Ian Hyland - Mirror Newspapers

Richard Ingrams in The Oldie (for a while, he didn't actually have a set! Hahaaaa! Er, no, Richard.)

Victor Lewis Smith when he can't be bothered, which is much of the time these days.

Bushell and Catchpole - they virtually read the same these days.

The winner....AG in RT. Who else could it have been?

George Wood off Teletext is an idiot.

Yes, definitely. Actually makes Sam chuffing Brady look like the mouthpiece of reason.

I don't buy RT anymore....what is wrong with this AG person peopel?

>I don't buy RT anymore....what is wrong with this AG person peopel?

Alison Graham - such a patronising, unfunny, just plain bad feature writer/reviewer, that I wouldn't trust her to edit the school magazine. (Alright, so I've said that before.)

I'll ask again: what else has she done to get the RT gig? Anyone? Anyone?

RT reveals a substantial amount of the plot of next week's One Foot in the new issue. Thanks a bunch, you bastards.

A.A.Gill

>A.A.Gill

How could I have forgotten?!

Now, A A Gill may be an awful PERSON, but he reads OK. (At least better than his gawdeplpus books. Strewth. Just the thought of it makes me sick.)

Is the quality of the reviewer at all related to the paper? Or are they diametirically opposed? ie: I don't mind AA Gill, but have little time for his paper, while I like the Guardian, but hate its daily TV reviews. Ditto Time Out's TV section, which is a pale shadow of the level of criticism in its music pages...

>Now, A A Gill may be an awful PERSON, but he reads OK.

A A Gill may read OK. It's the content I can't stand. And the fact he so so wishes to be thought of as a funny guy but can't quite manage it.

Alison Graham got the job at RT because she genuinely believe the shit they shovel. I was APPALLED to see her as an expert on the panel at the BFI's 100 Top TV Shows (along with the equally awful Bruce "let's compile a picture book about a comedian with the text based on on newspaper articles about them" Dessau) defending polls.

"I love them" said Alison, "they're fun and they're great." She then went on to say how representative they are and to defend a poll that was based on the answers from the 1 or 2 40+ industry people from Hampstead who actually bothered to reply and tell the BFI which shows that had been repeated in the past 10 years they thought were the best shows EVER EVER EVER.

Kathryn Flett in the Observer. Offensive, narrow-minded, suburban-plays-city, nasty, patronising, supercilious, bitch. Can't stand her.

"suburban-plays-city"

What's all that about?

>Alison Graham got the job at RT because she genuinely believe the shit they shovel. I was APPALLED to see her as an expert on the panel at the BFI's 100 Top TV Shows (along with the equally awful Bruce "let's compile a picture book about a comedian with the text based on on newspaper articles about them" Dessau) defending polls.
>
>"I love them" said Alison, "they're fun and they're great." She then went on to say how representative they are and to defend a poll that was based on the answers from the 1 or 2 40+ industry people from Hampstead who actually bothered to reply and tell the BFI which shows that had been repeated in the past 10 years they thought were the best shows EVER EVER EVER.


She doesn't disappoint, does she? But what did she do *before* RT? I had never heard of her.

With you on Bruce Dessau, Bean. Bought his Rowan Atkinson biog in paperback when I had a train journey to endure not long ago. When I finished it, I found I actually knew *less* about RA. Quite an achievement.

>She doesn't disappoint, does she? But what did she do *before* RT? I had never heard of her.

TV reviewer for the Daily Mail I think.

>Kathryn Flett in the Observer. Offensive, narrow-minded, suburban-plays-city, nasty, patronising, supercilious, bitch. Can't stand her.

Abso-fucking-lutely. Couldn't have put it better myself. Most of the Guardian Guide reviewers are poor. Graham, obviously. Adam Sweeting in the Grauniad is pretty terrible also.

>Most of the Guardian Guide reviewers are poor.

Meaning most of the listings reviewers. Brooker is pretty good. Shelley - v. funny on soaps. Not so good on anything else.

New Guardian reviewer who is as bad as bad can be: Gareth McClean. Writes like he's just come out of Uni, yet hates students. Also seems to hate women, says people who commit suicide 'have a screw loose', likes 'Brotherly Love', drops in irrelevant references to Strindberg, makes weak puns. I could go on.

>With you on Bruce Dessau, Bean. Bought his Rowan Atkinson biog in paperback when I had a train journey to endure not long ago. When I finished it, I found I actually knew *less* about RA. Quite an achievement.
>

I'd like to see Bruce try and write something about Chris Morris. He'd base a 50 page large size book on that blue tinted photo of Chris Morris with his hair stuck up from Blue Jam and a couple of quotes from The Day Today.

Mind you, at least he's not Robert Ross. If Robert Ross did a book on Chris Morris he'd get the quotes wrong, spell Morris with one r and forget to talk about Brass Eye.

>"suburban-plays-city"
>
>What's all that about?

Meaning she comes over all metropolitan and dynamic in a silver-scooter fashion, but really she's a semi-detached, Mondeo on the drive, pelmets-and-valances, Archers-listening Tory scumbag. In my opinion of course. Shallow crapness aspiring to shallower crapness.

And, er, what are "pelmets-and-valances"?

>And, er, what are "pelmets-and-valances"?

Ooh, recursion. I've just spent ages remembering/finding out what they're called. Pelmets are the things you get at the top of windows, covering curtain rails. Valances are the things that serve a similar pointless function for the space under a bed.

And, er, what's "recursion"?

No, sorry, I do know, just couldn't resist it...

Aren't the things under beds called bed-pans? 'Valance' must be the posh, suburban word for them.

>Meaning most of the listings reviewers. >Brooker is pretty good. Shelley - v. funny >on soaps. Not so good on anything else.

I have to disagree with this. Jim Shelley's "tapehead" columns were the most consistently witty, acute and impassioned since the early Clive James Observer reviews. He picked up on many programmes that were languishing in scheduling hell (Oz, Homicide, etc), and gave some well deserved kickings to celebrities who were living on past glories (Richard E. Grant for example).

More importantly, he recognised that it's better to write at length about the good programmes while they are around, instead of trying to review the many different programmes each week (that are mainly crap). Because of this, the good stuff was written about at an appropriate length, and over several weeks. This allowed many motifs and themes to arise over the seven year period he was writing the column.

The best thing about Tapehead was that he managed to convey the depression that comes over you when you realise your favourite programmes are coming to the end of their run, and you are going to have to put up with shit again. In an age where you have to wait years between each Chris Morris series, or run the gauntlet of the BBC's crazy approach to Seinfeld scheduling, Tapehead really captured the nightmare of our current broadcasting system.

But I do think that Charlie Brooker is quite good as well.

>>With you on Bruce Dessau, Bean. Bought his Rowan Atkinson biog in paperback when I had a train journey to endure not long ago. When I finished it, I found I actually knew *less* about RA. Quite an achievement.
>>
>
>I'd like to see Bruce try and write something about Chris Morris. He'd base a 50 page large size book on that blue tinted photo of Chris Morris with his hair stuck up from Blue Jam and a couple of quotes from The Day Today.

And it would be called "Chris Morris: The Latest News". Or "Chris Morris: In A Jam".
Or...oh, you know. He'd manage to secure interviews with someone who lived in Bristol in 1989, Emma Freud, Rob Moore from the 11 O'Clock Show, and someone who spotted Armando Iannucci on television in 1997.