Television
Bits of fluff
John Diamond
It's been a while since TV companies dis- covered that rather than spending fortunes on paying writers to write scripts, actors to act them out and directors to put the writ- ing and the acting together, they could instead construct programmes from the bits of film that other writers, actors and direc- tors couldn't use. In the old days it was the custom to cut together all those cocked-up pieces to camera and sitcom mis-takes into tapes which the production staff would show privately at their Christmas parties; it was the prissy-languorous Dennis Norden who first gave these tapes a public airing by linking them in LWT's It'll Be Alright on the Night. The first couple of shows were funny enough, but by the third enterprising pre- senters and reporters had got the point and every time they felt a fluffed line coming on they would purposefully try and turn it into the sort of thing they could pick up a fee for. After all, if you spend your life reporting car smashes and WI fetes for HTV West, it must be pleasant to see your face on prime-time TV, albeit your face as it fluffs a piece to camera for the 14th time.
Eventually Norden started running out of even the most humdrum out-takes, and although he still runs his own fluffy show he has' passed the prime-time baton to Jeremy Beadle. Beadle's stock-in-trade thus far had been the televisual equivalent of the apple-pie bed but without the matu- rity and wit which that jape involves. Hav- ing apparently run out of punters who would be willing to subject their loved ones to his oafish brand of practical joke, he realised that there was an even easier living to be made by asking the same punters to send in any home videos in which members of their family circle had been humiliated. Thus was born the imbecilic You've Been Framed (ITV, 7.15 p.m., Sunday).
Beadle's show has no saving grace what- soever, bar one: people watch it in their millions. On this basis ITV sell advertising in and around the show and thus is provid- ed with the wherewithal to make Morse and The South Bank Show and The Darling Buds of May and, indeed, more episodes of You've Been Framed. I have no objection to any of this.
Caught in the Act (BBC 1, 8.30 p.m., Fri- day) is the BBC's response to Beadle's show and is, if anything, even more feeble- minded. Because the best (and I use the word advisedly) British home videos have presumably already gone to Beadle, Caught in the Act has been reduced to soliciting tapes from elsewhere and the show is punc- tuated by Swedish and Spanish hostesses reporting in with the most humiliating home videos available in those countries. I wouldn't mind so much if the foreign prod- uct was as truly humiliating as the home- grown version. Indeed the European examples are often so unobviously cocked up that the director has to superimpose a little cartoon finger over the picture less we miss the shadowy man in the back row of the orchestra losing the slide of his trom- bone.
Were all of this, like Beadle's show, paid for by advertising I'd be the last to object. But as there already exists a perfectly good compilation of domestic humiliations on ITV, what is the point of providing a less good copy or, indeed, any copy at all? If there is any point at all to the BBC — and I really do believe there is — surely it is to provide those programmes which we would otherwise miss if television was run accord- ing to the market forces that obtain on the commercial channels. I'm not calling for a born-again Reithian BBC devoted to Moni- tor and the Open University, but there's no possible excuse for this old tosh.
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