IF there’s one thing I hate on TV it’s a fait accompli dressed up as a serious political investigation.
You know the sort of show. It always involves someone Channel 4 or the BBC regards as a bigot experiencing a tearful road to Damascus epiphany when they’re presented with the public service broadcasters’ liberal version of the world.
It felt like The Apprentice, right down to the wheelie suitcases the participants trundle along a Kent beach[/caption]
A show, in short, exactly like Channel 4’s Go Back To Where You Came From series, where the starting point and framework isn’t really a proper debate about illegal immigration at all.
It’s The Apprentice, right down to the wheelie suitcases the participants trundle along a Kent beach as they compete to see who can make the most outrageously numb-nutted claim.
An unofficial contest won by Dave, a chef from Mansfield, with: “Winston bastard Churchill would be rolling in his grave. So what I’d do is get the Royal Navy to take up landmines, and any boat that comes within 50 metres of this beach? They get fookin’ blown up.”
No shame
Dave, I should add quickly, is also by far the most sympathetic presence in this experiment, where the participants have been split into two groups of three to recreate the journeys illegal immigrants/asylum seekers make to reach Britain.
On the anti-immigration side of things with him, there’s Chloe, Jess and Nathan, who’s straight out of Harry Enfield’s old blunt Yorkshireman sketch.
He “says what he likes and likes what he bloody well says”, which is mainly: “This place is a s**thole.”
There is at least a redeeming honesty to Nathan, though, compared to the pro-immigration pair, where the very least of our troubles is posh, left-wing Mathilda who, like a lot of fellow travellers, exhibits absolutely no shame when she tells working-class people they’re “privileged”, just to close down an argument.
The really bad news, however, is toxic Bushra Shaikh who, coincidentally, has washed up here via The Apprentice and is alive to everyone’s “racism” and “bigotry” except her own.
She hates Britain, naturally, claiming “a large part of it is thick as s**t”, and a week after the anniversary of Hamas’s October 7 pogrom tweeted that Jewish people who move to Israel, often to escape from people like her are: “A bunch of lying scumbags.”
She also thinks we should: “Send this European problem back to Europe.”
The phrase ‘lowest common denominator’ really doesn’t do this creature justice, but if those sort of entry requirements were put on the participants they also applied to the show’s locations.
’Cos if they didn’t, C4 would’ve started their journey in Albania which supplied 50-60 per cent of small-boat illegals in 2022, 83 per cent of whom were male.
There’s more shock value to be had, though, by sending them to Somalia and Syria, which have both been reduced to Stone Age rubble by Islamist terrorists, war and political corruption and produce a more forlorn-looking type of “refugee” than the Balkans.
The awkward fact here for C4, of course, is that Britain has taken in over 109,000 Somalians and 30,000 Syrians, since 2000.
Chloe and Bushra sitting with a family in Raqqa, Syria[/caption]
Mathilda, Nathan and Jess look out at Lido Beach, Mogadishu, Somalia[/caption]
So I cannot really fathom the guilt-tripping element to the show, but will admit it makes for some startling dialogue in Mogadishu when the horrifying details of female genital mutilation are explained to Nathan.
“They cut the clitoris off.”
“The clit? Why the fook do they want to cut that off? It’s the best bit.”
Jess: “It’s the same as you having the bell end off.”
Which would effectively leave nothing.
Scorn, though, really shouldn’t be poured on Nathan.
It should all be reserved for Channel 4 which, just like Bushra Shaikh, is so lost in its own woke prejudices and loathing of Britain that, if we took in every single asylum seeker on the planet, C4 News, from its bunker deep under London, would still accuse the country of having “white saviour syndrome”.
That’s why I’ll forever regret our last useless Government’s cowardly refusal to sell off Channel 4 and raise £1billion for the Exchequer. You could’ve hired a lot of Border Force officials with that money.
