The 100 Greatest TV Moments From Hell

Channel 4
9 September 2000

‘History doesn’t repeat itself - it just burps...’
- CRAIG RAINE

The current state of affairs at Channel 4 is, of course, exactly like the Holocaust in every possible sense, both metaphorically and literally. You know that.

The truth, however, is that the idea of bad television ‘happening again’ is historically meaningless. The ‘so bad it’s good’ concept, once so innocently ubiquitous in the late 80s, simply doesn’t exist any more - television is no longer messy, whimsical, amateurish, silly or odd...it’s just bland. And everyone in TV knows the score - the Theakstonization of the medium has resulted in a mediocre, hair-gelled, press-the-right-buttons nothing-goes dystopia where presenters are perennially on parole for good behaviour. Keep reading those press releases, darlings, and there’s a nice cushy career awaiting you in the fashion industry. Everyone is so fucking media literate they’re absolutely no fun whatsoever.

Of course, this isn’t the message you get from Channel 4’s 100 Greatest TV Moments From Hell , a selection of ‘awful’ and ‘embarrassing’ clips culled from the television archives. The subtext here is that, phew, thank God we’ve left all the bad stuff behind us. Isn’t it great we have Charlie Dimmock telling how to look after our gardens rather than those sad-eyed avuncular blokes from Wigan standing around in their sheds (© Stuart Maconie Inc, 2000). Television is so much better nowadays, isn’t it? Y’know, since we took over n’that?

Well, no. Fuck off. Television used to be wonderful until the rise of (for want of a better word) 'Theakstonism'. Take kids’ TV. In the old days, the presenters looked like they wanted to be there. They loved children and understood how their ludicrous little minds worked - mainly because they were all over 40, and had something to say. What’s more, their career was for life. Nowadays, people only become kids’ TV presenters as a stepping stone to something else, something ‘better’. Their hearts aren’t in it. They’re just biding their time, hoping they won’t have too long to wait before FHM come a-knocking. Listen to the speech patterns of any Theakstonesque presenter - the whole rhythm of their delivery continually suggests that the next sentence they’re about to say is much more exciting and relevant than the one they’re currently saying (‘And. We’ll. Be. Coming. Back. To. That. Later. In. The. PROGRAMME, Now...’) It’s something they get taught by directors, and it probably made sense when an American media guru suggested it to them. The sad fact, however, is that (a) in a donkey’s carrot style, said exciting and relevant sentence never arrives, and (b) the idea of continually ‘moving on’ to something bigger and better is a tragic metaphor for the decline in television presentation in general. Andy from Big Brother has now left the building.

In 1992, the concept of ‘bad television’ still meant something. In August of that year, BBC2 screened TV Hell , probably the best-realised of their theme nights, an evening of clips and features hosted by Angus Deayton as The Devil and Paul Merton as (for want of a word) 'a pleb'. The evening was excellently conceived and, while being a 'celebration' (in that the choices were presented as entertainment), there wasn't too much of an attempt to foist the ‘so bad it’s good’ ethos on us. The underlying feeling one got from watching was that there was a lot of genuine contempt for basic, regrettable TV stupidity.

The evening was separated into various strands. John Peel did a personal round-up of worst songs, Danny Baker looked back at chat-show travesties, various half-hours were given over to Eurovision , It's A Knockout , etc. A general A-Z collected together any miscellaneous clips which didn't fall into previous categories. Victor Lewis Smith also contributed three short but fantastic inserts. The evening ended with a showing of a one-off 60s show called Mainly Men , billed as a misogynist tragedy but actually a completely inoffensive little gem featuring a terrific piece on shark-fishing. It was seemingly re-vamped several years later as a BBC2 strand called MenZone.

And the latter highlights the main problem with the current thinking. For now we are 'post-ironic' and, far from having contempt or indignation for the foibles of the past, can now celebrate and recreate the horror for real, secure in the knowledge that we are all far too intelligent to do so in innocence.

Well fuck that noise. Bad TV is bad TV. Putting an ironic slant on it only serves to make it a hundred times more painful. It's just another lie, perpetrated to disguise a basic lack of talent or originality. And Channel 4's clip-shows are leading players in this field. People have, of course, always laughed at old TV, but - until recently - their laughter has been essentially good-hearted, stemming from a genuine fascination for broadcasting history. Nowadays the laughter is sneering and hollow.

It’s SOTCAA’s belief that old television, like the past in general, should be treated with respect. Why? Because, even though bad television is obviously not a new phenomenon, the fact is that nobody on TV in the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s was genuinely offensive. At least, not in the way that the likes of Gaby Roslin and Johnny Vaughan are offensive today. They may have misjudged things, but at least they did so in apparent innocence, usually with a genuine desire to make television that people wanted to see; nowadays, people make deliberately bad television, secure in the knowledge that it’ll (a) get the viewers in, and (b) it’ll give them the opportunity to do other things. Obviously, there have always been wily, cynical business-operators working in television, but at least in the past they managed to disguise it well. Nowadays, their self-serving mediocrity is insultingly blatant. In the 80s, for example, the then-likeable Noel Edmonds presented Swap Shop and the ridiculous Mick Fleetwood hosted the Brit Awards. Nowadays, Saturday morning kids’ TV is fronted by anonymous, interchangeable boyband clones and award shows are presented by Davina MacCall. Is this progress?

Davina MacCall ensuring that no genuine unscripted emotion appears on Channel 4

Laugh at bad television, by all means. Tell the TV of the past to fuck off. But don’t assume that you can’t learn from it. After all, it’s only through making those ‘mistakes’ that current presenters are able to exist at all - and look what an anaemic, soulless job they’re doing of it. We don't need Zoe Ball sneering at bad TV when she obviously doesn't care either way. We want somebody who is passionate about the problem. And the problem has fuck-all to do with Keith Chegwin, Zena Skinner or the bloody Mini-Pops.

Hell is attitudes - people watching TV through Red Bull-tinted spectacles instead of doing their jobs properly.

So anyway, 100 bad TV choices, and they were all completely wrong. For various reasons. And we're going to go through them all, one by one, very slowly. So descend with us now into the sheer unadulterated inferno of Channel 4 as we count down The 100 Most Stupid And Lazy Decisions Made By 19-Year Old Twats In A Channel 4 Office. From Hell...

Counting down…

100 David Frost And The Yippies
Frost attempts to interview Jerry Rubin, the leader of the political hippy movement. Rubin offers him a joint. He declines. The audience (of Yippies) yell 'Smoke it, smoke it' (the show obviously influenced Morris and Baynham's radio sketch about Simon Bates eating human flesh) before taking over the show. This sequence was last given an airing during Jerry Sadowitz's Greatest F***ing Show On Television documentary about swearing (Channel 4 - part of the Without Walls series) so no first-hand research has been attempted here.

As with all these clip-shows, talking-head pundits pop up and abbreviate the choices with their unwelcome views. This gives the whole thing an artificial air of 'popular culture sociology' but, as we'll see, is just an excuse for the same old professional witterers to deliver intrusive and lazy soundbites for money.

In the case of The Frost Programme, Paul Ross pretends to hazily recall seeing the show when it went out (yeah, yeah - and the first LP he bought was Revolver, not 'Fluffy The Mouse Goes To Town', narrated by Thora Hird) and thinking 'Now that's a TV presenter'. (well, he got that bit right). Even if he did see the show, he's been sent a tape prior to the recording session anyway so he can practise his fake recollections.

