We love drama. Second to the drama of reality TV, we love a bit of escapism. The more sensationalised the better. EastEnders, Coronation Street, CSI, Desperate Housewives…the list goes on; if it’s got drama, we’ll watch it. Who cares if the plot is unrealistic? If it helps us temporarily forget the daily grind we’re up for it.

Don’t you just love the way us Brits don’t sugar-coat anything? Our soaps create controversy in the vicinity of its local pub or corner-shop. Phil Mitchell wouldn’t think twice about sleeping with his wife’s mother in the Old Vic. However, Americans want more. Sex and the City or Desperate Housewives would never have a drama in the local kebab shop, would they? It’s strictly posh-nosh bars and restaurants for them. You’re not going to catch Carrie Bradshaw at Wal-mart that’s for sure.

The storylines on our side of the pond are just as hideously far-fetched as their US counterparts, just minus the glossy layer that makes everything look shiny and new. What’s the point in setting EastEnders in Mayfair? No-one’s going to relate to it. However, when it comes to American dramas we’re quite happy to indulge in the Manhattan love affair with all things arty-farty. It’s a different world in the US of A. Even when they’re digging up dead bodies in CSI, they’ve still got a glossy sheen to them. In Waking the Dead the bodies look like they’ve been festering on an Ikea table for too long.

Lately, there seems to be a new wave of Brit dramas that are trying their hardest to mimic the US glossiness, but at the expense of quality. Think Harley Street or Spooks: Code 9. I’m not sold on either. They try too hard. Sometimes you don’t want things to be sugar-coated. You don’t want every single actor to look like they belong in GQ magazine. Sometimes it’s okay to be Phil Mitchell - a bald, overweight actor with a slight red tinge to his face. It keeps things real and it’s what we love about British TV.

The Olympics are underway and so far China has been more in the news for security threats and human rights protests than the actual games. Hopefully the focus will get back to the action now, as our British hopefuls nervously wait for their events to draw closer. So who should we pin our hopes on?

Well, athletics is always one to watch. They say the pollution in Beijing is so bad that it is expected to impair the athletes’ performance, so much so that it is expected that no records or personal bests will be broken in these conditions. So much like London then. With the likes of young guns Craig Pickering and Simeon Williamson competing in the 100m there should be plenty to get excited about, although they aren’t really medal hopefuls to be honest. However, we have number one seed Phillips Idow looking to gain a medal in the triple jump. Christine Ohuruogu will be running the Women’s 400m. She served a one-year ban for missing drugs tests, but came back in 2007 to win gold in her event at the World Championships. Definitely one to keep your eye on. Also doing it for the women will be heptathlete Kelly Sotherton. In 2004, she won bronze at the Olympics in Greece and went on to win gold in the last Commonwealth Games – so get the pom-poms out for her for sure! Not to mention Britain’s successful cycling team, which comprises Rebecca Romero, Victoria Pendleton, Chris Hoy, Mark Cavendish and Bradley Wiggins. They are all medal hopefuls too.

However, it looks like our best chances of winning medals could be in water. Our top sailor Ben Ainslie will be vying for his third gold in a row. The Men’s Coxless Four gained golds in the last two Olympics, but were defeated last year at the World Cup regatta. Can the new team of Tom James, Peter Reed, Steve Williams and Andrew Triggs Hodge do it this time around? Then there’s David Davies who won gold at the 2006 Commonwealth Games in the 1500m freestyle – he’ll be participating in that and the Men’s 10km Open Water this year, so fingers crossed for him. Less likely to win a medal is Tom Daley who, at 14-years-old, is the second youngest ever Olympian. The 10m diver will probably be a true threat at the London Olympics in 2012 but there’ll be a lot of publicity surrounding him during these games so good luck to the young’un.
It’s time to clear your summer schedules and get behind our hopefuls - Go Britain!

What it is with our obsession with the physical? Britain’s obesity levels are ever-increasing and people seem to be more aware and more conscious of their figure. So trust TV producers to exploit this growing concern! As far as I can see, you have two types of programme that are tapping into this issue:

Firstly, the ‘love thyself’ type of programme where it’s all about seeing the inner-beauty and bringing it to the surface. You’re made to accept the love handles that you own, embrace them (not literally but go ahead and have a squeeze if you want) and wear the right clothes to minimise the flab. How to Look Good Naked or Undress the Nation are perfect examples of this category. Trinny and Susannah will pinch and poke away to help you discover the new you, whilst passing dismissive comments and generalisations about your personal life.
Secondly, you have the type of programme that utters ‘Come on! Do something about it!’ in a motivational manner and aims to get you down to the gym quick-smart. The Biggest Loser and Living’s Diet on the Dancefloor hook you in with heart-warming stories of how the overweight contestants battled and eventually conquered their fight with obesity. Although some of their training methods are questionable at best, at least they encourage people to get out there and get off that couch.