Random irritations
GRAYSON PERRY looking far more ridiculous as his creepy alter-ego “Claire” on Would I Lie To You? than he did as Kingfisher on The Masked Singer.
Panorama’s climate change p**s-taker Justin Rowlatt imagining viewers wouldn’t understand what an offshore wind farm looked like unless he flew over one in a helicopter.
And Love Island’s Ronnie claiming “Curtis is so interesting. He’s like David Attenborough,” which is either the most deluded thing ever broadcast on British television or a rather hurtful reference to watching single-cell amoebas having sex.
Neither’s good.
SNORE OF THE JUNGLE
NETFLIX has taken some of the biggest arse-aches in Britain and plonked them down in the Costa Rican jungle for a glorified game of hide and seek with Holly Willoughby and Bear Grylls.
It’s a show called Celebrity Bear Hunt and features professional foghorns including Big Zuu, Steph McGovern, Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, Lottie Moss and Mel B, who introduced an audience participation element when her escape craft leaked during the opening game.
Celebrity Bear Hunt has taken some of Britain’s biggest arse-aches and plonked them in a jungle for a game of hide and seek[/caption]
“Mel! MEL!,” yelped Bear, coaxing her back to the riverbank, “That boat will sink, then you’re in the water with crocodiles. So we can do this the easy way or the hard way.” “THE HARD WAY,” I heard myself yelling back at the television.
Not out of pure blood lust, you understand, but just because the show’s lacking real jeopardy or any spark of originality beyond the
“Chopper’s incoming” catchphrase Bear has introduced to eliminate one of the celebs.
So desperate did it become, in fact, that midway through the second episode we were reduced to watching recorded highlights of the contestants sleeping, accompanied by the legend: “Cacophony of snoring.”
An infectious process, as it transpired, as I didn’t wake up until I heard Una Healy, from The Saturdays, claiming: “Danny Cipriani was there to encourage Shirley Ballas from behind.”
Chopper’s incoming.
- AND yes, the correct survivalist term for the position Bear Grylls found himself in, with the reptiles and Mel B, is “caught between a croc and a hard face”.
Great sporting insights
NED BOULTING: “Luke Littler turned 18 earlier this month, so he’s no longer a teenager.”
Stephen Warnock: “Marmoush will make people sit and stand up.”
And Darren Fletcher: “Ordonez hasn’t left Haaland’s side. He’s stuck to him like glue all night. And when he passes him on to his teammate, it’s the same story.”
(Compiled by Graham Wray)
TV gold
Joanna Lumley captures the insincerity of London perfectly in BBC1’s Amandaland[/caption]
THE random genius of Michael McIntyre getting Tony Hadley to say goodbye in Armenian to Heather Small, on his way to “buying a lottery ticket”, during the Big Show’s brilliant Unexpected Star segment.
Lucy Punch and Joanna Lumley capturing the insincerity and unpleasantness of London perfectly in BBC2’s Amandaland.
And U&Drama’s reruns of Bergerac, which have a Nostradamus quality about them, from pre-empting of Strictly’s rise, during series seven (episode three), to episode two of the second series, starring the great Rikki Fulton, where Operation Yewtree is foreshadowed in the most chilling fashion imaginable.
Channel 5’s imminent reboot better not desecrate this BBC masterpiece.
Unexpected morons in the bagging area
THE Weakest Link, Romesh Ranganathan: “The 1904 Puccini opera about the doomed relationship between a Japanese woman and a US naval officer is titled Madame what?” Kate Lawler: “Tussaud.”
Romesh: “In TV, the phrase “winter is coming,” first spoken by Ned Stark, is from which fantasy drama series?”
Ella Thomas: “Friends.”
Mastermind, Clive Myrie: “In the 1974 boxing match dubbed the Rumble In The Jungle, Muhammad Ali defeated which fighter?”
Rosie: “Cassius Clay.”
And yes, she will be beating herself up over that.
Lookalike of the week
Sent in by Robert Morgan, of Wester Hailes, Edinburgh.
