"WHO AM I!?" cries The TV Book Club, the hideous schizophrenic monster show as it wearily drags itself up the Channel 4 satellite building.
The TV Book Club is a stupid persons clever show and has therefore found something like a home on More Four. More Four of course only shows television programmes that no one wants to watch. It's like Channel 4 saying, "I don't entirely have faith in you".
It's another show that really does it's best to get to know you and crawl into your home as part of your daily routine - like a nectar card. The TV Book Club thinks it's a nectar card. Because no one seems capable of actually ever meeting or speaking to each other in person in our modern society, The TV Book Club caters for people who don't know anyone and must therefore discuss their books with celebrities, instead of anyone they can actually touch, or smell.
So, if I wanted advice on a good book, I would ask a writer or a really keen reader. I would not at any point ask Gok Wan. If I want to know what colour pumps I should be wearing this summer, then boy howdy, he'd better be by the phone. In the meantime, he can keep his book opinions to himself.
The TV Book Club is too cliquey, I don't feel part of the gang. A specially selected elite of celebrities, two horribly unfunny comedians (Dave Spikey & Jo Brand, with her disgusting black & white glasses that make her look like she has a permanently raised eye-brow which, ironically, I also have when I watch The TV Book Club). There's Gok, and then a man and a woman that no one has ever seen before, but might have read some news or written a newspaper article before or something. Out of all these..."CELEBRITIES"...it is hard to work out which one is the presenter. Is it Jo Brand with her gentle, gentle humour? Is is the unknown bloke with the gi-GAN-tic face? Or is it Spikey with his...northern accent?
I can only hope that this ill-matched group of people solve mysteries in their spare time, because to watch them discuss books with a put-on sincerity and pretend interest in what they are doing is more than I can bare. Some mad scientist/market researcher obviously worked out how to appeal to the entirity of society by choosing a group of..."CELEBRITIES"...that can draw in every demographic around. Oh, apart from that key demographic, PEOPLE WHO CAN READ FOR THEMSELVES.
The TV Book Club is a pompous, fart of a show! It's full of hyperbole and hot air and emotionally manipulating musical renactments of the content of the books and it's just awful. It's like reading one of my English essays. The background is bland and they all sit round on a big DFS sponsored chair and it supposed to make me think "OO, now there's something that would enhance my lifestyle, I'm going to get a bottle of wine and invite my friends to start a book club with me" - on second thoughts, I'm going to drink a a beer and read something good. All they fucking do is review..."REVIEW"...books involving child abuse, or murder or painful personal growth. Yuck. Nobody wants to read that, they really don't, unless they're the most dull people I've ever met and I bet they are the wankers.
Of the show, Gok says: "I think the idea of a book club is to recommend a book or not, and I think I would recommend this book"
I say: "A good TV Show is one that doesn't make you want to throw books at the television in the hopes that one of them smashes the screen, and I think that The TV Book Club does quite the opposite of that"
And then the show ends with some ill-chosen dramatic violin nightmare. As I said, it's just awful.
