The most important television event last night didn’t actually happen on telly. October 19th was supposed to be the start of the fourth season of Community. Except NBC suck balls, so the best American comedy of the past decade doesn’t have an airdate (or it’s creator/showrunner/genius but that’s a different matter entirely). What Community does have is a lot of dedicated fans on the internet (a community, if you will), and as a reward to these poll fixing mentalists, last night the cast all tweeted an link to video. There’s an entire blog entitled ‘5 great things about Community’s October 19th Video’ coming up but I’m doing this one first.
Anyway back to British telly, Hollyoaks (First look on E4, obviously) was pretty dull. There’s a new good looking Irish guy in town; the boring Jacqui, Tony, Cindy and Rhys story rumbled closer to the inevitable heartbreak of everyone finding out; Ned from Neighbours did some evil looks while bringing Lacey and the deaf guy together. Not even a decent comedy side story.
Channel 4 have been banging on about their telethon Stand Up To Cancer all week, and finally it arrived in all it’s disappointing glory. The number of big names the trailer promised, and the actual number who showed up gave the show a look of, well I suppose Bilbo would say, “butter spread over too much bread.”
Cheryl opened the show, after Davina, Alan Carr and Dr Christian did their opening bit. Sound was a major issue in these first ten minutes, the mics above the audience were turned up too loud so their already over enthusiastic woo’s became distorted, like Sonic Youth sampling a hen night. Cheryl’s backing track didn’t get turned up until the final chorus. Let’s hope the people curing cancer are slightly more capable than the tv crew.
I swapped to Corrie after it was clear Stand Up To Cancer was terrible, but with some clever flicking I saw JLS’ hilarious prank on the easily confused but affable Olly Murs. And Derren Brown being fantastic/scary with Chris O’Dowd and Dawn Porter.
Coronation Street’s double bill was ok, Sue Johnston continues to be hilarious in her quest for Pub Of The Year, mistaking Rita’s fancy man as the mystery drinker and getting him drunk, while ignoring the real mystery drinker. The serious family drama came from Lister’s efforts to reunite his daughter with her mother and Audrey giving 10k to some woman Lewis (Richard? I can’t remember his name) conned years ago. David suspects it’s a scam, Nick looked like he should be pushing Meerkat toys to people in inappropriate circumstances. It was also Moroccan night in the cafe, and I saw Izzy in Selfridges yesterday.
Over on BBC4 it was Kinks night, which was pretty good. The documentary about David Davies and his massive inferiority complex to his brother was quite sad and the collection of Kinks videos from the BBC that followed it were a delight. Except for Apeman, that songs terrible.
And that was last night’s telly.