Photo by Johnnie Craig
From the archives

Without daytime television, students would have an awful lot more time on their hands. They would have enough time to wash their genitals and cook nice meals and study more and sit around camp fires singing songs about carefree squirrels and stuff. Maybe the world would be a better place. In fact, the world would definitely be a better place. Unfortunately daytime TV will never go away, so for the good of the world we have made a definitive list of which programmes you should and shouldn’t waste your precious time watching. Thanks, us. No problem, world.

TELEVISION THAT SUCKS

NEIGHBOURS
Due to its scheduling this mundane tramp through Antipodean triviality will sort of act like your alarm clock. You are bound to have at least one housemate who insists on watching this every day so you can work out how heavy the night before was by whether you wake up in time for the midday or evening show. Nothing ever changes anyway so if you snooze through both it’s no big thing.

THUNDERCATS
You aren’t seven anymore. You don’t get up at 6 AM and eat four bowls of Coco Pops cereal and then doze off in the afternoon (well, we really hope you still don’t). Trying to re-live some lost sense of innocence by buying T-shirts and DVD box sets from HMV is pretty creepy. If you are not careful you will start playing Warhammer 40000 again and then you are one step away from becoming comic book guy from The Simpsons.

STAR TREK
By the time you live in your own house you have no excuse for not having Sky+. Once you get there you will soon begin to wonder why this is on almost constantly every day on about 15 different channels. It’s almost impossible to have a clue what is going on as they seem to have a total disregard for ordering and everyone looks like they have a cauliflower stuck to their heads. It might however have some kind of brainwashing quality as usually discerning people seem to fall under its spell like Xanax-dosed flies to a big glowing orb.

THE BILL
How is this thing still going? The only good thing about it was that alcoholic womaniser guy that played Tosh. He was pretty good and he had a great moustache. Now he’s gone it’s kind of like The Office but without the funny bits. This is largely because crime in Britain is generally pretty lame. People aren’t stupid or opiated enough to commit crimes that look fun on TV.

COUNTDOWN
How is this fun? Rudimentary spelling and maths games? Do people actually fancy Carol Vorderman? It’s like your mum presenting the Daily Mail coffee break page after she’s been to a health spa for the weekend. Count me out.

TELEVISION THAT DOESN’T

MONK
This guy is great. For a minute from the name you might think that he is Cadfael – the detective/ rebel/warrior/monk. In fact he is just a guy called Monk who gets into a whole bunch of scrapes and comes off like the wisecracking bastard child of Kojak and Columbo.

AQUA TEEN HUNGER FORCE
Rather than buying into the revivalist trappings of studentdom, why not attempt to watch something aimed at human beings with a reading level above Peter and Jane stories? This, along with pretty much every Adult Swim cartoon, is a tiny piece of greatness that you should never let the rugby-playing, campus bar crawling cunts find out about. Those people ruin everything that is good and are your enemies.

BATTLESTAR GALACTICA
Now here is some sci-fi you can run with. Not the outmoded camp fiesta from the late 70s with Face from the A-Team but the amped up Sky One remake. It takes the pretty cool anyway pretext of the original series (rebels on the run from scary killer robot army) and shoves a testosterone-stuffed dildo up its arse until everything explodes in a massive action-soaked orgasm.

THE WIRE
This is the best thing on TV full stop. Even better than The Sopranos. It manages to show you both sides of the fruitless war on drugs in the notorious projects of West Baltimore. It makes you love the cops and the dealers because it so perfectly pitches the moral ambiguity of each side. It also has drunken police brutality, tonnes of heroin and crack, gun play and an amazing soundtrack.

HAVE I GOT NEWS FOR YOU?
This is consistently one of the funniest things on British TV and remains well worth going out of your way to catch. It’s basically Private Eye on TV so you get prescient, witty, topical, social comedy handed to you in handy half hour chunks. If you watch this every Friday you can basically get away with not reading the newspaper for a week.

Tagged: chillaxing, home, tv
November 12th, 2009 @ 07:01