This clip wasn't shown for any genuinely 'hellish' reason. 'Actually, I think someone actually used the C-word…' , says Ross. It was, but this bit was edited out of the footage shown for some reason. The full final sequence ran as follows:

FROST
Now Jerry, people who are watching this have had a good look at the party and what it is. How many people do you think have been converted to your cause?

BEARDED YIPPIE
It's not a party!

FROST
Well, Jerry said it is. And Jerry's a reasonable man - I'm sure he can give a reasonable answer.

BEARDED YIPPIE
He's not a reasonable man. He's the most unreasonable cunt I ever heard in my life! (LAUGHS CHILDISHLY)

FROST
How pathetic…

BEARDED YIPPIE
(SQUIRTING FROST WITH A WATER PISTOL) Aw shut up, Frost, you were dead years ago… (YIPPIES CHEER) You've died. Die die die…

AUDIENCE MEMBER
David, will you get rid of these people?

FROST
Listen. By laughing, childishly, when you've managed to say a four-letter word on television. Big deal!

YIPPIE
Okay, man, how many times have you said a four letter word on television?

FROST
Never, and I hope I never do because it's so pathetic, and so childish, and so pointless…and we'll be right back…

The editors picked up from the phrase ‘...so pathetic’, which made Frost look like a syntactical goon. No indication was given as to what happened to the Frost show after it returned from the break. Maybe Paul Ross couldn't remember that bit.

99 This Morning Stars In Their Eyes
Stuck in to appeal to daytime students. Yes, appalling and embarrassing. But not entertaining or even pleasant considering that This Morning would, like a child murderer, do the same again tomorrow.

98 Play Guitar With Ulf Goran
Stuart Maconie, having already foisted himself as a professional talking-head on BBC2's equally badly-conceived I Love The 70s shows (and scripted Zoe Ball's patronising narration), pops up here to recall 'this geezer, Ulf Goran' in an overly-neat recollection piece filled with tidy soundbites. Maconie - like most of those interviewed - got to see the full shows prior to interview. Hardly surprising, really, seeing as he also rented the camera and interviewed himself - luckily, he chose the ingenious tactic of looking slightly sideways, meaning no one would ever know.

Much is mentioned of the fact that guitar-tutor Mr Goran couldn't speak English. Well, at least he tried, which is more than today's presenters attempt. 'Remarkably, Ulf was a daytime TV star for five years' says a sneery caption. Yeah, such a hellish innocent age that threw up a likeable bearded bloke with an acoustic guitar.

97 Bottle Boys
Nondescript, throwaway, obvious choice. Perhaps they couldn't choose Terry & June for copyright reasons. Nothing hellish about Bottle Boys which was certainly no worse than most ITV sitcoms made back then, but - ironically - far superior to the field-removed atrocities currently cited to ‘save’ the sitcom industry. David Schneider seems to have based his 'Them Next Door' persona from The Day Today on Robin Asquith.

96. Tony Banks On Naked City
Nothing hellish here. Johnny Vaughan on Naked City, maybe. Or how about Collins & Maconie on said show doing a weekly comedy routine in front of a small but totally bored audience. That was hellish for Stuart, surely. But Tony Banks rolling a joint is just dull. A fake air of 'whoo, it's come back to haunt him', shouted from a disinterested bystander to an audience of who-gives-a-sod-anyway....

95. Oxford Roadshow
'Youth TV was still in nappies…', squawks Zoe Ball's voiceover which, as with other selections in the list, smugly suggests that today's industry have the balance completely correct. Another sneer from one generation of Youth TV to another. Knocking the past as a means to an end. How dare they.

94. Open Door - Albion Free State
Another clip nicked from TV Hell's A-Z. Nobody remembers it actually going out of course. No first-hand research needed or even attempted.

93. Boyzone on The Late Late Show
'And now, that embarrassing first appearance they all want to forget…' , says the idiot Ball. Not likely, considering how many times this clip has been dredged up. Always interesting to watch The Priory's 'Theakston Report' as it invariably features such 'exclusives' which have been shown on every Penk / Brand / Deayton type clip-show over the past five years. It would appear that most TV researchers wear blindfolds and ear-muffs for most of their working lives.

92. Curry and Chips
'Proof that even comedy Gods can have feet of clay…'. The first genuinely contentious one here. And, yes, here she is… Stunt-Paki Meera Syal is wheeled out as a talking head to give her viewpoint on a show which nobody really remembers anyway. 'It was so blatantly "let's have a laugh at the wog"…' , she assures us. The clips of the show on display here don't do much to bolster its reputation, comedy-wise, but the researchers were obviously searching for clips which fully illustrated its 'racism' rather than its comedy anyway. And as is always the case with 'racist 70s sit-coms', (or 'poison', as RT's Alison Graham recently described them), they've failed to point out that all the white characters are always horrible and brutish while the ethnic parts are always played sympathetically.

With Curry & Chips, the satire was very obvious, but its complexity seems to be what alienates people - Milligan’s character was an Irish Pakistani who hated blacks, his co-worker was a black man who hated Asians, and Eric Sykes was the liberal, ant-racist foreman who reprimanded his employees for hating just about everyone. Perhaps a ‘SATIRE WARNING’ alarm could be employed especially for stupid people, should LWT choose to repeat the series? 'I think we can look back on programmes like that now and go "God, how did that ever get through, but isn't it good that it wouldn't get through now"', says Meera. Funny - we thought the same about The Real McCoy.

Clive James recently pointed out that since Spike Milligan is actually Indian (and spent most of his War years posted to Africa), he defies you - and denies you - the chance to tar him with the ‘racist’ brush. Milligan is about four million years old, and has seen more than you have ever seen - so have some fucking respect. Particularly you born again liberals working at Channel 4.

91. Paul Shane on Pebble Mill
'One memory from the show has haunted viewers down the years…', reads Zoe. No, you idiot. It's haunted viewers of Shooting Stars.

90. Origami
Maconie is back on camera, once again snidely targeting a show which could surely couldn't offend anybody. Given the choice between nice shows discussing the art of paper-folding and Zoe Ball sneering at anything which doesn't fall into a followed remit of pop-culture, which would you choose? The clips are here intercut with inserts of the Not The Nine O'Clock News contemporary parody. Do you see Rowan and Mel sneering? No.

89. Otway and Barrett
Bastards. John Otway and Wild Willy Barrett have more talent in their little fingers than the entire production crew of this Channel 4 show put together. This performance (from Whistle Test in 1977) is fantastic and has Otway sending up rock star performance foibles. Last shown when Otway was a guest on Jonathan Ross (so, again, no real first-hand research here). A great piece of silliness, totally misrepresented on this show as an example of 'how awful things were before pop video'.

88. Something Else
'In the late-70s, the BBC said "Hey, why not have programmes made for the kids, by the kids!" Because they were rubbish at it, that's why!'. That was Zoe Ball, saying that. Don't ever forget it.

87. Friday Night, Saturday Morning
Another one from TV Hell, this time from Danny Baker's piece on chat shows. Exactly the same clips were shown, of Harold Wilson not-particularly-floundering as he attempts to chat with Harry Secombe and Pat Phoenix. And, as an eerie but potent afterthought, an onscreen caption reveals that Harold Wilson was suffering from Alzheimer's - about fifteen years later.

