Top Five: Rubbish Sunday Night TV Shows by shoutingatco.ws

Boomtown Rat and charity bothering Sir Lord Bob Geldof sang “I don’t like Mondays”, which is a sentiment that we can all understand. However, perennial cockgobbler Bono also sang “Sunday, Bloody Sunday”. All in all, tossheaded singers aren’t keen on the end of this part of the week, which is a sentiment we can fully understand. Even if they don’t have to get up and go to work at 8am in the cold.

Sunday evening is depressing. The shops are closed, at least, all the good ones are, you can still pop to a petrol station to pay £2.65 for a two litre bottle of Coke, as I did the other day. There’s nowhere to go, no entertainment out there, just sitting quietly at home waiting for the working week to start. And worst of all, for years, it has been the dumping ground for TV that nobody wants to watch. A punishment for your wanton Godlessness.

Admittedly, things are a bit better now – there’s Top Gear for stereotypical blokes and Reality Show De Jour for stereotypical ladies, and thanks to Sky+, YouTube and a million other options, you don’t need to watch TV when it’s broadcast anyway. Except sport, of course, because the moment you record it, you’re tempted to skip through the boring bits.

So, here are the Top 5 Shit TV Shows Of Sunday Nights In The Mid 90s That Made Me Long For School. I should give it a snappier title.

1) Lovejoy, Pie in the Sky, London’s Burning, Soldier Soldier and any other drab generic drama series

I assume these were cheap to make, because there were hundreds of the bloody things. The dramas were always an hour long and fall into one of two distinct categories: Soap opera set in a [job], and crime fighter with a second job.

For some reason, in the Pie in the Sky world of Henry Crabbe, he was more than capable of being both a police officer and the head chef in a busy restaurant. Gordon Ramsay would have bollocked his arms off for that.

London’s Burning, too, dragged on for series after bloody series of Sunday Night misery. Enjoy a light hearted bit of evening fun as a family of four burn slowly to death as the result of a chip pan fire. Cheer as a middle aged lady is cut out of her car, but loses her legs, after a tragic crash. All this mixed up with the usual soapy mixture of lies, affairs and fighting. Still girls, phwoar, firemen, or something.

2) Last of the Summer Wine

It’s easy to hate Last of the Summer Wine, because it’s the single least funny sitcom ever created. Three old men ambling around occasionally doing something wacky. Brilliant. Each series now is totally different from the previous, because half the cast have died. One of the old sods died and was replaced by their equally old son, like a sort of doddery fucker production line. Wikipedia even has this to say:

In May 2008, The Times reported that Frank Thornton and Peter Sallis would no longer appear in outdoor scenes of future series because of the cost of insuring actors over the age of 80. Thornton and Sallis, both in their late eighties, will only film scenes indoors while younger actors film the outdoor scenes.

How brilliant is that?! Too old to go outside!

There’s 289 episodes of LOTSW. 289. That’s a lot of bathtubs to go downhill in, but if there’s one thing that LOTSW has achieved, it’s going downhill at a staggering rate.

3) Points of View

Middle-class people take note. Nobody cares what you think about the BBC. If you liked a program, well done, watch the credits and have a wank. Didn’t like something? Never mind, there’ll be another one on in a minute.

Points of View is all about giving the weirdos that bother the BBC a voice. Presented at various points by a smug Terry Wogan, an inanimate Anne Robinson and according to Wikipedia, Alan bloody Titchmarsh.

The irony of Points of View is that the sort of person who thinks that writing a letter to the BBC is exactly the sort of party bore that you don’t want to listen to. Brilliantly though, the BBC got the letter writers to read out their own letters, their non-natural television voices making even the most reasonable correspondent sound like a buffoon.

Fifty years, the daft show has been running. Fifty years. There’s a reasonable chance that your parents, in their childhood, were as equally bored of Last of the Summer Wine and Points of View as you were. And your children will be.

4) Antiques Roadshow

Yet more wonderful middle-class banality, everything about the AR is child unfriendly. From the dreary opening titles to a town-hall hastily converted to accommodate the local money-grabbers, nothing screams mass appeal.

Watching an old man reminiscing tearfully over a bit of wood that he nicknamed Woodles and played with every day during his deprived youth. Hardly a match for your average modern day Barnaby, with his Sony Wii motion sensing every time he goes out happy slapping. Sorry old timer, you played with wood because the twenties were shit.

5) Songs of Praise

I genuinely admire the producers of Song of Praise for persisting in placing the lyrics on screen, as though there’s a single person in the entire country sat at home singing along.

Even the people in the congregation don’t want to be there, there’s no way the churches are that full week after week. Throw a camera crew in and all of a sudden pestering God is the new smack addiction, or whatever the kids are up to these days.
The best thing about Songs of Praise is that it puts the Daily Mail into a bind: It’s on the BBC, so it’s inherently a shit waste of the license fee, but it doesn’t have any of that funny Muslim singing.

Comments

1. Jon says:

   April 1, 2010 at 10:53 am

   Good read. Can’t believe you didn’t mention Heartbeat, the poor sods have been stuck in the 60s for about 20 years. I’d have killed myself by now!

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