In the interests of remaining well-informed, I sat through the whole two hours of Peter Kay's Britain's Got the Pop Factor-wyllantisiliogogogoch. It looked perfect, but it didn't make me laugh once. As a satire (and some listings billed it as such), it was toothless, with Pete Waterman, Nicki Chapman and Dr Fox (who is, in the words of Lee and Herring, neither a real doctor nor an actual fox) all desperately trying to show how good they are at taking a joke and thus improving their own profiles in the process. As comedy, it was lazy. It seems that they'd spent so much time and effort getting the set right that they had no time to write any actual jokes. Still, we shouldn't be too surprised. Has Peter Kay been any good since he parted company with Dave Spikey and Neil Fitzmaurice?
Anyway, I can just about tolerate the existence of bad comedy, but on Monday, 'The Winner's Song' was released as a single. Extensive enquiries have brought forth no indication that the single is a charitable venture. So, it would appear that Channel 4 paid Peter Kay to make a two-hour promo for his own single, the profits from which will be going to buy his mum a bigger garden for her bungalow - I'm told she's got her eye on a little place called Lancashire. If so, am I being hopelessly old-fashioned to think that the whole setup stinks? Even the useless Ofcom must take a dim view of this sort of corruption.
4 comments:
I was in Tesco earlier, and the Peter Kay single was on display all over the place. It was even sitting atop the sodding 'album' chart, despite not being an album.
Interesting thing is, assuming the song itself wasn't performed until the second part of the show (I'd long given up on it by then), much of the audience would have missed it. Going by figures listed in meejaguardian, part one attracted 6.1 million viewers. Part two troubled just 3.2 million. It'd be nice if the single really did die on it's arse.
I watched a few moments of this show - and admittedly, laughed - but it's the old free promotion scam that I objected to as well. It's like when Coldplay released their last album and there was a massive BBC2 special on it from TVC, for which I bet EMI paid not a penny for this huge promotional opportunity.
Looked like another example of bloating telly to me. End of Part One would have nailed the format much better in two minutes and moved on to a fresh idea. And I'd have bought any single they did, for sure.
EoP1 would have nailed it in a couple of minutes, 10 at the most. Harry Hill would have cracked it in an aside. I honestly thought this would be the moment when Kay was seen to push his luck too far, but the plebs seem to have lapped it up, unaware that he's playing them like a harp and fleecing them of money they might need for non-frivolous expenditure in the not-so-distant. Also, one of the sites I visited during the programme was full of extreme, effusive enthusiasm for the programme, but if you asked why they liked it, you were told "get a life" and "it's just funny, innit". A) I've got one and B) I didn't think so.
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