Did anyone notice we had an election? If you voted you will no doubt have been disappointed. Tory supporters didn’t get the clear mandate they wanted. Labour did better than some expected, but still got pushed out of Downing Street. The Lib Dems think they’ve done quite well by getting a few cabinet seats, but I suspect that in a few years’ time we’ll see that as a mistake and they’ll become even more obscure than they were before the election.
Nobody else really figured on the electoral radar, apart from the Greens who did a fantastic job of bagging a seat down in Brighton. The first of many, I hope.
The biggest winners, then, seem to have been the broadcasters, who have been camped out on the green outside Parliament for the last two weeks.
The BBC, as ever, is putting on the biggest show as it seems to have moved half of White City to Westminster and boxed it up in a big black spaceship. Sky, on the other hand, is having a little garden party and has cracked open the gazebo. ITV, too.
Kay Burley, from Dancing on Ice, interviews Ken Clarke, Secretary of State for Justice
The ITV gazebo (left) and the BBC’s glossy black spaceship (right)
It’s taken us almost three years (certainly more than two) but we’ve got to the very end of Allo Allo. All nine series and 85 episodes. I didn’t think I’d be saying this when we were sitting through its nadir around the end of series five, but now I’m actually quite sad to see it go.
Admittedly it went on longer than it should, running for longer than the actual war during which it was set. It first aired on 30 December 1982 and finished almost exactly ten years later on 14 December 1992. There was a best-of in 1994 and a terrible ‘Return of’ programme in April 2007, but I don’t think you can count them as part of the actual series.
So what does happen when you get to the very, very end? Inevitably, what follows contains spoilers.
The British and Americans are advancing on Nouvion and the German forces fleeing the town. Herr Flick has plastic surgery to change his appearance and then he and Von Smallhausen try to escape to South America in a bathtub submarine. The plastic surgery storyline was a bit of a fudge to explain the fact that Richard Gibson had left at the end of series eight, and to be fair they pulled it off pretty well because David Janson, his replacement, was so good at mimicking him.
The Germans are thrown in the local jail until the terms of their surrender can be finalised, and then we skip ahead several years. Rene is in a wheelchair and his son has taken over the bar. Mme Edith is more or less bed-bound, as her mother was before her, and Gruber, without his little tank, is now an international art dealer. He is also, bizarrely, married to Helga, despite his amorous pursuit of Rene throughout the war.
The final scene is set in the square outside the cafe. The aged characters are admiring a statue of Rene that has been erected in the square to celebrate his work for the resistance. They manage to snap off one of its hollow arms and, as it drops off, out falls the lost picture of the Fallen Madonna with the Big Boobies.
Finally rich, Rene jumps in the car with Yvette and they elope – something he had been promising and failing to do through the whole of the previous nine series.
It was a neat tying off, but we did get the feeling watching the last two series that they were only commissioned for the sake of completing the storyline. That aside, it’s a pretty impressive achievement.
It is cheesy in parts, but that’s half the fun of it, and I think over the course of 85 episodes you have to make some allowance for that, don’t you?
Whoop for the return of Crystal Maze. Treat with caution when you learn it’s headed to ITV. Eye with suspicion at the idea of replacing the contestants with so-called ‘celebs’. Decide not to tune in when they replace Richard O’Brien with Amanda Holden.
An opportunity missed.
Perhaps I’ll subscribe to Challenge.
QI takes two whole hours to record. That’s not two hours of stopping, stalling and chopping bits out, but two hours of full-on, unbroken chat. I know because we got tickets to see a recording tonight, at the London Studios on the South Bank.
The show, now in its sixth year, was all about the letter F (series one was about the letter A, series two about B and so on), with this particular episode majoring on Families, as it’s due to go out on Children in Need night. That was strange enough, as the studio was decorated with Pudsey Bears and it won’t go out until November. Last week, though, they did the Christmas episode which must have been even stranger.
Anyhow, being Children in Need night they had Terry Wogan on as a surprise guest. A bit hmmm, but at least they balanced him out with Ronnie Ancona and David Mitchell (and Alan Davis, of course).
We were lucky to get in. Doors opened at quarter to seven, and we were told to get queueing (beside the people for Have I Got News For You) from five, but that doesn’t really work with general office hours, so we were much later than that. When we got there they were queueing around the block, with burger and ice cream vans doing a good trade by the kerbside. But of course we did get in, although only by the skins of our collective teeth: just a few spots further back and we’d have been turned away.
As ever with these things, once we got inside we found everything to be smaller and slightly tattier than it is on TV. We also found it hard to work out what would make it to air out of the two-hour recording. I’m guessing Wogan’s admission that he can understand why a parent would flip out at their crying child would most likely be trimmed, though, as this will be shown in the news break of a charity show about child abuse and poverty that he himself will be hosting.
He seemed to have calmed down about the Eurovision voting, acknowledging that countries that share similar musical tastes will probably vote for each other. That’s not what he was intimating at the end of this year’s contest.
But it was a fun night and I’ll tune in on 14th November to see how they manage to squash down 120 minutes of recordings into 30 minutes of airtime. By then I’ll probably not remember much of what we saw live, so I doubt I’ll spot the cuts.
I’ll probably forget the surprise guest, too.
Technorati Tags:
qi
