious?”), Pete and Dud, Monty Python ridiculing the people they’d left behind when they quit their home towns for Cambridge. I much prefer the warmer humour of the Royle Family or Peter Kay or even Paul Merton – people poking affectionate humour at what they know. Coronation St, which relies on detail, observation, character and wit, is 100 times funnier than the likes of the catchphrase-aholic Little Britain. My current fave Peep Show may be pitiless, but its targets are the sociopath main characters, not incontinent old ladies; it pokes fun at the sneery laddism of the likes of Davids Walliams and Baddiel.