The Last Few Weeks in Review

I’m sure you’ll all agree that the period of time including the month of November and the beginning of December 2009 has been one of the most creative, side-splitting and intellectually verdant of the Imaginary Review’s history. Indeed, not since this blog began, more than two years ago, has there been a period containing as many well-written and interesting reviews of the calibre of those of the last few weeks.

For that reason, then, I think you’ll forgive me for indulging myself in a bout of recent nostalgia and self appreciation.

At the beginning of November I reviewed a batch of music merchandise that I had been sent in the past. Readers will recall my excellent analysis of the Rhianna-branded umbrella, which was “quite nice to look at, but quite useless for its intended purpose of rain-hindrance, given that it is made of fishnet stockings.” I was more complimentary towards the Jonas Brothers Acne Cream which, when applied to the face and neck, gave me a “tingly feeling not unlike that of realising one is reaching the apex of puberty.” My favourite comment on this post was by new reader Andrew, who said “I don’t get it, is this real, lol”.

An analysis of the latest reality TV shows came next, and I looked at programmes like Neck Swap, Pimp my Kidney and America’s Next Top Public Defecator. My favourite was What? You Think You Can Dance? Yeah Right. Prove It. No, Go On. Prove It. Dance For Me. Dance For Me. No, Dance For Me. See, You Won’t, Because You Can’t Dance, You Liar. In the review I said that “the ultra-aggressive attitude of the judges is refreshing to see, and many a hopeful contestant has been reduced to tears before even reaching the stage. The fact that many of the people trying out are as young as eight only adds to the pleasure.”

In that post, I didn’t reply to all of the comments I received, so I will attempt to fix that here, with some personal replies.
Mr London Street: You can, but you have to remove the false moustache first, otherwise they may take a swipe at your face.
Katrocket: I agree with you in principle, but I think the probability of seven people all falling into the trap at once is a little unlikely.
Beckeye: You’re wrong; I’ve never been to Norway.

My next review, of the new Cirque Du Soleil show Guttenberg (which chronicles the life of the popular actor from his appearance in the Police Academy films to his tragic death while filming 3 Men and a Baby Whale) contained one of the finest sentences ever written in the English language: “If I ever see another stilt-walking clown attempt to do handstands on a high wire again, I’ll saw all his limbs off.” I have been contacted by the Oxford English Dictionary people, who want to put it in the new edition as a definition of “Brilliance”.

Last week I reviewed the new romantic comedies for the holiday season, such as Colin Firth’s The Awkwardly Uptight Englishman Who Falls For a Fast-Talking American Girl and Has to Meet her Family at Christmas with Hilarious Results. My favourite part of this movie was when Firth stutters a lot and looks awkward while his girlfriend (Jennifer Garner) shows new facets to her personality when in her home setting. Also recommended in this post was the new Sarah Jessica Parker/Matthew Broderick film, The Man Who Married a Horse.

Finally, to respond to some personal emails I received regarding these posts, I would like to say the following:

Yes, I’d love to mention Tungsten Steel Wedding Bands in my blog, because they’re both stylish and durable.
I keep telling you: I’m married, and so are you.
You know the one! Of course you do! It’s the one that goes “Na na na na naaaar…na na na na nuuuuuur!” Don’t tell me you don’t recognise that!

Coming soon I shall be counting down some of my highlights of the last decade, as is customary towards the end of years that end with a '9'.

Finally, I’d like to remind everyone that it’s not too late to vote for me as Blogger of the Year in the Annual Drysdale Awards. If you haven’t already done so, I’d be very happy if you’d show your support, even if other people have been cheating.

Last Night’s TV: Jesus Job-Swap

Jesus Job-Swap, the latest reality TV show from the makers of Wife Swap, Trading Places and Let’s Make a Koala the Mayor of Innsbruck for a Week and See What Happens, debuted last night on DBC. It takes a well-worn premise – two people switch jobs for a while - and stitches a little new life into it: one of the people swapping jobs is Jesus Christ, son of God and major player on the religious scene.