86: The Who on Russell Harty Plus
A 1973 clip of Keith Moon saying amusing things in character to Mr Harty. Not hell. Entertainment. There is a difference.

85. Mr and Mrs
Oh, such a hellish show. Recently brought back on satellite. When will they ever learn?

84. Indoor League
Another load of clips from a show which nobody considered particularly bad, except for a few 90s comedians (and even they were just using it as blokey kitsch). Once again, NTNOCN fills in some gaps with a few clips from the 'Darts' sketch (which is on one of the Not compilation videos one of the Channel 4 production crew got for Christmas a few years ago from his mate who knew he'd like a bit of a laugh even though most of it's probably dated now).

83. Club X
Paul Morley is literally the only talking-head contributor to 100GTVMFH with anything of interest or merit to say. TV Hell also did a piece on this show. And how can Channel 4 sneer at this when they've recently had the audacity to broadcast Frontal - basically Club X with a Fuck-Art-Take-A-Look-At-My-Clitoral-Piercing policy. Club X was at least presented by likeably wide-eyed toffs who were vaguely bemused at the idea of being on TV in the first place - Frontal is presented by embarrassed people in their late 30s depressingly familiar with what’s expected of them and television. Which, of course, is nothing, because they’re sad wap-heads without anoraks.

We have to admit though, the clip in which the Club X presenter feyly toasted 'So, to Futurism, everybody…' before being startled by an off-mic explosion made us howl our pants off. No sneers though.

82. Animal Kwackers
We need only really quote ourselves here: 'Do you enjoy taking something you obviously adored as a child and sneering at it to compensate for the lack of any grass roots things you've contributed to the world?'. The 'Joe' one off of Adam & Joe gives the game away a bit by saying that he'd suppressed all memory of the show until he saw it again 'the other day' (i.e. when Channel 4 sent him a copy). Fuck knows what the supposed problem is with the show. Surely, just a British version of The Banana Splits with a Glam Rock slant. Hell Rating: flap all. Ricky Gervais contributes to the debate by making wry observations based on absolutely nothing. Such a jewel in Channel 4's crown.

81. Kevin Keegan on Superstars
The England football manager falls off a bike and hurts the side of his leg ha ha ha. 1. Not hellish. 2. Not entertaining, just bland. 3. If the rumours concerning what the media are currently protecting Mr Keegan from are true then there is a genuine hell awaiting him.

(‘Excuse me a moment...’ - Rob S.)

FX: TOILET FLUSH

80. The Girlie Show
Well yes, it was bad. It made a lot of people believe that the spirit of modern feminism was best presented by three women acting like sneery blokes and calling people wankers. But what we have now is a lot worse. The idea of Zoe Ball slagging something which isn't essentially any different from what she does herself is genuinely offensive.

One of the original presenters (the ‘Claire’ one, we think) left after the first series, saying she had been misled by the producers into believing The Girlie Show would be a warm, intelligent series in the spirit of the C4 she had once loved. When she saw the result, she jumped ship as soon as her contract allowed. Funnily enough, C4 didn’t pick her as an obvious interviewee.

79. Out Of Town
Another bit of sneering at a 70s show in which a nice man talked passionately about a given subject. God, how pathetic it was in the 70s when people used to have interests. And it's no coincidence either that Stuart Maconie once again emerges from behind his prop bookshelf to blether about it. Why does this man have such a downer on such programmes? Hasn't he made a career out of presenting music shows based on his own passionate interests? Very strange. Paul Morley pops up to say, without sneers or 'irony' to say how he loved the show. Top man. Out Of Town influenced the Bob Fleming character in The Fast Show so the research is all theirs.

78. Anabella Lwin on B.A. in Music
The jailbait Bow Wow Wow singer acts like a spoilt little cunt in front of 'ageing pop star' B.A. Robertson. No manners, these kids.

77. Ask Zena Skinner
Oh no - a cookery show from ages ago. Zena Skinner, mother of Frank, once appeared in an episode of The Innes Book Of Records. For that reason alone she doesn't deserve to be in this chart.

76. Love Thy Neighbour
Yeah, come on then. Let's hear the same fucking opinions reiterated by the same old idiots. The Curry & Chips bit was just a warm-up, surely? And on they come, one by one, to say the same over-rehearsed talking-head twat-talk they've spat out a hundred times before. Racist sitcoms from the 70s, blah blah. They were poison, blah blah. Fuck you. If people are too stupid to recognise the basic differences between decades then they forfeit their right to own tongues.

Meera Syal is back again in her capacity as a professional minority, moaning about being abused in the playground by kids recreating the racist dialogue. Probably never occurred to her that maybe it was because the other kids thought she was an idiot. Poor old Vince Powell, the show's writer is brought out too. 'All I've ever wanted to do is make people laugh…', he says, bleakly. And the on-screen caption once again attempts to add a weighty afterthought: 'Love Thy Neighbour was axed after eight series in 1976'. Eight series? Good innings!

75. Bernard Levin Gets Punched
An obvious choice. Shown dozens of times on a million clips shows down the years. 'Should have got the punch in quicker', Arthur Smith once noted. What we want to know is a) What did Levin actually write in his review which so infuriated the posh man with the glasses; b) Why does Bernard Levin look shorter standing up than sitting down?; c) Why has nobody tried punching Jamie Theakston?

74. Littlejohn Live and Uncut
This is actually quite a revelation. A visibly distressed Michael Winner calling Richard Littlejohn a homophobic arsehole. Nothing hellish about it. Presumably seldom seen because producers worry that it interferes with the ‘Michael Winner is a cunt, no arguments’ position they’ve been carefully cultivating. It re-writes the rulebook, but in a good way, using evidence - much like old episodes of Swap Shop do to Noel Edmonds’ reputation. ‘La-la, we can’t hear you,’ the execs chorus...

73. Benny Hill
Oh for crying out loud. Received opinion overload. Described by Zoe Ball as a 'controversial British comedian…' Well, here we go then:

Documentary Makers : Oh no, he was filthy because he chased naked girls through the park.

Old Fucker : No, he was a great great man - I don't hold with all this 'political correctness'.

Producer Bloke : Of course, when alternative comedy came along he was mercilessly dropped by Thames.

Etc. Talking-head snippets seemingly left over from all the other documentaries done about Benny Hill over the last decade, but thankfully no vaporous twattle from comedy historian and British subscription magazine editor Robert Ross face.

Party-animal Mark Lawson goes glassy-eyed while talking about the scantily-clad ladies, for some odd reason, before suggesting that there'll be a time when serious academics will applaud Benny Hill as a true exponent of farce (without realising that everybody was doing this about five years ago - we've now moved on to C4 interviewing women who claim to have wanked him off).

72. Mo Mowlam on So Graham Norton
'Meanwhile, in Ibiza, some sunburnt women laugh at a vibrator…'

71. Telethons
Just the idea of Telethons, without offering opinions or even particularly good clips. Much is shown of the 1988 ITV one which had a few bits of genuine badness (for instance Ruth Madoc assuring the country that everyone in Wales was well up for it - the Welsh crowd refusing to recognise that this was their cue to cheer, leaving her looking a tad lost). But, naaah, people can reminisce in their own time. Or download the necessary from the net.

