Entertainment For Lively Minds
Barrowman!
I appreciate that a post about John Barrowman won't grab as many of the Massive as, say, one about Richard Thompson, Procol Harum, Focus, or Pickettywitch, but I shall continue nonetheless. I've never seen any of the shows I believe he does that bookend the National Lottery, nor any of the auditions-for-west-end-musicals programmes that he crops up on, but I genuinely find him highly amusing, whether he's crunching through his dialogue in Torchwood or corpsing on a panel show. The surname seems to have something to do with it; witness David Tennant on Never Mind The Buzzcocks...
Here's an odd thing, though. The worst TV show of the early 1970s was Junior Showtime, a juvenile mix-up of The Good Old Days and Oliver! presided over by a cringing grown-up, Bobby Bennett, and a Jack Wild wannabe, Glyn Poole. Poole had a very minor hit with Milly Molly Mandy in 1973. Barrowman, it turns out, was living in Scotland in '73, so he must have seen the programme and heard the song. And now he performs it in concert. Not that I've seen him in concert. Doing the math(s), it could be concluded that as he was an impressionable six years old in '73, Barrowman got the theatrical bug from watching Junior Showtime. Any road, here he is on daytime TV, doing Milly Molly Mandy to two utterly bemused hosts.
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Some People Don't Rate Him
Not leaping to Barrowman's defence..
but that doesn't strike me as very good. The hackneyed, Radio 4 panel show piano, the build up to the slightly posh voice swearing: it's old, laboured and predictable. Also, the Barrowman persona (TMFTL) is full of self-mockery, so it's not as though he's set himself up for a fall from the blimp of pomposity.
Now, if they'd taken the approach of my old band, Pass The Ammunition, and managed a couplet like '..turn on the radio it's Judy Tzuke/all those harmonies make me puke', then we'd be talking.
Squeezy
My pal was on Junior Showtime playing the accordion. Wish we had VCRs then.
My dad
was Glyn Poole and the rest of the Poole family (there were hundreds of 'em) GP...and Viv 'Spend Spend Spend' Nicholson (though I don't think she was part of the Poole family). I've no anecdotes about nasty diseases etc to relate, though (dad was very proper, in not breaking any doctor/patient confidences).
Another of my (minute) claims to fame.
Leaping, instead, to the defence of Adam Kay..
Sixth Form swearing and stuff writ large, he and Suman Biswas have been ploughing a very succesful and juvenile furrow for some time.
And they're nice lads.
*Barrowman!*
I will forgive John Barrowman for anything because of this:
Barrowman's ad lib was intended to make his 'Shark Attack 3' co-star laugh but was left in the final cut.
Seems like a nice bloke...
Fairly handsome dude, great singer, confident presenter, and has a charasmatic prescence as an actor in Doctor Who.
So of course anyone trendy will hate him and want him to die.
Don't know about that...
I'm far from trendy but really can't stand John Barrowman (mind you it's his work I don't like and I have certainly never wished him dead, or even a mild cold, instead I find that turning the tv over or leaving the room seems just as effective).
Not Keen Either
The problem I have with him is that I've only ever seen him on panel shows and he behaves as if we should all be familiar with all his other work which I'm not so he comes across as a a wannabe that's simply trying too hard. I appreciate that other people that whose work I am familiar with, might do the same and I wouldn't notice.
Torchwood
Most TV shows are quite easy to figure out even if you only dip in and out of every fifth episode (and in the middle of it obviously) but I've never been able to understand what this show is about.
I have happened upon it ever so often while channel hopping and I always stay a while to see if it will make any sense to me this time around, but it never does.
Especially not his character. Is he human, alien, superhero, demon ? Good or evil ? Gay or straight ? It seems to be different every time I see a snippet of it, or maybe I'm just very stupid...
Feel free to reveal as many spoilers as you want! (I'll never watch a complete episode of it anyway...)
I've only come to Torchwood recently
but I gather that Harkness is a rogueish conman who's been on earth for a couple of hundred years, and is taxed with protecting the planet from alien invasion.
That old story...
I thought it was something a lot less obvious.
