daytime tv – Plain Or Pan

Diggin’ through the debris of daytime TV so you don’t have to.

I’ve been unwell and off work last week and this, and I’ve lacked a real oomph to do anything other than sit on the couch and watch TV. At the prospect of this, lots of folk in my situation might rub their hands together, fire up a Netflix series and settle in for the duration, but I’ve not had the mental scope to involve myself in anything quite as cerebral. Up and down the channels my attention span and I have gone, from the glossy national networks – apparently the retirement home for old pop stars and athletes with a neat line in self-reinvention – and where, for £2 plus standard network charges, you can text in and maybe win yourself a £6 million super-home in the Cotswolds, to the up-the-numbers, non-HD, +1 channels that spit out their drivel in between frequent ad breaks for animal charities, JML multi-purpose tools that you can’t buy in shops and actual lift (as in elevator) systems for the home. I doubt even your most hardened of daytime TV watcher knows this sort of stuff exists. It’s a real carnival of nonsense when you venture through the cathode glass.

You can break your daytime TV schedule into four handy genres:

Upcycling and recycling of old tat for profit, sometimes charitable profit, but never profit of more than a few pounds. Whether it’s the well-spoken lady who waits by the recycling centre then asks if she can rummage through the boot of your car for anything interesting, or it’s a posh old classic car-driving English guy with pink chinos and mustard teeth zig-zagging his way across middle England’s antique shops, or it’s a former soap star turned DIY expert, the concept is the same. A bit of spit ‘n polish and the auction house will help you shift this shiny new old tat to its next gullible owner who, in 10 years or so, will turn up at the recycling centre with the same old piece of crap. It’s the circle of life, as Elton once sang.
Home shows. These fall into two categories; fixer uppers/mover on-ers or secondary homes in the country (can’t do Spain anymore, mate, Brexit innit?!) for Home Counties twonks (also often in pink chinos) with more money than they know what to do with. “Yah. We’ve a budget of two hundred and forty-two, but we can p’raps stretch to two fifty for the right place.” Oh, fuck off.
Human interest shows. Neighbourly disputes, people who’ve overcome the odds to get on in life, ordinary people ripped off by bogus tradesmen, relationships that cross boundaries, borders and age gaps, menopausal women discussing their sex lives. It seems we’re a nation of nosey so and sos, eager to find out the gossip whatever it may be.
Quiz shows. Loads of them. I don’t mind a good quiz show….but in the middle of the day, a good quiz show is hard to find (Countdown excepted). Wooden presenters and stupid contestants do not good telly make. Have you seen Tenable? Or Lingo? Or that Ross Kemp one? Oh boy! And yet…the thicker the contestants, the better the prize money. Mind boggling.

I don’t actually mind some of the upcycling shows either – the posher the host, the brighter the chinos, the wonkier the teeth, the more outrageous the combo of hat and cravat the better the show, but I’ve learned very quickly to draw a thick and divisive line at Storage Hunters UK.

As the title suggests, this is a franchise show, brought in this instance from America, with a rude US presenter who switches to a ridiculous rrrrrapid fi-rrrre vocal style when he hits the auction sections of the show. The premise, if you don’t know – and why would you, you’re all highly intelligent people, possibly in full-time employment, who wouldn’t ever consider watching such trashy telly – is simple; Our American host gets access to a storage unit where the previous renter has defaulted on payments to the point where the container’s contents can be sold at auction. A merry band of modern-day pirates and hawkers follow the US host around as his muscled-up heavies break locks, allow the potential bidders a minute or so to look inside – No touching! No removing of covers! – and then put the contents up for auction there and then as a job lot. If you think the host is rude, that’s nothing compared to the Cock-uh-knee wide boys and resting bitch-faced wimmin and aggressively-stanced baying motley crew who make up the show’s regular ‘cast’ who, with barely a glimpse of the leg of a potential Queen Anne chair, or the sight of the corner of a stuffed pigeon, or a milk float, or a hint of arcade machine behind a mountain bike, or a dumb bell sticking out an old box can instantly tell that there’s money – pwopah wodge – to be made in this ‘bin’. It’s all scripted of course, but the bidders all hate one another and often provoke an adversary into dropping out or – even better – bidding waaay over the odds for a storage unit of shit. After sitting through six episodes over three days in a row last week, I gained the courage to go for a long-needed shower. Never again.

I hit rock bottom this morning, the absolute peak of the nadir, when I stumbled on, then downloaded to watch from the start, an episode of Undercover Boss USA. You know the score with this, right? The self-made CEO of a mid-west burger franchise chain or similar goes back to the ground floor as a new employee to find out what makes his company click and what makes his company clunk. Between sweeping floors and flipping burgers he’ll encounter bully bosses, hard working staff with multitudes of personal problems (but they just gotsta keep workin’ for ya), faulty machinery that makes the job three times as difficult, at every turn meeting a real cross-section of the people who represent his company. By the end of it, the bullies are told they don’t demonstrate the family values of the company and are removed, the temperamental machinery is fixed and the teary-eyed hard workers who’ve just been told who the ‘new guy’ really is are rewarded with promotion and/or cold hard cash and/or a school fund and/or a new car and/or a fully-paid holiday. Like Storage Hunters, it’s heavily scripted. Unlike Storage Hunters, it’s highly watchable.

Today’s episode was a break from the norm. Billed as Celebrity Undercover Boss USA, it featured the singer Seal incognito with wig, facial hair and a flimsy story about making a film about the music business with three struggling artists. Seal calls himself Victor and visits the three artists in turn; New York, Chicago and L.A., hearing stories of broken vans, broken lives, working multiple jobs, getting multiple rejections, yet all still with a burning desire to turn dreams of singing for a living into a reality. Seal, of course, sees a piece of himself in each of these hopefuls, torturing himself with the notion that he can’t yet break his cover and help them. He plays guitar for one of the unsuspecting singers at one point – “Hey! You pretty good, Victuh!” and it’s only after he brings the three singers together for a show as part of his ‘documentary’ finale that he reveals his true self. Do 20-something Americans even know who Seal is? Apparently they do.

“Hey Victuh!” calls one of the girls at the show. “We wanna hear you sing first!”

With a shrug of calculated bashfulness he instructs the assembled band – there just so happens to be an assembled band – to fall in as he plays Kiss From A Rose, his Billboard Hot 100 number 1 record that featured on a Batman movie and won multiple Grammy awards. The camera pans the small crowd and films as Seal hits the high notes in the chorus. Bay-bee! His three starlets eye-pop in amazement at their documentary maker’s previously unknown vocal skills. Should I compare you to a kiss from a rose…? You can see it dawning on most people by the end and, after rapturous applause, game old Victor rips the wig off his head and the prosthetics from his face to reveal yr actual Seal, exactly as he’s known to the world.

It’s box office telly. You really should look for it.

I really need to get back to work.