70. Countdown saying 'wankers'
Not even ever broadcast. As such how could this have possibly been voted for? Lies, lies, lies…

On one occasion, a contestant came up with the word ‘Labia’. That was broadcast. But incidents like these are not the reason why people watch the show. And it wasn’t funny anyway.

69. Hylda Baker and Arthur Mullard
This edited package was presumably left out of the Top Ten Worst Comedy Songs for reasons of time.

The onscreen caption mentions that their appearance on Top Of The Pops caused the song to slide down the chart. The same thing happened to Tiswas' Four Bucketeers 'Bucket Of Water Song' (possibly due to the BBC's insistence that they throw buckets of Christmas tinsel over the audience in lieu of water for safety reasons). A more recent exponent of the phenomeman was Bis' 'Kandy Pop' but there seems no possible reason why this might be the case.

68. One Hour With Jonathan Ross
A man from the Freedom To Party campaign handcuffs himself to Ross. Then he throws a glass of water over Paul Morley and (without even pausing) takes a sip from a second glass. He even apologises when Ross tells him off. No hell involved. As talking-head, Morley recollects that they 'carried on as if it was just one of those things - it didn't seem to be particularly unusual' - and that live TV was great because that sort of thing could happen. This man should be on television a lot more.

67. Roger DeCourcey on A Christmas Parade
Several children 'sabotage' a performance by the famous vent and Nookie Bear. Except of course they don't. They just wander about a bit.

‘Roger looks around for assistance’, the captions tell us. For the benefit of those without fucking eyes.

66. Mind Your Language
More poison from the 70s. Poor old Vince Powell. He never seemed to get it just right. Paul Ross has the total audacity to take the moral high-ground over the issue, despite being Paul Ross. Stunt-female Arabella Weir pops up to describe the show as 'beyond belief'. See, these people - always the same ones, the Syals, Weirs, Rosses, Maconies, etc - they're not there to be genuine pundits and comment on these changing fashions of broadcast and media. They are there because they have this basic need to make their specially reinvented, lying, two-faced, shallow-views personae public so that people may put a face to the received opinion and vice versa. And as far as comedy teams are concerned, it always seems to be the fucking idiot of the group who needs that kind of exposure.

65. Stan Boardman's 'Fokkers' gag
And what's so terrible about this? Boardman isn't the only comedian who's used this particular play on words. Neville Chamberlain used to incorporate it into after-dinner speeches. Not offensive, and only outrageous in the context of the Des O'Connor show. A comical play on the amount of times the fokker / fucker pun can be used in a short burst of time. Des' patient face as the fokker blethers on is actually a pure delight. Not hellish. Not very funny, as a joke, but then there's nowt much to laff at these days.

64. Pam Ayres
'She was a shimmering sexpot of 70s excitement', says the 'Joe' one off of Adam & Joe, thus relinquishing his right to life. Next time we're being rude to the Goodies we'll take time out to turn around and break his fucking legs too.

63. James Harries on Wogan
No, this isn't hell. The hellish part of the James Harries experience came a few years later when he was being hailed as a child genius and airing his views on all and sundry despite having not yet developed a basic pubertal understanding of comedy. A bit like Dan L in that respect. 'If I'd 'ave spoken like that when I was a kid, I'd 'ave got a smack in the mouth', said Frank Skinner, also on the Wogan show.

Steve Coogan, a guest on Wogan around the same time as the latter Skinner / Harries appearance, went on to illustrate Skinner's amusement on Knowing Me Knowing You.

62. Lynne Perrie on The Word
Fuck off.

61. Heil Honey, I'm Home
For crying out loud, what the hell is going on? This was quite obviously a parody using a very obvious gag - coupling Adolf Hitler with a cosy sitcom premise. What kind of stupid fucking jerk arsehole would miss the point of a joke like that? And despite being an obvious send-up, they're still trying to bracket it with a 'racism' tag doled out to Vince Powell's stuff.

Geoff Atkinson is interviewed, talking about the notion of turning Hitler into a domestic fool, something which comedians have been doing since he first strutted his stuff on the newsreels. Dick Fiddy, idiot TV historian, describes the show as 'reprehensible because the next door neighbours were Jewish'(despite that being the whole shitting point). One of the Corpses is Jewish and he'd absolutely love to see the show (nay, the series) in full. Very interesting that the full title sequence is shown, including Paul Jackson's 'executive producer' credit, especially given the animosity twixt Mr Jackson and certain people at Channel 4 - an allusion to office politics they assume we're too stupid to pick up on. The inclusion of Heil Honey… in this chart isn't just misguided, it's deliberately offensive.

60. Beauty Contests
Yeah, yeah, I'd like to work with children and animals, etc, blah, blah, bored…

59. Felix on The Tube
A 13-year-old boy interviews Paul McCartney and still makes a better job of it than Jamie Theakston ever could.

58. The Comedians
'In an era before irony…', says Ball. Garry Bushell does his usual schtick. Charlie Williams is dragged on to defend himself to all the post-ironists watching despite having apparently had a stroke. Two interesting things here: Williams' act was always based on him making jokes about the fact that he was black. Russell Peters is still doing that shit in this supposed 'enlightened age' (and getting pissed off by the fact that nobody in this country really cares what colour he is).

Several snippets of John Thomson's 'Bernard Right-on' are shown, just to show how far things have moved on. What nobody's ever pointed out is that the latter sets out to prove that without a certain degree of unpleasantness Bernard's act is totally meaningless. And that's the biggest lesson of all. Without cruelty you don't get beauty. Surely, in this post-modern age, (what with everybody being socially aware and everything), racist and sexist comedy should make us laugh all the more. Thing is, generally, it does. But despite their claims to the contrary, the media still brackets people as idiots who need to be told of the above. And this is why we get people like Meera Syal taking the moral high ground. An insidious reflection of a perceived public feeling. Well, as long as we all agree with each other, everything will be fine.

57. Swearing Football Managers
Not hell, just an excuse to laugh at some blokes saying the F-word on telly, even though it’s perfectly allowable these days. 'Bad language on TV is still frowned upon by many', reads the onscreen caption, as if to remind the viewers why these clips constitute 'hell' and show us where to laugh.

56. The Epilogue
Several earnest vicars do nobody any harm. That's odd - no Stuart Maconie putting the boot into harmless old men in this bit. Perhaps he was too busy kicking his grandad.

55. Glen Medeiros on Juke Box Jury
We all remember this one. The hellish thing was that Glen's song wasn't particularly trite or awful in the face of the Stock Aitkin Waterman-littered 80s pop charts. The cross-the-board glory-hunting panning he received was a perfect illustration of safety-in-numbers sneery opinion. On this occasion it backfired on them. We recall similar situations occurring on the show where the recipients of the slaggings took it in their stride. Channel 4 doesn't acknowledge this - 'The panel was right. The song wasn't a hit' says the onscreen caption. No mention is made of the fact that Medeiros cancelled several further British TV appearances and fucked off back home pretty sharpish, so it's hardly surprising really.

54. Crossroads
Yeah, yeah, carry on. Call us when you've finished. We'll be upstairs, formulating some original opinions.

53. Why Don't You
Here it comes again. We all watched Why Don't You. We all enjoyed it while waiting for The Monkees or Dudley Do-Right to come on. And yet suddenly the opinion is that it was rubbish. Producer Russell T. Davies pops up to talk about how he had to invent all the 'things to do' because all the kiddie-viewers ever sent in were recipes for chocolate rice crispies. Now isn't that a perfect illustration of how The Top 100 TV Moments From Hell works?

