Quelle domage

The greatest era of British music ever known is feared to have ended forever with the cancellation of The X-Factor.

ITV’s legendary music show launched the careers of the most gifted stars Britain has ever known, including Olly Murs, Fleur East and Sam Bailey. Fans are now afraid that a future Rak-Su could go undiscovered. 

Music journalist Jules Cook said: “We’ll never know another golden age of British music like this one. The world weeps.

“The 2010 series alone brought us the matchless Matt Cardle, the unforgettable Cher Lloyd, global titans One Direction and the magisterial Wagner. That’s better than every band that came out of the 60s put together.

“Are we really ready to deprive the world of the next JLS or Joe McElderry? Doesn’t the government have a moral duty to subsidise young, exciting artists like Reggie ‘n’ Bollie?

“Without the X-Factor acts will have to hone their craft playing live, write their own songs, and sell themselves on nothing more than their music. It’s like going back to the Dark Ages.”

The Daily Mash

Of course.

I think we'll survive.

Pop will eat itself

I despair.

Time was when famous people were famous for something - for their acting, artistic, scientific, sporting or political prowess, perhaps. Genuine "stars" were the people whose talents made them a household name; people of the calibre of Clark Gable, Alfred Hitchcock, Katherine Hepburn, Laurence Olivier or Ingrid Bergman...

Nowadays, such cultural morés appear to be vanishing in the wake of a slew of cheap and nasty, attention-seeking non-entities whose only claim to fame is the fact they have appeared on "reality TV" [whose "reality"?, I'd like to know] or happen to be popular on "social media". These people are now considered worthy of the epithet "celebrity", apparently.

A case in point is the crowing announcement today by none other than the BBC [once itself a proud bastion of culture; no longer predominantly so, especially in the last few decades] that a couple of people-one-should-never-have-heard-of, who seemingly were featured in a television show about people watching television [some prime time excrement called Gogglebox, which is shown on another former culturally significant medium, Channel 4] are going to appear in another "reality television" show Strictly Come Dancing.

It is a sad day when this is the level of entertainment to which the general populace aspires.

"Bread and circuses", indeed.

Trash, me and you

Stuart Heritage in The Guardian is celebrating news about a new televisual highlight imminently heading to our screens:

Amid all its troubled antiheroes and fatalistic gunplay, the golden age of television has been desperately short of one thing: trash. Not your common or garden, lowest common denominator, mass market, light entertainment crap – switch on your TV after 5pm on any given Saturday and you’ll practically drown in the stuff – but knowing, high-drama, campy trash. Trash such as Footballers’ Wives and Desperate Housewives.

We’ve come close – Scandal is clearly preposterous but takes itself slightly too seriously, and House of Cards perpetually seems seconds away from turning into a full-scale Frankie Howerd parody of itself – but it has always been hard to shake the feeling that most modern showrunners have been too busy eyeing up prestige to fully commit to trash.

Thank God, then, for Mark Schwahn and his forthcoming series The Royals. It is an American-made drama about a present-day British royal family. Liz Hurley plays the Queen. Joan Collins plays the Queen Mum. If those last 11 words didn’t immediately fill your heart with uncontrollable joy, there’s a good chance that you’re a lost cause.

Do we share his enthusiasm? Hmmmmm.

From a purely camp perspective, this could well have that "Showgirls Effect" - whereby a really bad movie became a cult, beloved of drag acts and "quote-a-long-a" parties for many years - but maybe that's an ambition too far.

Will I watch it? That I very much doubt. I'll just wait for the fall-out...

The Royals premières on Sunday, March 15th at 10pm on E!

Dumbing down

Culture is reaching a point of maximum dumbness, it has been claimed.

Researchers at the Institute for Studies have warned that it will soon be impossible to dumb down news and entertainment media any further.

Professor Henry Brubaker said: “Most television is about cooking, the paranormal or poor people having arguments. The news is just opinions punctuated with pictures of ‘extreme weather’.

“The only books being published are ghost-written celebrity biographies or thrillers about serial killers called things like ‘The Face Collector’. Apart from that people just read lists of ’10 facts about muscle growth’ off websites.

“The problem is that although our culture cannot get any stupider, human intelligence may continue on its downward trajectory.

“The result will be a world in which nobody understands anything. Even a film about The Rock driving a jeep into explosions will leave viewers confused and angry at its pretentiousness.”

However TV channel boss Mary Fisher said: “Don’t worry, I’ve just commissioned 'Jamie & Jimmy’s Paranormal Antiques Auction Sex News'.

“And I’m confident we can go even lower. We must keep striving to find new depths of idiocy.”

The Daily Mash.

Of course.

Here's Kingsize Taylor and the Dominos to sing about it:

King Size Taylor & The Dominos - Stupidity

[They were a real band]

I know we’ve just had Halloween, but...

Eek!! Apparently media muppets Peter Andre and Jordan are recording a new television show! Will the horror never end?



Katie & Peter show page

Acceptable in the 80s?

Yuk!

My heart was slightly lifted at the news that the Human League, Bananarama, Jimi Somerville, the Eurythmics, ABC and other classic bands were going to play at something called "Retrofest" in Scotland this September! Sounds fun, I thought - the prospect of a summer music festival that features just about ALL my fave acts from my youth!



But such thoughts evaporated when I read further into the report. Judging by the tone and attitude of the promoter, quoted in the article, this smells like a cynical piss-take and nothing more than a massive Karaoke for the moron TV generation... Of his proposed "talent contest", whereby entrants could get to "sing" on stage with some of the hapless acts, he said:

"...the list of successful solo singer/songwriters is longer than the all the shoulder pads worn in the 80s so we're happy to help give someone a bit of exposure. And if someone's really bad, we might put them up as well - after all that's half the appeal of the X Factor, American Idol and so on."

I feel sick! Does EVERYTHING these days have to be reduced to such an utterly brainless and banal level?

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