Saturday Night saw the return of that trundling juggernaut of bad taste The Eurovision Song Contest in which we sneer and laugh at those tasteless foreigners for their musical choices whilst surpressing the niggling truth that the UK will never be able to secure the votes of the other entrants thanks to our increasingly frosty relationship with… pretty much everyone.
Being in the entertainment business, or at least the business of entertaining, we often get the opportunity to slip on our high waisted trousers, put on a low cut black T-shirt and audition some new acts. Everyone in the office enjoys an audition and thankfully we get a lot of very talented people coming through our doors to show us their acts. So there are actually relatively few opportunities to make snide comments and snigger at the hapless audition-ees that you might see on a talent show. And even if we did get a Ken Lee or an Onka Judge, it’s unlikely anyone here would cut them down in quite the manner a TV judge would.
Michael McIntyre and Frankie Boyle are two comedians who have suffered a great deal of criticism from the media and their peers throughout 2010 for their differing levels of offensiveness; as performers, they couldn’t be more different – the former a purveyor of the kind of mild, light hearted observational comedy that no doubt everyone was exposed to over Christmas, his DVD having sold by the boatload – and the latter an acid tongued bearded button pusher who seems to take more pleasure in gasps of shock than genuine laughs from his audience. Fellow comedians seem to be lining up to take pot shots at one or the other. McIntyre for being all smoothed edges and no substance, Boyle for being all edge… and yet still no substance. “Offensiveness for Offensiveness’ sake” it’s often called. It’s strange how offensiveness or the lack of it can create the same amount of vitriol in certain commentators. Over the weekend Ricky Gervais received mixed reviews for his hosting of the Golden Globes having made a few off colour remarks about Charlie Sheen and Tom Cruise among others – but if he’d played it safe he would have received similar treatment.
For me, the only thing more intimately linked with the Christmas period than Morecombe & Wise is Programs Posthumously Celebrating Morecombe & Wise. Once you hit Christmas Day, dinner’s finished and the presents are open, there’s nothing left to look forward to other than the spectacle of a mid-to-low level celeb explaining exactly why it is so funny that these two men are making breakfast in unison to the strains of ‘The Stripper’ – apparently it’s the timing, or perhaps giving us some social historical context; reminding us that “news presenters just used to stick to the news, y’know?”
Booking celebrity presenters for award ceremonies, famous facilitators for conferences or well known comedians for the after dinner cabaret spot, were, pre credit crunch times, frequent occurances. However, it always seemed to me that the reason for booking a `named act` were often pretty weak (we can afford it, so why not!,)wheras the potential risks for booking such a person were very great because fundamentally you are in their hands. If they choose not to follow the brief. to be crude, to turn up late or to cancel because a more important event has cropped up- what can you do?
Haymarket © 1957 – 2012
