If you thought the era of on-screen rogues was at risk, think again. Yesterday — and I don’t wish to alarm you — Good Morning Britain bad boy Adil Ray stormed off on live telly after Kate Garraway lightly ribbed him (correctly) for referring to the Thames as “the river near me” in London. He let his face contort, stood arrow straight and thundered through the exit. Oh, but he was faking it. What a card. Other big TV news of the day? Josie Gibson getting rinsed on Twitter for “staring into space” and “playing Candy Crush”, accusations hurled after her less-than-enthusiastic performance on This Morning, which seemed a little unfair — if I were sitting down with Nick Ferrari, I’d stay mute too. Elsewhere, Lorraine Kelly again didn’t present the show with her name on, which seems to be a fairly frequent occurrence these days — in the spirit of managing viewer expectations, producers may wish to consider if “Lorraine” might be better as “Lorraine?”
But to me, bigger news than all of that is knowing that married couple Marvin and Rochelle Humes are gainfully employed by the Beeb as presenters. On Saturday, I had the misfortune to mistakenly stumble over their show The Hit List. Nice idea, The Hit List — contestants are played the intro to a song and must guess its name as quickly as possible. Schoolchildren have been playing it since the Walkman was invented. It’s good game for grown-ups too, just the thing to lift a dull dinner party if nobody has any drugs. It’s fun! Although you wouldn’t know it from the Humeses, who I briefly took for AI experiments.
I had the misfortune to watch The Hit List — and mistook Marvin and Rochelle Humes for AI experiments
“Let’s see how you’re doing so far,” Marvin would say, with all the enthusiasm of a doctor donning his gloves for a colonoscopy. No doubt the Humeses are lovely if you get to know them, and they’re not responsible for the script they’ve got to work with (I mean, hopefully not). They’re far from the only boring presenters on our screens, either — food telly suffers this problem particularly, being full of salt-of-the-earff blokes (in most cases, actually millionaires), like Gregg Wallace or Tim Lovejoy. And who keeps booking Tom Kerridge?
I think half the trouble is that a fair number of this lot — and all the others like them — seem to be utterly sick to the back teeth of what they’re doing. Hardly surprising, seeing as the last round of casting for the big shows — excusing the likes of the excellent Maya Jama or Micah Richards — seems to have happened around the time Ant ’n’ Dec made it to prime time, or Stephen Mulhern first put on long trousers.
There’s value to getting fresh faces on; they bring energy to places where energy may be missing. It’s not about age, it’s about passion — say what you like about Piers Morgan, but if his recent YouTube successes reveal anything, it’s that he absolutely bloody loves what he does. Richard Madeley, on the other hand? I’m convinced he’s making all these blunders on purpose to liven things up.
The death of TV apparently looms. And maybe it’s down to Netflix and Apple+ and Disney+. But part of me suspects it is about viewers being bored by TV bosses always choosing the safe and sweet and just-a-bit-dull sorts to front their biggest franchises. Bring back the rogues. The proper ones.
The real problem with Bennifer
Yesterday news came that on the day of their second wedding anniversary (ouch), Jennifer Lopez personally took to the Los Angeles County Superior Court to file for divorce from Ben Affleck, marking the end of her fourth marriage and his second. A shame, seems to be the general take; theirs was a love story resurrected after 18 years apart. It’s not all bad, though: surely, this spells the death of “Bennifer”, the original (probably) and worst (definitely) celebrity portmanteau. It also means audiences don’t have to live in fear of The Greatest Love Story Never Told pt II, though J-Lo does deserve a little credit for that — making a movie about recapturing true love only to kill that very love months later is a serious power play.
But it was always a strange relationship, in some sense, one built on their inoffensiveness. No great fights, no explosive scandals; mostly, just talk of Affleck staring into the middle distance. Some comparisons have been made to the joyfully torrid love story of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor (a champion marrier, with eight to her name), but come on — where are the affairs, the parties on private jets, the million-dollar diamonds? It’s hard to care without any goss.