52. Public Image Limited on Check It Out
The sneery ex-Sex Pistols singer acts like a spoilt little cunt on late night television. The bleeps suggest it was pre-recorded anyway. 'Sorry, rude word…', says Lydon, repeating his one and only joke. This - and the Juke Box Jury choice later - suggests a concession to originality (as an alternative to simply dragging out the Grundy footage again). Still a false economy though.

51. The Black & White Minstrel Show
It was racist, says one talking head playing the obvious role. No it wasn't - it was great, says Garry Bushell playing his usual role as a professional reactionary. A clip of The Goodies' 'Alternative Roots' is shown as an illustration. 'This is what we were meant to be watching in the 60s? When the Beatles and the Stones and the Doors were happening?', blurts Paul Ross. In fact, the Beatles and the Stones and the Doors were also shown frequently on TV in the 60s. Perhaps Paul Ross was safely in bed listening to 'Sparky's Magic Piano' by that time, despite his blokey insistence that he was with-it enough to appreciate David Frost as a top bloke.

50. L7 on The Word
A woman with a guitar shows her pubic hair for all of a quarter of a second. Nobody mentions that this public display was actually a protest by said Riot Grrrl against a preceding filmed piece about two women who dressed up as Barbie dolls. They also taunted Terry Christian with cries of ‘Sexist!’ etc over his next link. Steven Wells wrote in the NME the following week that he was watching the show with a revolutionary grin on his face, applauding a truly great television moment. No he wasn’t - he was eating cornflakes like the rest of us.

Of course none of the above matters to the Channel 4 compilers who see nothing except a woman's bits.

49. Keep Fit Shows
Stunt-female Arabella Weir pretending to reminisce about stuff. TV critic Kate Thornton: 'I'll never forget Mad Lizzie inflicting her keep fit routine on Take That!'. I shouldn't think you would Kate - you only watched the fucker for the first time before the cameras started rolling, you lying little sod.

48. World of Sport Wrestling
So this is hell, yet Channel 4 habitually show overlong choreographed American wrestling matches throughout the night instead of Absolutely repeats. Leave now.

47. New Faces
Exactly the same clips as TV Hell. The teenaged girl from The Hart Family being slagged off by the panel because she's had the audacity to grow tits since a previous performance (and no longer wears a mini-skirt). Shame nobody thought to dig out The Goodies episode 'Hype Pressure' which features the ultimate high-concept send-up of the show.

46. The Time The Place Studio Demo
Coupla shifty-looking coons being ultimately ineffectual . If that's how they feel, why don't they go and live in Russia…

(‘Hadn’t you better explain that was irony, guys? Your readers might not understand otherwise...’ - Channel 4 Ed)

They obviously wanted the Chris Morris appearance but found that the Brass List had all taped a Nick Drake documentary over the top, to impress a girl.

45. OTT
Once again, this is a received opinion based on skewed memories and little evidence. The horrible thing is, the compilers of this list do actually have access to the archives and as such could refresh peoples memories if they so wished. Your humble Corpses watched every episode and found it exhilarating. And we have a few of them on audiotape too so this isn't a false memory retrieval.

Alexei Sayle, in his book Great Bus Journeys Of The World recalls how 'some of the script material was feeble but I was good, Lenny Henry was good…'. And they were. So were the rest of the cast (including Helen Atkinson-Wood). Certainly as good as Tiswas ever was.

Paul Ross totally misses the point by blethering about how it was 'an idea decades ahead of its time, pre-dating the laddish culture…' , blah, toss, drone… What nobody ever understood was the reason it worked was due to Chris Tarrant being this amiable, avuncular bloke who anchored the anarchy with comic dignity and aplomb. The idea of a bikini-clad woman having gunge poured over her isn't funny in itself but the fact that it was done while Tarrant was reading out competition winners in his fey voice (and, with Atkinson-Wood, affecting not to understand why the pleb-audience were whooping) was what made it fantastic. Something which all gunge-ridden entertainment shows have gallantly missed the point of since.

OTT was great. Naughty Bob Godfrey cartoons, vintage pop footage, Alexei Sayle doing his Stoke Newingtons every week. There was also a spin-off book (OTT - Beyond The Pale) but that was a bit rubbish.

Nice to see Dave Gorman's father John as a talking-head recollecting about the first show in which Malcolm Hardee (and 'The Greatest Show On Legs') first did their balloon-dance show-stopper on TV. Shame they couldn't be arsed to broadcast the opening sequence of the second show where each of the cast (in close-up) apologise earnestly in turn for the naughtiness (pull back to reveal them all defiantly nude with balloons).

'After the first series TV watchdogs refused to let the programme go out live', says the caption. There was only one series of OTT.

Much is then made of Gorman's statement about how Tarrant 'left television' and vowed never to produce another TV show, mixed through to a clip of 'Who Wants To Be Millionaire?' as if to prove otherwise. Ignoring almost two decades of other television work produced or presented by Tarrant. Well, who needs to worry about facts when you've got a nice production-segue…

44. Pan's People dance routine
Another dip into the TV Hell bag-of-pre-selected-clips. If you're worrying why we're so irritated by this lack of originality, just remember that it's through clip-shows borrowing easy choices from other clip-shows in this way which has lead to the all those 'Best Of Comedy' Basil-Fawlty-hitting-his-car / Delboy-falling-through-a-wine-bar / Fork-handles vote-results of the past decade. If the public are habitually served rehashed clips through basic producer-sloth then it stands to reason that they will become just as lazy. And this suits those producers just dandy.

43. Jeremy Paxman at the Berlin Wall
Yeah, typical mentality here. A momentous event like the passing of a fascistic regime can only be remembered for the fact that some fireworks were obscuring what a bloke was saying. 'This is pure Monty Python' , says a spectacled gentleman to Paxman. No, it's not even slightly funny.

Interestingly, this clip didn’t become a ‘classic moment’ until earlier this year, when it was unearthed for the (rather better-researched) 20 Years Of Newsnight documentary. Excluded from both said compilation and from ...TV Hell was a similar clip featuring an earpiece-free Alan Clark trying to make out what Kirsty Wark was saying - ‘This is just like The Day Today!’ he quipped, leaving Wark to move swiftly on. The difference is that the ‘Monty Python’ allusion was merely an amiable comment on the incongruous setting for a political debate (showing that the spectacled gentleman had a better unerstanding of the term ‘Pythonesque’ than all the spammy parrot idiots who do hack-job tributes to said programme), wheras Clark’s comment actually undermined the authority of Newsnight itself.

Channel 4 also captioned the fall of the Berlin Wall as happening in 1990 rather than 1989. But, hey, it was only the most important political event of the post-war era, so don’t worry about it...

42. Mini-Pops
Not only do all the clips in this entry come from TV Hell, it's obviously also a VHS copy of the show. Odd, considering it was a Channel 4 programme. And the picture quality suggests that whoever taped it has watched it again and again and again. Sweaty commissioning C4 Ed Mike Bolland talks-head exactly as he did on TV Hell.

Meera Syal tells us how much she wanted, as a kid, to be on the show, but then - remembering where she is and what she's supposed to say - lies through her stupid teeth about how she found it a bit 'disturbing'.

