'Bronzed, scanty-clad young people'... the cast of this year's Shipwrecked.
Television, the drug of the nation, apparently. Well, if it is, at the moment I'd say it was somewhere around the level of Junior Disprin. Kind of bland, cheap, and with near-as-damnit no actual discernible effect. And round. And powdery. Hang on, my metaphor's just fallen over.
Still, drudging through the round, powdery summer offerings, we may currently be enjoying the US imports, but otherwise neither here nor there as regards home grown series. Big Brother's only got a couple of weeks to go, and while some witty bloggers and hilarious professional pithers continue the conversation online, I have to admit to becoming distracted. See, following the morning repeat of Big Brother are catch-up shows from the now perished reality series Shipwrecked, which I end up watching at the gym. Though it's actually all finished now, it seemed to be full of bronzed, scanty-clad young people who at least seemed to have more fun than those holed up in the Elstree Portacabin, so I thought I'd look up what I'd been missing and what people had been saying about it during its several month run ...
... And discovered that it created a viral buzz as loud as a gnat with a sore throat trapped in a hermetically sealed woolly hat.
We were all probably just jealous at the time, I'm sure. But here's a plea: if, as you're on your travels, you do spot any mentions of Shipwrecked ever having been blogged about, I'd love to see them. It would be interesting to see how this creature was treated in the wild. Before it died and everyone forgot it had ever walked among us at all, obviously.
In the meantime, looking at what is out there in the best of TV Blogs:
- There's dissection of series just finished: Cape Wrath, for example; of which I'm yet to meet someone who's seen more than five minutes - anyone? Anyone?
- There's conversation about cult favourites, in this case Family Guy, which I'd have more strong feeling about if I could just once work out the complex algorithms by which BBC3 decide their schedule, managing constantly to have everything you might possibly want to watch at a) an inconvenient time and b) never quite the same inconvenient time as it was last week.
- And then of course there's conversation about series yet to start - teasers for Torchwood being one notable example. But, still grumpy about the fact they thought stealing one good assistant from the Doctor could rescue an entire mainly-pants show, I'm sweeping over those teasers entirely.
So, of course, there's the eager anticipation of the upcoming X Factor, which Unreality TV are covering with remarkable ferocity before it's even begun - including the interesting news that producers are now admitting to being fake first so no one else can get in there and steal their Fake-TV thunder. Meanwhile, one of our own has been backstage at the auditions, and reports on that in our sisterblog Organ Grinder, here
So is the return of the ubiquitous talent show a good thing? Yes, and no. Yes because lots of people seem to enjoy it, surely; no because it may not ever be as enjoyable and as beneficial to society as giving this guy his own prime time Saturday night fitness show. But you can't have everything.
Though you can, of course, have burgers.
Yes, that may seem like an utterly random link, and in many ways, it is, but... No, can't think of anything, it just is. Still, news of some press release by Tivo about the 'higest rated commercial in the US' had me scampering about watching not only that advert (bit odd, quite charming and funny, actually made me quite hungry for a burger ... until they showed a picture of the burger it was advertising) but lots of other blogs featuring adverts - which are somehow quite enjoyable to watch when they're either a) old or b) from somewhere else entirely, because you somehow feel relieved from the pressure to actually want to buy anything they're thrusting at you.
I had a similar feeling with the lovely animation offered by this Australian campaign and yes, before you start shouting 'kickback' or 'free advertising' I realise that their range is available in this country too, but you'd have to be some kind of moron to spend £22 on a flip flop, wouldn't you? So that doesn't count.
