In 1996, You’ve Been Framed host Jeremy Beadle unveiled his big new project. Beadle’s Hotshots was a series in which he invited members of the public to submit sketches and short films they’d made at home. The show vanished without trace almost immediately, because nobody thought the idea of watching handmade footage from Joe Ordinaries at home would ever catch on. Then someone invented YouTube and proved everyone wrong.
Now, in 2017, You’ve Been Framed host Harry Hill has unveiled his big new project. The Remote Controller is an upcoming show where the British public are asked to pitch ideas for new television programmes to a panel of industry experts. It sounds like an unholy amalgamation of Dragons’ Den, Gogglebox and the failed 2004 1am ITV experiment Shoot the Writers. The Remote Controller sounds like it’s going to sink without trace almost immediately.
If that’s the case, this would be especially bad news for Harry Hill. Since he stopped making the matchless TV Burp in 2012, Hill has floundered to find the next big thing. His X Factor musical I Can’t Sing closed after six weeks. You Cannot Be Serious – a sort of sport-based TV Burp hosted by Alistair McGowan and produced by Hill – lasted barely a month. The Harry Hill Movie came and went without fanfare. Worst of all, Hill’s brilliantly nightmarish fever-dream reimagining of Stars in Their Eyes befuddled so many ITV viewers that it has basically been airbrushed from history.
Now (aside from You’ve Been Framed, which doesn’t count) Harry Hill fans can only take solace in Harry Hill’s Tea-Time, his silly Sky1 cookery show that barely anyone watches, despite its sketches about forcing dog food into hairdryers.
Looked at from afar, this struggle to find a new format seems logical. After all, Hill isn’t a mainstream comedian by any stretch – he’s far too intelligent and esoteric to ever be mistaken for, say, Keith Lemon – and TV Burp looks more and more like a one-off hit that blew up and overshadowed the rest of his career. Equally logical is the idea behind The Remote Controller; viewers apparently aren’t interested in any of his ideas any more, so why not serve them up a big bowlful of their own?
Whether it’ll work or not is anyone’s guess. On paper, the thought of asking viewers to think up TV formats for free – a job that’s usually incredibly well paid – smacks of laziness. It’s a sort of do-my-job-for-me arrogance, a shrugging reliance on user-generated content that has simply not worked in the history of the medium. On paper, it sounds awful.
Then again, on paper Harry Hill presents Stars in Their Eyes didn’t brace anyone for a recurring sketch where a furious Adele impersonator repeatedly attacked Hill for abducting her newborn baby either. The joy of Harry Hill is seeing how splenetically he can regurgitate terrible-seeming ideas. Nobody can predict what The Remote Controller will be like, or what berserk treats he’ll wring from it. Harry Hill might be down, but he isn’t out. Fingers crossed he proves everyone wrong.