Saturday’s episode had Jesus swapping roles with Delores, owner of a small catering firm in California. As with most shows of this ilk, both participants were built up for a fall from the beginning, with the producers showing each of them oozing bravado and confidence at the task ahead. Jesus, for example, is unfazed by the prospect of having to cater a wedding reception for five hundred people the following week. “Five hundred people?” he asks, unimpressed. “I’ve had to feed ten times that before. No worries,” he laughs.

Delores was equally ebullient from the onset, quoting her “excellent man-management skills” as reasons why she’s more than qualified for the role of Son of God. She does warn, however, that while God may be the all-knowing, all-seeing creator of the universe, “He’s going to have to learn that I don’t take crap from anyone.”

But, as is always the case with these shows, neither Jesus nor Delores has an easy ride. In the course of the hour-long programme, the American woman learns that being figurehead for a belief system is no mean feat. Conversely, Jesus gets to know that the catering business isn’t a breeze, even for a man worshipped by millions of devotees.

It’s during these scenes that the best moments in Jesus Job-Swap arise. When the irate newlyweds confront the Son of God over his deviation from the agreed menu at their reception, it’s car-crash television; I couldn’t look away. As the bride violently asked why the steak tartare and scalloped potatoes had been replaced by a simple bread-and-fish meal, I thought for all the world that she was going to punch the earthly incarnation of the Creator. Luckily, fate intervened and an earthquake interrupted the fight.

Delores didn’t have it any easier, either. All the way through the episode she has to repeatedly tell her new boss that “you can treat your own son like that, Mister, but you can’t treat me like that!” She also becomes extremely fatigued at the task of making her face miraculously appear in food products, and in doing so, realises that being the Son of God isn’t all lambs and magic wine tricks. “There’s some self-sacrifice in this job, you know,” she tells the camera, wearily.

And ultimately, as with most shows of this genre, both participants learn many things about their switchee and about themselves, which in turn gives the viewer a sense of accomplishment and closure. Both Jesus and Delores realise things that we, the external viewers, could already tell. Delores becomes nicer to her staff and doesn’t insist on working them as hard, while Jesus resolves to stand up for himself more, especially when it comes to his Dad.

Jesus Job-Swap is another great reality TV show that promises to be essential viewing throughout. I haven’t enjoyed the company of Jesus this much since the time I sat on his lap in a shopping mall at Christmastime, all those years ago. And next week’s episode, in which Christ swaps roles with a Muslim cleric, promises to be even more volatile than this one!

Jesus Job-Swap is shown on DBC (Satellite Channel 148 between the Washroom Channel and the Bob Hope Underpants Auction Channel), Saturdays, 10:00pm, from now until Armageddon (six weeks tomorrow).

Television Review: Extreme Makeover Spinoffs

Extreme Makeover: Home Edition is a highly popular American reality TV show, the spin-off of Extreme Makeover, a show in which hideously ugly people were bullied by family members into having plastic surgery. The weekly episodes of Home Edition usually follow a similar format: Someone contacts the show because their family of 300 are forced to live in a stripper’s g-string in the bottom of a vat of acid. They can’t even afford the rent on the g-string because the head of the family (usually a soldier or a priest, or – even better – both) has been forced out of work due to his legs having fallen off while saving a kitten from death at the hands of a combine harvester. One (or all) of the 160 children in the family has a very rare disease that means they can’t come into contact with anything made of an odd number of atoms, and they all need to be permanently attached to giant medical machines that are so big they can’t be moved. The team of architects and designers then send the family to Disneyland, destroy the old living area and build a palace of luxurious proportions big enough for the population of a small nation, replete with specialist medical facilities (and staff) for the diseased children and enough bedrooms to make Bill Gates blush. The houses are built and furnished by companies who consider such generosity to be a small price to pay for being mentioned repeatedly by a popular prime-time show.

The popularity of this programme has led to several new spin-offs of the Extreme Makeover format. I had a look to see what they were like, and hoped that the unconcealed hatred I displayed in the previous paragraph didn’t affect my judgement.

Extreme Makeover: Personality Edition will begin in November, and will be hosted by Dr. Phil. Participants in the show will be nominated by their friends, relatives, coworkers and people who just happen to encounter them on the street. The criterion for inclusion on the show is that the participant must have some outrageously annoying personality defects, which the programme’s team of psychiatrists, psychologists and lifestyle consultants will attempt to fix.

