An Object Lesson In Getting Your Ideas Vetted By Non-Fandom Types
Normally when I whinge about fandom needing a slap it's because people are being insufferable on the internet. This time I was trapped in a studio with some hideousness and COULDN'T LEAVE and was reduced to hiding my face against Bethan's arm with my fingers in my ears while Bethan did something similar.
Yesterday bethan_b_bad and plum177 and I went to a recording of a thing that Chris Addison is doing for E4, because the first of those people texted me and said "we have a ticket for a thing do you want to come" and I sort of felt that I needed reasons not to be indoors and hadn't seen Bethan for a bit and Teaboy for a bit longer than that.
It was in general pretty good - Chris was funny, the two comedians I hadn't heard of were okay, Josh Widdicombe was okay (and I kept myself occupied wondering if I actually knew the eeny weeny Dartmoor village he came from since I grew up in a slightly larger Dartmoor village & recognised quite a lot of what he was talking about), Steven Grant was as good as he always is, and the atmosphere was good and I now recognise Nick Keane to see in the street which says something about either my memory for faces or the amount of time I've spent sitting in BBC studios looking at floor managers.
Unfortunately some bright spark involved in the design of the show - it may have been Addison, it may have been the producer, I don't know - decided that what TV needs is to be more like live comedy and to have AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION ONE-ON-ONE. There was ONE interesting story - a volunteer paramedic who had spent her gap year in Israel and been involved in the extraction of a very dead old woman from a block of flats - and it was told well. There were two stories that could have been interesting but the people involved didn't know how to tell them and couldn't cope with being chivvied; producers, audience members, everyone, please take note: there is a reason one person is paid to stand on stage and talk and someone else pays to come in and watch them talk, and it is usually because the latter isn't as good at talking.
The nadir was a GCSE student who had brought in her big pink dream diary in which she drew terrible, terrible anime art of her dreams and had apparently had several "quirky" dreams about Christ Addison, and then protested when he decided to read the text out to everyone (which, as he pointed out, was a no-go - if you're going to bring a DREAM DIARY to "Show and Tell" because you have no concept of acceptable social boundaries and want the audience to die of second-hand embarrassment, you have to put up with a gangling comedian delightedly mocking the contents of your subconscious). SO. BAD. Being good at this social malarky, comedian in question then went on to tell her that her art was very good. It wasn't. In case anyone feels I am being unduly mean to a 16-year-old, I know a fucklot of 16-year-olds who draw a fuck of a lot better. This is the kind of rubbish I was producing at 16.
So yeah, that was painful to watch and cast a pall over the entire rest of the show which also went on for nine billion years because for some reason that is how long pick-ups take at the BBC studios; also the producers appeared to have no earthly idea what they were doing and what they wanted. I can only assume they were new.
Yesterday bethan_b_bad and plum177 and I went to a recording of a thing that Chris Addison is doing for E4, because the first of those people texted me and said "we have a ticket for a thing do you want to come" and I sort of felt that I needed reasons not to be indoors and hadn't seen Bethan for a bit and Teaboy for a bit longer than that.
It was in general pretty good - Chris was funny, the two comedians I hadn't heard of were okay, Josh Widdicombe was okay (and I kept myself occupied wondering if I actually knew the eeny weeny Dartmoor village he came from since I grew up in a slightly larger Dartmoor village & recognised quite a lot of what he was talking about), Steven Grant was as good as he always is, and the atmosphere was good and I now recognise Nick Keane to see in the street which says something about either my memory for faces or the amount of time I've spent sitting in BBC studios looking at floor managers.
Unfortunately some bright spark involved in the design of the show - it may have been Addison, it may have been the producer, I don't know - decided that what TV needs is to be more like live comedy and to have AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION ONE-ON-ONE. There was ONE interesting story - a volunteer paramedic who had spent her gap year in Israel and been involved in the extraction of a very dead old woman from a block of flats - and it was told well. There were two stories that could have been interesting but the people involved didn't know how to tell them and couldn't cope with being chivvied; producers, audience members, everyone, please take note: there is a reason one person is paid to stand on stage and talk and someone else pays to come in and watch them talk, and it is usually because the latter isn't as good at talking.
The nadir was a GCSE student who had brought in her big pink dream diary in which she drew terrible, terrible anime art of her dreams and had apparently had several "quirky" dreams about Christ Addison, and then protested when he decided to read the text out to everyone (which, as he pointed out, was a no-go - if you're going to bring a DREAM DIARY to "Show and Tell" because you have no concept of acceptable social boundaries and want the audience to die of second-hand embarrassment, you have to put up with a gangling comedian delightedly mocking the contents of your subconscious). SO. BAD. Being good at this social malarky, comedian in question then went on to tell her that her art was very good. It wasn't. In case anyone feels I am being unduly mean to a 16-year-old, I know a fucklot of 16-year-olds who draw a fuck of a lot better. This is the kind of rubbish I was producing at 16.
So yeah, that was painful to watch and cast a pall over the entire rest of the show which also went on for nine billion years because for some reason that is how long pick-ups take at the BBC studios; also the producers appeared to have no earthly idea what they were doing and what they wanted. I can only assume they were new.