THE fight is over. They’ve colonised the entire planet.
Pole To Pole, Coast To Coast and back, via the old A12’s Army & Navy roundabout, Portillo, Toksvig, Calman, McDonald and the rest have claimed every square inch of it in the name of minor celebrities and their wretched travelogues.
TV’s decided we love these shows as well, so they play on an endless know-all loop, admonishing you for the places you haven’t visited and telling viewers they had a far better time in the places you have, on account of the fact the presenter had a TV network picking up the tab and catering for their every C-list whim.
I’m not fond of any of these famous freeloaders, obviously.
However, in the absence of Richard Ayoade (Plus A N Other rubbish comedian) smirking their way round some Third-World hellhole for another 48 Hours, my current bugbear is a series called A Wright Family Holiday, on BBC1 of all places, which is a British-based rip-off of ITV’s Breaking Dad.
Opening guff
This means that as well as Towie’s Mark and his brother Josh, who never tires of reminding us he’s “a professional footballer”, without clarifying it’s for Ebbsfleet United, we have Mark senior, who is cajoled, nagged and almost bullied into jumping out of aeroplanes and off bridges and engaging in other adrenaline-fuelled activities the poor old sod clearly doesn’t want to do.
There is one very significant difference here, though.
Whereas Bradley Walsh is instantly likeable and funny, the Wright boys have a distinct air of Mitchell brothers menace about them and a sense of humour that’s “route one” from the moment Mark introduces himself as “a mature 35-year-old man”, then farts.
Following on from this opening guff, something of a pattern emerges.
Winding their way through the Peak District, Mark Snr says, “Take it all in, look around, breathe in the air”, then Mark farts.
At the hanggliding centre, near the beautiful River Derwent, Mark says, “I’m going to sum up how I feel about this”, then farts.
And on a drive to Lincolnshire, just to break the pattern and the monotony of each other’s company, Josh farts.
It gets big laughs from the boys every time, obviously.
This entry level “bantz” is all Essex-lad bravado, though, as it quickly becomes apparent Mark is a gigantic wuss and has the same shrieked reaction to almost every activity. “Me legs are trembling . . . and I’m not even joking.”
“I feel like crying . . . and I’m not even joking.”
“I think I’ve got the Loch Ness Monster . . . and I’m not even joking.”
If you’re somehow imagining, though, that amid all this swaggering, crying and farting the BBC has magically crafted the sequel to Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation, now might be the time for me to manage your expectations.
It hasn’t.
All three are so completely wrapped up in themselves and the wider Wright “faaaahm-lee” that everything else is lost on them, including the unparalleled majesty of Loch Lomond, which aroused Josh’s interests just about enough to ask: “How about the views you get in Scotland?”
“Yeah,” replied his dad, barely glancing up. “Very mountainous, innit, like, ’ills and mountains.”
Words so stirring that I may one day have them tattooed right across my back, underneath a Lion Rampant flag.
The highlight of the entire tour, though, was probably the moment a penny dropped on the final leg in Cornwall.
“This is going to sound stupid,” said Mark Jr, putting me on high alert, “But I never even thought about Cornish pasties coming from Cornwall.”
You wonder, then, if Mark now thinks, just beyond the next headland, there is another county called Steak-andale or if he’ll spend the next series trying to find the town of Rarebit on his Welsh satnav.
You wonder mostly, though, why this jolly was all paid for by BBC1, where they instinctively used to know exactly what to do with talented, working-class boys like Morecambe & Wise and Brucie.
Now, however? The Beeb clearly loathes and mistrusts this entire demographic so much they don’t even know what to do with untalented working-class boys, like the Wrights, other than to get them following in everyone else’s tracks bleating about their very real struggles with mental health issues and blah blah blah.
Still, in terms of Mark’s opening mission statement, A Wright Family Holiday has served its purpose and more if we judge him by these words: “Dad’s turned into someone who just wants to sit on a sofa watching telly. I’m hoping we’re about to change all that.”
Click. Job done . . . and I’m not even joking.
- PS: Off on my own “emotional journey” to Norway. Column returns June 30.
FULL-ON MONTY WOKERY
FOR reasons of numbskulled virtue-signalling, Disney + has replaced The Full Monty’s soul and sense of humour with a checklist of left-wing obsessions and turned it into eight episodes of Waterloo bloody Road.