A few things which are never mentioned on this subject: firstly, the Minipops existed before Channel 4. There have always been little stage kids who enjoy plastering their faces with lipstick pretending to be adults. Whichever stage-school belched out these tots was already releasing singles, LPs and foisting them on other TV variety shows as little novelty compact versions of chart-toppers. Secondly, nobody at the time really gave a fuck about the 'moral implications' of the show. It was broadcast in innocence and received in innocence. It was, after all, a teatime children's show, and not really that removed from other shows of the age. Lastly, anybody who might sneer at the bygone era of broadcasting a sexualised image of children might like to shut their stupid mouths and watch any Saturday morning kids show where they will see dozens of them every week accenting their barely developed tits with designer Wonderbras, gyrating and thrusting to very best of that week's sexy pop hits.

CD:UK - Ant (or is it Dec) introduces the latest hit by Steps next to a starry-eyed 13-year-old who's been told by the director to point her puppy-fat knockers at the camera

41. The Stone Roses On The Late Show
Indie-idiot Ian Brown acts like a spoilt little cunt in front of himself. Another far too obvious choice, untimely ripped from the womb of TV Hell. 'Singer Ian Brown was angry about persistent technical problems', says the idiot caption for anybody who might have their fingers in their ears at that point.

40. Private Dicks
Yeah, go on, show a bit of recent Channel 4 tack, just to blur the edges between good and bad even further. A sunburnt woman opens her mouth with amazement at several partially denuded penises in turn. Are they showing this because they genuinely think it's hellish and regrettable? Or are they insisting, as Zoe Ball frequently dictates throughout this travesty, that bad TV is actually fantastic. If all these errors of judgement are presented as 'Great TV' then what the fuck can anybody learn from it? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. How dare Channel 4 so blatantly insult us?

39. Junior Showtime
Another well-worn VHS from somebody's 'private collection'. The 'Adam' one from 'Adam & Joe' goes on a personal journey of recollection we could well do without.

38. Game For A Laugh
Usual reference-comedy jokes about Jeremy Beadle (without ever attempting to analyse the origins of his foibles). No conclusions drawn from the clip shown. And no Not The Nine O Clock News clip either. A throwaway choice.  And again, we all quite liked it as kids.

37. Disco Dancing Championships
Ricky Gervais attempting his fucking comedy intercut with clips of disco dancers. TV Hell, blah. Regrettable.

36. Novelty variety acts
A clip of the bloke who used to bang a tea tray on his head while singing 'Mule Train'. And is that Bill Oddie, just visible in the background, giggling? Much is droned about the smugly aware sensibilities about this post-irony age, but the inherent ridiculousness of the gentleman's act (a stalwart of Tiswas and OTT incidentally) reveals the basic truth that most people were actually a lot more aware about things in the 70s and 80s than people assume. It's the offspring of these wonderful, silly people who have rebelled against their parents to the extent of becoming humourless opinionated bastards. Zoe Ball being a moot case in point.

35. Prisoner Cell Block H
You twats. Hilary Kingsley (once a mere tabloid TV critic, now a 'TV Historian' apparently) blethers about how it was great that Australian TV recognised that lesbians existed. Paul Morley once again excels here by stating the obvious - that it was actually a 'tender show' with some genuinely moving storylines.  And it was. Garry Bushell by way of contrast comes out with a load of crap about how bad the acting was. 'The series was made in Australia between 1979 and 1986', says the caption. An Australian soap opera made in Australia? Surely not. At least nobody did the 'wobbly walls' observation (mind you, they'd already done it in reference to Crossroads…).

34. Sale Of The Century
Go fuck a pig.

33. Iggy Pop's Trousers
Mr Pop not even slightly showing his genitals on The White Room.

32. DIY Shows
Yes, he's back. Stuart Maconie strikes another blow where it hurts. He pulls no punches here as he offers his valued critique on nice friendly blokes giving household tips. Backing this uselessness is Zoe Ball's intro (from Maconie's script) which further insists that this old-school style of presentation was a load of old rubbish but with the nice populist (successful) Carol Smilie approach, we've achieved greatness. Contradicting this is an on-screen caption which points out that one of the nice friendly DIY blokes 'received up to 35, 000 letters a week' when he was on the box. And what's more, nobody had to come on TV and tell those bygone viewers how fucking popular and successful he was. There's a lesson there somewhere. But Maconie and Ball are too busy rehearsing their opinions for a fee to learn from it.

Stuart Maconie reading his script

31. Norwegian Eurovision entries
Same clips as TV Hell. All opinions replaced by a captioned 'nil point' joke which doesn't work in print.

30. Timmy Mallett
'These days, Kids TV presenters are suave, sophisticated and on the cover of glossy magazines…', says Zoe Ball with no concession to the basic human trait of humility. The truth is that Kids TV presenters are boring self-publicists who care not an idle toss for the idea of television for children and that's why they're on the cover of glossy magazines - so they can whore themselves onto video promo shows and follow in the stinking footsteps of Zoe Ball, etc.

They are doomed to failure however as most Kids' TV presenters don't have a father who was much loved as a kids' favourite in the 70s whom they can latently diss at every given photo opportunity in an attempt to cast off the weight of the past. The more we think of this, the more we regard Zoe Ball as ignorable scum.

29. Johnny Rotten On Juke Box Jury
The bored PiL singer acts like a spoiled little cunt in front of Alan Freeman (who tells him to shut up). Excellent. Not hell, but very entertaining. Noel Edmonds as host also being lovely. Lydon affects the most ineffectual walk-out in TV history, angered by The Monks and Donna Summer. Paul Morley is the talking head. 'It's all in the eyes', he says of Lydon's performance. And of course, it is.

28. Hoddle & Waddle on Top Of The Pops
Oh give us a break, please…

27. Going For Gold
Much comedy has been extracted from the idea of the unfairness of contestants from all over the world battling each other on a quiz show where the questions are asked in English. Well balls to that. A) If the various nationalities can write a letter asking to be on the show in the first place then they're fair game. B) The questions are about people and things which aren't specifically Anglocentric (even so, statistically it's more likely that someone from across the water will have heard of a British playwright than a Brit will have heard of a Yugoslavian one). C) Henry Kelly hardly talks 'Radio 4 English' anyway. D) This observation originated in The Mary Whitehouse Experience , which none of the ...TV Moments From Hell compilers ever heard - and MWE only mentioned it because they understood that Steve Punt saying ‘We do not get Top Gear in our country’ in a Norwegian accent was the funniest thing ever.

26. The Grand Knockout Tournament
The Royal one. The 'Adam' one and the 'Joe' one off of Adam & Joe pretend to do amusing off-the-cuff comedy even though it looks scripted and ultimately worthless. Off-the-cuff observations only survive if they are genuine. Otherwise it's just another insidious way of getting away with crap material. Adam & Joe have always excelled at doing stuff that's sort of okay because it's a bit amateur.

25. The James Whale Radio Show
Wayne Hussey being drunk and boring on said show before being escorted out of the building by Whale. Hardly an isolated moment - a common occurrence in fact. This incarnation of Whale's TV work wasn't too dreadful. A genuine attempt at an interesting and intimate discussion / phone-in / pop video / whatever programme. Later, after Mike 'Cue The Music' Mansfield's tabloid make-over, it became desperately plebby (with Jerry Hayes' political spot, Baz Bamingboy's showbiz gossip and that enormous lawyer from the Daily Mirror dishing out legal advice).