If all else fails and we find, six months on, that we haven’t been to the gym in weeks and nothing in our wardrobe makes the best of our figure, there’s always the third type of programme: the quick fix. Offerings such as Extreme Makeover and Cosmetic Surgery Live make plastic surgery look like a realistic and quick alternative to the old-fashioned diet and exercise. Why sweat if off when you can cut it off? You’ve even got dramas like Nip/Tuck making the whole thing look sexy!

Well, I for one will stick to the common man’s attempt at a healthy lifestyle: going to the gym for a few weeks, stopping after about six, and then spending the rest of the time complaining about how my figure isn’t what it was…until I watch another one of these programmes and start up the gym again. Thus, the cycle continues!

Compare the chat show hosts of old with the ones currently gracing our screens. At 22-years-old, Charlotte Church is presenting her own chat show. Does she really have enough life experience to hold her own on a chat show? She tries, bless her, but I’m not convinced. As far as I can see, her show starts off with an out-of-tune song, continues with a script clearly not written by herself and delivered badly, then ends with her interviewing celebrities whilst throwing in numerous references to Wales. It’s hardly Wogan or Parkinson. At least these veterans had years of broadcasting experience, and indeed life experience, behind them to judge what makes a good interview. People like Charly and even Jonathan Ross seem to use their shows as a vehicle to promote themselves as personalities.

Jonathan Ross features slightly higher up the scale of awful chat show hosts, mainly because he should know better at his age. Yet, disappointingly he seems to make every interview somehow link into his own life and his own sense of humour. At times he even makes the celebrity interviewee curl into the couch in discomfort. Having watched a few of his interviews, I could now tell you quite a bit about his wife, his kids and his love for comics/toys/roboty-type things. As for his guests, I probably didn’t learn too much about them by the end of the interview since my brain was too saturated with facts about the Ross family to be honest.

While I’m at it, what happened to Davina McCall? Anyone remember her failed chat show? She used to be quite good at fishing out the dirt from the ejected Big Brother housemates on their eviction night interviews. Now she’s turned into a cringe-worthy amateur comedienne who jumps around in her chair whenever the housemates mention love or relationships. Can we get back to the point please? It’s about the interviewee not the interviewer! We need to redress the balance between host and guest or else they could equally be interviewing an A-list celebrity or your next-door neighbour and it wouldn’t matter. There’s nothing like good old Parky – at least there’s no danger of him stripping down to a bikini in an interview (coincidentally shortly after releasing a fitness video)!

As far as sex on TV goes….there really is a wide spectrum of viewing out there. You’ve got the bog-standard Sexcetera/Generation Sex-type titillation for the late-night viewer. These programmes rarely have a point to them; they’re just there for the specific purpose of showing sex on TV or, depending on how you look at it, an endless source of amusement.

The ‘sex sells’ concept is never far from mainstream producers’ minds either. Dramas such as Desperate Housewives and Sex and the City include gratuitous sex scenes. Gabby fornicating with the gardener or Samantha in the bedroom with her model boyfriend, it’s just a regular Friday night for our favourite characters! Period dramas love a bit of steamy action in their four-poster beds too. Take Deadwood or Tipping the Velvet. The latter was publicised widely for featuring lesbian sex in it. Then viewers were apparently under-whelmed by the end result and even complained to the BBC about the lack of sexual content!

On the other end of the scale, reality TV is always looking to encourage a little tonsil tennis or more if they can. The Big Brother house is unapologetically designed to implicitly increase the libido of the incarcerated wannabe’s, and Big Bro endlessly plies them with alcohol for good measure. However, ironically, the only time we really saw some hardcore action was in the teenage edition, where issues of adult consent became a concern for the producers. Will BB9’s Bex and Luke provide some proper action in the house this year? More to the point, would we really want to see it?

Overall, sex is the one thing that any type of TV show or even advert can and will manage to incorporate that’s guaranteed to boost viewing figures…from glossy love scenes on a drama programme to quick fumbles caught by an infrared camera in BB - it takes all sorts!
Ok, it’s 11.30 - I’m off for a Diet Coke break…

The bets are on folks. Australia has officially axed Big Brother after eight series and it remains to be seen whether UK producers will follow suit. Even putting ample-bosomed Pamela Anderson in the house didn’t turn Aussie viewers on; the ratings had plummeted and producers recognised that the show had reached its shelf life Down Under. So can we say the same for us Brits? Celebrity Big Brother was dumped after that infamous racism row, so why wouldn’t we consider giving the original programme the same treatment?
Every year we moan about how awful the housemates are, then inevitably some drama will capture the attention of the public and viewing figures go up. Even by Week Three of the eighth series, two people had been removed from the house after some nail-biting drama! Maybe we just like this kind of car-crash style TV drama in our country. The series has been commissioned until 2010, so I’m thinking producers will ride out two more series and see the full contract out. Afterall, many are saying the current series is one of the best yet. Without Big Brother, how will fame-hungry but talentless members of the public find their 15 minutes of fame? Maybe the producers owe it to these people to string out two more series, just so they can add to the ever-increasing list of Z-list celebrities spawned off reality TV. Or maybe not.