The pilot episode featured Dave, an advertising salesman from Detroit. This man had so many personality problems that after ten minutes his very appearance on the screen made me want to kick the television. He finished other people’s sentences for them, laughed nervously at everything he said, made awkward comments to strangers and picked his nose on public transport. He was also so arrogant that Dr. Phil nearly punched him. The end of the show saw the experts make so little progress with Dave that they were forced to resort to making him watch a video of some kittens playing for eight hours, in a scene reminiscent of A Clockwork Orange.

From this first episode, Extreme Makeover: Personality Edition is a surprisingly satisfying show. It’s really worth it for the final few minutes, when a practically lobotomized Dave is revealed to his friends and relatives, now a much more agreeable individual whose sole personality flaw is the unfortunate tendency to drool slightly.



From next year, viewers will get to watch Extreme Makeover: Cockatiel Edition. It’s a common problem: You buy a cockatiel, you enjoy it for a few weeks, and then you start to get bored with it. Well, this is the show for you. People with dull avian pets can have bird and image experts redesign their cockatiels to make them much more interesting. The first episode had Minxy, a two-year-old female owned by Gordon Sludge of Brampton, painted blue and given a trendy Mohawk haircut. She was also given bionic wings so that she could double up as a cooling fan on hot days. I predict big things from this show.

Finally, Extreme Makeover: Makeover Show Edition has got the TV industry in a spin. Reality show producers with staid, unimaginative programmes and no inspiration can get their productions improved with help from the Extreme Makeover team. I didn’t like this show, because I felt that the people giving advice were bullies. The poor reality show makers were being forced to make conceptual changes to their programmes that they weren’t comfortable with. An example from the early episodes is a fashion makeover show specialist being forced to supervise in the building of a new lighthouse. And I couldn’t help but feel anger towards the expert who made a restaurant makeover show production team start creating makeover show makeover shows. For one, that episode was just confusing.

Musical Theatre Review – Andrew Lloyd Webber: The Musical

The career of Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber has been an incredible success story, with many of his musicals running for years in the West End and on Broadway. He has placed in the Sunday Times Rich List of the top 100 wealthiest people in England for several years, and he has been both knighted and made a life peer. The one thing missing from this prolific musician and composer’s résumé is a stage musical about his life. Until now.

Written by Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber himself, Andrew Lloyd Webber: The Musical follows the life and times of the great man, from his promising school days through all three of his marriages and the success of his many musicals, including Evita, Cats, The Phantom of the Opera and The Beautiful Game. Webber’s fans will be ecstatic to discover that he has revisited many of his old songs, updating the lyrics to reflect the points in his own life.

There are times when these new songs work very well, such as when a popular song from Joseph is rewritten for the birth of his children (Webber and Sons), and when one his best-known songs illustrates his rise to fame (“Lloyd Webber/Superstar/Written some songs now he can buy a car/Lloyd Webber/Superstar/We always knew that you’d go far”). At other times, unfortunately, this technique seems to limit the composer, and the songs seem to fall flat. This is particularly evident when the famed Evita anthem is rewritten for Lloyd Webber’s first divorce (Don’t Cry for me Andrew Lloyd Webber). While this was being sung I noticed a lot of awkward shuffling in the seats around me.

Another quibble I would have with the production is the set. For much of the play this is a realistic representation of Lloyd Webber’s surroundings, but at the end, when the composer has become famous, a giant replica of his head comes down from the rafters, almost filling the stage. I was terrified by this apparition, so what the children in the audience made of the grotesque spectacle, I can only imagine.

The music is as good as you’d expect from such a production, and Gareth Mead shines as the eponymous musical genius. (His performance is even more amazing when you consider that he was selected through a reality show, Who Wants to be Andrew Lloyd Webber?) It’s also nice to see that Lloyd Webber, fearing accusations of egotism, changed the titled from Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber: The Musical, to remove the mention of his knighthood. The man doesn’t have an egocentric bone in his body!

All in all, this is a good, if slightly flawed production, but one that is sure to please Webber’s many gibbering, Cats-t-shirt-wearing fans. As the song goes, never has there ever been a composer so clever as Magical Mr. Lloyd Webber!

