Entertainment For Lively Minds
Never Mind The Buzzcocks - new series
Posted by Ben Milne on 25 October 2008 - 12:35pm.
What do people think of the new series? I'm not sure about the guest slot captain situation - Stephen Fry was his usual smug and irritating self, Bob Mortimer was OK and Johnny Vegas, well... is it my imagination or is he getting less funny the slimmer he gets?
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For what it's worth
I thought it couldn't get much worse than the last series, but it has. The Amstell idiot manages to make the most gormless 'guest' look like a polymath renaissance genius, and the gormless 'guests' almost always have less to say than the jobbing actors in the line-up section. The show is waaaaaaay past its sell-by date, and long overdue the axe.
I don't mind the Amstell idiot
He's better than Lamarr who was just, clearly bored. It's alright - it's better than some stuff but not essential. Bob Mortimor is always welcome. Vegas' wit is correlated to his girth it would appear.
Amstell and co
I thought he was fine. I suppose it depends on how you feel about the approach of getting laughs by picking on certain individuals who may sometimes be easy targets, but then although these targets can be a bit dim they are usually fair game since they often take themselves too seriously and Amstell tends to say what we are all thinking - ie x is a bit of a twat, not that that's his whole act. And I found it funny I have to say. Bill Bailey is great too. Not so keen on the Boosh guy - is he on it all the time now? Not sure.
The format is really tired though, the same old elements each week: the intros, the id parade - yawn. The thought of changing presenters each week sounds bad. I wonder is it all scripted the same as if nothing's changed - like on Have I Got News For You, where you realised that it had nothing to do with the presenter (Deakin) as he didn't really write it, he just read it? Amstell seemed pretty natural and spontaneous to me though, in fact I preferred him to Lamarr also. Lamarr was sometimes not funny but just nasty.
Lamarr's nastiness and his overall demeanour
in his later Buzzcocks seasons had led me to stop watching the show altogether. I'm sure I was not alone in this, and I'm sure that viewer desertions were a phenomenon not entirely disconnected to his disappearance from the MC's seat. I figured that eventually some guest would twat him one right royally, and it would turn up on YouTube for my enjoyment. Sadly, no one rose to the occasion, and he just slunked off, chips dragging.
Does anyone know why he became such an irritating, nasty, swinish little twerp like that?
To be fair...
...I think Lamarr has never suffered fools gladly (working with the likes of Chris Evans and Terry Christian would surely have turned even Mother Teresa into a bit of a misanthrope) and as time went on, he grew to prefer doing his (excellent) radio shows to Buzzcocks.
To be fair,
being fair, as in refraining from low, cheap and nasty verbal abuse of those less well equipped than oneself to reply in kind, is precisely what Lamarr never was. To the extent that it was painful to watch.
If he didn't enjoy it, why did he do it? I'm sure his 'fee' per programme was a good deal higher than what I take home in a week.
I hope he was unceremoniously sacked, but I doubt it. In the sycophantic bubble of the world of TV production companies, all kinds of post-modernist crap is spoken about entertainers having 'edge' and 'grit' and so on, when what is really meant is that they are insufferable egomaniacal twats.
Out of touch
Haste in post. I see now, it's the team captain not the presenter. It does help if one actually reads. Well it was fine this week. The Gavin and Stacey chap was very good. I laughed to myself on several occasions. Germaine Greer did well. They do need new rounds ideas badly though.