Here's a bit of Whale 'hell' which was a lot more embarrassing than some pop star taking his shoes off and saying 'fuck'. Rob Newman appeared on The James Whale Radio Show several years back, (ages before his big elevation to little-girl-student hero status), ostensibly to plug Rob & Dave's Comedy Phone-In which was broadcast that week on Radio One. All went fine for a bit - Newman, then sporting short hair and a tache - did his Ronnie Corbett impressions and stuff, no problem. But at some point the mood turned and vague insults started to fly. He started talking over Whale as he was reading out the letters and seemed irritated about being on the show in the first placel. Whale, much more shrewd and adept at dealing with idiots than Rob Newman, managed to quite easily turn the minimal audience gathered behind the sofa in the studio foyer against him. Newman couldn't come back to any of this so he simply muttered 'Alright, yeah, I've been sussed by the Whale!' or somesuch.

But he gave it one last shot. At the close of the show, Whale left Newman whining on the sofa in the background, and approached the camera for his final bit to the viewers. He earnestly conveyed a greeting to his mother who was in hospital at the time. Seizing his chance, Newman yelled out 'SHE'S GOT CANCER!'. Oh dear - not a single laugh.  Whale turned back and simply announced 'I didn't think that was very funny. Did anybody here think that was funny?' The audience were unanimous and it was all Newman could do to affect a comedy 'Okay, who said that - right, outside, now!' before leaping from the sofa, through the audience and presumably out of the back door straight into the arms of Jon Thoday.

Now that's a hellish TV moment. But nobody saw it, so there's no opinions on it, and ultimately not considered for this list.

24. QVC
Meera Syal and Arabella Weir do their respective shopping channel material. We reckon those two should get together. And fuck off.

23. Chris Mayhew on Panorama
The Coogan character being fellated in The Day Today (as part of 'Attitudes Night') is an obvious nod towards this untransmitted show which featured a staid BBC presenter taking mescaline as part of a TV experiment. TV Hell also showed this as part of their A-Z. It worked there as a general exploration into television silliness, but - like the Countdown clip earlier - it doesn't really count as a 'TV Moment'. If this were the case then surely all sorts of out-takes swapped within the industry could be shown (for instance the stuff from all the various 'Christmas Tapes' over the years - see HIDDEN ARCHIVE for furtherness).

22. L!ve TV
All we can hear now are Peter Cook and Dudley Moore: DUD: Have you learned from your mistakes? / PETE: Yes, and I'm looking forward to repeating them exactly. Live TV was deliberately bad. And Channel 4 are following its example. That's hell. Topless women playing darts and midget weathermen - that's just bland.

21. Blue Peter Garden Vandalism
Ricky Gervais consolidating his 'dangerous' persona by saying he thought it was funny when the garden was wrecked. He's surprisingly camp for a 'hard man of comedy'. And he has beautiful eyelashes. This of course shouldn't dissuade us from hunting him down and ripping open his stomach in from of his family. Back at the garden, Percy Thrower opines that people who wreck Blue Peter gardens must be 'mentally ill'. We reckon it was Johnny Rotten, still in a bad mood after having Alan 'Fluff' Freeman tell him to shut up.

It’s worth pointing out that ABSOLUTELY NOBODY (least of all Gervais, who presumably loved television as a child and respected its parameters) found the wrecking of the Blue Peter garden remotely funny - most people either didn’t particularly care, or they felt a bit angry and sad and depressed. But try telling that to some stubbly turk guzzling Red Bull and vodka in a Percy Street bar- he’s re-written history, and he doesn’t want facts to get in the way of his sales pitch.

20. Dexy's Midnight Runners on Top Of The Pops
'Jackie Wilson Said' but a big picture of Jocky Wilson as a backdrop. Not hell. Deliberate. They've said so. 1982. Pre-irony, totally aware and pissing all over the dickheaded media of today.

But they've included it anyway.

19. Bullseye
Not even slightly hellish. Tedious, if you don't happen to like darts, but well liked and fondly remembered by people who are in love with the world. Not deserving of a place in this chart at all.

18. Driving School
Only hellish in that it opened the floodgates for a shitload of faked, second-rate television (or a 'heritage of…' as TV critic Tina Baker spits it) which has resulted in TV attempting to emulate the same tired formula again and again, and gushing middle-class, middle-aged women writing RT leaders telling us how great it is that finally there's some good down to earth ordinary people on TV. That's hell. We're surprised Alison Graham hasn't made an appearance on these sorts of show actually.

17. Shaun Ryder on TFI Friday
Yes, yes, we've heard it all before. Shaun says 'fuck' a few times. Not hellish. And nobody's yet pointed out that, by singing 'Pretty Vacant' by the Sex Pistols, he gets to say 'Cunt' several times anyway.

16. Streaker On This Morning
A naked man jumps onto Fred Talbot's floating weathermap and sort of runs around a bit showing his bottom. Deemed so shocking by the producers that they actually returned to him after a bit so you could see his penis too.

15. Bobby Ewing coming back from the dead
Hell? Quite ingenious, looking back. Has anybody explained whether the corresponding storyline in Knots Landing was meant to be a dream too?

14 The Hopefuls On The Word
'Whenever the story of trash TV is told…' says Ball. Every fucking year on Channel 4, surely? A man licks a fat woman's armpits. Another man snogs an old woman. Depressing, perhaps, but not hell. As with everything on The Word, it was never the events that were entertaining but the various reactions to it. After the gerontaphilic piece above, Bob Mortimer's reaction was a totally unfazed and hilarious 'No, in fact, the elder mouth holds no fear for me'. That was the funny bit.

‘The Hopefuls’ is also always cited, by revisionists, as a satire on the mindlessness of the junk TV generation. Yeah, and I bet Thatcher had a lot to do with it as well. The bottom line is, nothing can change the fact that ‘The Hopefuls’ played up to a moronic mass audience, upon whom producers at The Word were relentlessly reliant.

Taken to its conclusion, 'women bathing in pigshit' and 'Zoe Ball' are actually part of the same TV producer remit.  One day she might even work this out. 

13. Dubbed TV
'If you look it the dictionary under the word Gruff, it says "like all the men spoke in all of those dubbed TV programmes"…'. We just looked up the word 'arsehole' and found 'Stuart Maconie trying to be funny'. No mention here of Oscar, Kina and the Lazer or Heidi, both of which were very popular with children.

The feeling one gets, watching this entry, is that the people who've compiled the list have only just been told that such shows used to be dubbed and feel the need to share this info with anybody who might still be troubled by the phenomenon.

The truth was a lot more simple. The pictures don't match the voice, so...:

'Mum - why don't the pictures match the voice?'

'Because it's a foreign show in a different language dubbed into English, son'

'Oh. I see…'

It was that fucking simple. And we understood all the jokes Not The Nine O Clock News made about Freddie Laker too, simple by asking a responsible adult what they meant.

That's the root of what's wrong with plebbed-down TV. Everyone in the industry assumes there are no more responsible adults to ask.

12. John Redwood sings (sort of)
Yawns.

11. Eldorado
Like we said, the nadir of reference comedy is Jim Davidson making a joke about Eldorado last week. And so it continues.

10. 321
No better or worse than any other quiz shows of the age. No reason for it to be in this list.