I'll just ignore DogFacedBoys' sarkastic suggestion of actually watching a complete episode though. :)
I'm trying to watch less TV these days, so I'm avoiding getting caught up in anything new. Also, having missed god knows how many seasons it seems silly to start now.
I just always seem to run into that show when I'm escaping the commercials on whatever channel I'm really watching.
The little I then see always manage to confuse me a lot in a short time, hence my curiosity.
Thanks for clearing some of it up (sort of).
Maybe if you watched a whole episode
or for more than a minute you might understand it. Thats how narrative works. Although not always in the case of Torchwood
He is
Mr Saturday Night and my wife loves him. That'll do for me.
Barrowman
I've seen him walking about Birmingham, and signing autographs for everyone who asks. That makes him a proper star in my opinion. Long may he continue to entertain a large number of people & not take himself terribly seriously.
Absolutely
He was doing some sort of in-store Torchwood signing a few years ago, at Borders in Brighton, long before I knew what Torchwood was, let alone twigging the anagram. He got the approach pitch-perfect, entering the store in sunglasses and smilingly acknowledging the lack of a frenzied queue.
No idea who he is
but i'm not missing up a chance to slag off Junior Showtime.
Quite simply the worst of a bad bunch.
4.20 0n Tuesdays and my father would comment on how cool it would be to have talented kids (answers a lot to why none have my brothers and sisters have spoken to him in over 25 years). We would just make fun of Mark Curry (Born in Stafford making him a kind of local celeb but he had a Yorkshire accent),Bonnie Langford,host Bobby Bennett and most of all, Dougie Squires' Younger generation.
Those awful dancers you saw on variety shows were bad enough but a kids version ! It answered why tigers eat their young.
The only thing i've seen as bad is the Spanish version of "Stars in their eyes" for kids. It was on on Saturday nights,no wonder everyone goes out.
Junior Showtime - my Room 101
Oh my God, I hadn't thought about Junior Showtime for years (decades?!) until I read this blog - eek! I absolutely hated that show as a child - my parents both worked, so after school each afternoon I used to go to my auntie's, and she loved it, so I couldn't avoid it. I seem to remember Glyn Poole being on all the variety shows back then - probably incredibly talented and a lovely person, but that kind of 70's stage-school super-precociousness was teeth-peelingly horrible... can I resist YouTubing it to see if it's as bad as I remember...?
Hated that show
In fact we hated anything with precocious kids in it doing stuff, like Why Don't You..? and other horrors. Nasty, show-off kids, eyes and teeth, Bonnie Langord, Bobby Bennet. Ugh.
However, I am a fan of this Glyn Poole accidental classic:
Milly Molly Mandy
What's not to like. She's one of the Massive.
John Barrowman sings Milly Molly Mandy
A true professional
If only everyone in the business was as amenable as he is.
Torchwood
It's a profoundly odd show isn't it? I've watched every series, though I suspect I only got through the extremely uneven (and needlessly crude) first one because I'm a Dr Who geek. But from the second series onwards, it found it's feet and became something interesting, with clever plotting, a seam of darkness running throughout yet all with a sense of awareness of its own ridiculousness.
The last couple of series have seen it shift from Dr Who spin-off to though experiment: what are the logical implications of no one ever dying again, or what we do if we were given the choice of saving the planet or most of our children? I like the fact that it gets to explore these strange ideas fully. The current series has now shifted to the US which I've struggled with a little, but it probably gives it the budget the story demands.
As for Barrowman, he kind of works as this intergalactic ageless rogue, though I can't help feeling he seems a little out of his depth when paired with 'proper' actors. I haven't watched his talent shows, but I'm sure he loves the chance to ham it up. On a personal note, he almost ran me over in Soho last year: his smile was charming enough to make me forgive him.
A very likeable man
I was lucky enough to have been able to take my children on a visit to the Doctor Who set a few years back. Everyone there was incredibly friendly, but none more so that JB, who gave up a huge amount of his time for us and was especially delightful to my son, who was 7 or 8 at the time. I understand that he is like this pretty much all the time - as five-centres says above, a very amenable gentleman.