DVD Review - Who Wants to Fuck a Goat? - The Entire First Season 8-disc Box Set

When Who Wants to Fuck a Goat? first aired on Channel Five in late October of last year, opinions were divided as the cultural validity of the program. Indeed, a show in which members of the public compete in various challenges for the grand prize of six hours' uninterrupted coitus with a goat doesn't have the hallmarks of great TV, like The Simpsons, May to December or Byker Grove. But for ten weeks, goat fucking was on everybody's lips.

The success of Who Wants to Fuck a Goat? was a surprise even to its creator, Gaviscon Bentley. 'I didn't think we'd get enough people to sign up for the show, to be honest,' he says on the DVD commentary, 'but in the end we had to beat off potential contestants with sticks. Literally. We beat them with sticks. Hard. One lost an eye.'

As the episodes of WWtFaG? unfold, we come to know and love the participants. Dave, the happy-go-lucky cab driver whose dream of fucking a goat is the one thing that keeps him alive during the long, cold, lonely nights; Sharon, who sees goat fucking as a way of getting invited to film premieres; and fan favourite Babted, the diarrhea-plagued mongrel.

'We talked long and hard over whether it was fair to have a dog as a contestant on the show,' opines Bentley in one of the interviews that come as part of the DVD extras package. 'In the end I tossed a coin and threw it at a pigeon. The pigeon died.'

What was it about WWtFaG? that electrified the nation for two and half long months? Was it the blossoming romance between Gavin and Debbie2 (Blonde Debbie)? Was it Sharon's wonderful way with words, spawning a silagetank full of colourful catchphrases? (Do you remember the days before everyone was saying 'What happens at now?' and 'Put the crayons where?'? Me neither!) But whatever made that Goat Fuckery popular, it's all here on an eight-disc goat-shaped special edition boxset.

From Dave slipping in the trail of Babted's wake during the Waiter challenge and getting his hair all pooey to the final triumphant thrusts into the lucky goat's orifices, you can relive all the moments from the show. And there are twenty-six hours of unseen footage, too, including a bit in a car when some of the contestants discuss crisps and six hours of people sleeping in a room. The DVD is jam-packed with goat-fucking extras, like a 'Pin the Goat on the Member' game and twelve hours of interviews with the makers, contestants and Twiggy, the goat himself.

Overall, this DVD gets a three-point star advantage, with heavy lilting for the extras, giving it a grand total of uneven camber.

Who Wants to Fuck a Goat? The DVD box-set is available in time for the Christmas rush, on December 23rd. To buy a copy, simply give some money to a slack-jawed infant in HMV and walk away tutting as his general apathy during the purchasing process causes you to briefly stare at the porn behind the counter.

Tonight’s Reality TV

Looks like we’ll be having another interesting episode of America’s Next Top Gynaecologist (Sky One, 9.00) tonight. Fan-favourite Morris’s speculum technique is improving, but his failure to wash his hands could mean the end for this popular contestant. Watch out for an exciting hissy-fit between Callum and Dave over correct ultrasound technique. Riveting.

ITV’s Celebrity Porn Star Challenge (7.30) is really hotting up. Since the departure of Ann Widdecombe (MP) last week, the rest of the contestants are really pulling out all the stops to try and win a leading role in the next Seymour Butts movie and £30,000 for charity. As host Jenna Jameson says this week, the celebrities really have what it takes to be the next big blue movie star! Tonight will see TV host Jenny Powell and comedian Russ Abbot pairing up for some hardcore action while former Olympic javelin champion Fatima Whitbread will be in a threesome with journalist Christopher Hitchens and OJ Simpson.

The makers of Channel Five’s Extreme Sandpaper Threat Hour (5.30) are taking no chances with their new show: all preview copies of the show sent to reviewers have contained hour-long footage of a kitten in a birdcage. Expect the unexpected from this show, folks!

Finally, Stare at the Big Man (BBC2, 11.00), which showed so much promise when it began last autumn, is turning into a massive turkey. From the looks of things, the big man himself isn’t too pleased with all the staring, either.