I’d say it also reminds me of late-era Last Of The Summer Wine, but some people might take that as a compliment and it deserves none.
Disney’s version is a travesty, a mess, a shameful desecration of a much-loved film where the only recognisable elements are Sheffield and the original cast, including Robert Carlyle, Mark Addy and Hugo Speer, who was vanished, mid production, for strenuously denied “#MeToo” reasons.
You can’t say it affected the rhythm, though, as the show hasn’t got one, or a storyline.
It just has a series of crass political gestures which reach a tipping point with the arrival of Kurdish asylum seekers, who appear just to teach us the error of our heartless British ways.
Earnest class war lectures from rich TV people are always irksome, of course. But coming via the $171billion Disney organisation, with its past involvement with Third World sweatshops?
In its own stupid, darkly hypocritical way, that’s something The Full Monty TV series never managed to be. Funny.
- AND on Wednesday’s Springwatch they featured “the oldest Chough in Wales”, a bird not to be confused with “the oldest Welsh chuff”, which belongs to Bonnie Tyler.
TV quiz
On last Thursday’s episode of Springwatch, in Porthdinllaen, North Wales, presenter Gillian had a life-size model of which “bottom ambush predator that’s occasionally caught but hasn’t been since last year”?
A) The angel shark?
B) The Conservative MP for Tamworth, Chris Pincher?
Great sporting insights
ROBBIE SAVAGE: “They’ll be dancing from the rooftops of Manchester.”
Dion Dublin: “Even though he meant it, I’m not sure he did.”
James Collins: “This West Ham victory, it’s unreal, it’s unreal. It’s a real experience.”
(Compiled by Graham Wray)
TV GOLD
BBC2’s North Korea: The Insiders, which should’ve been given a full hour.
Michael Sheen, with Sharon Horgan, standing out in BBC1’s characteristically miserable Best Interests.
Lee Mack zeroing in on an Anne Robinson lookalike who claimed to be an ex-art college teacher: “Sorry, I can’t hear you properly. You used to present The Weakest Link?”
And the hugely under-rated introductions on The Chase, which are so good I can almost guarantee some fun sponge will try to ban them before long.
“Could it be The Governess? If she was The Bride of Dracula he’d go vegan.”
Lookalike of the week
HAVING watched a nightjar eat its own noisy chick alive, on last week’s Springwatch, Chris Packham said: “We’ve rung all the experts, asked the people that know anything about nightjars and combed the scientific literature and we can’t find any incidence of a female adult eating their own young.
“What on earth could be happening here? We’ve all got our own theories . . . ”
And mine is called “the Chloe Madeley effect”.
It just gets too bloody annoying.
Great lies and delusions
Extraordinary Escapes, Sandi Toksvig: “I’m escaping the ordinary with five glorious, talented ladies, queens of comedy every one of them.”
Africa Rising, Afua Hirsch: “I’m from West Africa.” (Wimbledon.)
Love Island, Sammy: “Without sounding like a p***k, if a girl’s tasty, things are getting sticky.” He said, sounding like a p***k.
Random TV irritations
THE grimly inevitable way the Love Island girls are throwing themselves at Tyrique and Zachariah, the two most obviously unpleasant boys.
Disney + ruining my happy memories of The Full Monty.
BBC2’s High Priestess of Wokery Afua Hirsch cutting and pasting all her English public schoolgirl views on to an entire continent, on Africa Rising.
And Soccer Aid failing to introduce a basic level of quality control for the likes of Tommy Fury, who plays football much as Sandy, the Supervet’s three-legged dog, performs the Dance Of The Sugar Plum Fairy from The Nutcracker in a tutu. Very, very badly.
Make it stop.
Unexpected morons in the bagging area
TIPPING Point, Ben Shephard: “Oscar-winning actress Rachel Weisz married which James Bond star in 2011?”
Jordan: “Piers Morgan.” (No Time To Diet.)
Ben Shephard: “What colour is also the name of a UK political party?”
Margaret: “Labour.” Ben Shephard: “Which major war in Asia began in 1950 and concluded with an armistice in 1953?” Ashnique: “World War Two.”
Ben Shephard: “Which former X Factor star joined the coaching panel for the 2018 series of The Voice UK?”
Kev: “Molly Urs.”
Tucking fwat.