If the producers do decide to give two more years a go they will have to pull some seriously good tricks out of the bag. We’ve pretty much seen everything over the eight series – the mentally challenged, the physically challenged, fights, love, sex and even a transsexual! Good luck Channel 4 – it’s either going to be more of the same or something we never saw coming. The current odds are 8-1 that the show will get axed before next year – place your bets!

Am I the only person who misses Top of the Pops when it was in its hay-day? It was our staple music programme. Back in the day it was THE music show. We loved it; it was part of our youth. Then you also had CD:UK. Gone are the days when you’d get your weekly fix of Girls Aloud on a Saturday morning. You’d tune in to watch your music idols lip synch - “live”!

Nowadays, we’re confronted with a multitude of music channels on various platforms. You’re spoilt for choice – unless of course you happen to only have the five terrestrial channels, in which case Sound on BBC2 or C4’s The Green Room are probably your best bets. These two plus E4’s Freshly Squeezed are the only regular shows that actually have interviews with bands and features. The rest offer you a monotonous string of pop videos grouped together under a tenuous ‘category’ like “Top Ten MILFs!” or “Every Number 1 Hit From 1990-2000!” Give me strength. Why on earth would I want to spend my weekend listening to every single number 1 over 10 years? And as for the whole MILFs category, well that’s subjective isn’t it? (I seem to be remember Kerry Katona was in one of them – that says it all really).

The sad reality is that we’d rather see music on TV as part of a reality TV programme, be it X Factor or I’d Do Anything , than good old-fashioned live performances from established pop bands. We’re still interested in music on TV, but we want to be a part of the process of making a pop act and interact with it.

This is all very interesting considering live tours still sell out in a nanosecond and downloading music is as popular as ever. Perhaps TOTP died because it was centred on the Top 40. We seem to have lost the concept of charts, or at least lost interest in it these days…Who cares who’s number 1 if I can download my favourite band’s new album online before it even hits the charts? The only televised music-related programme that gets top bill these days is the live concert or festival. We had Glastonbury and Nelson Mandela’s birthday gig, and now the return of T4 on the Beach. So what happens after the summer of music festivals ends? TV producers need to come up with a new programme format that interests both internet users who love to download music and those that go to live gigs. All the best to Leona Lewis and her reality TV successors, but let’s cater for those that enjoy the musical grunge of grassroots bands as well.

So You Think You Can Dance? I can, but more in a drunken environment where comical moves are valued over technical ones. Anyway. Do you remember the US show of the same name by any chance? Despite now having our very own Cat Deeley presenting it, here in the UK we only screened one series on Living. Since then, it’s nowhere to be seen on our side of the pond. Meanwhile, in the US, the show is into its fourth series and is the third most watched TV programme in the country. It has also been a ratings winner for Australia, Japan and more. So…where are we in all of this? Britain is usually quite avant-garde when it comes to TV programming. We love our reality TV and we’ve thrashed out every format possible – so how come we seem to have missed this one?

Seriously, what’s there not to love about this programme? It features hot young talent. Men (or boys depending on your own age) dancing, flipping and sometimes shirtless. Girls wearing not a lot, in high heels and revealing outfits. Something for everyone! Plus, there’s the whole phone-in vote which we all love to do – it makes us feel involved and more importantly it means our favourite may win the show at the end. Dance is something that reaches all ages and the success of Strictly Come Dancing and Dancing on Ice shows the British audience has an interest in it. Now all we have to do is get a UK production company to make the series over here. Let our British dancers have an arena to showcase their talent – we’d give these lot a run for their money:

The much-hyped ‘de-facto’ actors’ strike has begun to take effect in the US, with TV production coming to a literal standstill despite the fact that an actual strike has not yet been announced. In case you have been under a rock over the last few days, let me explain. The Hollywood Screen Actors Guild (SAG) has called for a strike over payments to actors for the use of online video clips. It’s much the same hoo-ha as the writers’ strike which ended a few weeks ago and crippled US TV production for 14 weeks. Apparently that cost the industry over $2billion – serious bucks. So what does this new threat mean for us? Well, those of us that love our US drama, don’t expect any new series to be out any time soon. If there are any, they will be noticeably shorter due to rushed production shoots that scrambled to get everything done before any strike was formally announced. House and CSI have apparently finished their new series but with fewer episodes, and favourites like Gossip Girl and The Closer have stalled production pending an outcome to the SAG saga.

The seventh series of 24 was much anticipated, after production was initially stalled during the writers’ strike and then resumed. Now it’s had to rush to finish again! Hopefully this won’t affect the quality of the production as this series promised to be one of the best yet – with a female President, the ‘resurrection’ of Tony Almeida (after his apparent death in series 5) and main character Jack Bauer no longer working with the CTU.

The funny thing is, no-one is actually on strike at the moment yet productions are already folding and producers are running around pulling their hair out (I don’t know this for sure obviously, but I have a mental image). SAG is currently reviewing a final offer from the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) and will decide whether or not to strike by July 8th. Obviously, if they do strike, it will be disastrous for the TV industry but to be honest the damage has already been done, hasn’t it?

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