9. Soap Characters Changing Actors
Ha ha, Tracey Barlow went upstairs to sulk and didn't come down for ten years, ha ha ha, did they honestly think we wouldn't notice, ha ha ha, aren't I a right old laugh with my funny observations.

Whenever a soap character changes actors there's always a tossing big write-up on the replacement in TV Quick or whatever. So why do the gushing Alison Graham middle-class, middle-aged woman brigade act like they're in on some 'big secret' which they're naughtily sharing with the world?. Because they're scum who genuinely believe that their readers are as thick and slow on the uptake as they are. Hell? Oh yes.

Anyway, whenever actors are changed in this manner, the scriptwriters nearly always insert wry references to the situation. When Brookside ’s Gordon Collins returned to the series in the skin of another actor, his first line upon returning home was ‘Well, everything looks the same, mum...’. A reference designed to be spotted by the viewers, who - it was assumed - could differentiate between television and real life. When the bloke in Game On was replaced, they were less subtle, but their heart was in the same place. Becky from Roseanne, meanwhile, did a song and dance routine pertaining to her departure, which was a parody of something we expect. See - people revelling in the silliness of television. And again, no sneers.

8. Some girls being not much cop on University Challenge
Hell for the girls involved, dull for anybody else. The one in the glasses was nice.

7. Naked Jungle
A naked Keith Chegwin leading naturist contestants through a series of adventures in a set left over from another show. For some reason he's put out an embargo on images of his cock being used in this entry. Not unlike Esther Rantzen and her face in fact.

Nothing hellish about Naked Jungle. Bland tack, offending nobody. The hell came with the right-wing press afterwards erroneously claiming it as a new low in TV while making nasty comments about the various shapes of the contestants. Great stuff - 'It was disgusting! There were naked people on television. And what's worse, they were all slightly overweight too!'.

6. Julian Clary on the British Comedy Awards
This must surely be the first time this clip has been repeated since it happened. From a VHS copy several generations down the line it would appear. It's not hell, but it is bloody great. Purportedly led to Clary being banned from TV for two years (according to other documentaries) and brief tabloid hysteria. The Sun described the word 'fisting' as 'so disgusting that we can't tell you what it means as this is a family newspaper' (in other words they had yet to dig out their copy of the Oxford Book Of Obscure Words For Rudeness and didn't know themselves) yet Michael Barrymore appeared a bit later in the evening to reiterate Clary's amusement in the form of a mixture of charades, hand-signals-for-the-deaf and mime (which pretty much explained the premise) and received no comment.

Garry Bushell gets himself back in character to dismiss Clary as a disgusting individual who should never be allowed on mainstream television (despite earlier having claimed - of The Comedians - that it doesn't matter what the subject is, as long as it makes you laugh)

The joyous reaction from the audience (there's one particularly excellent shot of Richard & Judy crying with mirth) elevates this to comedy heaven, not hell.

The hell came later as this incident kicked off the brainless opinion that 'something always goes wrong at the Comedy Awards'.  Oddly, Buster Merrifield's collapse at the 1997 awards wasn't shown.  Maybe there were too many abrasions on Stuart Maconie's tape?  And spunk.

5. Clive Anderson All Talk
The Bee Gees walk off after one pun too many from Clive. The BBC wouldn't allow this to be shown so Channel 4 opt for the VHS option. And like the clips on You've Been Framed (or indeed the Minipops earlier) you can see how many times the actual walk-out bit has been played and rewound by the amount of drop-outs and indentations on the tape.

The bearded one from The Bee Gees has never had a sense of humour, being the one who took great exception to the Hee Bee Gee Bees' 'Meaningless Songs In Very High Voices' (while the other two thought it was a hoot). But since the whole All Talk appearance has now become an industry joke (with Anderson appearing on the recent Audience With The Bee Gees), this also doesn't qualify for a hellish moment.

4. Shakin' Stevens jumps on Richard Madeley
And Rick Parfitt is such a rock and roller that he takes time out to brush the dust kicked up by the non-ruck from his nice expensive shoes. No hell.

3. Tara Palmer-Tomkinson on the Frank Skinner Show
Dull. The dick from The Sun blethers about how this TV appearance led to Palmer-Tomkinson entering rehab. Well, chronologically, maybe.

2. Mick Fleetwood and Samantha Fox on The Brits
Good morning. Welcome to the beautiful sleepy docile town of Received Opinion, Twatville. We hope you'll enjoy having all your decisions made for you by people you've never met. Your song for this evening is William Shatner’s version of ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’.

'The most toe-curling, cringe-making, awful, shambolic, shameful piece of television I have ever seen!', says Kate Thornton, the woman who murdered Smash Hits.

Only about three separate things actually went wrong that night. The rest of it was just Fairground Attraction. But it captured the end of an era in British TV - a time when messy incompetence was still, to use Gary Davies’ terminology, a possibility. Think about it - can you imagine a crowd of teenybopper pop fans openly booing a cabinet minister on live TV these days? Wrong question. The fact is, can you imagine a crowd of teenybopper pop fans being given the opportunity to boo a cabinet minister on live TV these days? Well, try it with one of Zoe Ball’s lackies and see how far you get.

Who the fuck wants ‘professional’ television anyway? Where’s the fun in that? These days, The Brits is presented by Davina MacCall. We rest our case.

1 Richard Madeley's impression of Ali G
This is the worst of the lot. This sums it all up for us. Is it embarrassing? Is it hellish? Well, no. Not a bit of it. There's the vague irritancy which always accompanies somebody blatantly latching onto a fad, but Richard Madeley has nothing to gain either way. He did it in response to some pleb-feed tabloid article suggesting alternate hairstyles. His response was to take that dull joke a stage further. What's worse is that it's actually a pretty good impression. Even Judy does a good impression of herself being pissed off at the embarrassment factor of the idea.

So why is it in this chart? Moreover, why is it number one in this chart? Is it not simply Channel 4 promoting itself? What they are saying is that, basically, they've created Ali G. He was a great big fat success. In fact he was so successful that Richard Madeley degraded himself on TV (even though he actually didn't) and thousands upon millions upon quadrillions of people have voted for this clip (even though they haven't) as the very very very very best hellish TV moment (even though it isn't) and this just shows how far the popularity of Ali G has spread (even though it doesn't). The subtext, as with the contemporary Guinness commercial which suspiciously "won" the the station’s Best Adverts poll earlier in the year, is ‘Bank with Channel 4’.

Here you see the final irreparable smudging of the gap between good and bad TV. The final big HELL is revealed as a clip that doesn't even make sense. Its purpose here isn't to say 'this is bad' (or even 'this is great'). It's here as a PR exercise. No coincidence is it that the final shot before the fade-out and credits is not Madeley but the real Ali G.

The Top 100 TV Moments From Hell? Add another to the list.

[NOTE: Since this piece was written, Jamie Theakston has presented a clip show on BBC 1 which laughed at stars making mistakes or doing 'embarrassing things they weren't suited to' on various TV shows.  He did this by stumbling over his script and being generally incompetant.  And what a good sport he was - they ended with a clip of Theakston also doing something embarassing, just to show that he could laugh at himself.  Except they didn't.  It was a clip of him duetting with Kylie Minogue.  Not embarrasing, not excrutiating to watch.  Did the audience notice?  No - they howled with mirth all the same.  The edges are being blurred to oblivion.]